[s1artibartfast]

And in the meantime suicide and depression keep climbing

[xorfish]

Suicide rates worldwide have been consistently dropping. The same is true for Europe.

The US is an outlier, the suicide rate has increased by 10% between 1996 and 2017.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/suicide

I'm not sure that there is comparable data available for depression since our understanding of it has changed over the last 30 years and getting consistent data is very difficult.

[DanBC]

Our World in Data is not a suitable source for suicide statistics, especially if you're comparing different countries across time.

They don't tell you what populations they're using; they don't tell you how these different countries are counting suicide; they don't tell you whether the methods for counting have changed over time in these countries.

[xorfish]

The data source is the World Health Organization. The data quality from different countries is included in their report.

The data for western Europe and the US is of high quality.

Which data would be of higher quality?

[s1artibartfast]

If it is the case that suicide and depression is lower in the EU, then we would want to compare internet addiction in the US vs EU.

If the US is higher, this supports the argument, not refutes it

[OneTimePetes]

Yes, but the source of that is not the symptom.