Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?

I always see discussions on this topic online immediately start discussing how the content of social media is the driver of the mental health issues (comparison to others, everyone projecting their best selves etc).

My own experiences with social media and phone addiction leads me to believe its not JUST the content, but also (equally, perhaps moreso) the fact that teenagers AND adults with social media and phone addiction are just spending so much of their time absorbed into a screen scrolling and getting quick dopamine hits for hours and hours.

When that is your default that you revert to to distract yourself at almost any point of discomfort, slight boredom, lapse in focus, anxiety or feelings of sadness, all it does is just dampen those feelings momentarily. You live in almost a fugue state where those things just fester as you avoid them instead of learning to cope with them or respond to them in an agentic or healthy manner.

Working to cut out social media, reddit, youtube etc on my phone, leave my phone by our front door while at home, never have my phone in bed, and spend time writing/journaling my thoughts and actually engaging with my feelings of anxiety or depression or stress instead of avoiding them has been by far the most significant improvement on my mental health compared to many other things I've worked out.

This is definitely anecdotal, and its definitely my experience, but after the time i've spent working on these things and with what I see in the teenagers, young people, and friends in my life I feel very strongly about it.

Only correlation can never explain something. A bomb will tear a building into bricks, but finding bricks every time after a building explodes does not help identify the cause. Suppose it ended up eventually that the causal source was a novel virus epidemic, say N1H1, instead of social media or the post-2008 economic mess: it wouldn’t help much if people stopped using their social media. I don’t support social media usage for other reasons that are easier to quantify and assign causality, including the waste of time, but I understand the severe limitations of correlations and the differences to causality. Medical research has suffered greatly from errors in causality occasionally dismissing partial self-therapies due to observed correlations, whereas the careful delineation of causation is one of the key ingredients of what made physics such a mature science over the centuries. It is of course hard to try causal experiments for understanding the root of epidemics, and in this case any attempts for causality in therapies are also challenging.

Not just social media but more broadly highly connected online environments like certain games, discord etc. You may cpunt these as social media already but I think most think of Insta, X, FB etc.

The author is way overselling how controversial Haidt's claim is.

- The effect of social media at a societal level isn't something that can tested experimentally. And like all non-experimental research, results depend heavily on modeling methodology (for example, the meta-analysis linked by the author is literally just a regression of facebook DAU on life satisfaction polls [1]). As a result there will NEVER a universal consensus, same as with most "macro" level studies in social sciences. If you wait for researchers to reach an agreement, you will wait forever.

- The most credible research I've seen on this is this quasi-experimental paper [2]. Since the timing of Facebook's rollout was staggered across schools, it can be used as a natural experiment. Schools should've seen declines in student mental health that correspond with the date of Facebook's rollout on their campus, which is indeed what happened.

- The effect of using social media at an individual level (as opposed to a societal level) IS known and it is very clearly negative. See [3] for an example.

- Most importantly, the fact is that mental health and suicide rates have been rising significantly since exactly when social media gained popularity (mid-to-late 2000s). The effect is global so you can't blame country-specfic policies. And the rise is most significant with demographics most exposed to social media (young people, especially girls). There's not a single other explanation that makes sense. Frankly, I think people are afraid to admit that social media is the problem because so many people are tech addicts and don't want to admit that their own addiction is part of the problem.

[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.221451

[2] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20211218

[3] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658

Youth suicide rates are going up, I think that's quite objectively measurable.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db471.pdf

Not proof that social media is behind it of course.