Here is the growth in the teen suicide rate since 2000:
I'd like you to notice two things. First, the rise in teen suicides begins in 2007 and ends in 2017. Second, the overall growth in teen suicide through 2022 is the same as it is for adults. Neither of these things seems consistent with the smartphone theory of teen depression and anxiety:
- Teen suicides start to go up well before the introduction of smartphones and social media, and the rise stops in 2017 even though smartphone and social media penetration continued to grow.
- Adults didn't grow up with smartphones or become nearly as addicted to social media as teens did. Yet their suicide rate grew just as much.
This is why I remain skeptical of the Jonathan Haidt/Jean Twenge theory that smartphones have wrecked American teens. The suicide stats don't fit. The research results are thin. And the state of American adults seems to be about the same as it is for teens:¹
It's obvious that something happened around 2012 or so, but it's happened equally to both teens and adults. This doesn't mean the smartphone theory is wrong. Maybe adults are affected as much as teens. But nobody seems to believe that, and it should make us cautious about accepting a theory just because two starting points² sort of match up—sometimes.
The smartphone theory really does seem to have some commonsense power to it, and I'm in favor of limiting social media use among young teens—though I'm not entirely sure how to do this. Still, I think something else is going on too. We just don't know what yet.
¹This is a complicated chart stitched together from several sources. It's meant to be suggestive, not definitive. The rate of teen major depression comes from Jean Twenge here. The teen depressive symptoms are an average of three questions on an annual survey, also from Jean Twenge as reported here. Adult mental health care comes from "Trends of mental health care utilization among US adults" here. The trend is extrapolated through 2022 using adult data from "Antidepressant Dispensing to US Adolescents and Young Adults" here.
²Smartphone use and teen depression both started rising at about the same time.
Suicides or not, cell phones suck for teens. The main concern I have comes from my years in the classroom. Cell phones train their users to respond to social demands outside the classroom, which means that students are constantly distracted from their work in classes by their virtual social lives. Any teacher who cares that students learn hates them.
That seems stupid.
Like, seriously.
How is this any different than passing notes, being distracted by relationship drama, or reading books in class? Some people will handle it, others won't.
US suicide rate highest since 1941,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/11/29/2022-suicide-rate-historical-chart-comparison-graphic/71737857007/
I wonder what this would look like plotted against runaways and highschool graduation rates since the 80s.
Or climate news. It became obvious we weren't going to do anything in 2011.
“ Teen suicides start to go up well before the introduction of smartphones”
The iPhone was introduced in 2007, the year before teen suicide rates started to rise, so there is most definitely a correlation. Android phones came not long after.
Certainly community has declined and should be considered as a contributing factor. I’m not suggesting social media and cell phone use isn’t harming wellbeing, but I’d much rather see research done on the loss of community and the rise of anxiety and depression.
It's hard for me to believe anything that Jonathan Haidt says.
I feel that he has a history of intentional, subtle deception.
Now, in this case, he might just be making things up. It's hard for me to see what he might gain with this assertion, but that doesn't change my opinion of him.
This could be the sequela from the Housing Crisis: anxiety, moving, loss of home, changing schools, austerity, possibly homelessness culminating to a crescendo of suicide.
The Great Recession is still causing problems (lack of housing stock, some families still have not recovered from their losses).
But that also correlates with "deaths of depair" and the opoid epidemic (prescription problems started ca. 1999, but the move to illegal drugs caused more problems)
https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/epidemic.html
Just need to add in availability of guns.
A Perfect Shitstorm.
Grandchildren are god's reward for not murdering your teenagers
Bruh you're just gonna make up the adult dotted line on the bottom chart but not do the same for the teen line because it wouldn't support your point?
...because the other chart doesn't support that?
Wow these are big numbers. Up 50% in 2017? That’s pretty startling.
No, since 2000. You're misreading the graph.
Haidt mostly defines my morality but Twenge has always hated millenials. Glad she moved on to a new generation
Remove the assumption that phone use is not also bad for adults and the interpretation of the graphs suddenly change.
It is frankly infantile to try to draw conclusion from such graphs.
Human individuals and human societies are far far too complex to be analyzed like that.
Guns. It’s always guns.
Devolution.
When a toddler cries, because the universe is such a baffling and hostile place, is that "mental illness"? When a nominal adult behaves like a toddler, is that "mental illness"? These are not the same question, in that many people would say no to the first and yes to the second; but when the dominant dynamic is devolution, they become the same question, and the question becomes irrelevant.
Are we not men from Akron?
"Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason." - Jonathan Haidt
Haidt's smartphone hypothesis may have missed the target, but his warning about worshiping reason hit the bullseye. Too many people worship their own ability to reason while ignoring the irrationality implicit in their willingness to ignore what interest is being served.
The interest being served is an input into the reasoning process. Garbage in + perfect reasoning = garbage out.
A healthy body is comprised of subsystems that act like subsystems. A body with a subsystem that acts like a system is an unhealthy body because it has a cancer. A body with an immune system that acts toward a part of the body as if it was an extra-body entity has an autoimmune disorder.
A healthy social system is comprised of subsystems that act like subsystems. When subsystems start acting like separate systems, the unhealthy system's attempts to heal itself are potentially but not necessarily successful, and the suicide rate is one indication of its success.
Hypothetically, an increase in the suicide rate is a function of the extent to which there is a shared perception that the future is hopeless, and a decrease in the suicide rate is a function of an increase in an intuitive sense that the good guys are going to win.
Hint: President Biden and his ardent supporters are the "all for one and one for all" good guys whereas Biden's predecessor and his ardent supporters are the "divide and conquer" bad guys.
An expansive view of Durkheim's anomie might figure here, especially if you reverse the causes - atomization first (frayed communities/society, the 'virtual' but very real isolation-in-a-crowd of phones) with anomie resulting. I'm with the phones are bad crowd, especially with developing minds and identities but all around for sure, also not a big fan of trying to isolate and measure "mental health" as a construct separate from what humans are, which no matter how well we appear to adapt to increasing disconnectivity masquerading as connectivity, is profoundly in-person social beings. The further away we get from this the worse off we are, regardless of surface appearances. Cancer is an insidious disease.
"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." - from MLK's "Letter from Birmingham City Jail"
"For human beings, affection is the ultimate motive." - Wendell Berry
Should also mention the "Moral Majority". Yes, that started in the 1980's, but is was mainly in the 2000's that churches went deeply into right-wing partisan politics in a secular power grab--in part to deflect from sex and molestation scandals. Not to mention the "prosperity gospel" and old-fashioned grifting. Instead of supporting their congregations, it becomes treating them as marks.
Churches were an integral part of local institutions, along with schools, hospitals, libraries, and local government. Church leaders could provide a lot of mental health support and help people work through issues. In bad cases, they would cover up problems. Unfortunately, the latter took over and it will take a while before they gain respect.
Does real Christianity need to gain the respect of non-Christians, or do non-Christians with prejudicial opinions need to learn how to recognize and respect real Christianity?
It is as easy as falling off a log to tell the difference between "look at your neighbor and see an enemy" CHRINO (Christianity in name only) and real "look at your enemy and see a neighbor" Christianity per John 5:44.
Seems like the problem doesn't rely on recognizing them, or being 'nice' to them, but dealing with evangelical predation in out communities.
+1
I appreciate you calling out the church's role in the lives of teens. With many conservative church's digging in their heals around topics that youth care about - sexual identity, science, climate change and politics, many will feel that an expected source of community (and possibly their own families) have been withdrawn from them.
It is not conclusively evident from the numbers that anxiety and depression have increased. It could be a matter of different societal attitudes - remember everything can be subject to fads - or to different diagnostic practices. If some people you know say they are having depression then you more likely to think you are too (yes, everyone is subject to this). Everyone knows by now (or do they?) that a supposed "epidemic" of autism caused by vaccines (or something) was really a result of more people being diagnosed with autism instead of other things or not being diagnosed at all. If the mental-health profession has been expanding then a greater number of diagnoses which require mental-health treatment is probably inevitable (or does a greater fraction of mentally ill result in a greater number of mental-health professionals?). Have the diagnostic criteria for anxiety and depression (for example) always been the same or have they become more expansive?
Of course the suicide numbers indicate that something is definitely wrong, but could this be due to drugs? How many suicides are drug-related? Have suicides been correlated with all types of drugs - the usage of which is always increasing - or just certain addictive ones (if any)? Some medical-purpose drugs are known to cause depression and/or anxiety among other side effects.
Anti-anxiety, anti-depression and other psychiatric drugs have not been around forever and it's hard to believe that their availability has not increased diagnoses. Those diagnoses mean money to several industries and professions. I don't know of anything that would have caused a sudden increase around 2012, but anyone trying to explain trends should be taking these factors explicitly into account.
If the psychiatric professions and relevant drugs are getting better why are these complaints or illnesses getting more frequent? Or are we not looking far enough back in the data? I believe drugs greatly reduced the severity of things that required institutionalization but that was many decades ago.
We're often ignoring other data. Suicides used to be runaways, teen driving, risky behavior, assaults and violent deaths. Deaths from exposure aren't always called suicide.
Depression was often diagnosed as other diseases or not at all.
The more we care about our fellows, the more we'll recognize the signs and not write it off.
Then again, you have prescribed toxicity labeled suicide (such as Nex's death) without actual correlation of suicidal behavior.
At the beginning of 2010 most participants in the US economy became aware the recession was bad and would last a long time. Layoffs continued throughout the year and the housing market was still falling. 2011 was not any better and many participants in the economy were adjusting to job losses, evictions, wage cuts, furloughs. Some realized saving the banks and the imposition of austerity were not adequate responses to the pain they were suffering due to the failure of the financial markets they had nothing to do with. The American goal of home ownership for median wage earners was lost, never to be recovered, reducing a large proportion of Americans to a lifetime of tenant renters. A reality confirmed ten years later, which might explain the rising slope for deteriorating mental health status.
Maybe it’s just screen time. You don’t need an iPhone to go down a YouTube black hole.
Also, an iPhone on Edge probably sucked too hard to depress anyone with Internet content.
From the first chart it looks like teen suicide rates started to rebound in 2007. However, the lines on the chart hide the fact that we only have numbers for "2004", "2007", "2009", etc. Rates could have been flat through the entire year of 2007 and then bumped up in late 2009 with the Recession.
One might expect the recession to show a larger affect on adults than teen but a Teen being told that they will not be able to afford prom or college will think their world is over while the adults have seen hard times before.
This chart from the CDC:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
seems to show a previous perk in teen suicide of 18/100,000 back in the late-80s to mid-90s before it slipped down to 2007 levels. Explain that using iPhones!
Once again it’s all about where you place the cutoff