This is excellent. Thank you for the data. Now, if only people in power would sit up and notice instead of blaming teachers for all of the ills in this generation of students who are going to grow up to be voting citizens.
This piece (similar to previous ones) treats teen distress as mostly about themselves (i.e., how they look, how they compare, what's done to them). But that misses a huge part of what smartphones deliver, which is a constant, intimate view of highly distressing real-world dysfunction. Teens are watching climate catastrophes unfold, democratic backsliding around the world, unfathomable numbers of children killed in Gaza and elsewhere, children and teens killed by gun violence in their own country ... (I could go on). Why would we think they aren't affected by this?
In the Monitoring the Future data, the amount of time teens spent thinking about "social problems of the nation and world" rose substantially around 2012, particularly among liberal teen girls (the same group with the largest rise in depression). Hopelessness about the world and pessimism about the world's future also rose around the same time. And in climate surveys, a large proportion of young people are highly distressed by climate change, and many say the world is doomed.
I think it's important to consider that smartphones gave teens an intimate look at societal dysfunction, and their distress is likely an accurate and reasonable response to that dysfunction. Further, confiscating phones may help by partly blinding them to our modern societal ills, but it does nothing to address the fact that their distress is likely a direct reflection of the hypercompetitive, image-obsessed, threat-saturated, deeply dysfunctional society we live in.
Smart phones did this, yes. But they did it in the absence of historical perspective. We’ve done a really poor job teaching optimism, and how to calibrate social ills against historical “standards,” or maybe more properly, historical averages.
Or perhaps their societal standards have risen now that they can see more of the dysfunction. Watching a heavily sanitized nightly news broadcast in the pre-smartphone era was nothing like watching the intimate, daily details of corruption, conflict, political instability, war, and gun violence that teens see now.
The available data supports this "rising standards" interpretation. In the Monitoring the Future survey, liberal teens' sense of civic efficacy and civic responsibility rose substantially around 2012, alongside a declining belief in American exceptionalism (i.e., agreement with the statement "despite its many faults, our system of doing things is still the best in the world.") and declining government trust. In addition, liberal teen girls specifically had a massive rise in boycotting starting around 2012. This combination of more civic efficacy, more civic responsibility, and more civic action, but less confidence that the system works or that the future outlook is good seems more like teens holding society to a higher standard now that they have a fuller picture of its dysfunction.
Good point. And I don’t doubt that there is some rising (raising?) of standards over time. But go back further than the era of television. Did Francis of Assisi, the Boston Tea Party patriots, Mahatma Gandhi, or Sir Thomas More need any kind of media to spot the injustices they faced? Adams and Jefferson had a heroic debate over human nature and the kinds of constraints required in a modern democracy given the problems it presented. (Adams the pessimist, and Jefferson ever the dreamer-optimist.) This is the kind of calibration that I think needs to be part of the solution to the waywardness of SM. The Good in this world have always had higher standards. They’ve also had some realistic expectations regarding the ability of the rest of us to meet those standards.
I recently had a conversation with friends about the effect of their gloom and doom conversations around their kids.
For some people, mental-health problems may arise from a life that has fallen out of balance: too little sleep, movement, friendship, family connection, purpose, autonomy, meaningful activity or osmosis of gloom and doom. Heavy social-media use may sometimes be one cause of that imbalance, but it may also be a symptom of it, or a mechanism that helps perpetuate it.
That is why the blame game is so unhelpful. Blame encourages us to search for a single culprit when the reality is usually a web of causes and responsibilities. It also invites overreaction. Once we decide that the phone, the platform, the parent, or the teenager is “the problem,” the response quickly becomes control: bans, restrictions, surveillance, moral panic.
But excessive control can undermine exactly what young people need to develop: judgment, responsibility, and the freedom to learn from consequences. I am less interested in finding someone or something to blame. I am more interested in recognizing who has the capacity to improve which part of the environment. Shared responsibility is much more realistic than a single cause to blame.
I appreciate the breadth of evidence here, and the seriousness with which this question has been pursued. I also think the evidence has moved beyond “this is just correlation.” There is now real causal evidence that *reducing* social media can improve some measures of mental health.
I still think you are over stating when you declare a cause, especially as it often seems you declare singular cause.
In randomized restriction studies, the intervention is not simply removing social media. It is removing social media and allowing something else to occupy that time. What replaces it? More sleep? Face-to-face time with friends? Exercise? Family interaction? Hobbies? Or another screen?
There is also a difference between causing the onset of depression and contributing to its maintenance. Heavy social-media use may begin as a response to loneliness, family stress, boredom, or an already declining mental state, and then worsen the problem by displacing sleep, relationships, movement, and meaningful activity. Many of the studies cited do not address this issue.
Is social media use a symptom, is it an amplifier, is it both?
Based on this reading I am willing to accept a more moderate conclusion. Some forms and patterns of social-media use appear to causally *worsen* some mental-health outcomes for some people.
The harder questions are still about mechanism, vulnerability, displacement, and the broader social environment in which the use occurs.
My wife and I have sons of 16, 15, and 13. We are regularly talking to them about what they'll experience as they get out of the home and live life more independently. Until then we talk—often—about how to approach the broader world as they get more and more into it. They share one phone we just got last week (almost a year into having a driver in the home.)
There's an old Anglican priest who wrote a short book to young men. It could've been written today. And after he lays out his case he, knowing there might be dissenters to his points, asks, "Are they not true?" Essentially saying, "Don't you see this—and even feel this—to be true?"
Empirical data can help, and I'm grateful for the post, but the argument we are trying to make isn't one in minds, I don't think. It's one in hearts. It's the impact in families that feel overwhelmed and out of touch. And it requires a significant amount of vigilance to keep the conversation common but not exhausting.
I limit my usage of each social media I am active (X, Instagram, TikTok) to five minutes per day. Facebook and YouTube get 30 minutes per day. I am 27 years of age and I was diagnosed with then-called Asperger's Syndrom 11 years ago.
This is excellent. Thank you for the data. Now, if only people in power would sit up and notice instead of blaming teachers for all of the ills in this generation of students who are going to grow up to be voting citizens.
This piece (similar to previous ones) treats teen distress as mostly about themselves (i.e., how they look, how they compare, what's done to them). But that misses a huge part of what smartphones deliver, which is a constant, intimate view of highly distressing real-world dysfunction. Teens are watching climate catastrophes unfold, democratic backsliding around the world, unfathomable numbers of children killed in Gaza and elsewhere, children and teens killed by gun violence in their own country ... (I could go on). Why would we think they aren't affected by this?
In the Monitoring the Future data, the amount of time teens spent thinking about "social problems of the nation and world" rose substantially around 2012, particularly among liberal teen girls (the same group with the largest rise in depression). Hopelessness about the world and pessimism about the world's future also rose around the same time. And in climate surveys, a large proportion of young people are highly distressed by climate change, and many say the world is doomed.
I think it's important to consider that smartphones gave teens an intimate look at societal dysfunction, and their distress is likely an accurate and reasonable response to that dysfunction. Further, confiscating phones may help by partly blinding them to our modern societal ills, but it does nothing to address the fact that their distress is likely a direct reflection of the hypercompetitive, image-obsessed, threat-saturated, deeply dysfunctional society we live in.
Smart phones did this, yes. But they did it in the absence of historical perspective. We’ve done a really poor job teaching optimism, and how to calibrate social ills against historical “standards,” or maybe more properly, historical averages.
Or perhaps their societal standards have risen now that they can see more of the dysfunction. Watching a heavily sanitized nightly news broadcast in the pre-smartphone era was nothing like watching the intimate, daily details of corruption, conflict, political instability, war, and gun violence that teens see now.
The available data supports this "rising standards" interpretation. In the Monitoring the Future survey, liberal teens' sense of civic efficacy and civic responsibility rose substantially around 2012, alongside a declining belief in American exceptionalism (i.e., agreement with the statement "despite its many faults, our system of doing things is still the best in the world.") and declining government trust. In addition, liberal teen girls specifically had a massive rise in boycotting starting around 2012. This combination of more civic efficacy, more civic responsibility, and more civic action, but less confidence that the system works or that the future outlook is good seems more like teens holding society to a higher standard now that they have a fuller picture of its dysfunction.
Good point. And I don’t doubt that there is some rising (raising?) of standards over time. But go back further than the era of television. Did Francis of Assisi, the Boston Tea Party patriots, Mahatma Gandhi, or Sir Thomas More need any kind of media to spot the injustices they faced? Adams and Jefferson had a heroic debate over human nature and the kinds of constraints required in a modern democracy given the problems it presented. (Adams the pessimist, and Jefferson ever the dreamer-optimist.) This is the kind of calibration that I think needs to be part of the solution to the waywardness of SM. The Good in this world have always had higher standards. They’ve also had some realistic expectations regarding the ability of the rest of us to meet those standards.
I recently had a conversation with friends about the effect of their gloom and doom conversations around their kids.
For some people, mental-health problems may arise from a life that has fallen out of balance: too little sleep, movement, friendship, family connection, purpose, autonomy, meaningful activity or osmosis of gloom and doom. Heavy social-media use may sometimes be one cause of that imbalance, but it may also be a symptom of it, or a mechanism that helps perpetuate it.
That is why the blame game is so unhelpful. Blame encourages us to search for a single culprit when the reality is usually a web of causes and responsibilities. It also invites overreaction. Once we decide that the phone, the platform, the parent, or the teenager is “the problem,” the response quickly becomes control: bans, restrictions, surveillance, moral panic.
But excessive control can undermine exactly what young people need to develop: judgment, responsibility, and the freedom to learn from consequences. I am less interested in finding someone or something to blame. I am more interested in recognizing who has the capacity to improve which part of the environment. Shared responsibility is much more realistic than a single cause to blame.
I appreciate the breadth of evidence here, and the seriousness with which this question has been pursued. I also think the evidence has moved beyond “this is just correlation.” There is now real causal evidence that *reducing* social media can improve some measures of mental health.
I still think you are over stating when you declare a cause, especially as it often seems you declare singular cause.
In randomized restriction studies, the intervention is not simply removing social media. It is removing social media and allowing something else to occupy that time. What replaces it? More sleep? Face-to-face time with friends? Exercise? Family interaction? Hobbies? Or another screen?
There is also a difference between causing the onset of depression and contributing to its maintenance. Heavy social-media use may begin as a response to loneliness, family stress, boredom, or an already declining mental state, and then worsen the problem by displacing sleep, relationships, movement, and meaningful activity. Many of the studies cited do not address this issue.
Is social media use a symptom, is it an amplifier, is it both?
Based on this reading I am willing to accept a more moderate conclusion. Some forms and patterns of social-media use appear to causally *worsen* some mental-health outcomes for some people.
The harder questions are still about mechanism, vulnerability, displacement, and the broader social environment in which the use occurs.
As a psychiatrist seeing adult patients, I think social media is unhealthy for a lot of adults too.
My wife and I have sons of 16, 15, and 13. We are regularly talking to them about what they'll experience as they get out of the home and live life more independently. Until then we talk—often—about how to approach the broader world as they get more and more into it. They share one phone we just got last week (almost a year into having a driver in the home.)
There's an old Anglican priest who wrote a short book to young men. It could've been written today. And after he lays out his case he, knowing there might be dissenters to his points, asks, "Are they not true?" Essentially saying, "Don't you see this—and even feel this—to be true?"
Empirical data can help, and I'm grateful for the post, but the argument we are trying to make isn't one in minds, I don't think. It's one in hearts. It's the impact in families that feel overwhelmed and out of touch. And it requires a significant amount of vigilance to keep the conversation common but not exhausting.
I limit my usage of each social media I am active (X, Instagram, TikTok) to five minutes per day. Facebook and YouTube get 30 minutes per day. I am 27 years of age and I was diagnosed with then-called Asperger's Syndrom 11 years ago.
This is also a social media platform, hi. This one is different, don't you think?