UCSB Arts & Lectures presents Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 20 at the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara.

Haidt will discuss why Gen Z (those born after 1995) has such extraordinary rates of mental illness.

He explains how their loss of independence and free play in the 1990s combined with the move to a fully phone-based childhood in the early 2010s caused a collapse of mental health.

Haidt offers more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison and perfectionism.

Mainly, Haidt issues a clear call to action, proposing four simple rules that might end this epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and taught for 16 years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia.

Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures – including the cultures of political progressives, conservatives and libertarians.

His goal, he said, is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other and even learn from each other despite their moral differences.

Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including HeterodoxAcademy.org, The Constructive Dialogue Institute and EthicalSystems.org.

Tickets are $18-$44 general public; free for UCSB students with current student ID.

For tickets or more information, call UCSB Arts & Lectures, 805-893-3535 or visit www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu; or www.TheArlingtonTheatre.com.