> I have my doubts that it's about the phones. It seems more likely that their adult problems are the student loans, the cost of rent, the lack of jobs, the corporate greed, and on, and on.
That wouldn't explain the sharp reductions in mental health among girls around 2012. Something definitely seemed to be going on between 2010 and 2014. Cell phone usage patterns could be a part of it, but I'd like to see error bars on these charts.
The global economy just tanked and advanced economies were barely recovering. I would see that as enough of a cause for children to feel a bleaker future and be impacted in direct and indeect ways.
The author, Jonathan Haidt, has considered the global financial crisis but doesn't believe it explains the data [1], he writes
"It’s not because of the Global Financial Crisis. Why would that hit younger teen girls hardest? Why would teen mental illness rise throughout the 2010s as the American economy got better and better? Why did a measure of loneliness at school go up around the world only after 2012, as the global economy got better and better? (See Twenge et al. 2021). And why would the epidemic hit Canadian girls just as hard when Canada didn’t have much of a crisis?"
He is admittedly open to other ideas, but claims that no one to date has been able to provide a explanation for the upticks depression and mental health issues which disproportionately impacts young, pre-teen girls and is seen across many developed countries.
Let's step back a minute: the author strongly believes that social media directly causes mental illness in teenagers (blog written in February, wo before this one), but he's still dead on blaming smarphones in general for all the ills ?
> Why would teen mental illness rise throughout the 2010s as the American economy got better and better?
Inequality also rose in that same time period. I mean, we could go through hundreds of indicators that somewhat fit the curve. Taking any of those to ask "Why wouldn't this one fit better than the others ?" is a fine exercice, but at the end of the day we're still playing a guessing game and not progressing much.
> The global economy just tanked and advanced economies were barely recovering. I would see that as enough of a cause for children to feel a bleaker future and be impacted in direct and indeect ways.
The other poster noted data points that refute your claim, mainly because this is a global trend and you've pointed out a mostly US-centric condition.
Another point to consider is that it's simply implausible that 10-12 year olds understand or call all that much about the economy or recovery.
A final point: previous generations went through literal wars with military drafts, and Cold War nuclear bomb drills which are far more direct dangers, and yet we did not see these other issues with mental health. They only arose since the advent of smart phones and social media.
Many other possible causes have been explored, but systematically eliminated because they aren't global, wouldn't preferentially affect genders or age groups, and so on. Other explanations just don't fit all of the data.
> it's simply implausible that 10-12 year olds understand or call all that much about the economy or recovery.
I'm surprised about this kind of takes. Is it assuming that kids aren't affected by their dad getting laid off, or money getting tight in the family in general, adults' reactions to the news or everyday events etc...And of course it's also more complex than just money going in and out. Adults' feelings, anxiety, pressure usually propagate through kids.
The economy is not just a line going up or down in someone's chart.
> They only arose since the advent of smart phones and social media.
Are we positing that nothing else changed in comparison ? Do we really want to compare the war time many decades ago and our current situation and say phones are the only thing that differs ?
> I'm surprised about this kind of takes. Is it assuming that kids aren't affected by their dad getting laid off, or money getting tight in the family in general, adults' reactions to the news or everyday events etc
Except this trend didn't happen at any previous downturn, so now you're special pleading that this economic downturn specifically is different somehow, based on... What exactly? And again, these mental health trends are international and cross-cultural and none of the other explanations can account for this. In fact, your suggestion that it's due to economic downturn is essentially refuted since even nations that didn't experience a downturn saw these mental health declines.
> Adults' feelings, anxiety, pressure usually propagate through kids.
What about adult anxiety about the Vietnam war, the nuclear threat of the cold war, the anxiety over terrorism that took out the twin towers. No meaningful blips seen with those momentous events.
You keep pointing to possible second and third order effects that maybe-somehow-sort-of indirectly filtered down to kids through mechanisms like "parental anxiety", instead of a direct and obvious first-order effect from a device that's literally in their hands 16 hours of the day, and whose use we know has been algorithmically optimized to drive engagement, fear and anger, and whose second order effects are known to disrupt sleep, which is particularly important for teens going through puberty.
Like, don't you see how absurdly implausible your second and third order effects are by comparison? To say nothing of the fact that they don't even explain all of the data, which is not a problem for the social media hypothesis.
> direct and obvious first-order effect from a device that's literally in their hands 16 hours of the day,
This is the core of the issue. You are right that none of the examples I gave are definitive first-order causes of a suicide trend (nor do I believe they are, I see any specific cause as only a part of more complicated situation). And it's exactly the same with smartphones: you assume it's a first-order effect through circumstancial observations, but I'd argue that's just your personal bias, and we have no effective tools to split the different.
To step back, the starting point of this was whether we could just randomly blame smartphones just before they became popular following the trend. There's just so many other things, including the technical evolutions that allowed smartphones to get popular in the first place, the social changes that also happen as we get a more global society etc.
And I also see a difference between saying "it's the smarphones!" and "it's social media!" (getting rid of smartphones doesn't delete social media)
You (and the author) seem to assume that because other people aren't coming up with random guesses that look convincing, your own random guess has suddently extra weight and validity. My opinion is a random guess is still a random guess, what I'm trying to argue would be that there's probably a lot more to this than a single cause, and if it really was mainly the smartphones front and center, we'd have seen specific issues way before 2010, especially in SEA for instance.
> And it's exactly the same with smartphones: you assume it's a first-order effect through circumstancial observations, but I'd argue that's just your personal bias, and we have no effective tools to split the different.
Incorrect, we have many self-reports from direct interventions of people leaving social media and reporting drastic improvements in mental health. We also see in the data, temporal correlations from the onset of poorer mental health after people receive cell phones and join social media.
> There's just so many other things, including the technical evolutions that allowed smartphones to get popular in the first place, the social changes that also happen as we get a more global society etc.
What other things are simultaneously global/cross-cultural and affect genders differently?
> And I also see a difference between saying "it's the smarphones!" and "it's social media!" (getting rid of smartphones doesn't delete social media)
It's both. The effects are clearly synergistic. Phones are a constant distraction and engaging on their own, which could lead to sleep loss and less direct social engagement, and social media itself is also toxic in numerous ways, and its constant presence by your side means constant preoccupation, and compounded with their algorithmic optimization to drive engagement, it's a recipe for poor mental health.
> You (and the author) seem to assume that because other people aren't coming up with random guesses that look convincing, your own random guess has suddently extra weight and validity.
Not extra weight and validity, it carries all the weight and validity that literally the only explanation for the current data should carry.
> and if it really was mainly the smartphones front and center, we'd have seen specific issues way before 2010, especially in SEA for instance.
Haidt has been very clear that smartphones + social media are the main drivers. Phones themselves might cause some issues but not enough to explain the trends, and social media alone might cause some issues but not enough to explain the trends if you're only logging in a couple of times a day from your desktop or laptop. Combined, they clearly augment each other.
Doubtless these effects were felt by children through increased hardship at home, but having witnessed first hand the vice grip that negative social media interactions had on the friends I had during high school (starting 2011) and the complete lack of awareness the social circles I ran in had of the wider economic situation, I'm more inclined to believe that the shock therapy exposure to social media and smartphones had a large part to play.
I, for one, was pretty adversely affected by what I saw and was subjected to on social media as a young teenager. It gave me and most other kids I knew additional stress outside of the in-person problems that would arise at school.
That wouldn't explain the sharp reductions in mental health among girls around 2012. Something definitely seemed to be going on between 2010 and 2014. Cell phone usage patterns could be a part of it, but I'd like to see error bars on these charts.