[owlbynight]

I'm not sure how you would control for this. I was born in 1981, not long after the Vietnam war ended, and my Dad was a veteran with PTSD who never went to a therapist. My home life sucked and I came out of it with pretty severe depression. I became addicted to computers as a means of escape, and thankfully -- luckily -- it turned into a lucrative career.

However, even though my home life sucked, society as a whole felt much better than it does currently and I still wanted nothing to do with it.

Is it possible these kids now just have a front row seat to witness their generation being systematically torn down in front of them before they even have a chance to get a footing? My parents sucked. Their whole world sucks.

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.

[strict9]

I am of the same generation as you with a slightly different story but also found computers as a means of escape.

But then it was more exploratory. Learning about computer internals and talking to others on a BBS is not in the same galaxy as the perfectly honed and ruthlessly efficient addiction networks employed by social media companies.

It can still be an escape today but the real world and online world are no longer distinct entities as it once was. We had the gift of being forgotten or failing without everyone knowing.

It was a lot harder to compare yourself to others with more means or other attributes that particularly for girls can lead to a downward spiral of anxiety and depression.

For some it can bring hope and something positive but the older I get the more I think the result is a net negative for kids.

[tgv]

I've written this several times before. I'm one (or half a) generation older than you. I grew up with the Cold War, an oil crisis and an economic crisis. As if that wasn't enough, the Club of Rome had just published their report on The Limits to Growth, which was the first time ecology entered public awareness, and did so with a bit of a shock. We called ourselves "generation nothing" (a word play on generation X in Dutch), and in England, which had it worse, the youth had the slogan "no future". But no mental health crisis.

Staring at a small thingy all day instead of looking at the world, getting nervous when it buzzes (and it buzzes hundreds of times per day), being inactive because of the enormous amounts of time it consumes, and knowing that that's not ok, but also knowing that you can't escape it. Is it so hard to imagine that that is bad for your mental health?

[timmytokyo]

> 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.

[makeitdouble]

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.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/184723-an-analysis-of-the-i...

[cpsempek]

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.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

[makeitdouble]

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.

[naasking]

> 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.

[makeitdouble]

> The other poster

Responded there.

> 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 ?

[naasking]

> 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.

[makeitdouble]

> 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.

[stewartmcgown]

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.

[scythe]

>Is it possible these kids now just have a front row seat to witness their generation being systematically torn down in front of them before they even have a chance to get a footing?

First, that doesn't explain the gender effect.

It doesn't explain why the crises of the early 2000s didn't cause a similar problem. In three-ish years we saw the Asian financial crisis, the dotcom bust, Bush v. Gore, 9/11, the Afghanistan War, the Patriot Act and the Iraq War with no similar effects on teen mental health.

It should show a strong correlation between news — not social media — consumption and mental health which remains to be demonstrated.

>However, even though my home life sucked, society as a whole felt much better than it does currently and I still wanted nothing to do with it.

"Everything was better when you were twelve"

[naasking]

> Is it possible these kids now just have a front row seat to witness their generation being systematically torn down in front of them before they even have a chance to get a footing? My parents sucked. Their whole world sucks.

These trends are global. Not every country has seen declining quality of life, higher rent and debt, etc. Haidt and co. cover a lot of data across multiple articles. They note some positive uses of social media too, like what you describe re: finding good communities and positive messaging. It's the rest of it that's the problem.

[nancyhn]

But what if you had spent that time on Tumblr instead of learning about computers and playing games?

[thomastjeffery]

Maybe they would be an artist, like several people I know who did just that.