Social media’s dangerous experiment on teen girls

Today I want parents to explore some of the work around teen use of social media. Since 2010, teen mental health has been on decline, especially for girls.

First, the data

Here’s what the CDC shows us:

On the other hand, we have contradicting data from the WHO and Our World in Data, showing suicide rates of older people are going up dramatically, but teen rates are not:

Is it just a coincidence that the combination of smart phones and social media has risen dramatically in that time? It doesn’t seem to be 100 percent causative, but all suicide rates are fairly high in the US. The use of Fentanyl has increased dramatically, so many of these deaths could simply be overdoses. We can’t be sure about causation, but ten deaths by suicide for teens is much too high, and social media likely plays some role. (By the way, what’s going on in Finland? Look at the scale on their chart.)

Nevertheless, depression, anxiety, and disengagements are real concerns for parents of teens these days. I want to point you to some work here that may give you more details so you can make better decisions about your kids’ use of phones and social platforms …

What should parents know?

The first thing any parent should do is watch the movie The Social Dilemma.

A recent academic paper shows that rises in the number of kids having suicidal thoughts were actually caused by changes in methodology of measurement much more than actual self-harm and suicide.

What You Need to Know About Youth Suicide, by the National Alliance on Mental Illness

“Suicidal thoughts are common among teens and young adults. In fact, about 11% of young adults (ages 18-25) report that they’ve had serious thoughts about suicide, and about 1–2% report a suicide attempt during the prior year. These numbers are higher among high school students — nearly 20% report serious thoughts about suicide and 9% report a suicide attempt. Among young adults 15–24 years old in the U.S., the rate of death by suicide in 2019 was about 14 per 100,000 people — slightly higher than one suicide for every 10,000 people in this age group.”

CDC data finds sharp rise in suicide attempts among teen girls amid COVID-19

“Emergency department (ED) visits for suspected suicide attempts among females ages 12–17 increased 51% during February–March 2021 compared with 2019. Visits among males during that time increased 4%”

Yes, we do know social media isn't safe for kids, by Jean Twenge

“… there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people’s mental health.”

Suicide is Gen Z's second-leading cause of death, and it's a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age.

“Since 2014, millennials (or people who turned 23 to 38 in 2019) have seen a 47% increase in major-depression diagnoses. "Deaths of despair," or dying from suicide, alcohol, and drugs, increased in the millennial population in the last 10 years, and they are more likely to report feeling lonely than other generations.”

Surgeon General report: Social Media and Youth Mental Health

“As of 2021, 8th and 10th graders now spend an average of 3.5 hours per day on social media. In a unique natural experiment that leveraged the staggered introduction of a social media platform across U.S. colleges, the roll-out of the platform was associated with an increase in depression (9% over baseline) and anxiety (12% over baseline) among college-aged youth (n = 359,827 observations). The study’s co-author also noted that when applied across the entirety of the U.S. college population, the introduction of the social media platform may have contributed to more than 300,000 new cases of depression.”

The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls, by Jon Haidt

“Social media—particularly Instagram, which displaces other forms of interaction among teens, puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts—takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them.”