[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.