It seems that every generation laments the state of youth as they evolve into old age. But what if – and just hear me out for a second – the kids aren’t actually okay?
there Accumulating quite a bit of data The mental health and image of young people is worrying. Whether you look at anxiety or depression or suicide or even the quality of friendships, the trends are not good, and this seems to be true in different countries at the same time.
So how should we make sense of that?
Jonathan Haidt is a professor at NYU and the author of a bestselling new book called Anxious Generation: How the Great Remodeling of Childhood is Creating an Epidemic of Mental Illness. If you’re looking for a master variable to explain what’s happening with kids, Haidt says you should look directly at smartphones and social media.
The book has provoked a ton of comments and criticism, which is not so surprising. This is a huge topic important to basically anyone with children, and there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of some causal connection. But Haidt has a fairly convincing story to tell, and it’s worth engaging whether or not you fully buy his argument.
As always, there’s more in the full podcast, so take a listen and follow along gray area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sean Ealing
Can you give us the data we currently have on youth mental health? How bad is it?
Jonathan Haidt
There has always been concern about the mental health of young people, and there has been a gradual increase in depression and anxiety since the 1950s. The richer we get, the further away we get from hard times, the more fragile people become. But there was a big spike in suicides and other things in the 70s and 80s, and then it went down. And in fact, if we go into the 90s and 2000s, millennials, when they were teenagers, had better mental health than Gen X.
So things were pretty stable from the late 90s to 2010 in terms of levels of depression, anxiety and self-harm. But then all of a sudden, right around 2012 and 2013, you’ll find hockey stick shapes in most graphs related to anything related to internalizing disorders — anxiety, depression, and especially self-harm.
Sean Ealing
Are smartphones and social media causing this decline in mental health in your case?
Jonathan Haidt
My theory in a nutshell is that humans have had a play-based childhood for millions of years. We are mammals. All mammals have a play-based childhood. We have gradually deprived children since the 1990s. By 2010, children did not have a completely normal suite of unsupervised outdoor activities, but their mental health did not decline during that period. It is only a phase. The second stage is when we get the phone-based childhood. That’s really what they did, and it’s both of these reasons together.
As a social scientist, I share the view that things are usually complicated. It’s usually all kinds of interactions. But sometimes there are things like leaded gas. Leaded gas had a huge impact, especially on Gen X. It had a huge impact on children around the world, especially boys, because it disrupted the development of the frontal cortex. So you get a huge crime wave in many, many countries around the world.
Then we banned leaded gas around 1981 and then 15 or 17 years later crime went down around the world. So I expect my fellow social scientists to say, “Yeah, usually it’s not boredom, but you know what? Sometimes it can be.” We should be open to the possibility that it was a big thing.
Okay, now what is the evidence? We use experiments to establish causality. If you have a random assignment and one group is told to get off social media and the other is not, you look at that and you can see why. As we’ve moved on in time, there’s been a lot more experiments, a lot more correlational studies, a lot of longitudinal studies, and now a lot of quasi-experiments where you look at what happens when you have high-speed Internet in a part of British Columbia. Coming from other parts of Colombia a few years earlier, things like that.
So I organized all the studies, and I did this Jack Roush And Jean Twenge, and guess what? Correlation studies are overwhelming. There are some that show no effect, but most do, and it’s usually bigger for girls. Longitudinal research is a little different. It’s like if you use social media more in period one, does that mean you’re more depressed in period two? And most studies suggest that kind of linear causal effect. Some show the opposite, but most recommend it.
So the skeptics are now saying, “Well, there’s no evidence.” Wait a second. There is a lot of causal evidence in experiments alone. We can debate whether you are convinced by them, but you cannot say there is no evidence. A lot of experiments are going on now. It’s not just correlational data.
Sean Ealing
One of the counterarguments is the fact that reported cases of anxiety and depression have increased, but a large part of that is that people are now willing to be transparent about their struggles because it’s no longer a source of shame or stigma, and that’s a good thing. It won’t explain everything, but maybe it explains some of it?
Jonathan Haidt
I would assume so, but now that I think about it more, I’m actually a little more skeptical. Because when I was growing up in the 70s, my mother sent me to a psychologist for a short time. It was very shameful. I didn’t want anyone to know. In the 70s and 80s there was real shame for any kind of mental health problem.
In the 90s, however, the stigma began to wane, and in the 2000s it really did. Yet we are not seeing the numbers increasing. We don’t see young people saying, “Oh yeah, I’m more anxious, I’m more anxious, I’m more anxious.” We don’t see that. By the time you get to 2012, mental health issues are largely de-stigmatized.
Sean Ealing
Is it possible that some of these associations between social media use and psychological distress are a reflection of children who may already have mental health problems and are using these platforms more than their more healthy peers? Maybe we’ve created platforms that tease out the problems that are already there?
Jonathan Haidt
Well, it’s not exactly teasing. It’s getting wider. Long before social media, some 2- or 3- or 4-year-olds were anxious, and you could see it. They’re exposed to something new, they pull away. So for kids who are prone to anxiety, there’s some suggestion that they’re more likely to turn to social media, because it’s easier than talking to people. So it is true that some of these correlations may be inverse correlations.
Sean Ealing
Are there more general changes in diagnostic criteria and the way hospitals and clinics code this sort of thing that might explain some of the spike in reported cases?
Jonathan Haidt
Around 2015 there was a big change that would affect things globally, it’s true. But we are yet to find a big jump in 2016. We found this in 2012 and 2013. So skeptics will find some research in New Jersey that shows that suicide rates may not have increased in New Jersey. Well, okay, okay. A study found in New Jersey. But the CDC data is pretty clear about the entire country. So yes, I think skeptics are often cherry-picking. They occasionally find studies that find no effect.
Sean Ealing
Smartphones create problems for all of us – fragmenting our attention, taking us away from the real world and real connections – we know it’s not good, and I don’t need peer-review to tell me it’s not good.
Jonathan Haidt
In this case, it’s not like we’re doing a review for an academic journal and we’re saying, “We’re not going to do anything until we’re sure.” Beyond understanding the risk of not acting if I am right, another generation is lost to mental illness and diminished learning.
It’s always good to have our doubts. They keep me and Jean Twenge honest. They push us at certain points. But to say, “There’s no evidence and we don’t think we should do anything until we know for sure,” is a misunderstanding of the role of science in society. Science does not require absolute certainty. It doesn’t even need settled science before we can act. The tobacco industry, the oil industry – they’ve tried to muddy the waters [on tobacco use and climate change respectively] And say, “Oh, it’s not settled science. There are some conflicting results.” Now there, the cost of acting was quite expensive, but we did it anyway. Cost nothing here. So I think we can do it.
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