It’s difficult to draw a clear causal relationship between phone use and declines in youth mental health. But then that’s true of most possible sources of poor mental health.
We do know that children and teens spend much less time playing outdoors or socializing face-to-face with peers than they did 20 years ago. And experts are pretty much unanimous in saying this is a bad thing for child development and mental health. It stands to reason that efforts to get children to play more often and teens to socialize more in meatspace are going to involve reduced screen time.
One curious fact is that the steep increase in reported teen mental distress is pretty much an anglo thing. We’ve not seen the same increase among teens Germany, France, and S Korea as we’ve seen in Canada, the U.S., UK, and Australia. Even in Canada, anglo teens report anxiety and depression at higher rates than francophone teens.
So something besides phones seems to be going on. One theory is that as talking about anxiety and depression have become far more common on the english-language social media platforms young people spend time on, we’ve begun to pathologize the normal unhappiness that we all experience in adolescence.
Quote:
America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety
…Smartphones are a global phenomenon. But apparently the rise in youth anxiety is not. In some of the largest and most trusted surveys, it appears to be largely occurring in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “If you’re looking for something that’s special about the countries where youth unhappiness is rising, they’re mostly Western developed countries,” says John Helliwell, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the World Happiness Report. “And for the most part, they are countries that speak English.”
The story is even more striking when you look at the most objective measures of teen distress: suicide and self-harm. Suicides have clearly increased in the U.S. and the U.K. Emergency-room visits for suicide attempts and self-harm have been skyrocketing for Gen Z girls across the Anglosphere in the past decade, including in Australia and New Zealand. But there is no rise in suicide or self-harm attempts in similar high-income countries with other national languages, such as France, Germany, and Italy. As Vox’s Eric Levitz wrote, the suicide rate among people ages 15 to 19 actually fell significantly across continental Europe from 2012 to 2019…
… People who keep hearing about new mental-health terminology—from their friends, from their family, from social-media influencers—start processing normal levels of anxiety as perilous signs of their own pathology. “If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them … they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens,” Foulkes and Andrews wrote. This can create a self-fulfilling spiral: More anxiety diagnoses lead to more hypervigilance among young people about their anxiety, which leads to more withdrawal from everyday activities, which creates actual anxiety and depression, which leads to more diagnoses, and so on...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...ressed/678724/
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