Social Media, Not the Economy, is Harming Teen Mental Health

Here’s the evidence.

(Photo by Maria Korneeva via Getty Images.)

For centuries, adults have worried about whatever “kids these days” are doing. From novels in the 18th century to the bicycle in the 19th and through comic books, rock and roll, marijuana, and violent video games in the 20th century, there are always those who ring alarms, and there are always those who are skeptical of those alarms. So far, the skeptics have been right more often than not, and when they are right, they earn the right to call the alarm ringers “alarmists” who have fomented a groundless moral panic, usually through sensational but rare (or non-existent) horror stories trumpeted by irresponsible media.

But the skeptics are not always right. The lesson of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is not that after two false alarms we should disconnect the alarm system. In that story, the wolf does eventually come.

The question before us now, on the topic of teen mental health and social media, is this: Are the skeptics correct that we are going through just one more groundless moral panic over teens and tech in which adults are freaking out while, in fact, the harms of social media are so minimal that they shouldn’t be a cause for worry? Or did the wolf really arrive around 2012, and has been mauling young people ever since via their smartphones and social media accounts? (Of course, there are researchers who reside in the space between these two perspectives.)

Psychologist Candice Odgers recently stated the skeptics’ case in an essay in Nature titled “The Great Rewiring: Is Social Media Really Behind an Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness?” The essay offered a critique of my recent book, The Anxious Generation.

Odgers’ primary criticism is that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that “there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.” She also warns that my ringing of a false alarm “might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people,” which, she suggests, are social ills such as racism, economic hardship, and the lingering impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and its disparate impact on children in low socioeconomic status families.

In what follows, I’ll present the two main problems I see with Odgers’ review: 

1. She is wrong to say that I have no evidence of causation.

2. Her alternative explanation does not fit the available facts.

There Is Evidence of Causation

Odgers’ central claim is that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that I have “no evidence” that social media is a cause, rather than a mere correlate, of the current epidemic of adolescent mental illness. Odgers says that I am just “making up stories by simply looking at trend lines.”

In 2018, when I entered this debate as a co-author of the book The Coddling of the American Mind, it was true that the great majority of published studies on digital media and mental health were correlational—and every social scientist knows that correlational studies often suggest a causal pathway that vanishes when experiments using random assignment are published.

But even in 2018 there were a few experimental studies on social media and mental health. For example, college students who were asked to reduce their social media use for three weeks generally experienced mental health benefits compared to the control group.

More recent experimental studies have also found either significant evidence of harm, or of benefits from getting off of social media for long enough to get past withdrawal symptoms. There are also a number of experiments that have looked at Instagram’s unique negative impacts on women, including the finding that it is more harmful to women than is Facebook. Studies also show mental health improvements, increases in physical activity, and reductions in bullying when schools go phone-free. 

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See also: “Jonathan Haidt on The Anxious Generation.”

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I am not saying that academic debates are settled by counting up the number of studies on each side. But bringing many studies together in one place gives us an overview of the available evidence. That overview suggests several problems with the skeptics’ arguments.

First, if the skeptics were right and social media did not cause harm to teen mental health, then the published studies would just reflect random noise and Type I errors (believing something that is false). In that case, we’d see experimental studies producing a wide range of findings, including many that showed benefits to mental health from using social media, or that showed harm to those who go off of social media for a few weeks. 

Yet there are hardly any such experimental findings. Most experiments find evidence of negative effects of social media; some find no evidence of such effects, and very few show benefits. There is a clear and consistent signal running through the experimental studies.

The skeptics also focus on testing one narrow model of causality that treats social media consumption as if it were an individual act, like consuming sugar, and then looks for the size of the dose-response relationship in individuals. But much of my book is about the collective action traps that communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual-level effects.

Alternative Explanations Don’t Work

The second major problem with Odgers’ review is that she proposes an alternative to my theory that does not fit the known facts. Odgers claims that the “real causes” of the mental health crisis are longstanding social ills such as “structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation.” She proposes that the specific timing of the epidemic, beginning around 2012, might be linked to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, which had lasting effects on “families in the bottom 20% of the income distribution,” who were “also growing up at the time of an opioid crisis, school shootings, and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence.”

I agree that those things are all bad for human development, but Odgers’ theory cannot explain why rates of anxiety and depression were generally flat in the 2000s and then suddenly shot upward roughly four years after the start of the financial crisis. Did life in America suddenly get that much worse during President Obama’s second term, as the economy was steadily improving?

Her theory also cannot explain why adolescent mental health collapsed in similar ways around the same time in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Nor can she explain why it also happened at roughly the same time in the Nordic countries, which lack most of the social pathologies on Odgers’ list. Nor can she explain why it also happened in much, though not all, of Western Europe.

If Odgers were correct that the “real causes” of the epidemic are America’s social ills, then we would not find these patterns in so many countries. I just can’t see a causal path by which America’s school shootings, lockdown drills, poverty, or racism caused girls in Australia to suddenly start self-harming or dying by suicide at the same time as so many American girls.

An equally large problem for Odgers’ explanation is that it commits her to the prediction that the increases in mental illness were largest for teens in low socioeconomic status families. The psychologist Jean Twenge has tested Odgers’ explanation by looking to see whether rates of major depressive episodes increased faster for teens in families below the poverty line. There was no difference up through 2012, which is contrary to Odgers’ thesis about the differential impacts of the financial crisis on mental health, and then a difference opened up after 2012, but in the opposite direction of Odgers’ prediction.

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If my account is true, what policy implications follow? That we should roll back the phone-based childhood, especially in elementary school and middle school because of the vital importance of protecting kids during early puberty. More specifically, we’d try to implement these four norms as widely as possible: 

1. No smartphones before high school (as a norm, not a law; parents can just give younger kids flip phones, basic phones, or phone watches).

2. No social media before 16 (as a norm, but one that would be much more effective if supported by laws).

3. Phone-free schools (use phone lockers or Yondr pouches for the whole school day, so that students can pay attention to their teachers and to each other).

4. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.

These reforms, taken together, cost almost nothing, have strong bipartisan support, and can be implemented right now, this year, if we agree to act collectively.

And what if it turns out that I am wrong? What if the multinational collapse of adolescent mental health in the early 2010s was not caused by the arrival of phone-based childhood; it was just a big coincidence. Will kids be damaged by these four norms? I don’t think so. What irreversible harm will be done to children who spend more time listening to their teachers during class, more time playing and exploring together outdoors, and less time sitting alone hunched over a device?

We certainly need skeptics to challenge alarm-ringers, who sometimes do ring false alarms. God bless the skeptics. But at a certain point, we need to take action based on the most plausible theory, even if we can’t be 100% certain that we have the correct causal theory.

I think that point is now.

Jonathan Haidt, a member of the Persuasion advisory board, is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the author of The Anxious Generation.

A longer version of this article originally appeared on Haidt’s Substack After Babel.

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