Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
I don’t think a crusade against cyber-bullying is the answer. I am enough of a McLuhanite to say that the medium is the message. There is something about smart phones that is damaging, and I suspect it is the sheer immediacy of them. I think that this immediacy is what makes contemporary politics so stressful. You see what somebody posts online and if you like it, great, and if you don’t it really gets your fight-or-flight hormones raging.
Also, this is something I noticed and remarked on when I was teaching high school:
Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture, from Rebel Without a Cause to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, has lost its appeal for today’s teens. Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school.
The book is due out in less than two weeks.
I read the article until I got to the word “skyrocketed.”
The fact that she didn’t offer an actual number was a red flag, so I went looking for actual information.
The first site I came upon was https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/
Suicide rates for less-than-20-year-olds remain unchanged between 2011 and 2015.
So I didn’t get any farther in the article.
You made it past the “spending time on their phones, UNCHAPERONED!!!!!!!!!” part? I couldn’t, i ran off screaming at the thought.
So I just read a little farther in the article after Bacon²s comment, and she writes:
“Depression and suicide have many causes; too much technology is clearly not the only one. And the teen suicide rate was even higher in the 1990s, long before smartphones existed. ”
Perhaps there was a golden age of teen happiness caused by increased airport security between 2001-2011.
In general it is a terrible article. The graphs at the end are atrocious, with the iPhone realease in 2007 ‘causing’ all these problems, only
1. The fall in dating started in 1985 and fell from ~85% to 75% prior to 2007
2. The fall in driving started in the late 70s and dropped from ~87% to ~80% by 2007
3. Hanging out with friends was in decline for 8th and 10th graders from the late 90s.
4. Less Sex only appears to be true for 9th and 10th graders, the sex rate for 12th graders was flat from the late 90s until the last data point in 2015, which shows a modest drop.
“Perhaps there was a golden age of teen happiness caused by increased airport security between 2001-2011.”
Holy cow that’s funny, Andrew!
The “rates have skyrocketed from x to y” would be a much meaningful blurb.
Unfortunately I cannot post a table here, but I went to the CDC and got the rates for 5-year age cohorts from 2010-2015. Note that the suicide rates for older cohorts are all even higher (e.g. very old males with rate over 40), but there are lots of other deaths too, so they don’t get as much press.
Here are the rates from 2010-2014 by cohort, and the year 2000 (i.e. pre social media and smartphone – pre-internet for most people) at the end in parentheses for reference:
10-14 years:: 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.9, 2.1 (1.5)
15-19: 7.5, 8.3, 8.3, 8.3, 8.7 (8.2)
20-24: 13.6, 13.6, 13.7, 13.7, 14.2 (12.8)
That’s not including “teen depression rates”, and there is a general trend of increase, but yeah, “skyrocketed” is just not justifiable with those numbers. Keep in minds these are rates per 100,000 members in the cohort. Teen suicide is horrible and wrong, but an extra one person per 1 or 2 hundred thousand teends taking their own life in a year vs. the year 2000 simply does not make a rational case for some kind of lethal cultural shift brought on by new communications technologies. That’s just FUD-style sensationalism.
I say this as someone who agrees entirely that smartphones and social media are asolutely horrible for our culture and psychologically and morally ruinous for kids. A child of mine is still in elementary school and begged for a smartphone for a birthday gift because most of his friends already have them, with all the social media apps. I’ve talked with other parents about this and they are conflict-averse and so don’t want to say no, even though they know full well that these devices are unfiltered and too tedious to monitor and these kids have access to every awful thing under the son which poses a constant, irresistible temptation for them. And I can keep the phones out of my kids’ hands, but I can’t watch them all the time if they’re out with friends whose parents have let them have unmonitored smartphones. And so giving all these young kids smartphones is a form of ubiquitous social insanity.
But all that said, raising the specter of “skyrocketing teen suicide rates” is factually incorrect and arguably unethical.
Can you get separate information by race/ethnicity?
How about the method chosen? Red state/blue state?
According to the AFSP site, half of suicides are by firearm… not what one imagines when one thinks of a teen getting depressed on the internet.
Yes. The place to go is the CDC Mortality Tables site. The big problem is that the vital statistics are bundled in limited sets of years for various reasons including lack of consistency in definitions and data collection, so it’s not always easy to compare apples to apples across long historical periods.
For the most recent data of the type to which you refer – from 1999 to the latest available – use the LCWK1 series.
I feel like we should apologize to Arnold for hijacking his page to complain about an article he has no responsibility for.
So, thanks Arnold for providing this forum.
It’s true that the internet provokes an intense reaction (https://xkcd.com/386/).
It’s obvious that the internet has changed our society in profound ways and will change it in even more profound ways.
From my point of view as an ex-nerd who went through high school paralyzed at the thought of asking a girl out, I think that social media provides a sort of intermediary playground where people can communicate in a less risky way.
John Gruber wrote a nice article about this when the Apple Watch was introduced:
“You’re 16. You’re in school. You’re sitting in class. You have a crush on another student — you’ve fallen hard. You can’t stop thinking about them. You suspect the feelings are mutual — but you don’t know. You’re afraid to just come right out and ask, verbally — afraid of the crushing weight of rejection. But you both wear an Apple Watch. So you take a flyer and send a few taps. And you wait. Nothing in response. Dammit. Why are you so stupid? Whoa — a few taps are sent in return, along with a hand-drawn smiley face. You send more taps. You receive more taps back. This is it. You send your heartbeat. It is racing, thumping. Your crush sends their heartbeat back.
“You’re flirting. Not through words. Not through speech. Physically flirting, by touch. And you’re not even in the same classroom. Maybe you don’t even go to the same school.
“I’m not saying digital touch is only for teenagers. I’m not saying it’s only for flirting. But the scenario above exemplifies the ways that digital touch opens the door to forms of remote communication that most of us haven’t ever considered.
https://daringfireball.net/2015/04/the_apple_watch
Indeed, the whole article is one big fakenews. I’m sure the author means well (and is probably also keen to become a well-paid public speaker) but the article is too short on facts and too long on fear-mongering:
https://medium.com/@RogWill/that-atlantic-smartphone-article-905b4fc6fbf2
In 2015 she was writing about how the expectations of the older generation wasn’t being met, but teens were still happier.
“In the last five years, the once-reliable correlation between age and happiness among adults has vanished. Adults 30 and over are less happy than they used to be, while, teens and young adults are happier”
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/the-age-happiness-connection-is-breaking-down/414349/
Yet now she is writing how she was noticing a shift in teens emotional state in 2012 before the previous article was written.
“Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states”
Looking for new clickbait.
I think AK is so fixated on forests that he doesn’t take the time to inspect some trees.