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.