Earlier today I put up a chart showing that feelings of sadness and hopelessness in teens had jumped dramatically over the past four years. Keeping in mind that this jump happened in 2019—i.e., after social media and before COVID—I wondered what was going on.
Here's another chart—this time just for girls, who display much higher levels of depression than boys. I would like this one to go through 2021, but unfortunately the boffins at the CDC are able to produce a lengthy and beautifully formatted report about the 2021 survey but were not able to add a couple of columns to their database during that time. So this goes only through 2019:
I've broken this down by grade level. Don't worry: the sample sizes are large and the results are plenty accurate even when broken down by age and gender.
I drew a trendline through the 1999-2015 results to see how things have gone since then. Here's the upshot:
- 9th grade girls just followed their usual trendline.
- 10th and 11th grade girls suddenly spiked upward in 2017 and again in 2019.
- 12th grade girls showed little movement until 2019, when their results skyrocketed.
I don't have anything special to say about this because I can't figure out anything to say. It just seems odd that 2017 and 2019 results are so different for teen girls separated in age by only a year or two.
It's possible that these are statistical anomalies and all the grade levels experienced pretty similar changes. If that's the case, we're back to our old question: What happened in 2017? And 2019?
As someone who worked in high school education--first teaching, then as an administrator--for a dozen years from 2007-2020, I can share some qualitative observations that may be of value.
Social media isn't a monolith and student engagement with it has evolved through the years. There was a significant difference between the Facebook-->Twitter-->Snap/Insta eras. The intensity of the engagement grew as, I'd guess, the companies learned more about how to leverage human psychology to deepen the addiction. This makes sense! They evolved their products after years of practice.
Also, much more practically: data. In the late aughts and early 10's, students often had very limited data. They were always scrounging for our school wifi passwords (secret in those years) and rationing their use. Even texting had limits (remember X minutes + X texts month?). As data got cheaper--combined with better/cheaper phones--student noses-in-the-phone skyrocketed.
Again, super anecdotal and speculative, but perhaps interesting to the Jabberwockers.
BTW this doesn't address Kevin's question about 2017 and 2019 🙂
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Aren't the 10th grade girls of 2017 the same girls as the 12th grade girls of 2019?
Donald Trump plus TikTok.
We probably need some teenaged girls to explain it, since it may be down to something unique to youth culture, like the release of 13 Reasons Why. Why, for example, was 2009 so great for 12th graders? That seems just as weird as the recent increase in sadness.
Eyeballing the chart we see an equally dramatic improvement in 2007-2009.
in 2009/2010 we would have been trying to answer what caused this sudden improvement.
My guess is that the variation up to 2019 is basically a statistical anomaly or a measurement problem of some kind - maybe a deep dive into exactly how this was measured would be worthwhile?
My assumption is that this then blends into the COVID-related spike. It seems likely that this age group will have been particularly affected by lockdowns, either stuck at home with their parents, or away from home for the first time and unable to go back at all, and in either case unable to form new relationships or ditch old ones.
Yikes! The kids are nuts.
https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-saving-trans-kids
"Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone."
There you go... it's all gender confused teen girls who suddenly became aware of all this after 2015.
Maybe they are Democrats? 🙂
In all seriousness though, although it could just noisiness in the data, it could also be the election of Trump. He definitely made it more acceptable to "speak your mind" and be as obnoxious as you feel. I can see how being treated as "just girls" would impact them. And they probably understood the social subtext in the Hillary attacks too, being high schoolers and all. Having that behavior rewarded probably hurt.
Just a thought.
Surveillance capitalism evolved ever better ways to capture and keep teenagers' attention during this period. Girls were especially affected because of greater engagement with social media sites and the ways that they interacted with them (social competition for popularity foremost). I suspect that we'll see similar data about radicalization of young men.
I'm reading Hari's Stolen Focus, and while I dont' buy all of what he's selling, I think that the effects of modern survellance capitalism, junk food, and popular culture combine to make life suck for teenagers, especially for teenage girls.
Can anyone plot this against adoption rates and usage rates for TikTok? That will show the answer.
Anyone saying "Donald Trump" is fundamentally misunderstanding how teenagers operate. Yes, the teenager in YOUR house is probably aware of and interested in politics. After all, their parent(s) are out there reading Kevin Drum. However the vast majority of kids this age couldn't give a whit about politics. What percentage of teenagers can even name the Vice-President?
It may have something to do with https://she-persisted.org/our-work/research-and-thought-leadership/
from: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/feb/17/gender-trolling-women-rights-money-digital-platforms-social-media-hate-politics?CMP=share_btn_link
Most of the culture wars of aggression by the Republican Party and their supporting right wing apparatus are probably interpreted by women as attacks on them
"this time just for girls, who display much higher levels of depression than boys"
Teen boys commit suicide at 2 to 3x the rate of girls, depending on the age you choose...
My point is not "boys vs girls, who's the bigger victim", it's that perhaps the techniques used to measure "depression" (whatever that is) are not measuring what they are claimed to be measuring? If girls, for whatever reason, think it's appropriate to talk about depression (or even more so, that it is cool) then you'll get different numbers in terms of what is said, but not in terms of reality.
Many of these things (apparently more so in girls than in boys) really do seem operate on the model of a wave of hysteria (or, if you prefer an apparently less loaded term) a wave of Girardian mimesis. For example anorexia in Hong Kong
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us
(Historically we have a variety of similar cases, eg witch accusations, not on the accusation side but on the "girls claiming to be witches" side, but those are politically fraught and people want to pretend they happened in ways different from what the historical record suggests.
Weirdness and nonsense around Satanic cults in the 1980s followed a similar pattern.
A less serious version is the image is always of girls screaming and going berserk for Beatlemania; while boys clearly also get obsessed with music, it manifests in rather different ways.)
There has been a big change in demographics in our schools since you (or I) were in high school.
1. Whites are not the majority of the student body anymore--but varies a lot by region.
2. Many more kids are being raised by single parents.
3. In general, smaller family sizes and a lot of single child homes.
4. and maybe an oldie by a goodie, the rich get richer and the poor have children.
Alas I don't have charts to see how large these changes have been...
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