In 2017 in 2017, psychology professor Jean Twenge set off a controversy on the subject of psychological.
Twenge studies the generational trend within San Diego State University. She was looking at the mental health indicators of teenagers in 2012, what she observed stunned her. “In all my research into historical data, some dating all the way back to 1930sI’ve never seen anything like this,” Twenge wrote in the Atlantic in the year 2017.
Twenge warned of the possibility of a mental health crisis that was on the near future. The rate of depression, anxiety and loneliness were increasing. The researcher had a theory to explain the reason: smartphones, and social media that goes with them. “Smartphones were popular among Americans in 2012 and at the same moment, loneliness rises. This is very alarming,” Twenge told NPR in 2017.
Many of her colleagues were skeptical. Some said she caused a panic by providing insufficient -and weakdata to support her assertions.
Six years after, Twenge is back. The author has a new book coming out this week, titled Generations which includes more evidence to support her theory. In the meantime a number of research studies of high quality have begun to address important questions like, do social media trigger depression in teenagers and if it is a significant factor in the rise of depression?
Particularly, studies that have been conducted in three different types of studies, in total they suggest the similar direction. “Indeed I believe the picture is becoming clearer and more congruous,” says economist Alexey Makarin at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A major shift in how adolescents spend their free time
Within Generations, Twenge analyzes mental health issues for five age groups, ranging from Gen Z, also known as the Silent Generation, who were born between 1925 and 1945 and up until Gen Z, who were born between 1995 and the year 2012. Twenge demonstrates that “the how teens spent their time outside of school was fundamentally altered in 2012.” in the words Twenge writes in the book.
For instance, socializing with friends in person. From 1976 on, the amount of times a week that teens get together with their friendsand not with the parents of course — was almost constant for 30 years. It was in 2004 that it began to slide slightly. Then, in 2010, it plunged.
“It was similar to it was a Black Diamond ski slope straight down,” Twenge tells NPR. “So these big changes happen.”
Then that year, 2012 was when the time on social media started to rise. In 2009, less than half of teens utilized social media daily according to Twenge. In 2017, 85percent utilized it every day. In 2022 the majority of teens admitted to using social media. About a third of them regularly use it in a survey conducted by Pew Research Center found.
“Now in the most recent figures that show 22% of girls in 10th grade spend at least seven hours per day using social media,” Twenge says, which implies that many teenagers are occupied with nothing but sleeping, attending school, and interacting with social media.
It’s not surprising that the amount of screen time affected many kids’ sleeping time. From 2010 to 2021 the percentage of 10th – and 12th graders who sleep 7 or less hours each night increased from one third to almost one-third. “That’s an enormous increase,” Twenge says. “Kids of that age are supposed to be sleeping 9 hours per night. Therefore, a sleep time of any less than seven hours sleep is an extremely serious problem.”
In its own way sleep deprivation can lead to mental health problems. “Sleep is vital to physical health as well as mental well-being. Sleep deprivation is an important risk factor for depression, anxiety as well as self-harming,” she explains. Unfortunately, the number of mental health issues have been on the rise ever since Twenge first raised the alarm about six years ago.
“Nuclear bomb” on teen social life
“Every measure for mental wellbeing and well-being has been more negative for young adults and teens in the last year,” Twenge writes in Generations. “The trend is astonishing by their consistency depth and scale.”
In general In the past decade depression, anxiety and isolation have been on the rise. “And there’s more than just symptoms that increased as well as the behaviors,” she says, “including emergency rooms visits for self-harm, for suicide attempts and even completed suicides.” The study continues to grow until 2019, but it doesn’t reflect changes resulting from COVID-19.
These rapid changes are in line with what Twenge claims, could be the fastest adoption of the history of technology history: the integration mobile phones in our daily lives that has enabled almost continuous interaction via social networking apps. Apple launched their initial iPhones in 2007 in 2012 and, by the time it was released nearly half of American adult owned a smartphone as according to the Pew Research Center found.
The timing is difficult to ignore, according to the data researcher Chris Said, who holds an Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton University and has worked for Facebook as well as Twitter. “Social media was like a nuclear weapon on the teen world,” he says. “I do not think there’s anything in recent times or even in distant history that has altered the way teenagers interact in the same way as using social networks.”
The murky picture is made clearer on the root of depression in teens
However, the time of day isn’t enough to determine if social media causes depression among teenagers.
Over the last decade scientists have released many studies attempting at answering this issue which sparked a heated debates among scientists as well as in the media. However, Said says, what many people aren’t aware of is that scientists weren’t using or had a lack ofthe right instruments to answer this question. “This is a challenging problem to solve,” he says. “The information they were looking at could not solve the issue.”
The results are all over the all over the. They’ve been noisy, murky as well as inconclusive and confusing. “When you employ instruments that aren’t able to solve the problem, then you’re likely to get weak answers” He states. “So I’m thinking that’s the primary reason why evidence that was really convincing did not show up in the data at all, if not in the beginning.”
Additionally psychologists have a negative track history in the area, Said points out. Since the beginning of time psychologists have consistently blamed technology for physical and mental health issues in children, even though they’ve had very little or unreliable — evidence to prove their assertions.
For instance, in the 40s and 50s psychologists were concerned that kids were becoming addicted to crime shows on radio The the psychologist Amy Orben at the University of Cambridge explainsin her dissertation. Then they raised questions about the use of comics in television andeventually video games. So, many researchers began to worry that social media might be the latest excuse for children’s mental health issues.
A few scientists such as the MIT’s Alexey Makarin, saw this issue with the data, instruments and the field’s previous mistakes, and took matters to their own. They scoured the internet and found more efficient tools.
Hundreds of thousands of college students suffering from depression
In the past few years, a number of quality studies have been published that directly assess whether social media can cause depression. Instead of being ambiguous and contradictory, they complement each other and demonstrate the clear consequences from social media. “The evidence suggests that, in fact social media can have negative impacts on mental health, particularly on adolescents’ mental health,” says Makarin, who was the lead researcher in what a lot of scientists believe is the most thorough research on the subject to up to.
In the study Makarin and his group made the most of a unique chance: the gradual launch of Facebook across U.S. colleges from 2004 to 2006. Facebook began to be introduced into the world initially on campuses at colleges, however, not all colleges introduced Facebook simultaneously.
To Makarin, and for his associates the staggered rollout is a test gold.
“It enabled us to evaluate students’ mental health across colleges in which Facebook was just arriving to those which Facebook did not yet exist,” he says. They also could measure the extent to which students’ mental health changed on one particular campus once students started to spend all of time using social media.
Fortunately, his team was able to keep track of mental health at that time, as college administrators were conducting a national survey, which asked students many questions about their mental health, which included treatments, diagnoses and medications for depression eating disorders, and anxiety. “These aren’t only people’s thoughts,” Makarin says. “These are real-life situations that people must declare.”
They had information on a lot of students. “The data is derived directly from over 350,000 responses from students in more than 300 universities,” Makarin says.
This kind of research is referred to as a quasi-experiment which allows scientists to assess the extent to which social media affects teens’ mental health or, as Makarin states, “We can get causal estimates of the effect that Facebook upon mental well-being.”
What happened? “Almost immediately following the time that Facebook is at campus, students observe an increase in mental health concerns that students are reporting,” Makarin says. “We notice a particular effect on the rate of depression as well as anxiety disorders, as well as other concerns related to depression generally.”
It’s not a minor effect He says. All across the world in the United States, the launch of Facebook resulted in around 2 percent from college students be clinically depressed. This may seem like a small number at first, but with over 17 million university students across the U.S. at the time this means that Facebook has caused more than 300,000 teens to be depressed.
For a person who is on the average, engaging on Facebook reduces their mental health by about 20% of effects of losing a job as previously reported in a meta-analysis that Makarin and her team have discovered.
Facebook’s rollout had a bigger impact on women’s mental health as opposed to male mental health a study found. However, the difference was not significant according to Makarin.
His colleagues and he have published their findings in December in American Economic Review. “I really like that article,” says economist Matthew Gentzkow at Stanford University, who was not part of the research. “It’s perhaps the most convincing research I’ve ever seen. It shows an obvious effect and is a lot of confidence. They did a great job in separating the effects of Facebook and it’s not easy.”
Of course, the research isn’t without its flaws, Gentzkow says. It’s Facebook that teens are making less and less use of. The version of Facebook isn’t very functional. The platform was launched in 2006 and the website did not have an “like” button” or the “newsfeed.” The earlier version wasn’t quite so “potent” than social networks today, according to the data science expert Chris Said. Additionally, the platform using a computer since smartphones were not yet available. This study only looked at the mental health effects for six months.
The findings from this study are in line with other research, like one Gentzkow directed.
Social media can be “like an ocean” for children.
In the year 2018, Gentzkow and his team recruited around 2,700 Facebook users aged 18 and over. They paid around half of them to disable their accounts on Facebook for a period of four weeks. After that, Gentzkow along with his colleagues analyzed at the way the effects of a Facebook break affected the way they felt about their health. They presented their results on March 20, 2020, in American Economic Review.
This kind of research is known as a randomized study and is considered to be the best method to determine if an element in your life is responsible for an issue. However, with the advent of social media sites, random tests have a lot of drawbacks. First, the studies are brief — in this case only for four weeks. Furthermore, people utilize social media in groups and not as individuals. Therefore, having people leave Facebook isn’t going to be as effective of having the entire social group abandon Facebook. Both of these limitations may undervalue the effect that social media has on a user as well as a community.
Yet, Gentzkow could see how disabling Facebook helped people, in general feeling better. “Being free of Facebook had a positive effect on wellbeing outcomes,” he says. “You notice a higher level of happiness, satisfaction with life as well as lower levels of anxiety, depression and maybe a more secluded.”
Gentzkow along with his colleagues analyzed the participants’ wellbeing through a questionnaire at the conclusion of the study, but they also asked questions by text message, throughout the process. “For instance, we texted people texts that read”Right now, do you say that you’re happy or unhappy?'” he explains.
Similar to Makarin’s study, the result was a bit less. Gentzkow and his coworkers have concluded that quitting Facebook can improve a individual’s mental wellbeing by approximately 30 percent of the benefit experienced by attending therapy. “You might interpret that as being a sign that the effects are large,” he explains, “or you could interpret it as indicating that the therapeutic effects aren’t as significant. Both of these are true to a certain extent.”
Scientists don’t yet know the extent to which social media plays a role in the increasing mental health problems in teens and if it’s the sole reason. “It appears that it is the caseas if it’s a significant element,” says MIT’s Alexey Makarin, “but that’s still up to debate.”
But, more details are starting to emerge. Scientists are focusing on which aspects of social media are the most harmful. They can also discern that social media will not cause harm to every teen or even harm them in exactly the same extent. It is clear that the longer that a child spends on online social networks, the more their chance of developing mental health issues.
In addition, certain adolescents are more likely to be vulnerable to the influence of social media, and children might be more prone to vulnerability at certain years. A study released on February 20, 2022 sought at how the spending time on social media differs with satisfaction in life at various periods of a child’s life (see this graphic).
Researchers also tried at whether the current use of a child’s social media could predict a decline of satisfaction with life one year after. The data suggests that there are two periods of time in which children are most vulnerable to the negative effects on social networks, specifically excessive use. For girls, the first window occurs between the ages of 11 and 13. While for boys, a window begins between the ages of between 14 and. Both genders have a sensitivity period that begins at around the age of 19 or close to the time when teenagers begin college. Amy Orben and her team at the University of Cambridge reported the results within Nature Communications.
This kind of evidence is referred to as correlative. “It’s difficult to draw any conclusion from the research” Gentzkow says, because numerous factors affect life satisfaction, including the environment and family background. In addition, people might utilize social media due to being depressed (and that’s why depression may be the cause, and not the consequence of social media usage).
“Nevertheless these research studies, in conjunction with the data from causal research depict a scenario that suggests we need to take the social web seriously, and take a look at the dangers,” Gentzkow adds.
Psychologist Orben had a conversation with an analogy that could aid parents in understanding how to handle this emerging technology. Children’s social media is as oceans, she claims she notes that it can be extremely risky for children. Before parents let their children go swimming in open water they must ensure that the child is prepared and is able to handle any problems that might arise. They supply safety vests and swimming lessons, usually in safer water, and then parents provide plenty of supervision.
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