“Epidemics of the mind” may be more challenging than ever to stop in an online world, experts say.
Most mental illnesses are individual problems, but others are contagious, according to Australian psychologist Dianna Kenny. These forms of self-destruction tend to spread by personal contact or by the distribution of information.
“These things just take off. Just one little aberration in the environment can start a terrible snowballing effect,” she said.
Although mental illness epidemics are bizarre, they’re not uncommon across history, Kenny said.
The Salem witch hunts were another “psychic epidemic.”
In the 1980s, American day care centers nationwide faced completely unfounded accusations of satanic child abuse.
Epidemics like these aren’t caused by anything physical, Kenny said, but they still damage people and communities.
Today, the transgender movement resembles these psychic epidemics, she said, but unlike past psychic epidemics, the internet has allowed the transgender movement to spread globally.
Identity Crisis
Widespread rapid-onset transgenderism is a new phenomenon, Kenny said. For most of history, feelings of being the wrong gender were found in a tiny fraction of people and didn’t start suddenly.“'The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ estimates that it occurs in 1 in 10,000 boys and 1 in 27,000 girls. And now the incidence is hundreds of times greater than standard wisdom about prevalence,” she said.
In 1968, a study that counted sex change requests estimated that 1 in 100,000 Americans identified as transgender.
In several European countries in the 1980s, similar studies found that between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 250,000 people identified as transgender.
Some groups dispute the accuracy of these surveys.
“Chances are that this number isn’t actually any higher than before, but that today more people feel able to count themselves into this category than ever before,” the website states.
However, it’s impossible to deny the rapid rise in reported transgenderism. Since 2009, the incidence of transgenderism appears to have skyrocketed in the United States, growing by leaps and bounds.
Government studies estimate that between 115,000 and 450,000 Americans identified as transgender in 2009. But in 2022, about 1.4 million Americans did.
Nowhere is this change more dramatic than among young people, according to Kenny.
Gender dysphoria is 300 times more common among teens than it is among adults.
All these qualities are classic signs of a “psychic epidemic” or mass hysteria, Kenny said.
“There are all these figures when you put them together, and all these patterns when you put them together, which strongly point to a phenomenon called ‘social contagion,’” Kenny said.
How It Happens
About 10 percent of people who identify as transgender today are between 13 and 17, according to a study by the UCLA School of Law. That age group is only 8 percent of the general U.S. population.Most of the time, young people first learn about transgenderism from online activists or influencers, according to Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, a psychologist.
“Now you have all these social influencers who are gender-confused and trans,” Kardaras said.
One of the biggest transgender Instagram accounts is that of Jazz Jennings, with 1.2 million followers. Other transgender influencer accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers.
The Epoch Times attempted to contact Jennings but received no response.
Gender dysphoria is a real condition, and some people genuinely struggle with it, Kardaras said. But it’s likely that the real condition isn’t nearly as prevalent as the copycat gender dysphoria that spreads rapidly.
When transgenderism seems cool to young people, many more people identify as transgender than usual.
“It’s become so popular that it’s become normalized. And in fact, I would say more than normalized, it’s become idealized,” he said.
In Their Own Words
On Egg_irl, a popular transgender Reddit page with 243,000 members, posts about changing gender show a community where changing sexual identity is a very self-conscious behavior.In the comments, multiple users say that curiosity about being transgender suggests that someone is transgender.
“I realize that if I wanna be seen as a woman, act like a woman, look like a woman, then it does not really matter if I am a woman, I wanna transition anyway [and then I will finally start to feel like a woman],” one commenter wrote.
“I used to think [for years, before cracking] that there was no way I could be trans because I don’t ‘feel’ like a woman. But how would I, after living and being perceived as a guy for decades?” another comment reads.
Another meme jokes about how transgenderism can be a performance that others can misinterpret.
“My parents asking me if I’m gay,” appears in the bottom half of the meme, along with the same girl wearing a concerned expression.
“If I did anything even remotely feminine, I was convinced it made me less of a man, that I was acting too much ‘like a girl,’” the post said.
The Epoch Times reached out to several transgender activists for comment, but none responded by press time.
This online transgender community can be massively influential, according to Kardaras. People copy famous people.
As an example of how contagious behaviors spread, Kardaras described a series of events that happened in the 1790s.
In 1794, author Johann Goethe published a novel titled “The Sorrows of Young Werther.”
In the book, a depressed, sensitive young man named Werther killed himself because he was in a love triangle.
The novel was wildly popular across Europe, but Goethe’s story had a negative impact. A plague of copycat suicides swept through Europe’s young men.
Similarities and Differences
Like other psychic epidemics, transgenderism has famous influencers and spreads rapidly among young women, Kenny said.“Most of the young people who decide they’re transgender have decided based on the super spreaders on the internet,” she said.
But unlike many psychic epidemics, transgenderism is finding support from governments, universities, courts, and health care systems, she said.
This course of action is madness, she said. Just because something is a trend doesn’t make it mentally healthy.
“If we look at a suicide epidemic, you don’t have courts changing the law to allow children to commit suicide if they want to,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter how much puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or mutilating surgery you have. You will still be a biological male or a biological female.”
Even so, it’s challenging to fight a psychic epidemic that spreads online, Kenny said.
“It’s a really, really thorny question,” she said.
“Minimize coverage of suicides. Keep the stories relatively brief and do not run too many stories,” the site’s coverage advice reads.
But the wide range of online transgender celebrities, pro-transgenderism websites, government approval for transgenderism, and other issues make fighting the psychic panic extremely difficult, Kenny said.
Activists have often attempted to suppress information about how transgenderism might not be an unchangeable condition that can only be improved by surgery.
In 2018, a network of 100 British academics published an open letter stating that many academics have faced activist, media, and academic attempts to suppress or quell their research into the rise of transgenderism.
Other studies have promoted treatments for transgenderism without good evidence.
The studies also had major design flaws that meant they were more likely to return a result that encouraged gender transition.
Confusion and Clarity
The increased publicity of transgenderism tends to leave young children and teenagers tormented by questions that kids in the past rarely had to face, according to psychologist Leonard Sax.When schools and society teach kids that something as foundational as gender identity can change day by day, the kids get anxious, Sax said. Encouraging kids to experiment with their gender doesn’t help them find an identity. It just confuses them.
“Gender turns out to be much more fragile than we imagined,” he said. “That actually has huge consequences [in] that kids get really confused. And as a result, they are anxious, depressed, and disengaged.”
Mental and physical differences between biological men and biological women are real, Sax said. They impact learning and thought in a variety of ways. Children need to be taught in a way that considers these biological differences.
“Every enduring culture, of which we have any substantial record, has devoted substantial resources to teaching girls what it means to be a good woman and teaching boys what it means to be a good man,” said Sax.
“These are biological realities found across the primate order, and indeed across mammals.”
If society doesn’t teach children to be good men and women, children won’t learn to live without gender, Sax said. Often, they will live out the worst qualities of manhood and womanhood.
Boys often become absorbed in pornography and violent video games, and girls seek sexual attention on social media, he said.
How Things End
The best thing people can do for people who identify as transgender is not to argue with them, Kenny said. Their decisions aren’t coming from a place of rational argument.“You'll lose them in the first two minutes,” she said. “Unfortunately, some young people cannot be worked with, because they’re so closed, and so brainwashed, and so convinced that transitioning is going to solve all their problems.”
Instead, people who want to help should try to understand people who identify as transgender and learn why they are struggling, she said.
Some young people return to normal after psychotherapy. But others are so brainwashed by the transgender movement that they are almost unreachable.
“It’s a very uphill battle,” Kenny said.
Psychic epidemics usually end when people start publicly speaking up against them, she said.
An epidemic that spreads through speech can be countered by speech.
“It takes courageous voices to speak up and say we’ve got to stop this madness,” she said.
