Every generation, at some point as the young approach old age, seems to lament the state of their youth, but listen, what if the young aren’t actually well?
There’s a lot of data out there about young people’s mental health, and the situation is alarming. Whether we’re looking at anxiety, depression, suicide, or even the quality of friendships, the trends are not good, and this seems to be true in many different countries at the same time.
So how do we make sense of that?
Jonathan Haidt is a professor at New York University and author of the bestselling new book, The anxious generation: Massive rewiring of childhood leads to epidemic of mental illnessIf we’re looking for key variables that explain what’s happening to kids, Haidt says we should look squarely at smartphones and social media.
The book has drawn a lot of commentary and criticism, which isn’t all that surprising. This is a very important topic for anyone with kids, and there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical about some of the causal connections here. But Haidt tells a pretty compelling story, and it’s worth engaging with whether or not you fully accept his arguments.
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This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you explain the data we currently have on youth mental health? How bad is it?
Concerns about young people’s mental health have always been there, with a gradual rise in depression and anxiety since around the 1950s. As people get wealthier and move further away from hard times, they become more vulnerable. But there was a spike in suicides and other issues in the 70s and 80s, which then declined. In fact, going into the 90s and 2000s, millennials had better mental health than Gen Xers as teenagers.
In terms of levels of depression, anxiety, and self-harm, things were pretty stable from the late 1990s through 2010. But then suddenly around 2012 and 2013, most of the graphs related to introversion disorders, like anxiety, depression, and especially self-harm, took on a hockey stick shape.
What is your claim that smartphones and social media are causing poor mental health?
My theory, in a nutshell, is that humans have had play-centered childhoods for millions of years. We are mammals. All mammals have had play-centered childhoods. Starting in the 1990s, we slowly took that away from our kids. By 2010, kids were no longer doing any of their normal outdoor activities unsupervised, and yet their mental health didn’t worsen during that time. That’s just one phase. The second phase was the arrival of phone-centered childhoods. That’s what really killed them, a combination of those two things.
As a social scientist, I subscribe to the view that things are usually complicated. Usually it’s all kinds of interactions. But sometimes there are issues like leaded gasoline, which had a particularly big impact on Generation X. Leaded gasoline had a far-reaching effect on children around the world, especially boys, because it interferes with the development of the frontal cortex. So that causes a huge wave of crime in many countries around the world.
Then, around 1981, leaded gasoline was banned, and 15 to 17 years later, crime dropped dramatically around the world. So I hope that my fellow social scientists say, “Well, it’s not usually a single cause, but sometimes it might be.” We should be open to the possibility that it was a single big cause.
Okay, so what’s the evidence? We use experiments to establish causation. If you randomly assign one group and tell them to stay off social media and the other group doesn’t, you look at that and you see causation. Over time, we’ve seen more experiments, more correlational studies, a lot of longitudinal studies, and now we have a bunch of stuff like quasi-experiments that look at what happens if high-speed internet is introduced to one area of British Columbia two or three years earlier than another area.
So I compiled all the studies, and I did this study with Zach Rausch and Jean Twenge. And guess what? We have an overwhelming number of correlational studies. There are a few that show no effect, but the majority show an effect, and the effect is usually bigger for girls. The longitudinal studies are a little different. Does using more social media the first time make you more depressed the second time? And the majority of these studies suggest this kind of linear causal relationship. There are a few that show the opposite, but the majority suggest it.
So now the skeptics are saying, “There’s no evidence.” Hold on a second. There’s plenty of evidence for causation just from experiments. You can debate whether the experiments are convincing, but you can’t say there’s no evidence. There are plenty of experiments now. It’s not just correlational data.
One counterargument is that while it’s true that reports of anxiety and depression are on the rise, a big part of this is that because it’s no longer a source of shame or stigma, people are speaking more openly about their struggles, which is a good thing. This doesn’t explain the whole story, but it probably explains some of it.
I suppose so, but actually, upon reflection, I’m a little more skeptical because when I was growing up in the ’70s, my mom sent me to a psychologist for a short period of time, and it was very embarrassing. I didn’t want anyone to know. In the ’70s and ’80s, there was a real shame associated with any kind of mental health issue.
But by the ’90s, the stigma started to fade, and in the 2000s it really faded. But the numbers aren’t going up. We’re not seeing young people say, “Oh, my anxiety is increasing, my anxiety is increasing, my anxiety is increasing.” We’re not seeing anything like that. By 2012, the stigma around mental health issues was pretty much gone.
Is it possible that part of the association between social media use and mental distress reflects kids who may already have mental health issues disproportionately using these platforms than their healthier peers? Or are we just creating platforms that highlight problems that already existed?
Well, it’s more of an amplification than an elicitation, exactly. Long before social media came along, we saw anxiety in some 2-, 3-, 4-year-olds, and you could see that. Anything new would push them away. So some of the argument goes that kids who are prone to anxiety are more likely to turn to social media, in part because it’s easier than talking to people. So it’s true that some of these correlations could be inverse correlations.
Have there been more general changes in diagnostic criteria or the way hospitals and clinics code these types of things that could explain some of the surge in reported cases?
It’s true that there was a big shift around 2015 globally. But we don’t see a big uptick in 2016. We did see it in 2012 and 2013. Skeptics will find studies that show maybe suicide rates aren’t going up in New Jersey. Well, okay. One study found that in New Jersey. But the CDC data is very clear for the whole country. So I think skeptics are often cherry-picking. They just find the occasional study that didn’t find an effect.
When it comes to the broader issue of smartphones causing problems for all of us — that they’re dividing our attention and drawing us away from the real world and real connections — we know that’s bad, and we don’t need peer-reviewed studies to tell us that it’s bad.
In this case, we are not peer-reviewing an academic journal and saying, “we won’t accept anything until we’re sure.” If I’m right, the risks of not acting are enormous: another generation lost to mental illness and learning decline.
It’s always good to have skeptics. They keep me and Jean Twenge honest. They help back us up on certain points. But to say, “We don’t have the evidence, and I don’t think we should do anything until we’re sure,” is a misunderstanding of the role of science in society. Science doesn’t require absolute certainty. We don’t even need established science before we take action. The tobacco industry, the oil industry, have tried to muddy the waters. [on tobacco use and climate change respectively] And they say, “Oh, this is not scientifically established. There are contradictory findings.” The cost of taking action there was quite high, but we did it anyway. Here, the cost is zero. That’s why I think we can do it.
