This is a super interesting thread, but (un)fortunately Haidt's claims about a teen mental health epidemic have been pretty convincingly debunked.
https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...
Aaron Brown checked a sample of the papers Haidt relies on to build his case and found that they couldn't support his claims. They're of the sort of quality we've come to expect from the field, dominated by tiny unrepresentative samples, bad methodologies, bad statistics, weak signals and so on.
Unfortunately Haidt's initial response was to make a circular argument, saying you can't demand a high quality of evidence for the crisis because there's a crisis, and to engage in a subtle form of gish gallop by saying that surely not all 300 papers he selected can be bad even if a subsample were.
https://twitter.com/JonHaidt/status/1641850836287356930
Still, to his immense credit Haidt engaged seriously with the criticism and so Brown wrote another response:
https://reason.com/2023/05/30/not-every-study-on-teen-depres...
I didn't express "concerns" about specific studies; I argued that the majority of the 301 papers cited in his document are garbage. I went through each category of studies on Haidt's list, chose the first one that studied social media and depression to get a random sampling, and then showed that they were so embarrassingly bad as to be completely useless. They were guilty of coding errors, fatal defects hidden in mid-paper jargon, inappropriate statistics, longitudinal studies that weren't longitudinal, experiments in name only, and red flags for hypothesis shopping and p-hacking (that is, misusing data analysis to yield results that can be presented as statistically significant).
"A bad study is like a bad mortgage loan," I wrote in my original piece. "Packaging them up on the assumption that somehow their defects will cancel each other out is based on flawed logic, and it's a recipe for drawing fantastically wrong conclusions."
It's quite probable that there is no teen mental health crisis.