AuthorWilliam McClain

• For the first few months of this new substack, I plan to publish a major post every two or three weeks to provide timely information and analysis of the teen mental health epidemic.
• The publication by the CDC of some of the results from its Youth Risk Behavior Study (YRBS) provide evidence that the mental health of teenagers has been steadily deteriorating since 2011, long before the Covid pandemic.
• The Covid pandemic decreased teens’ in-person social activities, however the decrease in social activities was much smaller than the decrease that had already occurred due to the advent of smartphones in the early 2010s.
• Covid restrictions had a greater negative impact on girls than boys, as girls are more likely to use social media, which is a major cause of the teen mental health epidemic.
• The evidence that social media is a major cause of the teen mental health epidemic is now overwhelming, with dozens of experiments, as well as consistent and incriminating patterns in the hundreds of correlational studies.
• Both surges in teen depression and suicide were caused by lead exposure for kids born in the 1950s through the 1970s, when leaded gas consumption skyrocketed in the post-war boom. Lead interferes with brain development in utero and early childhood, leading to a surge in boys’ suicide rates. The current surge is caused by something other than lead.
• Anxiety prevalence is significantly higher for Gen Z and younger millennials relative to other age groups, and that gap has only been expanding since 2012.
• Suicide rates are much higher among older men than among teenage boys, but the relative increase in suicide since 2010 is highest among the youngest boys, ages 10-14.
• Self-harm rates among girls have increased significantly, with an astonishing 201% increase for girls aged 10-14 since 2010.
• Self-harm rates among boys are significantly lower than those of girls, but there has been a comparably small, but significant increase in self-harm post-2010 for the youngest males, and the oldest age group plotted (60-64).
• The mental illness diagnostic bar has probably been lowered somewhat, but this does not just cause the appearance of an increase without touching the reality. A lowered bar combined with reduced stigma, combined with social media communities in which mental illness sometimes confers prestige, may be causing a real increase in levels of mental illness and suffering across the board.
• The epidemic may have started a few years before 2012, and seems to speed up around 2012. We will keep this critique in mind as we examine other datasets, and especially in our future post on what is happening internationally.

Published February 16, 2023
Visit After Babel to read Jon Haidt’s original post The new CDC report shows that Covid added little to teen mental health trends