[owlbynight]

I'm not sure how you would control for this. I was born in 1981, not long after the Vietnam war ended, and my Dad was a veteran with PTSD who never went to a therapist. My home life sucked and I came out of it with pretty severe depression. I became addicted to computers as a means of escape, and thankfully -- luckily -- it turned into a lucrative career.

However, even though my home life sucked, society as a whole felt much better than it does currently and I still wanted nothing to do with it.

Is it possible these kids now just have a front row seat to witness their generation being systematically torn down in front of them before they even have a chance to get a footing? My parents sucked. Their whole world sucks.

I have my doubts that it's about the phones. It seems more likely that their adult problems are the student loans, the cost of rent, the lack of jobs, the corporate greed, and on, and on.

[strict9]

I am of the same generation as you with a slightly different story but also found computers as a means of escape.

But then it was more exploratory. Learning about computer internals and talking to others on a BBS is not in the same galaxy as the perfectly honed and ruthlessly efficient addiction networks employed by social media companies.

It can still be an escape today but the real world and online world are no longer distinct entities as it once was. We had the gift of being forgotten or failing without everyone knowing.

It was a lot harder to compare yourself to others with more means or other attributes that particularly for girls can lead to a downward spiral of anxiety and depression.

For some it can bring hope and something positive but the older I get the more I think the result is a net negative for kids.

[tgv]

I've written this several times before. I'm one (or half a) generation older than you. I grew up with the Cold War, an oil crisis and an economic crisis. As if that wasn't enough, the Club of Rome had just published their report on The Limits to Growth, which was the first time ecology entered public awareness, and did so with a bit of a shock. We called ourselves "generation nothing" (a word play on generation X in Dutch), and in England, which had it worse, the youth had the slogan "no future". But no mental health crisis.

Staring at a small thingy all day instead of looking at the world, getting nervous when it buzzes (and it buzzes hundreds of times per day), being inactive because of the enormous amounts of time it consumes, and knowing that that's not ok, but also knowing that you can't escape it. Is it so hard to imagine that that is bad for your mental health?

[timmytokyo]

> I have my doubts that it's about the phones. It seems more likely that their adult problems are the student loans, the cost of rent, the lack of jobs, the corporate greed, and on, and on.

That wouldn't explain the sharp reductions in mental health among girls around 2012. Something definitely seemed to be going on between 2010 and 2014. Cell phone usage patterns could be a part of it, but I'd like to see error bars on these charts.

[makeitdouble]

The global economy just tanked and advanced economies were barely recovering. I would see that as enough of a cause for children to feel a bleaker future and be impacted in direct and indeect ways.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/184723-an-analysis-of-the-i...

[scythe]

>Is it possible these kids now just have a front row seat to witness their generation being systematically torn down in front of them before they even have a chance to get a footing?

First, that doesn't explain the gender effect.

It doesn't explain why the crises of the early 2000s didn't cause a similar problem. In three-ish years we saw the Asian financial crisis, the dotcom bust, Bush v. Gore, 9/11, the Afghanistan War, the Patriot Act and the Iraq War with no similar effects on teen mental health.

It should show a strong correlation between news — not social media — consumption and mental health which remains to be demonstrated.

>However, even though my home life sucked, society as a whole felt much better than it does currently and I still wanted nothing to do with it.

"Everything was better when you were twelve"

[naasking]

> Is it possible these kids now just have a front row seat to witness their generation being systematically torn down in front of them before they even have a chance to get a footing? My parents sucked. Their whole world sucks.

These trends are global. Not every country has seen declining quality of life, higher rent and debt, etc. Haidt and co. cover a lot of data across multiple articles. They note some positive uses of social media too, like what you describe re: finding good communities and positive messaging. It's the rest of it that's the problem.

[nancyhn]

But what if you had spent that time on Tumblr instead of learning about computers and playing games?

[thomastjeffery]

Maybe they would be an artist, like several people I know who did just that.