In sum, all five Anglosphere countries [US, UK, CA, AUS, NZ] exhibit the same basic pattern:
A) A substantial increase in adolescent anxiety and depression rates begins in the early 2010s.
B) A substantial increase in adolescent self-harm rates or psychiatric hospitalizations begins in the early 2010s.
C) The increases are larger for girls than for boys (in absolute terms).
D) The increases are larger for Gen Z than for older generations (in absolute terms).
Why did this happen in the same way at the same time in five different countries? What could have affected girls around the English-speaking world so strongly and in such a synchronized way?
[...]
At this point, there is only one theory we know of that can explain why the same thing happened to girls in so many countries at the same time: the rapid global movement from flip phones (where you can’t do social media) to smartphones and the phone-based childhood. The first smartphone with a front-facing camera (the iPhone 4) came out in 2010, just as teens were trading in their flip phones for smartphones in large numbers. (Few teens owned an iPhone in its first few years). Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, which gave the platform a huge boost in publicity and users. So 2012 was the first year that very large numbers of girls in the developed world were spending hours each day posting photos of themselves and scrolling through hundreds of carefully edited photos of other girls.
I see this constantly in his work, he writes as though his argument is driven by data, but if you look closely, the two are often barely related.
> At this point, there is only one theory we know of that can explain why the same thing happened to girls in so many countries at the same time
Ok this is what I mean. The idea that “there is only one theory” is something that’s 100% his opinion (and also, very obviously the opinion he came into the analysis to start with) yet he presents it as something that the royal “We” have agreed upon.
There are hundreds or thousands of theories one could posit about this trend. One of which is the very obvious fact that attitudes towards mental health are changing. I went to school in the mid-2000s. I knew so many people who attempted suicide none of whom were ever hospitalized for it.
I think you're probably right in that there's no one answer, but when we expand our thinking to encompass the impacts the Information Age has had on a number of other aspects of society – politics, learning, business, language, the economy – it's reasonable to suspect some correlation.
Successful suicides are up, not actually only suicide attempts. Changes in attitudes toward mental health don't result in changes in how bodies are counted.
But stating an opinion as fact is not evidence he thinks there is truly only one theory. It is just how many people talk. Everyone knows he means there is only one theory that he can think of to explain it.
The only wrinkle here is that if you go back to the 1970s and 1980s the teen suicide rate goes way up. In reality it seems like the second half of the 1990s until roughly 2010 were the anomaly. We had what seems like a golden age for teens where suicide and mental illness were lower in those years and may just be returning to the mean.
I am not arguing that social media on phones is good or that it couldn’t be part of the problem, just that the more data I see going further back the more it looks like there are other things involved too.
I was a teen during precisely that golden age. I was isolated and kind of depressed as a teen but I also remember a ton of interesting culture that really made me feel like there was something to live for. The three standouts in my memory were the great music, the teen and youth subcultures (which back then really were kind of underground), and the incredible frontier feeling of BBSes and then the early Internet.
If I were a teen today I have no idea what would feel like that. There just seems to be nothing. The music is awful. The movies are all remakes and comic book crap. The experience of the Internet is just scrolling social media. All subcultures have been publicized and commoditized. Maybe someone actually living it can contradict me. I hope I’m just old but it really does look bleak.
A wrinkle to your wrinkle: a cursory glance at this source [1] suggests that the rise of adolescent suicide in the 1970s and 1980s was greater among young men, which is the opposite of what we're seeing today.
Wow, if those were golden years, my heart breaks for today's teens.
Of the 50 people I finished 8th grade with in the epitome of upper middle class suburbia, 3 of them had died by suicide by the time the rest of us were finishing high school, and they weren't the last.
It seemed like an age where problems existed, but were deeply shameful, deeply hidden, and deeply isolating.
The music was pretty good in '70s too. You see many of today's youth looking back in amazement at the quality of that time's music. It was really kind of a renaissance.
Really though, the phones? To blame it all on phones and social media, is the classic “duh isn’t it obvious just look at what they are doing” moment.
This perpetuates the narrative of the “coddled mind” AKA dysfunctional generation who are glued to their phones and unable to cope with the “real world” requiring “safe spaces”. How we are all victims to radicalization from social media even though research has not been able to link the two.
It also completely ignores the fact that women are much more likely to be abused, men under-report depression/anxiety, our diets consist of shitty process foods, we don’t exercise as much, the economy has favored the rich again and again, the several research studies which suggest reverse causation, parental abuse etc.
> The CDC’s 2022 report found 3 to 4 times more teens reporting parental abuses (55%) than its 2023 report found for school (15%) or cyber (16%) bullying, even though the agency’s definition of parental abuse is narrower than for peer bullying. LGBTQ+ youth again suffer the most. They are 4 times more likely to be violently abused by household adults and 3 to 5 times more likely to have attempted suicide than non-LGBTQ+ youth.
> Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. “Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews.”
Gabor Mate has more weight in my mind on explaining the rise of mental illness in western society. His book “Myth of Normal” is great and does not contain new information so much as it ties things we know together.
> It also completely ignores the fact that women are much more likely to be abused, men under-report depression/anxiety, our diets consist of shitty process foods, we don’t exercise as much, the economy has favored the rich again and again, the several research studies which suggest reverse causation, parental abuse etc.
None of which started in the early 2010's, unlike wide access to social media and always on connectivity via smartphones.
Many things happened the last decades to account for such things.
It's hard to solely blame it on phones with cameras and Instagram. Although it's clear the huge impact it has. We already had social media like msn and pre fb like sites before 2010 that could have had similar effects. Of course fb funded research shows a net positive. And most teenagers already switched to more messy platforms like Snapchat a long time ago.
Anxiety is also higher in boys which have less visual pressure.
Things like older parent and excessive nurturing and overbearing parents also seem to play a big part. As well as the rise of victim culture, which also might have to do with social media.
FWIW, the phone I had in 2005 had a rotating camera. Not a smartphone, insofar as it didn't have touch screen, but it supported some (limited) web browsing and had a marketplace.
You have to be careful with that analysis. There are at least three issues:
1. The time period over which he looks is extremely short. Although the change in data looks compelling, I'd really want to see more than just a few years of "normal" levels to be convinced there's really a major deviation from the norm.
2. The argument starts by asserting a correlation (rollout of smart phones, change in the data) but then moves smoothly to a different correlation (social media usage, change in the data).
3. The biggest problem: this is all social science. Someone took a close look at the studies Haidt is using to try and prove a link to social media specifically (vs other causes) and discovered they're of the sort of quality we've come to expect from the field, dominated by tiny unrepresentative samples, bad methodologies, bad statistics and so on.
To his credit I found this rebuttal on Haidt's Twitter feed and he promises a response. Unfortunately, judging from his tweets so far, that response might not be convincing:
Haidt: "Brown requires a standard of proof not appropriate for a public health crisis"
Reply from someone on Twitter: "Oh no, that's a bad argument I think! We shouldn't be calling for lower standards of evidence during a public health crisis, but the inverse"
Haidt: "Aaron has set his skepticism meter so high that he says none of the 300 studies in the google doc are valid. That is too high. No studies pass muster?"
I don't think Brown actually does assert all 300 are invalid, just that he checked quite a few and none of the ones he spot checked were valid.
But this is a way of thinking that crops up all the time in academic work. Back when I was reviewing COVID papers I was constantly hitting this kind type of assumption in the public health space, that quantity is some proxy/substitute for quality, or that you don't need to verify the quality of studies you're citing because they can't all be wrong, or (worst of all) that because a problem seems important the standard of evidence should be low.
It's totally possible that there is an abnormal increase in teen mental health issues lately but it's too early to consider it proven. More raw data is needed stretching back a lot further in time. Additionally the claim that it's driven by social media needs a smaller number of higher quality studies before it's taken seriously. Right now not only do the studies not convince, but it's not even clear what they're measuring. For example the growth in smartphones would also make it much easier to consume news around the clock, and social media often rebroadcasts news, so it could be hard to decorrelate these things to decide to what extent it's selfies vs headlines that drives the depression.
Oh, you mean so after the global economy tanked things got worse? And you're deciding to blame this on smart phones? And only smart phones. Because their screens are somehow more magically bad than say, a desktop computer.
The global economy has tanked many times. Smartphones are just the once. Your argument is that having something new you're nearly always conscious of has no impact?
Exactly my point. Since 2008 it's been all downhill. You may have been insulated from the impacts of the series of crises is but I can assure you it's been pretty stressful for most people.
Do you think the growth of rates of depression and anxiety do not cut across socioeconomic groups? Doesn't it seem the rate of growth of these mental conditions outpaces any increase in poverty or economic strain? Presumably even those who "have been insulated from the impacts of the series of crises" are amongst the increase in teen mental illness.
All downhill? I remember the 2010s as an uninterrupted bull market. SPY opened the decade at $110, and closed the decade at $320. Tripling my money in 10 years, plus low inflation? Yes please!
Because of the housing crisis in my country that was a consequence of the 2008 crisis, my single parent household had no income and we barely didn't lose our home.
My siblings and I barely had food to eat and water to have a shower. We wore hand-me-downs for years to recover. Those memories have been etched in my brain to the point that it is almost impossible for me to give up habits picked from that time and change my mindset. Even though I am doing relatively okay now w/ an engineer's salary, I can't give up the bad habits formed from then.
I mean isn’t the seemingly unaffordability of U.S. housing, skyrocketing student debt, race to the bottom, etc. rooted in the inequality that has festered since 2008, which is why you see articles about how young people are burning out early or even starting to avoid college?
You forget that those 15 year old girl's lives are dependent on their 40 year old parent's lives which have been drastically impacted in terms of ability to provide a "good" life for their children.
As it often is with social studies the evidence is not bullet proof, but it seems that there is a general consensus that economic crisis is bad for mental health outcomes in a population.
This is much better than a typical opinion think-piece on the topic. A lot to chew on here.
I haven't read the piece very carefully, but I think they do a good job critiquing the 'moral panic' aspects of the issue, but side-step dealing with the more serious and long-ranging criticisms of contemporary media culture, for example those from Neil Postman. We're really in need of a Neil Postman stand-in for these current times.
I don't have children, but I plan to soon and I will be hardline against screen-time. I don't see my motivations and arguments in what these authors critique as 'panic' though.
My motivations are based on massive regret about youth spent watching too much TV and particularly playing too much Call of Duty, and fondness for the parts of my childhood that were spent roaming in my grandparent's rural estate pretending to be spies, fishing, playing with stick-swords, riding bikes on dirt roads. I'm from the 'best internet generation' whose youth experienced no-internet, then dial-up, then broadband, then the mobile revolution. We can assess both times.
My arguments are Postman's, and they've only gotten stronger since the Television era. Entertainment addiction has become normalized just like obesity, but it's still obvious that they're woeful sicknesses of rich Neoliberal society.
Listen to the rich technocratic and media elite discuss their parenting troubles. They don't sound panicked. They sound like drug manufacturers who got hooked and remain hooked on their own supply, and now struggle to prevent their children from falling into the same trap.
This article doesn’t have any actual information about how “screen time” affects kids in it. It’s just a “conversation” about the different forms of panic.
Screen time is an incredibly outdated way of thinking about modern devices and their impact on people, especially kids. The concept was originally centered around the passive viewing of TV. Even if kids are just watching YouTube, the algorithm makes it a much different experience than TV.
Teen girls do look to be inordinately affected by social media. Anecdotally, i worry about boys in particular when it comes to playing games. I have seen multiple young boys spending every free second playing games to the point of obsession/addiction. Between phones and Switches, a game is always within reach. What impact does the constant state of brain arousal and dopamine hits have on the young brain?
Casino games, in terms of reward if not actual gameplay, are a huge problem in adults. I shudder to think how helpless a child would be when presented with games that are designed to be addictive.
How do you expect the Investment Bankers to survive without addicting the kids to technology? Government intervention in the market works for the sugar industry, so I suggest all kids be required by government force to carry mobile tech "for their own safety" least we have another SVB "apocalypse"
Started skimming this, but quickly grew tired of not seeing firm data. Did a search for "withdrawal" and found no matches.
My kids watch about 20 minutes of carefully selected video content a day. It helps wind them down before dinner and gives my wife and I a moment to breathe, so I'm not in the "pure poison" camp.
But does that mean it's harmless in any quantity? I'm have no interest in assuming so, and finding out where screen addiction begins, and then trying to walk it back.
>> My kids watch about 20 minutes of carefully selected video content a day. It helps wind them down before dinner and gives my wife and I a moment to breathe, so I'm not in the "pure poison" camp
"20 minutes of curated content" sounds an awful lot like "20 minutes of supervised play time in the playground with kids we've vetted", minus the actual exercise. Good luck with this policy by the time they hit 10+
To me, it sounds a lot more like "not using screens as a default babysitter." Support. Who cares if it's sustainable at 10+? If you get ten years of low threshold screen time for your kids, you've done well. You've probably done well to establish an activity prioritization that helps you for the tween years and beyond. The playground bit doesn't sound great and I don't know anyone who does this (I know many parents who attempt to minimize screen time).
ChatGPt's disappointing Output: The paper is a study of the factors affecting the adoption of smart home technology among homeowners in Sweden. The researchers conducted a survey and analyzed the data to identify the significant factors influencing smart home adoption. The results indicate that perceived usefulness, compatibility, complexity, and cost are the most important factors that influence homeowners' intention to adopt smart home technology. Furthermore, the study found that perceived usefulness has the highest impact on homeowners' intention to adopt smart home technology, followed by compatibility, complexity, and cost. The paper concludes that in order to increase the adoption of smart home technology, stakeholders need to emphasize the perceived usefulness of the technology and address the concerns related to complexity and cost.
Like most things, I think there's a sweet spot. I learned a ton from video games and youtube. All the same, I could see how easy it would be to "fall into" the trap of just binging nonsense all day.
I remember having a playful argument with my wife and her siblings. They were tiktok users (not obsessed but they did watch _a lot_). They said it was good because it gave you interesting stuff based off of your algorithm. I took the phone and held it up saying "ok, let's see what's interesting." We went through 10 clips before something moderately interesting came up. That's been my experience watching too. You get 10 useless things before 1 potentially interesting piece of content shows up. Not to mention blatant ads, misinformation and downright lies. (I saw someone who must have been 19 giving "tax advice" that was just incorrect)
Now, lots of people point to boomers being couch potatoes themselves... but it's nothing like sitting down moving your thumb around to find a few seconds of dopamine between nonsense... and people will do that for _hours_ not minutes.
So your 'test' of tiktok was mostly invalid. It takes a few days for "The Algorithm" to become astonishingly good at finding things for you to watch.
TikTok also seems to 'run out' of new material to show you easily. This makes sense, mathematically -- there just isn't enough new content to avoid repeats and quality drop if you view it for hours at a time.
You will get more interesting content that appeals to you if you interact with the app honestly, instead of grabbing someone else's phone for a few minutes and then trying to prove whatever point you're on about here.
>> "The Algorithm" to become astonishingly good at finding things for you to watch.
You mean learns how to keep you engaged and shovels more of same down your throat? I have yet to find any algorithm other than human curation that can give you a variety of content while maintaining a set of deeper values and conceptual integrity. Recommendation engines peaked with pre-Amazon CD*Now
TLDR: The conclusions are that the reinforcement of short-term gratification by social media and phones in the young brain is a real treat to society, as a large part of it's normal functioning is based in long-term gratification.
I thought it was interesting that they framed blinking inboxes and vibrating phones in class to be a ''new kind of Marshmallow test'' ( test in which a child is asked to not eat a marshmallow left in front of them so that they can, after a delay, receive two marshmallows to eat - showing capacity to wait for delayed gratification.
It blows my mind to think of young kids having smart phones in class these days. In my day I had nothing but my own brain to distract me and notebooks to scribble drawings into.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-il...
Salient points:
In sum, all five Anglosphere countries [US, UK, CA, AUS, NZ] exhibit the same basic pattern:
A) A substantial increase in adolescent anxiety and depression rates begins in the early 2010s.
B) A substantial increase in adolescent self-harm rates or psychiatric hospitalizations begins in the early 2010s.
C) The increases are larger for girls than for boys (in absolute terms).
D) The increases are larger for Gen Z than for older generations (in absolute terms).
Why did this happen in the same way at the same time in five different countries? What could have affected girls around the English-speaking world so strongly and in such a synchronized way?
[...]
At this point, there is only one theory we know of that can explain why the same thing happened to girls in so many countries at the same time: the rapid global movement from flip phones (where you can’t do social media) to smartphones and the phone-based childhood. The first smartphone with a front-facing camera (the iPhone 4) came out in 2010, just as teens were trading in their flip phones for smartphones in large numbers. (Few teens owned an iPhone in its first few years). Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, which gave the platform a huge boost in publicity and users. So 2012 was the first year that very large numbers of girls in the developed world were spending hours each day posting photos of themselves and scrolling through hundreds of carefully edited photos of other girls.