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.
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.