Is social media messing with youth mental health or not? Social scientist responds to pushback on theory.

However, Haidt’s claim — that Gen Z kids differ from their predecessors in terms of mental health because they grew up with smartphones — as well as his suggestions for limiting them, have drawn a lot of resistance.

Haidt’s frequent critic Andrew Przybylski, a professor at Oxford University, Platform said“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And right now, I argue that he has no such evidence.” Chris Ferguson, of Stetson University, tried to temper Haidt’s defense. By reference The recent increase in suicides in America is not a phenomenon unique to teens. Candace Odgers of the University of California, Irvine, says in her research: nature Critical journal In his book, Haidt said this contributes to the “growing hysteria” around smartphones, and that it “tells stories that are not supported by research.”

But Haidt and his lead researcher, Zach Rausch, are sticking to their guns in what Rausch calls a “normal academic debate.”

What they’re trying to explain, says Rausch. luck“Smartphones and social media are a very specific change that happened at a very specific time among a specific subset of children,” he says. “I’m quite open to the idea that we might be a little bit wrong about how much they can explain the change over the past decade. But I certainly think we’re on track to say that[smartphones and social media]have led to a significant increase in anxiety, depression and self-harm among young people.”

Here, Rausch theorizes: Anxious generation And responds to criticism.

What is it Anxious generation Claiming?

The book’s basic premise is that something changed in the lives of young Americans somewhere between 2010 and 2015. “What we’re trying to explain in the book is what changed during that period to help explain why Generation Z is different,” Rausch says. “And the specific things they’re different about are often related to their mental health, anxiety, rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and even suicide.”

He and Haidt point to a range of findings, including that the percentage of American teens who say they had at least one “major depressive episode” in the past year has increased more than 150% since 2010, most of it before the pandemic. Emergency room visits for self-harm among American girls ages 10 to 14 have increased 188% over that period, while deaths from suicide have increased 167%; for boys, emergency room visits for self-harm have increased 48% and suicide has increased 91%.

“We see this in the United States, we see this all over the world, English-speaking countries, and measures of well-being and mental health in many countries around the world are showing similar declines at about the same time,” Rausch adds. “So that’s the big thing we’re trying to address.”

What they hypothesize is that one of the main things that has changed in the period in question – especially among young people and especially among teenage girls – is “the shift of social life to smartphones and social media, where they are now going from spending very little time on platforms like Instagram, which came out in 2010, (to) spending up to four or five hours a day on these platforms by 2015.”

This technology has changed the way children interact with each other, with family and with strangers. “That’s what we call the remaking of childhood,” Rausch says. “It’s the remaking of how we interact. It’s our social ecosystem and how it’s really changed, and that makes it very different from other technologies. Television hasn’t remade our relationships with everyone.”

The discussion revolved around three questions.

First, Rausch says, skeptics ask: Is there a mental health crisis, and to what extent? Second, is it a global crisis or is it just happening in the United States? And third, if you agree that there is a mental health crisis, what role does social media play?

But even if you don’t agree that such a crisis exists, Rausch notes that “social media is still not safe for kids, right? That’s something that I feel is being ignored, as is Surgeon General’s Report“All the attention is on the question: Can we explain this huge increase? But there are all sorts of consumer products for children that kill 50 children a year that we immediately pull off the market.”

Points of contention: moral panic, lack of evidence

One of the constant arguments against the book, Rausch says, is that “there are a number of people who have studied media effects for a while and are very attuned to past panics about technology, whether it’s video games or comic books, and there’s a justified skepticism and concern that this might happen again.”

In response, he asserts that they are trying to prove that “this is this “Time. It’s really different.”

The second detail they were called upon to give concerns the evidence that Rausch and Haidt point to, by collecting all the studies they could find, which they all collected in Public Google DocsThat amounts to “hundreds and hundreds… many of them low quality, some of them better quality,” Rausch says. Some critics point to studies that show correlation, not causation, between social media and mental health issues, for example.

But running actual experiments on young people that might show why is difficult, he explains. “First, social media is relatively new, especially the kind we’re talking about, which is constantly evolving every year.” Plus, “You can’t do experiments, in general, on kids. And doing the kind of experiments that you might want to do to really test this is completely unethical and would never happen—assigning one group of kids to one kind of childhood and another group to another kind.”

This is why it is so difficult to make a precise, conclusive scientific claim. “This is the nature of social science, and this is why there is so much controversy,” he says.

To bolster their arguments, Rausch and Haidt attempt to draw on various lines of evidence, including firsthand accounts from Gen Z, parents, and teachers—as well as internal documents from the social media companies themselves, such as Instagram verifications Of teenage girls who reported that using the platform made their body image and mental health worse.

The researchers also highlighted their belief that social media, especially when used excessively, has “addictive-like properties” and will in turn cause withdrawal symptoms when stopped.

“A big part of the story is that we’re trying to tell what happens when a whole group of people move their lives onto addictive platforms,” he says.

Other reasons for rejection

“There are groups of people who are very optimistic about technology—they have a lot of faith in technology, and they believe that more technology will solve the world’s problems,” Rausch says. And for those who feel this way strongly, Anxious generationThe results of this research may leave you feeling like, “This is just a small bump in the road. Things will get better as we invent more technology to solve the problems that technology creates, and we will continue in this direction.”

There is also the “very real concern” about government control of social media, which Rausch describes as a “more liberal critique.”

Finally, he says, there is concern that these issues are getting too much attention compared to other, equally important topics that other researchers are interested in — from poverty to the opioid epidemic.

But regardless of all the arguments, he says that much of what Anxious generation The study focused on this matter, which is “indisputable.” This does not only include the link between excessive use of social media anxiety or depressionBut “the bulk of the harm is happening on these platforms,” ​​including a rise in cases of sextortion, or forcing teens to send explicit images online.

What reassures Rausch that they are on the right track is talking to a teen, a parent or a teacher. “Whenever I have doubts, I go to the source,” he says.