Mental Health as a Policy Challenge
Finding statistics on America's growing mental-health problem is not difficult. A quick Google search will pull up millions of links detailing ever-increasing concern over the relationship between Americans and their brains. The word "crisis" appears time and again, hammering home the dire headlines.
While some commentators have pushed back on the use of the word "crisis" — or whether there's really an alarming spike in mental-health problems at all — it's clear that Americans are reporting higher mental-health concern than ever before. The number of adults receiving some form of mental-health care has increased by a third since 2002, while those reporting "excellent" mental health has declined by over 12% in the same timeframe. Between 2019 and 2022, the use of mental-health services increased by just under 40%, underscoring the Covid-19 pandemic's role in further accelerating the trend.
A 2023 Time article lays out some of the topline statistics in grim fashion: One in eight U.S. adults is on an anti-depressant, one in five receives some form of mental-health care, suicide rates have increased by 30% since 2000, nearly a third of U.S. adults report depression or anxiety symptoms (three times as many as in 2019), and about one in 25 adults has a serious mental illness.
Like any complex social phenomenon, it is difficult to unpack the factors that lie behind these numbers. Some commentators suggest that greater societal acceptance of mental illness has made more Americans willing to self-report mental-health concerns and seek clinical help. But whatever one might peg as the cause, it's clear that something is afoot in modern America when it comes to our mental well-being.
It may be helpful to understand America's mental-health problem as being comprised of numerous overlapping sub-problems. Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Thomas Insel has argued that it should be considered a three-part challenge: a youth mental-health crisis, a serious mental-illness crisis, and an addiction crisis. While Insel's tripartite framework captures much of the growing concern, a fourth sub-issue could be added in the form of the general rise in anxiety and depression rates, which also implicate what some have called a "loneliness epidemic" that's surging across the country. Schroeder Stribling, who was president and CEO of Mental Health America at the time, referred to the current situation as a "polycrisis," which accounts for the layered and complex strands policymakers need to consider as they approach this issue.
Even those who express skepticism about overall trend-line numbers regarding a mental-health crisis can still find reason for concern. For instance, addiction rates have shown a marked rise in recent years, suggesting that more able-bodied Americans are reaching for maladaptive coping mechanisms to soothe anxiety and depression, or to provide an escape from the ups and downs of daily life.
Statistics on traditional substance addictions, such as drug use, have garnered their share of headlines. Between 1999 and 2023, drug-overdose deaths increased by a mind-boggling 520%, with the majority in recent years involving synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. Alcohol-use disorder also appears to be on the rise, with a study by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism showing an uptick in alcohol-related deaths in recent years.
Less noted has been a concomitant rise in behavioral or process-based addictions. The data reveal alarming trends in a bevy of behavioral addictions such as gambling, food, sex and internet pornography, video games, and social media. There is also growing concern about the relationship many Americans have with their smartphones; some may debate whether that constitutes an "addiction," but at the very least, the phone operates as a self-medicating escape in a way that mimics addiction symptoms.
Americans themselves view all this as a crisis. A 2022 CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 90% of adults believe America has a mental-health crisis. One can quibble about survey methodologies, but in the end, Americans intuitively believe something is amiss in our country, and they tie it to our most advanced organ: the brain.
Many conservatives either resist the idea that there's a crisis at all or simply try to ignore it and pretend they are powerless to do anything. They would be wise not to forfeit this debate to the political left. As is often the case, left-leaning policymakers have largely focused on increasing funding for mental-health services as their preferred solution. This leaves a wide-open policy field for the political right to step into the fray with innovative, focused, people-based solutions.
In fact, a blend of traditional conservative and libertarian ideas — such as targeted deregulation for mental-health providers, a reinvigoration of American civil society and community connectivity, and a rededicated focus on America's youth — can provide some of the key ingredients for a way forward.
REFORMING THE MENTAL-HEALTH WORKFORCE
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, receiving telehealth care for mental illness was a relatively unheard-of concept. Once the pandemic hit, telehealth exploded overnight. A study of general telemedicine usage found a 766% increase in telehealth encounters in the first three months of the pandemic. While all types of telemedicine expanded rapidly during the pandemic, mental-health services proved particularly amenable to the virtual transition, since physical examinations are rarely needed to provide treatment.
Based on research from the Kaiser Family Foundation, less than 1% of individuals seeking outpatient treatment for mental-health or substance-use concerns prior to February 2020 received such treatment via telehealth. By March, this had surged to 40%. A study of mental-health-treatment facilities in JAMA Network Open found that under 40% of such facilities offered telehealth services before Covid-19 emerged; two years into the pandemic, this number had increased to just under 90%.
The rise in telemedicine generally — and for virtual mental health specifically — was largely driven by numerous notable policy changes that occurred in the early weeks of the pandemic. Traditionally, the American medical-licensure system requires physicians and other medical providers to reside in the same state as the patients they are treating. Covid-19 created a unique opportunity to revisit these long-ossified rules. At the federal level, Congress and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services relaxed prior rules to ease insurance reimbursement for certain telehealth services and loosened strictures on where telehealth must physically originate. At the state level, emergency licensure waivers were passed to allow out-of-state medical providers (including those working in the mental-health field) to offer services to in-state residents.
While Congress has continued to extend its Medicare relaxations beyond the end of the pandemic, most state licensure waivers have expired. How much of an impact that expiration has had on the supply of mental-health services is difficult to measure, but it's clear it has had some effect.
Research found that in states in which telehealth waivers expired, patients who were receiving out-of-state telemedicine services did not simply switch to in-person care; instead, they stopped receiving care entirely. This was particularly prevalent in situations where a patient and provider were located 200 miles or more apart, suggesting that residents located in rural areas were likely to experience the greatest disruption to their mental-health services with the expiration of Covid-era telehealth rules. This is backed up by data showing that rural patients were more likely to use telehealth services for mental-health and substance-use treatment than urban patients during the pandemic — 55% of rural patients used such telehealth services compared to only 35% of urban patients.
Even before the advent of Covid-19, researchers had extensively studied whether telehealth services can adequately address mental illness. Pre-pandemic studies of military veterans, for instance, found no notable difference in the effectiveness of telehealth for mental-health disorders compared to that of in-person care. Research published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research during the pandemic likewise concluded that telehealth was "a viable care alternative with no significant differences between in-person and telehealth groups" for depression symptoms. Among mental-health providers, support for telehealth treatment remains high, with over 95% of psychologists agreeing that telehealth "[proved] its worth as a therapeutic tool" during the pandemic.
Despite these findings and the dramatic changes brought about by the pandemic, America continues to face a severe shortage in the supply of mental-health professionals. Given the previously mentioned increase in the demand for mental-health services as more Americans seek treatment, the supply side of the equation has struggled to keep pace. The National Center for Health Workforce Analysis (NCHWA) projects substantial shortages of nearly every type of mental-health professional by 2038, including psychiatrists, psychologists, family and marriage therapists, addiction counselors, and other mental-health counselors. The shortage is not merely a problem for the future, either, as more than a third of the U.S. population lives in what is defined as a Mental Health Professional Shortage Area. According to NCHWA, nearly 70% of rural counties lack a psychiatric mental-health nurse practitioner, 45% lack a psychologist, and around 20% lack a counselor or licensed social worker.
It also appears that the overall demand for mental-health services is most acute in more remote and rural locales. A geospatial data project published by Esri's StoryMaps, which drew on the Wisconsin Population Health Institute's county health rankings, found substantial evidence of a rural skew to America's mental-health problem. In 2015, it found that American adults experienced an average of 3.8 poor mental-health days per month, with 33 counties reporting five or more poor mental-health days on average among their populations. But by 2019, the nationwide average of poor mental-health days had increased to 4.9 per month, while counties with an average of five or more days jumped exponentially from 33 counties to 1,312. The "heat map" illustrating these data shows a heavy bent toward the rural American south, with states like West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama featuring prominently.
Many of the rural counties with the highest mental-health concerns also have the fewest mental-health professionals and primary-care physicians. To pick one small example, in 2021, rural Overton County, Tennessee — with a population of just over 23,000 — had 8.9 mental-health providers per 100,000 residents, while Fairfax County, Virginia — located just outside Washington, D.C., and with a population of over 1.1 million — had 205.6. In 2019, Overton residents averaged 6.1 poor mental-health days per month, compared to just 3.5 such days for Fairfax residents.
Expanding telehealth options for residents in these rural locales could help remedy this problem. In a world with relaxed interstate licensing barriers for therapists, a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) residing in a therapy-dense locale like Fairfax County could virtually hop across state lines to provide counseling services to a single mom experiencing obsessive-compulsive symptoms in therapy-sparse Overton County.
Unfortunately, the current post-Covid-19 licensing regime for mental-health professionals is as nonsensical as it is arbitrary. The "highest" rungs of the mental-health professional ladder — psychiatrists and psychologists — reap the benefits of various interstate compacts that facilitate their ability to practice in more states, while the "lowest" rungs of the profession — like the largely unregulated life- and health-coach industry — are likewise able to practice across state lines. But the "middle" rung of licensed professional counselors (LPCs) and LCSWs — where the great mass of mental-health work takes place — are largely locked out of interstate practice.
In fact, the recent proliferation of life and health coaches across America represents a direct reaction to these licensing strictures. Based on data from the International Coaching Federation, the number of life and health coaches in America doubled from 2019 to 2025. It seems more and more licensed therapists are choosing to hold themselves out as coaches rather than actual therapists due to the increased ability to practice across state lines.
While this market-based regulatory workaround has helped expand mental-health services in some form, it is hardly an ideal set up. Insurance generally does not cover coaching services, thereby restricting it to those who are able to pay out-of-pocket. The current system also creates an incentive for would-be providers to opt for a coaching career path that usually includes substantially less mental-health training than becoming a licensed therapist.
Some attempts to streamline licensed professional counselors' ability to practice across state lines have taken hold, but a comprehensive solution remains elusive. The Counseling Compact — which would create an interstate compact for LPCs — was recently created, and 39 states and the District of Columbia have joined. But the compact is only live in a handful of states so far due to regulatory and technological complexities. Thirty states have joined a similar compact for LCSWs, but it remains several years from becoming operative.
While compacts can be a step forward in terms of reducing interstate licensing barriers, they are not a free-market panacea. For one, the way compacts are structured can vary significantly. Unlike the current compact for psychologists, the Counseling Compact will require LPCs to manually apply to practice in each member state in which they want to offer services. In many cases, each member state will charge its own additional fees to a provider interested in practicing in that state — according to the Cicero Institute, some states charge social workers up to $300. This acts as a de facto barrier to entry, since it's unrealistic for therapists to pay high licensing fees in more than one or two states.
Into this landscape, conservative and libertarian policymakers must step. Indeed, conservative governors have long been leaders in the push to establish interstate occupational-licensing reciprocity, as well as in reducing licensing barriers generally.
In the mental-health space, Florida passed a robust telehealth reform early in Governor Ron DeSantis's tenure, which included the full array of licensed mental-health professionals. Demonstrating the promise of telehealth when it comes to mental illness, the Cicero Institute found that mental-health counselors of various types now make up nearly half of the out-of-state practitioners who registered to provide medical services within the state (with traditional doctors, advanced nurse practitioners, and other providers constituting the remaining half).
Arizona, which was a leader in the occupational-licensing-reform movement under Republican governor Doug Ducey, uses a licensure-by-endorsement method that extends to mental-health professionals who have practiced for at least one year in another state. The average wait time for Arizona endorsement is merely one week, compared to the three months it can take to process licenses in other states.
Conservative policymakers across the county should consider emulating reforms like those enacted in Florida and Arizona. Occupational-licensing reform has long been a bread-and-butter policy priority for those on the political right, but conservatives can pursue further reforms by expanding the scope of practice for mental-health providers and creating new, accessible pathways into mental-health professions.
For instance, seven states have now granted some form of prescribing authority to psychologists to help alleviate psychiatrist shortages. Many have a more rural bent, such as Louisiana, Idaho, New Mexico, and Utah. A few states have also expanded the reach of what are known as "paraprofessionals" in the mental-health field. While they go by different names, all largely involve expanded roles for technicians and aides to amplify mental-health services that existing licensed professionals provide.
Utah, in addition to creating new career pathways and overhauling scopes of practice for various mental-health professions, also provides licensure for Substance Use Disorder Counselors (SUDCs). To become an SUDC, one need not obtain a bachelor's or master's degree in counseling but can qualify after completing certain prerequisite mental-health courses from an accredited educational institution. It also requires 200 hours of substance-use-disorder education and a 200-hour practicum to provide hands-on experience.
SUDCs have a limited scope of practice that focuses on substance addiction, which allows them to bypass the more extensive and expensive requirements needed to become a full LPC or LCSW. By opening the door into this corner of the mental-health profession to those who don't hold a degree while still ensuring adequate training, Utah's SUDC model could be expanded into other realms. As one example, the rise in behavioral and process-based addictions — food, internet pornography, gambling, and video games — should prompt more states to consider the concept of a Behavioral Use Disorder Counselor credential.
By lowering barriers in the mental-health field, whether it be through overhauling interstate licensing restrictions or reducing high barriers to entry to becoming a mental-health professional, right-leaning policymakers can play a leading role in alleviating America's mental-health supply shortage. Doing so aligns with the right's longtime emphasis on occupational-licensing reform, while also providing more entryways into middle-class jobs for those interested in the mental-health professions.
CONNECTION AND COMMUNITY
Though expanding the mental-health workforce is important, the solution to America's mental-health problem will not be found exclusively in supply-side reforms. As noted above, the numbers of those seeking mental-health care have skyrocketed at the same time the numbers of those reporting "excellent" mental health have plummeted. Much of this gap could once again be attributed to Americans' simply being more willing to acknowledge mental-health struggles in today's more accepting society. But as the previously mentioned Time article reported, some skeptics believe "the issue isn't only that demand is outpacing supply; it's that the supply was never very good to begin with, leaning on therapies and medications that only skim the surface of a vast ocean of need."
Indeed, even if mental-health-care access was dramatically expanded, it is unlikely to ever capture the full range of individuals in need of mental-health support. The diagnosis-based practice of modern mental-health treatment has led to frequent accusations of overdiagnosis as well as misdiagnosis or underdiagnosis, with some individuals experiencing difficulties that don't fit neatly within a discrete category. Someone seeking mental-health treatment may be experiencing significant mood disturbance and motivational struggles in his day-to-day life but fall short of the diagnostic criteria for depression, for instance.
What might be America's most widespread mental-health concern lacks a formal clinical diagnostic label altogether. In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy threw a spotlight on what he called America's loneliness epidemic. Currently, around half of all Americans report experiencing loneliness. Being chronically lonely is associated with higher incidents of cardiovascular disease, stroke, dementia, and premature death. Some research suggests that loneliness's mortality impact is analogous to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
It also appears that loneliness is a driver of other mental-health conditions. According to researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education's "Making Caring Common," 81% of adults who reported loneliness also suffered from anxiety or depression, versus only 29% of those with lower levels of loneliness. Writer Justin Whitmel Earley has called loneliness "a sickness you cannot see," since many individuals don't even realize they are struggling with it. He goes on to warn, "it is always the undiagnosed illnesses that wreak the worst havoc."
It's no accident that loneliness rates are accelerating in our internet-fueled age. As Yuval Levin observes:
[T]he internet has...come to mediate different parts of our real-world experience (from dating to calling a taxi to getting food at a restaurant) in ways that have let more people live as functional loners, meeting their needs with a minimum of eye contact or interpersonal risk.
A 2021 survey by the American Enterprise Institute's Survey Center on American Life found that the number of Americans reporting close friendships has fallen dramatically over the past few decades, with the number of Americans reporting 10 or more close friendships dropping from 33% to 13% since 1990. Twelve percent of Americans say they have no close friends whatsoever.
As Americans become more detached from the communities around them, more of them are turning to maladaptive coping mechanisms. Former senator Ben Sasse observed in his 2018 book Them:
The natural, healthy stimulus of community is vanishing, and the damaging health effects of persistent loneliness are being compounded — by drug overuse and abuse, which now claim more lives in a year than diabetes, liver disease, pneumonia, or the flu. This is very bad and very new.
Even if an individual manages to avoid a direct substance or behavioral addiction, Daniel Wiser has pointed out in these pages that isolated Americans still "seek refuge in technology, politics, work, individualism, and self-fulfillment," none of which brings them "closer to the happiness, connection, and love for which [they] long."
While counteracting these troubling trends is far from simple, it's clear that Americans need more community and more connection. Fortunately, the conservative emphasis on rebuilding civil society responds to many of the concerns brought about by our increasing loneliness and social isolation. Right-of-center policymakers should draw on this rich intellectual heritage to advance commonsense ways to increase Americans' interconnectedness. And they should do so with a clinically informed eye.
One option could include a renewed emphasis on group-therapy models. For years, 12-step groups have provided Americans struggling with addiction a ready-made community to increase their social connectedness and begin to reduce the isolation that often fuels addiction. Though group therapy has proven to be an effective model across a range of mental-health conditions, it remains arbitrarily hampered by regulatory restrictions. Insurance coverage can be more complex for group therapy versus individual therapy, for instance. And once again, interstate licensing barriers restrict therapist-led groups' ability to use telehealth platforms to connect individuals across state lines.
In addition to reducing licensing barriers in the group-therapy context, another step would be to streamline the use of Health Savings Account (HSA) funds for group therapy, retreats, and workshops. While regulators have recently clarified that HSA funds can go toward health and life coaching — including coach-led groups — those seeking treatment require letters of medical necessity (LMNs) to qualify.
The Internal Revenue Service has recently warned of its intention to clamp down on LMNs that aren't obtained through direct face-to-face interactions via in-person office visits or telehealth. Conservative lawmakers should push legislation to clarify that direct face-to-face interactions are not always necessary for an LMN to be valid. They might also consider eliminating the LMN requirement entirely for group therapy and retreats, which hardly represent the sort of sketchy expenses that would constitute an abuse of HSA funds.
Outside the health-care context, right-leaning policymakers should pursue ways to expand so-called "third places" — the community gathering spots where Americans are most likely to congregate and form connection. I recently detailed in these pages how restaurants are increasingly becoming a go-to third place in American civil society, and laid out ideas for how these critical community cornerstones can be supported in the years ahead.
Policymakers should consider pursuing some outside-the-box options as well. Zoning reforms to allow for more co-working spaces would help reduce isolation in our increasingly work-from-home society. Likewise, amenities like dog parks and even pickleball courts are quickly becoming popular third-place gathering spots for many Americans. Given that municipalities often face budget constraints when it comes to establishing and maintaining public amenities like parks, concepts like a user-fee model for dog parks or pickleball courts, in which users would pay a couple dollars in exchange for access to the facilities, could be explored.
In the end, there's not one single civil-society "fix" that will solve America's mental-health problems, let alone our loneliness epidemic. But policymakers at all levels of government would do well to pursue ideas that bring more Americans together into community, both inside and outside the health-care context.
A FOCUS ON CHILDREN
The ideas discussed here so far have focused predominantly on the mental-health needs and challenges of adult Americans. But as any rudimentary observer of culture and society will note, durable, long-term change must start with our youth. And when it comes to this demographic, there is cause for deep concern.
The behavioral addictions to pornography and social media mentioned above appear to be particularly prevalent among American youth. A 2018 study found that over 91% of men and 60% of women had viewed pornography at least once within the past month. According to Fight the New Drug, "porn sites receive more website traffic in the U.S. than Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Pinterest, and LinkedIn combined." Worse yet, as noted below, the evidence suggests that more and more pornography users are children.
Pornography addiction's negative health and wellness effects are legion. Research has found a link between pornography use and a whole host of mental-health conditions, including depression, anxiety, loneliness, low life satisfaction, and negative self-esteem. For those who express continued skepticism that pornography can be addictive, it has been shown to affect the neurological functioning of the human brain in the four ways most common to all addiction: sensitization, desensitization, hypofrontality, and a malfunctioning stress system. Pornography also wreaks havoc on romantic relationships, with studies finding that pornography users have lower relationship satisfaction and happiness, are more accepting of physical infidelity, and are more likely to experience divorce.
The idea that pornography can be or is confined to adults has become farcical in today's internet age, where it is free, ubiquitous, and instantly accessible by any seven-year-old with a smartphone. Pornography use is particularly common among boys, with over 84% of 14-to-18-year-old boys having viewed it. But it is becoming increasingly prevalent for girls too, with 57% now reporting that they have also viewed pornography. Even our youngest children are not being spared: The average age for being exposed to pornography is now estimated to be 12, with 15% of children saying their first exposure came while they were under 10 years old.
Levin has called the proliferation of pornography use a "hideous, colossal scourge that our society has inexplicably decided to pretend it can do nothing about." So far, this is how many right-leaning policymakers have reacted to the topic — if they have the courage to discuss it all. They vaguely wave at the First Amendment before throwing their hands up in the air. But they are hardly powerless in this regard.
In 2023, Texas passed a law that required online "adult content" producers and distributors to verify a user's age before allowing him access to their site. In response, numerous pornography sites sued on First Amendment grounds. But the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld the law.
In an amicus brief joined by distinguished experts in the fields of technology and physics, the legal-policy team at the Manhattan Institute convincingly argued that today's cutting-edge age-verification tools — such as zero-knowledge proofs and biometric age verification and estimation — are minimally invasive techniques compared to older forms of age verification that required uploading government-issued IDs or credit-card information. As the scholars concluded: "By offering low-cost, privacy-preserving, user-friendly, and commercially reasonable solutions, these AV methods uphold adults' free speech rights while protecting minors from accessing materials harmful to them."
Considering the recent Supreme Court holding, as well as the sound legal arguments that minimally invasive yet increasingly effective age-verification technology can help protect children while preserving First Amendment rights, conservatives in more states should seek to emulate Texas's example. Doing so would be politically popular, as research has shown that most adults — and even adolescents — support age verification.
Another realm where conservatives can prioritize protecting children is in the social-media sphere. As with online pornography, social-media use has seen a meteoric rise in recent years. In 2005, only 5% of Americans used social media; in 2024, just under 70% of Americans did. The average American is estimated to spend 2 hours and 15 minutes per day on social media, with 55% admitting they even check social media while driving.
Once again, research has shown links between social-media use and increased prevalence of anxiety, depression, loneliness, poor sleep, and low self-esteem. And once again, younger Americans have not been spared — in fact, they seem to bear the highest cost of all.
Over one-third of teens report that they use at least one social-media app "almost constantly" — a potential underestimate given the self-reporting nature of the surveys — and over 50% believe that giving up social media would be at least somewhat difficult to do. Well-publicized studies have documented a link between time spent on social media and increased risk of suicide, particularly among teenage girls, whose suicide rates tragically doubled from 2007 to 2015. Perhaps most alarming of all, the Centers for Disease Control reported in 2023 that close to one in three teenage girls have "seriously considered" suicide, a 60% increase in the past decade.
One obvious policy response would be to extend age-verification laws, similar to those discussed above in the pornography context, to social-media sites. In fact, numerous American states — such as Arkansas, Florida, and Utah — have done exactly that. Late last year, Australia became the first prominent country to enact a comprehensive youth social-media ban, bringing further attention to the topic. Like with pornography, these age-verification laws are currently being challenged in courts across the country on First Amendment grounds. While the Supreme Court has yet to hear a case on the legal merits, the same minimally invasive age-verification techniques discussed above support a compelling argument that these age gates can both protect children and preserve the First Amendment rights of adult Americans seeking to access social media.
As some observers have pointed out, the recent rise in teen depression, anxiety, and suicide started to become especially observable around 2012, which has been documented as the year when most cell-phone owners upgraded to smartphones.
This once again provides conservatives with an opportunity to offer real solutions that can respond to this moment. Reform-minded Republican governors have been early leaders in this area, recognizing that the use of smartphones in school was having deleterious effects on the well-being of children as well as their education. Under Governor DeSantis, Florida became the first state to pass a law banning or limiting cell phones in K-12 public schools, and according to an analysis by Ballotpedia, 29 states have passed such laws to date.
Of note, several deep-blue states — including New York, Vermont, and Oregon — have followed suit, demonstrating that, as with age verification for pornography sites, conservative moral instincts in this area can align with voters across the ideological spectrum. The example of Virginia is instructive, where former governor Glenn Youngkin first issued an executive order instituting a cell-phone ban before signing legislation that codified a "bell-to-bell" school phone ban into state law. The Virginia legislature was controlled by Democrats at the time, and the bill that Youngkin eventually signed was introduced in both chambers by Democratic lawmakers, underscoring the bipartisan consensus that rapidly coalesced around the issue in the wake of Youngkin's executive order.
Research has found that cell-phone bans improve student outcomes, including by raising test scores. Student engagement has also improved in the wake of such bans, while disciplinary issues have declined. Given this backdrop, conservative policymakers should seek to extend school cell-phone bans to the remaining states that lack them.
But the effort needs to expand beyond public schools. Many parents are concluding that the best way to protect their children — whether it be from pornography, social media, or substance abuse — is to be more actively involved in their education, including through home-schooling. During the pandemic, concepts such as home-school "pods" took off, as parents showed interest in banding together with other like-minded families to educate their children.
These schools have faced significant pushback in many states and locales, either in the form of restrictive zoning rules on meeting in homes or churches, or through overly burdensome licensing regimes that have sought to classify them as childcare centers. While home-schooling has traditionally been seen as the province of the religious right, data suggest that more left-leaning parents are opting out of public schooling now, too. A 2019 survey revealed that home-school parents were more likely to identify as Republicans than Democrats by 3-to-1, but in 2022, a Washington Post poll found that this ratio had declined to 2-to-1, with only 34% of parents saying they had opted for home-schooling to provide religious instruction to their kids.
Protecting home schools should be a wheelhouse issue for the political right, in both its libertarian and conservative camps. Given the many concerning challenges our nation's youth now face, right-leaning policymakers should unapologetically promote efforts to protect children. Unlike other social and cultural "wedge" issues, policies like commonsense age-verification laws, school cell-phone bans, and defending home-schooling pods could be a political layup.
A BETTER FUTURE
Of the myriad issues discussed here, the average person is likely to identify at least one or two they find concerning. For some, it might be increasing rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness. For others, it might be rising addiction trends. For yet others, it may be the ever-earlier exposure to internet pornography among our nation's youth. For those more economically inclined, recent research has also suggested that mental illness is costing an estimated $282 billion annually in reduced economic output.
Whether we call it a "crisis," a "problem," or something else entirely, America's declining mental health deserves real engagement from the political right. At the very least, we should not cede the issue to policymakers on the left. The approaches suggested here — loosening occupational-licensing rules, enhancing civil society and community connectivity, and protecting and supporting our children and families — show we don't have to. Instead, we can craft solutions to the nation's troubling mental-health trends that blend longtime conservative and libertarian priorities.
These three policy paths flow along a continuum that spans the national, communal, and individual levels, creating a sort of cascading waterfall approach of policy interventions. Reforming interstate licensing regimes is a policy task that implicates our broader union of states; rejuvenating civil society is a change that will need to take root at the community level; protecting children and empowering parents ultimately zooms in to the individual granularity of day-to-day living.
America's mental-health challenges are complex, nuanced, and multi-variate. One or more of the proposals here cannot be expected to magically "fix" the problem overnight. But policymakers are not powerless to respond, and neither are the rest of us.