https://seekingalpha.com/article/184723-an-analysis-of-the-i...
"It’s not because of the Global Financial Crisis. Why would that hit younger teen girls hardest? Why would teen mental illness rise throughout the 2010s as the American economy got better and better? Why did a measure of loneliness at school go up around the world only after 2012, as the global economy got better and better? (See Twenge et al. 2021). And why would the epidemic hit Canadian girls just as hard when Canada didn’t have much of a crisis?"
He is admittedly open to other ideas, but claims that no one to date has been able to provide a explanation for the upticks depression and mental health issues which disproportionately impacts young, pre-teen girls and is seen across many developed countries.
[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
> Why would teen mental illness rise throughout the 2010s as the American economy got better and better?
Inequality also rose in that same time period. I mean, we could go through hundreds of indicators that somewhat fit the curve. Taking any of those to ask "Why wouldn't this one fit better than the others ?" is a fine exercice, but at the end of the day we're still playing a guessing game and not progressing much.
The other poster noted data points that refute your claim, mainly because this is a global trend and you've pointed out a mostly US-centric condition.
Another point to consider is that it's simply implausible that 10-12 year olds understand or call all that much about the economy or recovery.
A final point: previous generations went through literal wars with military drafts, and Cold War nuclear bomb drills which are far more direct dangers, and yet we did not see these other issues with mental health. They only arose since the advent of smart phones and social media.
Many other possible causes have been explored, but systematically eliminated because they aren't global, wouldn't preferentially affect genders or age groups, and so on. Other explanations just don't fit all of the data.
Responded there.
> it's simply implausible that 10-12 year olds understand or call all that much about the economy or recovery.
I'm surprised about this kind of takes. Is it assuming that kids aren't affected by their dad getting laid off, or money getting tight in the family in general, adults' reactions to the news or everyday events etc...And of course it's also more complex than just money going in and out. Adults' feelings, anxiety, pressure usually propagate through kids.
The economy is not just a line going up or down in someone's chart.
> They only arose since the advent of smart phones and social media.
Are we positing that nothing else changed in comparison ? Do we really want to compare the war time many decades ago and our current situation and say phones are the only thing that differs ?
Except this trend didn't happen at any previous downturn, so now you're special pleading that this economic downturn specifically is different somehow, based on... What exactly? And again, these mental health trends are international and cross-cultural and none of the other explanations can account for this. In fact, your suggestion that it's due to economic downturn is essentially refuted since even nations that didn't experience a downturn saw these mental health declines.
> Adults' feelings, anxiety, pressure usually propagate through kids.
What about adult anxiety about the Vietnam war, the nuclear threat of the cold war, the anxiety over terrorism that took out the twin towers. No meaningful blips seen with those momentous events.
You keep pointing to possible second and third order effects that maybe-somehow-sort-of indirectly filtered down to kids through mechanisms like "parental anxiety", instead of a direct and obvious first-order effect from a device that's literally in their hands 16 hours of the day, and whose use we know has been algorithmically optimized to drive engagement, fear and anger, and whose second order effects are known to disrupt sleep, which is particularly important for teens going through puberty.
Like, don't you see how absurdly implausible your second and third order effects are by comparison? To say nothing of the fact that they don't even explain all of the data, which is not a problem for the social media hypothesis.
I, for one, was pretty adversely affected by what I saw and was subjected to on social media as a young teenager. It gave me and most other kids I knew additional stress outside of the in-person problems that would arise at school.
