Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

They also had an influenca pandemic to deal with.

I have mixed feelings on social media for young people. When I was growing up it actually helped me immensely as it let me connect with like minded people and escape the local echo chamber (I don't mean to disparage my childhood community, but I definitely didn't fit in). I feel that I was able to develop emotional intelligence in a way that my schooling environment could not provide, so there are some upsides.

However, there was definitely a period of time where I would have benefited from using social media less and giving it less importance in my day. In some senses, it felt like a responsibility, whereas now I treat it like an elective leisure activity.

I believe that social media access should be introduced in late teens, when the ability to discern and self regulate what an 'elective leisure activity' is.

As an aside, I also think that critical thinking skills should be in the curriculum for at least 2 years before a kid gets a smart phone, but that's unfortunately up to the discretion of parents, regardless of competence.

As others have noted, this isn't unique to the current times. And as someone who only recently finished being a teenager, I think the issue is primarily social media, especially for girls. The reason is because social media is communication and socialization. They are vital things for almost all teenagers because human beings are social creatures, and at this stage of life particularly, independence is developing, you are learning to become more of an individual and so on. In previous times you might get together after school at a park or whatever because you didn't have a phone, but these days everything is done on social media.

You are judged before you meet someone by your social media page. You can't know everything about a person before meeting them, or really without being a good friend of theirs, so social media becomes a proxy for this, and not a particularly good one because you put what you want on it and thus teenagers try to game it in various ways (for example only posting holiday pics to show how glamorous your life is).

It becomes a race towards the bottom in so many ways and in particular for girls, because so much value is placed on physical appearance (either by others or by the girls themselves) and how 'cool' are you and thus it makes you constantly compare and judge yourself with others. It is no surprise that teenage mental health is plummeting when a lot of time is spent on social media, it constitutes a large part of the status game, and there is no reasonable alternative. This is why I think it's a sole factor because I can imagine you would have the same problem even if you took away other economic/political/environmental problems.

Not to say those also don't have an effect, because they obviously do, but unlike those other things, every teenager wants friends, everyone wants a social life, it's not something only half of them know and the other half don't know much about because they read it on the news or learnt about it from school, it's something that affects every single one of them every single day. You cannot escape from it.

Surprisingly despite being a guy I don't know many guys with mental health issues, maybe they don't want to talk about it to other guys, maybe I am not close enough with them, but most girls I know do have mental health issues, and every single one of them (n~=50), literally without exception, has self esteem and body image issues. And it worries me, a lot, because how can we have it that 50% of the population suffers like this every day for years on end and nothing changes? What will the end result be?

> Yet, he and many others lived.

After the initial shock of the first couple of years, post-war Germany seems to have been a pretty comfortable place for a young person willing to conform to pretty strict social standards and put in some (by the standards of that time) moderately hard work. It tends to be that way after great disruptions, like after the plague, after the 30-years war, etc. When power structures that consolidate wealth have been thoroughly disrupted it usually takes a while to get back to a point where most people are excluded from most opportunities. Hence, for most people, opportunities tend to abound after great crises.

Most western democracies are not post-disruption societies; they're more like the opposite. Today's young people don't face the effects of a recent upheaval, they face the effects of decades of peace and comfort. History would seem to indicate that that, too, is a dangerous place to be in.

> Yet, he and many others lived.

> But I think humanity has proven that it will find its way.

So? People will live in the craziest conditions. Humanity's way has historically lead through an awful lot of unnecessary suffering. Good luck inspiring anyone with that sort of outlook, in times of peace and crazy prosperity no less.

Democracy and rule of law aren't ends in themselves, freedom is far from a natural equilibrium state. There's a social contract that says we do these things, you get peace, a good life, a chance at success and wealth, and a decent amount of participation. Right now, western nations across the board are hollowing out that contract crazy fast. The rising popularity of anti-freedom, anti-democracy, anti-rule of law politicians may be a foreshadowing of things to come if we keep this up.

> East Asia population are aggressive consumers of social media. If they are not getting depressed from it, then the Anglosaxon (which seems to be suffering from this crisis) should look elsewhere.

Only if you discount the rest of the sentence you quoted...

> ... although I have not yet found good data from those regions.