Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
nature.com
nature.com
My own experiences with social media and phone addiction leads me to believe its not JUST the content, but also (equally, perhaps moreso) the fact that teenagers AND adults with social media and phone addiction are just spending so much of their time absorbed into a screen scrolling and getting quick dopamine hits for hours and hours.
When that is your default that you revert to to distract yourself at almost any point of discomfort, slight boredom, lapse in focus, anxiety or feelings of sadness, all it does is just dampen those feelings momentarily. You live in almost a fugue state where those things just fester as you avoid them instead of learning to cope with them or respond to them in an agentic or healthy manner.
Working to cut out social media, reddit, youtube etc on my phone, leave my phone by our front door while at home, never have my phone in bed, and spend time writing/journaling my thoughts and actually engaging with my feelings of anxiety or depression or stress instead of avoiding them has been by far the most significant improvement on my mental health compared to many other things I've worked out.
This is definitely anecdotal, and its definitely my experience, but after the time i've spent working on these things and with what I see in the teenagers, young people, and friends in my life I feel very strongly about it.
"The medium is the message" never stops being relevant. The 'content' of social media is just the 'reward' mechanism for your engagement.
This is the fourth (?) time on HN I've recommended "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. If you're a reader, I think you might enjoy it. It is both descriptive of its time in the age of Television, and incredibly prescient. It has aged flawlessly, you can draw a straight line from it to our modern, socially mediated world.
Wikipedia helpfully selected a picture of somebody using an ebook reader as their illustration of what "screen time" means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_time
I'm just flabbergasted with the level of smokescreen that goes on in this discussion. Pretty sure reading books on ebook readers is not what is driving teenage mental health problems.
Social media is so much the problem.
Which necessarily follows because the closer you look the fewer people are "normal". In fact I'd go so far as to posit that everyone is aberrant, to nobody's surprise.
And of course this is all derivated from a basis of largely qualitative soft-science which had ought be treated as an art than it is a science, however there are pressures which force both practitioners and researchers to justify it as a science.
I'm sure there's some "law of self-awareness" as well. The closest analogy I have is the January Effect which describes an even in the market, a pattern of sell-off in the later year to mark a loss, and subsequent repurchase in January. Upon this pattern being disclosed, the market adapted strategies to exploit it which ultimately resulted in a complete silencing of the effect. In a sense more applicable to this, being diagnosed with some mental illness can also be leveraged to gain favor, I mean I can get a prescription for pharmaceutical grade amphetamines for fidgeting for instance; or excuse my bad behavior with some other diagnosis.
My position is that it's all very unclear. I'm lazy and don't care to dig it up but there was a study from the UK that observed the measurable effects from school based, non-individual interventions and it found their effects to be significantly detrimental for some students - to the extent that they negated the aggregate benefits - which I think supports this position because treatment can exacerbate things. And that's without mentioning pharmacological interventions which are... Interesting.
It really does feel like I was bred in a lab to exist as the counterexample for all this. I was diagnosed with ADHD in middle school and my parents thought exactly as you did and refused treatment. For a long time I held this as a point of pride and thought of my parents as saving me from those cruel teachers that just wanted to keep me down, any why would I question them? I have no other frame of reference and was marked "different" by my teachers and other kids so all of my struggles were just framed in terms of that. And so it went with my anxiety and depression, I didn't have an illness, I was a worrier that just needed to calm down. I didn't have depression I was lazy, angsty, and logical -- that's why I didn't get out of bed all day, thought everything sucked and existence was pain, and so numb I could give Spock a run for his money.
Fast forward to college where I was getting my annual checkup and flu shot and I got my first ever mental health questionnaire. I answered honestly because at the time I genuinely thought that my experience wasn't unusual -- "Doesn't everyone think about killing themselves all the time?" I got referred to a therapist and eventually a psychiatrist for confirmation (because teaching hospital) who both didn't even take an hour to be clock me with all three. I got put on an antidepressant, an anti-anxiety, and a stimulant over the course of about a year and a half and I felt something and then cried for the first time since sixth grade, realized what not having anxiety feels like, and what life is like when you're not constantly in pain from under-stimulation.
I just can't bring myself to think it's all quack science when I was so thoroughly dressed down by these two guys so fast and who took a little less than two years to get them all sorted. It was surreal when the psychiatrist just described my whole life experience without even missing a beat. Life changing undersells it so much and it came out of literally nowhere for me.
This is definitely a thing, it first started getting obvious on Tiktok with Tourette's.
So they didn't have Tourette's and they weren't faking it, but a seriously cool third thing. Monkey see monkey do is a powerful phenomenon. We just treat it as normal when it happens as part of socialization.
It causes mental illness like depression and also stunts social development.
Suicide and emergency room visits for suicide attempts among teenagers are also up, and also on exactly the same post-2010ish timeline.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db471.pdf
Not proof that social media is behind it of course.
Our wonderful, purely well-intentioned politicians could do something about this dire "need for more critical thinking", and yet what do they do to fulfill that need, despite it being literally their responsibility.
https://search.usa.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=ed.go...
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_cow_(idiom)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation (what my comment "is")
For example: these terrible people you are referring to out there....are you sure they are as they seem (where did you learn these facts about their intentions from, etc), and that they are enemy number 1?
Moreover, people who want me dead or removed from society because of my political views are in my immediate social or professional circle, no need for social media to meet them.
This is not the norm
I wonder what the issues where when Galileo was a kid?
They title says "epidemic of teenage mental illness", but do we not discriminate between mental illness and mental health? Where is that line?
I'm not suggesting social media doesn't have it's challenges, but it is the tool. We need to take responsibility for what we view/engage with, just like diet, we now must understand we have a mental diet and we need to treat our digital tools as the kitchen.
"People say [thing] is bad, but completely different people 50 years ago said [other thing] was bad" is not really an argument
the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.
Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.- The effect of social media at a societal level isn't something that can tested experimentally. And like all non-experimental research, results depend heavily on modeling methodology (for example, the meta-analysis linked by the author is literally just a regression of facebook DAU on life satisfaction polls [1]). As a result there will NEVER a universal consensus, same as with most "macro" level studies in social sciences. If you wait for researchers to reach an agreement, you will wait forever.
- The most credible research I've seen on this is this quasi-experimental paper [2]. Since the timing of Facebook's rollout was staggered across schools, it can be used as a natural experiment. Schools should've seen declines in student mental health that correspond with the date of Facebook's rollout on their campus, which is indeed what happened.
- The effect of using social media at an individual level (as opposed to a societal level) IS known and it is very clearly negative. See [3] for an example.
- Most importantly, the fact is that mental health and suicide rates have been rising significantly since exactly when social media gained popularity (mid-to-late 2000s). The effect is global so you can't blame country-specfic policies. And the rise is most significant with demographics most exposed to social media (young people, especially girls). There's not a single other explanation that makes sense. Frankly, I think people are afraid to admit that social media is the problem because so many people are tech addicts and don't want to admit that their own addiction is part of the problem.
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.221451
[2] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20211218
You know how many nerds didn't know they had any sort of issue other than being antisocial and lonely, and then someone made Slashdot aware of Asperger's and suddenly 90% of the site was self-diagnosed?
If really want to end the existence of a theory then find evidence that _disproves_ it. Simply stating there is no evidence to support will not stop a theory from persisting. Nor stop people from looking for evidence to support.
If everybody does it why are teenage girls most affected?
The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right
Humans really are mentally defective in very predictable ways.
You just had no way to know, and now you do.
I really don't get it, people can't just sit and do shit in the moment, everything has to be for status. This trend of injecting marketing into literally everything needs to stop, that's no way to live
While indeed, social media and specifically content algorithms (both in the present where they decide which content people see, and in the future where they may indeed create it entirely) are certainly worthy of scrutiny with regard to many mental illnesses, and the ongoing exploitation of the attention of young people especially by figures such as Andrew Tate are doing demonstrable, objective harm to tons and tons of young kids, and the entire notion that simply by virtue of making an account a child can, by default, access the entire breadth of content available on any of these sites, for zero money, with zero notification of their parents, etc., is certainly one that IMO doesn't get nearly enough time in popular discussions as to how we've simply shotgunned all of this into the faces of kids for decades now, with precious little data about what it does to them and it's only accelerating...
THEN, when that conversation happens, it's to explain of all fucking things, anxiety and depression. Not body image issues, not rampant misogyny in young boys, not the growing slice of the crowd that "fails to launch" and remain stuck with mom and dad long after it's traditional to do so, no, none of those things, just anxiety. Anxiety which is a perfectly normal and understandable thing, IMO, to experience in a period of history that's got, in a non-exhaustive list:
- A biosphere on the brink of collapse, and no one in power taking it seriously
- War in Europe involving multiple international powers and one of the larger nations on the planet, which seems like it could incredibly easily boil over into World War III
- Multiple ongoing ethnic cleansings and/or genocides
- The rise of authoritarian fascist movements in several countries
- The rise of unchangeable super-corporations that run more of our lives than ever with zero oversight
Like, as an adult, who has SEEN some shit, I have to meter my intake of world news to avoid entering a depressive state in which I cannot function. I have already had a vasectomy because this world is not one I want to bring children into, and my wife got her tubes tied, because there is a non-trivial chance that she won't have the ability in a few years to do so and feels similarly. And it's all well and good to say "well the 24 hour news cycle is probably behind that," maybe? But maybe if said news cycle ever had anything but the worst shit you've ever heard of to report, maybe that would be less of a contributing factor?
I dunno, this just sucks. This incurious response by the dominant media of "well it can't be that the world we're leaving them is fucking awful, it's gotta be those pesky iPhones" is so dismissive and shitty.
The pandemic did nothing to help this.
The narrative that social media is the cause and not the obvious looming climate change, war and wealth inequality is frustrating.
How could you see that as a young person and not feel at least a little hopeless?
Look at figure 1: https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2022/05/31/...
And climate change worry has been going on for much longer.
Based on the evidence available to us, what the little doomscrolling box has done is drive us crazy and actually make it harder for societies to act on these problems.