- Most teen girls (57%) now experience persistent sadness or hopelessness, and 30% have seriously considered suicide – the CDC’s bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey showed a substantial increase in these mental health issues since 2011.
- COVID restrictions added little to the overall trends – teens were already socially distanced by 2019.
- Social media is a potential cause – although evidence has been limited and mostly correlational.
- The debate has shifted since 2019 – new research has indicated that social media is a substantial cause, not just a tiny correlate, of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide.
- Social media has network effects – which can create a cohort effect and a collective action problem.
- The empirical debate has focused on the size of the dose-response effect – but much of the action is in the emergent network effects.
- The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) mentioned the possible role of social media in Gen Z’s mental health issues, but concluded that more research was needed.
- Orben & Przybylski’s study (2019) found that the average regression coefficient (using social media use to predict positive mental health) was negative but tiny, indicating a level of harmfulness so close to zero that it was roughly the same size as they found for the association of mental health with “eating potatoes” or “wearing eyeglasses.”
- The Social Media and Mental Health Collaborative Review Doc (2019) compiled relevant studies and found that nearly all of the published studies fell into one of three categories: correlational, longitudinal, or experimental.
- Thousands of adolescents reported how much time they spend on social media, or digital media more generally, and then reported something about their mental health.
- The great majority of studies find a positive correlation between time on social media and mental health problems, especially mood disorders (depression and anxiety).
- The relationships are tighter for girls; with correlation coefficients of roughly r = .20.
- Amy Orben’s narrative review of many other reviews of the academic literature concluded that “The associations between social media use and well-being therefore range from about r = − 0.15 to r = − 0.10.”
- Jeff Hancock and his team posted a meta-analysis in 2022, with data that went up through 2018, reporting very low associations (near zero) of social media use with some mental health outcomes, but with associations between r = .10 and r = .15 for depression and anxiety.
- Longitudinal studies found evidence indicating causation in 25 of 40 studies (62.5%), but only 1 of the 7 studies that used a week or less found an effect. 33 studies used a month or more (20 were annual) and of these, 24 found a significant effect.
- True experiments found evidence of a causal effect in 12 of 18 studies (67%), with college students or young adults randomly assigned to reduce their social media use for a while and then measured self-reported mental health outcomes, compared to the control group.
Conclusion: Social Media Is a Major Cause of Mental Illness in Girls, Not Just a Tiny Correlate
- 10 experiments found evidence that social media is harmful (80%) and two that did not.
- 6 quasi-experiments looking at real-world outcomes in real-world settings when the arrival of Facebook or high-speed internet created large and sudden emergent network effects, all six found that when social life moves rapidly online, mental health declines, especially for girls.
- Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls.
Published February 22, 2023
Visit After Babel to read Jon Haidt’s original post Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence.