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Jonathan Haidt’s analyses are absolute garbage.

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.

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.

It’s not how scientists talk. And stating your opinion as fact when you’re a hugely influential social psychologist is really bad.

A fair cautionary statement. But the substack post (and presumably its analysis) is by Zach Rausch. As Haidt writes in the intro:

>The rest of this post is Part 1 of Zach’s report, in his voice.

Haidt hired Rausch as a research assistant, so caveats, but it's not actually Haidt's analysis.

> I knew so many people who attempted suicide

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.

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.

> If I were a teen today I have no idea what would feel like that

AI doing my homework (and my future career)

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.

[1] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.pu.08....

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.

Some readings.

https://www.yesmagazine.org/health-happiness/2023/03/02/soci...

> 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.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/we-know-...

> 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.

Data is tricky.

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.

Also, boys are not less affected by this than girls. They are just affected in different ways. They are more likely to act out in anti-social ways.

They are less affected by Instagram perfect images and social pressure like girls are.

That's why I think it's more then just that.

> They are more likely to act out in anti-social ways.

Sounds like a healthy reaction to a society, that puts its media presence ahead of actual wellbeing.

> The first smartphone with a front-facing camera (the iPhone 4) came out in 2010

Uhm, my N900 from 2009 has a front-facing camera and I'm quite sure it wasn't the first.

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.

https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...

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.

How many times has the economy tanked in the past? How many of those times did we see the same effect?

How many times have we measured?

Don’t have an opinion, just curious.

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.

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...

https://journals.lww.com/co-psychiatry/Abstract/2010/03000/E...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-psy...

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...

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.

Everything isn't just economic phenomena.

after all, 15 year old girls’ top concern is how the 2008 crisis hit them

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?

Wow. This just made me realize today's 15yo girls were born in 2008.

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.

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.

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!

You will find that the market and greater society are related only when the market goes down.

Earnings up? Nothing in the pocket of the prole. Earnings down? We need to consolidate, focus on our profiting arms, and cut our operational costs.

Why would the state of the global economy affect adolescents in particular and girls in particular?

Also why didn't it get better when the economy improved?