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Yet another look at social media and teen depression

A couple of years ago I became pretty skeptical of the panic over social media. No matter how obvious the harms of social media might seem, especially to us oldsters, the evidence just wasn't there. This became especially obvious to me in late 2021 when the media wildly misreported the leaked Instagram survey of teen boys and girls. In fact, in my year-end list of bad trends, I included this one:

Blaming everything on social media. This really ought to stop. There's very little rigorous evidence to back it up, and quite a bit to suggest that social media is a net positive.

Jonathan Haidt has been on the opposite side of this argument for a while, and yesterday he criticized the kinds of objections people like me raise about the evidence of social media harms—primarily that the actual research is thin and inconclusive:

Those were reasonable things to write in 2019, but not in 2023. We now have dozens of experiments, plus some very consistent and incriminating patterns in the hundreds of correlational studies.

Maybe so! This is not a subject I follow obsessively, so maybe things have changed. Haidt referred me to his congressional testimony from last year for more, so I read it.

For a while I was nodding along as Haidt produced a bunch of charts showing a steady rise in anxiety and depression among teens starting around 2012. But then there was this:

“The associations between social media use and well-being therefore range from about r = − 0.15 to r = − 0.10.” I agree with this assessment, for both sexes combined....A ballpark figure for the correlation just for girls is roughly r = .15 to r = .22. The effect size is even larger for girls going through puberty....For them, the size of the correlation with poor mental health could be well above r = .20.

This requires a translation from math to English. Here it is:

  • Overall, social media can explain about 1-2% of the difference in well-being among teens.
  • Among girls, it explains 2-4%.
  • For girls going through puberty it "could" explain more than 4%.

As Haidt points out, 2% is low, but it's not nothing. And as he also points out, his concern is solely about the effect of social media on mood disorders like anxiety and depression. However, even limited to mood disorders it's hard to square this with the infamous Instagram survey that got so much attention in 2021:

Teen girls report that Instagram had a net +39% effect on loneliness; +29% on anxiety; and +49% on sadness. On all three measures, only about 10% of teen girls reported that Instagram made things worse.

So . . . I dunno. I'd offer up a few tentative conclusions:

  • Even Haidt limits his criticism to depression and anxiety, mainly among girls, but in the popular press this too often gets translated into a generalized panic about social media having a bad effect on nearly everything. Kids these days don't know how to use a salad fork! Blame Facebook! This is just wrong.
  • Even if Haidt is correct, the size of the effect on teen depression is quite small.
  • It also appears that social media has a negative effect only in large quantities. A couple of hours a day is unlikely to change anything.
  • Most likely, the biggest effect is on teen girls who already suffer from depression and then begin to obsess over their social media accounts, which makes them even worse off. If this is the case, it's counterproductive to panic over social media in general. The thing to watch for is depressed teens who suddenly start spending five or six hours a day on social media. That may be the sign of a dangerous downward spiral.

You can see from this why I called yesterday's CDC report kind of mysterious. It's one thing to look at trends in teen depression since 2012 and conclude that social media has played a role. It's quite another to explain a huge jump starting around 2019. The effect of social media is simply too small to account for it, and the timeframe makes no sense anyway. So it remains a mystery.

POSTSCRIPT: All this said, my gut agrees more with Haidt than my brain. For what little it's worth, here's a few pieces of advice for parents:

  • It's not really feasible to keep teens away from social media, but it's probably a good idea to keep them away at least until age 14.
  • Absolutely have no guilt about insisting that you have access to their accounts and will check in on them periodically.
  • That said, don't check in all that often.
  • Try to persuade your kids not to follow too many people. This is what causes phones to demand attention constantly.
  • Take their phones away at night. That goes for you too.

25 thoughts on “Yet another look at social media and teen depression

  1. morrospy

    There's a lot of research about teenagers' sleep and its connections to a lot of things. People think this is solved by changing school start times. In part, maybe. And since schools can just be ordered to do things, it was the low-hanging fruit.

    But if you're a parent of a child between 10 and 18, you know how hard it is to get your kids off the Internet at a reasonable hour or at all. You can be a nerd like me and lock down the wifi at a certain time, but most normies don't know how.

    I'm not convinced it's *just* social media, but the addictive/gamification nature of virtually all of the Internet-based interactions kids that age have makes it hard to put down and it exposes them to all kinds of stuff and interactions that are very, very difficult for adults to monitor.

    I'm sure being shut in during Covid didn't help, but I still think this is technology related. The exact mechanism and the exact really bad things may yet to be determined.

    But ask if we can have schools change their entire logistics (and it happened in California and isn't that bad) surely we can give parents information on how to get their kids off of these things at a reasonable hour or...
    .
    *gasp*

    Force any online service that lets minors use it only do so with their parents able to access a dashboard and set time limits. There is something like this for Windows and X-Box, but not for every device and not for every site. That's very similar to Haidt's suggestion and I think it should be required regardless of whether it is all or even part of this trend.

    1. Pabodie

      "The thing to watch for is depressed teens who suddenly start spending five or six hours a day on social media. That may be the sign of a dangerous downward spiral."

      The thing to watch for is a SM ecosphere that is completely unavoidable and embedded in kids' lives. It's getting there fast.

  2. stilesroasters

    putting phone in kitchen before bed has been an excellent, recent-for-me, habit that has been wonderful. Of course, it still requires the discipline to do it, but when I'm in a groove of doing it, it pays enormous dividends.

  3. skeptonomist

    Here we go again, taking poorly designed polls literally. You just can't accept poll answers as true reflections of people's feelings or beliefs. The answers are slanted by various things, not least what people believe they are "supposed" to or by the standard attitude of the groups they identify with.

    How could substantial fractions of the teenagers really believe that Instagram made all the specific things better for them? How exactly does IG lessen their "financial insecurity"? I doubt if the respondents really thought through all these things and found improvements in those area. Overall they are probably just saying they like using IG and with certain exceptions don't find use to be a major problem.

    If you really want to find out whether IG has effects, you need much more elaborate and controlled experiments than this simple-minded poll.

  4. cnbflem

    I spent some time reading the recent CDC report and poking around the interactive site where you can look at trends in YRBS data going back to the 90s. There was a DECREASE in depression and suicidality between the 90s and about 2009, followed by an increase between 2009 and 2019. In 2019, depression and suicidality were still not back up to their 1990s levels. The recent CDC report is a bit misleading because it only plots trends back to 2009. The CDC report adds the 2021 time point, where depression and suicidality did spike upward. It is hard not to put the pandemic at the top of the list of plausible causes for that spike. With regard to social media, the one thing that might have ramped up between 2019 and 2021 is TikTok and the way Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube feed users video clips. Youtube seems to want me to watch clips from the old Bob Newhart Show, which do not make me the least bit depressed.

  5. D_Ohrk_E1

    It is a widely-accepted, inherent trait of unregulated Capitalism that it seeks (and achieves) rents.

    Naturally, it is assumed that social media seeks rents by participating in dopamine (primarily, but also other neurochemicals) uptake, or as we commonly call it, addiction. Now, there are many such things that feed our dopamine receptors, but social media is slightly different.

    Social media is marked by successive systems that are more addictive. TikTok, being the current one with the greatest appeal to teens (and young adults), is pernicious in that it feeds into this addiction by shortened, quick hits of dopamine. Its successor will inherently be more addictive.

    Studies of social media in relationship to well-being, in general, are flawed by assuming all social media are the same. An hour of YouTube is not the same as an hour of TikTok. I suggest this is the reason why there is a weak association between well-being and social media consumption.

    If my thesis is correct, we'll see the true effects of TikTok (and the generational/iterative improvement of social media's addictiveness) by way of continued, unabated increases in ADHD, depression, rejection sensitive dysphoria, and a series of other comorbidities associated with ADHD.

    1. Narquan

      Yes — totally agree. TikTok is devious, the way it works, the speed with which the next video starts. It's a barrage. YouTube is not nearly so bad, and it still turned a lot of aimless teens into militant incels.

  6. Narquan

    I’m running a poorly designed experiment in my house: an n of 2 white teenage girls who became teens just as that spike happened.

    And my hot take is that it’s not social media generally but TikTok in particular. The immediacy and intimacy of having a fellow teen or someone a little older open up and share upsetting stuff.

    I used to assume the main issue with social media was interaction with people you know — bullying, fomo, body image issues, etc. High school kids being mean to each other even when you’re outside of school.

    But my own kids and their peers don’t seem to use social media that way. Instead, they’re “consuming content,” primarily on TikTok. And that content is often not only depressing but it's about depression! They’re all watching content creators they don’t know make videos about:
    -Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, OCD, suicidality, and other disorders
    Autism, neuro-divergency, etc.
    -Getting diagnosed with such conditions, legitimacy of self-diagnosis, getting treatment, struggles with the medical system, etc.
    -General focus on identity and struggles related to it
    -Anecdotes about sexism, racism, ableism, etc.
    -Political awareness that tends to focus inward — what to do to make yourself an ally, etc.
    -Internecine fights between folks on the left, why AOC is actually a fraud, etc.

    It’s all kind of bleak. We live in a college town, so the kids tend to be very lefty. But while they’re hyper-politically aware they’re not politically active. There’s always been a cachet to being a cool, jaundiced teen, but the pessimism about the future is way more intense than I remember even at my teen broodiest. As 80s nihilistic as I got, I still believed Mike Dukakis would be a great president when I campaigned for him!

    Anyway, is increased awareness of mental health conditions etc. and identity allowing kids in trouble recognize it and get help? Probably! But could it also be affecting how they experience the world, channeling their typical adolescent experiences through “do you have ADHD?” quizzes and neurodivergent checklists? Probably!

    P.S. I am old.

  7. Srho

    "All this said, my gut agrees more with Haidt than my brain."

    That's exactly what Haidt would... oh, I see what you did there.

  8. skeptic

    I was probably within the top 1% of most messed up teenagers, yet I suspect that if I could transport myself back now to teenagedom I would probably be amongst the 1% of the most together; even now I would guess that I have coped with COVID etc., at a very high level-- perhaps top 10th percentile. If anything, I have thrived during COVID and not struggled. For my genotype, COVID has presented a near ideal environment to succeed.

    How could such a large turnaround in life perspective have possibly have happened?

    Clearly, the most important element has been the insight that I have gained from my full genome scan along with hundreds of polygenic scores. This has been a personal breakthrough for me. I was quite surprised by what was reported. What the results suggested to me was all the advice given to me by doctors, my parents and leaders in my community was completely wrong. The advice they gave me did not help me to the road of recovery, but pointed me exactly in the wrong direction.

    Normally one would never have the confidence to make such a categorical statement because it's your hunch against a wall full of medical and other degrees. Most people would then simply let the experts decide what is right for them. Others on this blog have dismissed the self-proclaimed medical doctors of the internet as an emerging scourge.

    However, I have the polygenic scores; I have highly accurate genotypes; these scores are based on massive GWAS samples. Rejecting these results as non-scientific is not credible. With these results, I know precisely at a genetic level what caused my problems. Several of my polygenic scores were highly unusual at the 95th + percentile range (and some approached the 100th percentile) and several of these were almost certainly of clinical importance.

    In fact, I can see exactly what the doctors did wrong: Doctors only see symptoms, not underlying causes; they then treat these symptoms. Without the genetics involved that is all they could do. However, treating symptoms will never cure anything. So, the problems involved will simply continue for years and years until people age out. That is largely what happened with me.

    Yet, once I aged out and I could select my environments all of my symptoms vanished. Basically, I have been cured of my problems by simply understanding the polygenics and then accommodating my genetics. This strategy is remarkably easy and extremely effective. My suspicion is that this same approach could be used at near population scale and help a large proportion of those teens who are struggling now. I find it so disappointing that so many young people are going through all of these struggles when this is likely so unnecessary for so many of them.

    One comment that I think is of great importance is that it would be very helpful to move away from broad brush generalizations. There is hundreds of polygenic scores pulling us into all sorts of different directions: creating some hard and fast rules that are not informed by the underlying polygenics is a bad plan. For example, for me, being able to spend prolonged periods of time in the flow state with my computer has been extremely positive. For a substantial subset of the population, the computer age is not so much the end of the world as their personal salvation. I see the near obsessive insistence that youth be social as highly damaging to the non-socials.

  9. Zephyr

    99% of teen problems are caused by parents and other adults being a**holes and memory holing what it was like during their younger years.

  10. Vog46

    Teen depression is a serious issue for multiple reasons.
    It's not JUST Tik Tok or "social media" that is the problem. Todays children have immediate access to all sorts of information at their fingertips (literally) about societal "norms" world wide through the internet via their cell phones.
    When MY generation were impressionable teens we had to go to a library to look up - for instance- what the ideal body weight and shape would be for a male or female of similar ages. Would we go through that effort? I wouldn't, and didn't. But if you are an insecure teen and feel insulted on social media about your looks, THEN do just a quick search you than find out that world wide teens of your height weigh 40 lbs LESS. So you are already hurt by something someone said about you then you find out you're overweight (because the internet is always right). Now multiply that by any number of things that might be important to a teenager.
    *******The fact that we are even talking about this throughout "Drum-world" with the ability to immediately respond is a testament to the sheer power and influence the internet has over us************

    So times have changed and technology has made things so much better for everyone - but that change has come at a cost.
    My generation wouldn't even think to go the the library to look up things like weights, heights, sexual and social norms. We were blithely ignorant and had to rely on family and true friends to get a sense of how accurate our own self image was.
    The immediate availability of information (both factual and fictional with no distinction between the 2) through technology is both a blessing and a curse.............

  11. Vog46

    This is related to teens but it is OT.
    I read a news article the other day that a legislative body in the mid west (I believe it's Missouri) is being lobbied, and hard, by a consortium of businesses who want the legislation to -re-vamp youth employment laws to allow more teenagers to work longer hours because businesses were so desperate in their search for employees. Their plea was "we need help".
    I KNOW I have harped on this before but this is getting out of hand. Reagans own Dept of Labor studied population demographics and released a study saying that when the boomers started retiring there would be labor shortages - they even predicted it would first show up in truck driving and nursing sectors of the economy. Everyone pooh-poo'd the study. Unfortunately the study proved to not only be right but underestimated the problem because the birthrate has declined even further since that study was conducted
    How does this pertain to teens? Pardon the source but read this:
    https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/meat-plant-cleaning-service-fined-1-5m-employing-over-100-children-across-us-locations

    {snip}
    PSSI, one of the country's largest cleaning services for food processing companies, started being investigated last summer, the DOL said.

    While searching three meatpacking plants owned by JBS USA and Turkey Valley Farms in Nebraska and Minnesota, department officials found 31 underage workers as young as 13. PSSI's headquarters in Kieler, Wisc., was also searched.

    The DOL ultimately found 13 plants in eight states had 102 underage workers – Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Tennessee and Texas.
    {snip}

    And further along
    {snip}
    At least three minors, including a 13-year-old, suffered burns from cleaning chemicals used at the JBS plant in Grand Island, Neb., The AP reported. This plant also had the most underage workers employed at 27.

    Some of the children worked overnight shifts while attending school in the day, DOL Spokeswoman Rhonda Burke said.

    Other locations with large groups of minors employed were the Cargill plant in Dodge City, Kansas, where 26 children worked, and a JBS plant in Worthington, Minnesota, where 22 minors worked
    {snip}

    Imagine being 13, working a full 8 hour shift from 11pm to 7am then going to school

    Now, instead of being sorry for this they are lobbying the legislature to make this legal? "Oh, let's NOT make this "right" we'll just make it so we're not breaking any laws"

    As if teens don't have enough to worry about these days..........

    1. Justin

      I assume, but don’t know for sure, that the so called parents of these kids either work in the same place or otherwise arranged for the kids to get these jobs. So… let’s also spare a thought for their lack of good judgement.

      1. Vog46

        Justin
        The parents are to blame for some of this for sure. But, they are being asked to recommend workers to the company who are desperate for ANY bodies to do the sanitation work.
        I have been in multiple meat processing plants, pork, turkey and chickens (but not beef). These plants are full of non English speaking groups. One plant I was in had to have 8 different interpreters on staff. Hmong, Chinese (mandarin), Polish, and so on.
        One plant in particular employed nothing but Asian women in their hatchery. They had the eyesight and hand eye co-ordination needed to quickly and accurately "sex" the hatch-lings right after birth. The plant manager said we tried American, Mexican, and other nationalities but the Asian women, particularly the Vietnamese women were the quickest and most accurate in this particular function. Once the companies find that right group they actively recruit within that group.
        Working in any sort of meat processing is tough work. Its boring dirty, and highly monotonous. It's no wonder they are looking for any sort of workers..........

  12. sonofthereturnofaptidude

    Teen mental health is perceived to be at crisis levels now. That means it's worth taking seriously. Once again, I recommend listening to what Johann Hari is saying on this topic.

    Where once computers in the classroom were about all the interaction with a computer that many students had, especially in poverty-stricken neighborhoods, now every students is using a computer 5-6 hours a day in addition to any time spent in school using one. Since so many high schools have switched to online texts, this means that kids are spending an absurd amount of time interacting with computers. It's hard not to link mental health concerns with this huge change. Throw in No Child Left Behind and the increased competition to get into competitive colleges, over-scheduling and fewer opportunities for unstructured play, and you have a lot of reasons for teens to feel pretty damned anxious most of the time, and fewer factors to mitigate that anxiety.

  13. Justin

    In case Mr. drum hadn’t noticed, people are mean on social media. To the extent that repeated interactions with mean people affect one’s mental health, it seems perfectly reasonable that vulnerable people will suffer harm until such time as they develop a thick skin. Why is this so hard to grasp?

  14. skeptic

    A neo-lead hypothesis as explanation? Lead has not gone away. Lead toxicity was the dominate social force of the last century. Why do people assume that lead has somehow stopped playing a pivotal role today? What we are witnessing with today's teens might be caused by an indirect lead effect.

    One could have reasonably predicted that removing a known neurotoxin (lead) after over a century of population scale exposure would finally give us a near utopian society with high functioning teens. At some level this is true, crime rates, teenage fertility rates etc. have almost disappeared over the last few decades. Why then are today's teens experiencing all of these mental health problems? Problems -- choose which ones, not not having problems: You only have the power to choose the set of problems you will have.

    Lead has moved us to a state of higher social functioning with respect to lower crime and higher academic achievement. The inevitable consequence is that problems will then emerge in the context of high functioning. Logically it should not be surprising that people who are achieving more and who are striving for a better life will also have more problems. It could take some time for those newly arrived into the world of high achievement to adapt.

    The parents of today's teens notably have their own problems due to lead. The parents of today's teens are themselves still highly lead impaired. The parents with the long term neurotoxicity are shaping the world's of their children. Rapid technological change is occurring within the context of lead impaired parents of teens who are unable to make change work to the benefit of their children.

    Of course, creating a level playing field for lead also creates a much more intense competitive environment for today's young people: No one has an uncontested claim to victory bestowed simply by having low lead levels anymore. further, all of those high risk teens that would formerly have been in prison are out in the community. One response that has emerged over the last 10 years is to migrate to remote learning. The kids who are innately more social have been stuck in an increasingly toxic social environment that is being drained of its most dedicated students.

    Also all of those who have no family background in higher education are now flooding into the college system without any support. How could that possibly not cause a crisis? Further, there is no longer a clear lead divided society of those who are the providers (prison keepers, social services, doctors, etc.) and those who are the takers (prisoners, patients, etc.). The entire lead economic ecosystem has been disrupted. There is no obvious client group for the educational elite to serve. There is no pot of gold at the end of the competitive educational struggle for today's young people.

    The above reasoning suggests that a leadcentric perspective might still have power to explain our social landscape.

  15. shapeofsociety

    Instead of "don't follow too many people" much better to go with "turn off notifications for absolutely every app other than text messaging".

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