Ezra Klein recently interviewed psychologist Jean Twenge about teen mental health. Klein began like this:
I’m going to start today’s show with some numbers. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of teens and young adults with clinical depression more than doubled — more than doubled. Between 2007 and 2019, the suicide rate for those in their early 20s rose by 41 percent. And the suicide rate for 10 to 14-year-olds — 10 to 14-year-olds, think about how young that is — it tripled, and it nearly quadrupled for girls.
A C.D.C. survey found that in 2021, almost 60 percent of high school girls experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year, and nearly 25 percent — I just, this number, man — nearly 25 percent made a suicide plan.
Twenge's first comment included this:
Around 2012, more and more teens started to say they felt lonely and left out. And more started to say they felt like they couldn’t do anything right, or that they didn’t enjoy life. Those last two are classic symptoms of depression.
Then, other data started to pop up. Clinical level depression that requires treatment started to rise. Emergency room admissions for self-harm started to rise in C.D.C. data. Same thing for suicide attempts and completed suicides. So at first, I thought it might be a blip, a year or two of data. But it kept going. So for example, between 2011 and 2019, well before the pandemic, clinical level depression among teens doubled. Emergency room admissions for self harm tripled in 10 to 14-year-old girls.
Twenge is one of the people who thinks this is all about smart phones and social media. As she notes, the period between 2009 and 2013 when most of these bad indices started getting much worse corresponds very closely with the cell phones and social media becoming nearly ubiquitous. She justifies her view like this:
I think for the recent rise in mental health issues, we can look at it this way, that this is a generation where violent crime is a lot lower than it was in the early ’90s. Teen pregnancy was lower. They’re even less likely to get into car accidents or get into physical fights at school. Incomes were up for that period. There’s all these things that were going right, yet still, mental health among teens suffered. So there must have been some big mechanism.
The reason why I think the smartphones and social media explanation has held up is because that is what had the biggest impact on the day to day lives of teens.
That's true, which is what makes this a compelling theory. The problem with it is that several detailed studies of the amount of time teens actually spend on their phones or on social media have found that it makes no difference. Twenge pushes back on this and says that re-analysis of the data shows that there is a big effect from social media in particular, but data science is not really her speciality. I am certainly willing to grant that this is a hard topic to study and that we should be cautious with these claims.
But it strikes me that the other thing happening in that period is that the mood of the nation turned much darker. Despite the economic situation being generally good and crime going down and and the fear of terrorism fading and all that, we elected Donal Trump, whose whole schtick amounted to saying that the nation is going to hell so fast, with the connivance of the whole political elite, that only someone completely outside the system had a chance to reverse the slide. And his rise inspired his opponents to talk about fleeing the country.
Klein asks Twenge about studies that show liberal teens are much more depressed than conservative teens, which I think fits the doomster model, since liberals seem to think everything is getting worse. Twenge counters that liberal teens spend more time on social media and less time together in person, which may be true, but I don't think the data is really good enough to show it.
I am left where I was before this. Cell phones and social media fit the timeline of the increase in depression so well that it's hard to believe they are not involved. But I am not convinced, mainly because I see a darkening of the mood in the whole country–when was the last time you read a rosy, cheerful piece about the future?–and I think that might be very important.
5 comments:
I wonder if time on screen is really in itself important, even when juxtaposed with putative time spent with other people in person. It seems to me the major factor would be the content of interactions online. As a hypothesis, I would suggest that perhaps 10-15% of online sources/persons that the teens concerned are taking in--mostly meaning people already known to the teens, or influencers, celebrities, people like that--is, as we now say, "toxic" to a significant portion of the teen audience. This is why most teens get a lot of screen time, but not all are depressed. There's a vulnerable third or so who are really torn up by influencers or whoever telling them they're not pretty enough, or whatever. Research might show me to be wrong, but I think this would be a better place to start that raw screen time.
As for liberalism and depression, I would point out that, in our politics today, depression is the characteristic liberal malady, and a complex of paranoia, anger, and aggression is the characteristic right-wing malady. Among teens, this complex may present as a healthy vigor or as (adults may think age-appropriate) rebelliousness or as "boys being boys." In other words, I don't think there's something psychologically malignant about liberalism and something healthy about being on the right. It's just that liberals turn their hostility onto themselves, right-wingers (and sometimes the woke) turn it outward, and our society doesn't have readily available psychological-diagnostic terms in which to fit that turning-outward of inner misery (not readily available in the way "depression" and "anxiety" are--we just say, "this guy's an asshole!"). Not to mention the differential influence exercised by right-wing parents and liberal parents (and sure, there probably some truth to the stereotype of liberal parents who swing into medicalizing action at the first hint of the word "depression," with lists of potential therapists and potential medications, etc.; but imagine the reaction of a stereotypical worshiper of Donald Trump to a hint of depression or anxiety in his teens).
I'm sorry that the first comment was removed. I strongly esteemed it, and thought the points it made were basically right (maybe I should have said that). (I never saw the third comment, so I can't say anything about that one.)
This does seem to be a topic on which it is difficult to speak from the heart without fearing to cause offense.
Post a Comment