Social media isn’t like rat poison, which is toxic to almost everyone. “There’s been absolutely hundreds of studies, almost all showing pretty small effects,” Jeff Hancock, a behavioral psychologist at Stanford University who has conducted a meta-analysis of 226 such studies, told The New York Times recently.īut I think Twenge’s strongest point is misunderstood. In the past few years, scientists have disputed the idea that social-media use itself makes teenagers miserable. She looked for explanations and realized that 2012 was precisely when the share of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent and mobile social-media use spiked. Around 2012, Twenge wrote, she had noticed that teen sadness and anxiety began to steadily rise in the U.S. Here are four forces propelling that increase.įive years ago, the psychologist Jean Twenge wrote an influential and controversial feature in The Atlantic titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” based on her book iGen. The fact that COVID seems to have made teen mental health worse offers clues about what’s really driving the rise in sadness.” But he added: “We shouldn’t ignore the pandemic, either. “Rising teenage sadness isn’t a new trend, but rather the acceleration and broadening of a trend that clearly started before the pandemic,” Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, told me. The third fallacy is that today’s mental-health crisis was principally caused by the pandemic and an overreaction to COVID. Today’s teenagers are more comfortable talking about mental health, but rising youth sadness is no illusion. “Across the country we have witnessed dramatic increases in Emergency Department visits for all mental health emergencies including suspected suicide attempts,” the American Academy of Pediatrics said in October. Objective measures of anxiety and depression- such as eating disorders, self-harming behavior, and teen suicides-are sharply up over the past decade. The second fallacy is that teens have always been moody, and sadness looks like it is rising only because people are more willing to talk about it. Sex before 13 is down more than 70 percent. Since the 1990s, drinking-and-driving is down almost 50 percent. In fact, lots of self-reported teen behaviors are moving in a positive direction. The first fallacy is that we can chalk this all up to teens behaving badly. But before I start with that, I want to squash a few tempting fallacies.
I want to propose several answers to that question, along with one meta-explanation that ties them together. Since 2009, sadness and hopelessness have increased for every race for straight teens and gay teens for teens who say they’ve never had sex and for those who say they’ve had sex with males and/or females for students in each year of high school and for teens in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Credit: Derek Thompson, The Atlantic data from the CDC.īut the big picture is the same across all categories: Almost every measure of mental health is getting worse, for every teenage demographic, and it’s happening all across the country.
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