These Are Not Necessarily the Facts

Several people I know have been most exercised over the study lately published that drew a connection between Goth and depression. Of course they are: it could all too easily play into the dreadful stereotype which Goths so badly want to refute that they're all doleful, terminally morbid, developmentally-arrested souls, and that any young person who gets involved in the Goth world is in danger of self-harm or suicide. 'Smells like clueless generalisation', commented Cylene, herself hardly a stranger to depressive moods. In fact the coverage that I've seen, at any rate, was remarkably sympathetic, largely repeating the suggestion of the researchers, echoed by Goth commentators themselves, that tackling prejudice and bullying directed at alternative people might help to make them feel less depressed and alienated. 

There is much to say about this. The study was expressly focused on 15-18 year-olds, precisely the time of life when alienated depression peaks, and older Goths who have long passed beyond that stage react badly to being bracketed together with it, perhaps forgetting what it was that led them to be involved with the subculture in the first place. Besides, the study did make an attempt to screen for other factors in the lives of the young people concerned that might lead to a predisposition to depression in the people who identified with Goth; it doesn't help that this section in the actual report is almost impenetrable to anyone (like me) who doesn't have extensive knowledge of statistical language. Nevertheless, even the strong apparent correlation between Goth self-identification and depressive experiences doesn't necessarily demonstrate a causal relationship, as the researchers point out. 

Those of us who have taken part in the Goth world suspect that it's a way of dealing with feelings of being an outsider, for whatever reason, in a somewhat different way from other subcultures and scenes. If you are a young person with feelings of alienation you might adhere to a group of people who will make you feel less like that. Goths, however, take feelings of alienation and externalise them, turning them into a sort of serious pantomime, and take control of them that way. Older Goths testify again and again to the way the subculture made them feel better about themselves, not worse. 

Which leads to a deep methodological flaw in the study which nobody seems to have mentioned yet. The researchers took their data from a massive, long-term project called the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, which began in 1991-2 with 14541 pregnancies. Children were invited in for yearly interviews from the age of 7; at 15 they were asked questions about subcultural identification, and at 15 and 18 (so in 2006-7 and 2009-2010) about depression and self-harm. The pool of youngsters for whom both subcultural identification and depression data were available at both these ages was 3694; the number of them who 'very much' identified with Goth was 154.

This doesn't sound like much, but it is; it's about 4%. This would mean that one teenager in 25 in that cohort was a Goth; one for every secondary school class. I'm massively sceptical about that figure. It's true that the late-2000s were the high-water-mark of second-wave Gothdom, and Bath and Bristol at that time supported a number of Goth nights in pubs and clubs (unusually there still is one, Republic in Bristol); but observation does suggest that the number of Goths, of people who actually take part in the subculture, has never been as high as that. The population figures for the Avon region in 2006 suggest that, if the 2015 report is accurate, there might have been as many as 6000 Goths in the county. That somewhat stretches credulity.

The researchers are very careful in not going beyond their data: the paper is entitled 'Risk of depression and self-harm in teenagers identifying with Goth subculture'. This reflects that fact that the base of the data is self-identification: the teenagers were asked what sub-groups existed in the area and then how far they identified with each of them. But identifying with a group doesn't mean taking part in it. I suspect that perhaps the majority of the teenagers who 'identified very much' with Goth in Bristol in 2006-7 never went on to do anything about it, never got involved in a group, never went to a club; but however aware the researchers may have been of that ambiguity, it gets lost in the media coverage. This research, in fact, tells us nothing about the effect such participation might have on individuals, how it might calm or exacerbate feelings of alienation and help people to process them.