82% of cyberbullied teens are also abused by household grownups… two-thirds of girls who self-harm had violent parents… 80% of teens with depressed parents are also depressed…

Authorities’ destructive obsession with smartphones and social media prevents them from confronting vital interconnections the CDC’s survey shows really affect adult and teen mental health.

The taboo topic in American health authorities’ discussion of causal factors in teenagers’ poor mental health has been troubled parents and adults.

That taboo, slowly crumbling at the Centers for Disease Control and Surgeon General’s office, remains alive and destructive on fantasy-world sites like social-media-blamer Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel. There, grownups, especially parents, are canonized as wonderfully healthy, the rescuers of teens whose own torturous screen addictions drive adolescent misery. Daily media articles brim with the bizarro cartoon of perfect parents suffering screen-addicted teens, an image experts know – if they’re “experts” – is fictional.

That delusion has now been shattered. In 2021, the CDC finally asked teens three obvious, long-overdue questions about parents’ and household adults’ violent and emotional abuses and unemployment. In 2023, the CDC expanded on the alarming findings from 2021’s three pioneering questions to survey teens on parents’ severe depression/suicidality/mental illness, drug/alcohol abuse, jailing, absence, household violence, and adults’ sexual abuses victimizing teens.

Those obsessed with smartphones, Instagram, and TikTok are slavishly ignoring the massive realities those questions now reveal. Political and health authorities remain protective of their “fun” anti-social-media crusade and deeply reluctant to take up the real, potentially unpopular, “no fun” issues teens face.

For just three examples, this post examines CDC numbers on issues receiving phony attention – bullying, self-harm, and depression.

Bullying

Splashy reports from the CDC, Surgeon General, professionals like the American Academy of Pediatrics, and trendy academics spawn incessant, fawning media stories typically hyping some shameful unreality, like, “how parents can help their bullied teen.”

Here’s the reality 2,500 cyberbullied and school-bullied teens surveyed by CDC told us they face: five in six were ALSO bullied by their parents and household adults.

That is, peer bullying and parental bullying are the same things – except that peer bullying (even using a broader definition) is rarer and less damaging. Three times more teens report being bullied by parents and grownups than by peers; interestingly, four-fifths of teens psychologically abused at home are NOT cyberbullied or bullied at school.

Do authorities really want to prevent bullying? If so, why do zero reports on bullying I can find mention the vital domestic realities that teens face but pampered authorities quail from engaging? It’s like ranting about preventing lung cancer while not mentioning smoking.

Lying about self harm

Social-media blamers emotionally cite girls’ self-harm as proof of social media’s damage, without presenting evidence of a connection.

In fact, the latest CDC survey shows 4.7% of girls who use social media less than daily harm themselves, compared to 3.2% of girls who use social media daily or more (a pattern also true for boys).

We now have evidence of what drives the self-harm that afflicts around 5% of teen girls. Seven in 10 girls who harm themselves have suffered violent parents or adult caretakers. Girls with depressed/suicidal parents are nearly four times more likely to harm themselves.

If authorities really want to prevent self harm, you’d think this crucial backstory to self-cutting girls would feature prominently in agency, academic, and media reports by authorities who genuinely wanted to prevent them.

You’d be wrong. Psychologist Jean Twenge, for example, insists the reason young girls harm themselves is just mean cyberbullying peers and depressing internet images. Unfortunately, such escapism is the rule.

Mental health

Of girls from healthy households whose parents and adults do not abuse teens and are not depressed, suicidal, addicted, jailed, or violent, 13.5% of girls who use social media less than daily report poor mental health, compared to 17.8% of those who use social media daily or more, the CDC survey showed.

Social-media-blamers like Haidt and Twenge, as well as earlier CDC and Surgeon General reports, stop there and declare: See! Social media makes even girls even from healthy households more depressed (a bit more, anyway).

Don’t stop there. The same CDC survey shows that 3.6% of girls who use social media less than daily report attempting suicide, compared to 2.7% of those who use social media daily or more.

If we’re going to blame social media for making girls more depressed, shouldn’t we also credit social media for making girls less suicidal? More plausibly, we’d look at other causes than just social media, especially the fact that adult-abused girls use social media more than non-abused girls.

At the other end of growing up, consider girls from homes where parents and adults are abusive, violent, depressed, addicted, and/or have been jailed. Of these, 39.5% of girls who use social media less than daily report poor mental health, compared to 47.9% of those who use social media daily or more.

Note first that even going no further, using social media daily is superficially associated with 20% to 30% more depression among girls, while abusive, troubled homes accompany nearly 3 times more depression – an effect 10 to 15 times larger. So, even without further analysis, our biggest priority in teens’ mental health would be addressing abusive and troubled households; social media use would be far down the list.

But if we go further, we find that yet again, girls from abusive and troubled homes who use social media less than daily are more likely to report attempting suicide (21.0%) than those who use social media daily or more (17.2%).

Put another way, more than half the depressed girls from troubled families who don’t use social media much go on to attempt suicide, compared to a little more than one-third of girls who use social media daily or more. That’s crucial, because girls from abusive and troubled families are 6 times more likely to attempt suicide than girls from healthy families.

Once again, we have to ask: do authorities want to reduce teens’ depression and suicide? Why, then, aren’t they forcefully addressing its overwhelming family and adult interconnections?