Psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, and colleagues are selling a pleasing, destructive delusion: that today’s elders are wise, healthy, and provide young people with perfect lives; our big problem is young people’s “mental health crisis” driven by social media “addiction;” and the remedy is to ban teens from going online.
In this fantasy, domestic violence, child abuse, grownups’ drug addiction, grownups’ suicide, grownups’ poor mental health, community problems, global conflicts, climate change, student debt, and related, widespread, rising crises victimizing young people simply don’t exist – even though they demonstrably affect teens’ mental health far more than anything remotely attributable to social media.
Of course, Haidt’s, Twenge’s, and advocates’ Pollyanna escapisms are eagerly accepted by many older people and popularity-obsessed authorities eager to dodge uncomfortable realities and bask in feel-good self-indulgence.
But responsible authorities surely know the real crises we face are diametrically the opposite of what Haidt and Twenge peddle.
The escapism is beyond appalling. It’s cruel.
In a senseless essay titled, “Why the mental health of liberal girls sank first and fastest,” Haidt, the world’s leading advocate of banning teens from social media, declares in common parlance:
“We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded. I know so many families that have been thrown into fear and turmoil by a child’s suicide attempt… The recent CDC [Centers for Disease Control] report tells us that one in ten adolescents now say they have made an attempt to kill themselves. It is hitting all political and demographic groups. The evidence is abundant that social media is a major cause of the epidemic, and perhaps the major cause.”
It is incredible from a scientific and humanitarian standpoint that established luminaries would buy this evasive junk. That Haidt’s own 1970s-‘80s teenage generation was just as depressed and suicidal and far more provably messed up with less reason to be, than Gen Z is only the beginning.
Seriously! Haidt (amid thousands of pages, hundreds of commentaries, TED talks, a book, a substack, and an inexplicably packed schedule of media interviews as an “expert,” along with legions of collegial, political, and media fawners, honestly can’t think of any other GIGANTIC causes that might make teenagers more depressed and suicidal?
Start with glaringly obvious ones
Does it ever cross Haidt’s and his followers’ minds that…
· teenagers’ 2000s parents suffer soaring increases in suicide and (especially) drug overdose to record peaks (100,000 self-inflicted deaths and 5 million hospital emergency cases among ages 25-64 in 2024 alone) during EXACTLY the time teenagers became more depressed;
· the same CDC surveys he cites showing a shocking 30% to 40% of teens reporting their parents’ and adult caretakers’ “severe” mental illness, drug/alcohol abuse, and violence (which he doesn’t cite)…
…might – just MIGHT – be making teenagers more depressed? As the same teenagers repeatedly and forcefully tell our leading health survey they do?
Let’s put this another way to see if anyone important gets it
The US Department of Health’s Drug Abuse Warning Network reported, “In 2024, an estimated total of 8,378,593 drug-related ED visits occurred in the United States,” and that “individuals aged 26 to 44 and 45 to 64 composed 65.7 percent of all drug-related ED visits.”
That’s 5.5 million hospital ER trips for drug abuse among parent-aged adults – in 2024 alone! That number is equal to the ENTIRE age 25-64 population of North Carolina, from coast to mountains.
And Twenge, who creates straw-objections to bat down, sniffs that parent-aged adults’ drug casualties were “too small” in number to drive teens’ depression? 5.5 million drug deaths and ER cases in 2024 are “too small”? And Haidt nowhere admits these grownup crises exist at all? Just blame the kids and cut them off from smartphones and screens?
This kind of misinformation is driving public policy? It’s more than grownup dereliction toward the young; this is outright cruelty.
Teenagers don’t enjoy Haidt’s and authorities’ luxury to ignore these crises
Of course, drug/alcohol deaths and hospital emergencies are just the iceberg-tip of the addiction crises of arrests, community disruption, household violence and abuse, and family chaos. Here’s what the trends look like:
Figure 1. The fatal drug overdose explosion among parent ages (25-64) vs. trends among teenagers (10-19) (rates shown are per 100,000 population ages 25-64 and 15-19).
Source: Centers for Disease Control, 1990-98, 1999-2024.
Another taboo reality
During the social media era (2000 or so to the present), parent-aged suicide rates rose much faster than teenagers’ suicide rates.
Figure 2. Suicide rates per 100,000 parent-age population (25-64) rose sharply just as teenagers’ self-reported rates of depression also increased.
Sources: CDC 2025; Monitoring the Future, 2025 (teens reporting “not happy”; clearly, COVID had something to do with 2020-21 peaks).
Now, ethical observers will notice that I pulled a subterfuge typical of Haidt’s and Twenge’s (and popular media) presentations: I sharply truncated the figure’s vertical axes to make trends look vastly more drastic than they are. I also truncated the horizontal axis to encompass only the time period that makes my case, ignoring all previous and subsequent years. (What was teen depression like before the social media era? Take a look.)
Having illustrated that common deception, let’s use the ethical “zero” base for vertical axes and make a more apples-to-apples comparison of parent and teen suicide trends.
Figure 3. Suicide rate, parent age (25-64) vs. teen age (all suicides under age 20) per 100,000 population ages 25-64 and 15-19.
Source: CDC 2025. Notice that I followed prejudicial protocols. I divided all drug overdoses and suicides among ages under 20 just by the population age 15-19, making teen rates appear artificially high. Even with anti-teen biasing, adult rates of suicide and overdose remain worse.
The trends on a standard scale over a more normal period still merit concern but are not as horrific looking as those presented on the abbreviated scales. Teen suicide rates rose in tandem with parents’ suicide rates from 2007 to 2017, then both leveled off and fell from 2017 through 2024. That teen suicide rates have been falling for 7 years during the height of the social media era wasn’t supposed to happen, so of course it is being ignored.
In the early 1990s, parent-age suicide rates were just 23% higher than teen rates, but by 2024 had risen to 60% higher. But because in Haidt’s, Twenge’s, and authorities’ fantasy, only teens commit suicide, never grownups, these crucial trends offering insights into real causes and prevention are being swept aside.
The CDC reports what is really driving teens’ depression – to utter silence
The CDC’s analysis of its massive youth-risk survey found teens’ exposure to serious parent/guardian-inflicted “adverse experiences” led by “emotional abuse (61.5%), physical abuse (31.8%), and household poor mental health” (28.4%) is “common, with approximately three in four students (76.1%) experiencing one or more, and approximately one in five students (18.5%) experiencing four or more.”
The CDC analysis associated these “adverse experiences” inflicted by parents and household grownups with teens’ “seriously considered attempting suicide (85.4%), current prescription opioid misuse (84.3%)… persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness (65.6%),” and a host of other ills from binge drinking to vaping. These are staggering associations. (Social media? No effect on teens’ suicidal tendencies and only minuscule effects on mental health, a companion CDC analysis’s numbers showed – as do major reviews of social media studies.)
That is, teenagers told our nation’s largest, most definitive health surveys these household adversities are seriously depressing.
The entire teen-mental-health/ban-screens furor is a scam
Let’s look at yet another of the ignored, crucial trends – there are many – depressing young people.
Haidt argues the rise in students telling MTF, “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me” (note how their severely abbreviated graph makes the modest rise from around 50% from 1990-2006 to 59% in 2024 look like the apocalypse) is solely due to teens’ “quantity of time on social media” and “the messages liberal girls consume.”
A scientific method would carefully eliminate all other plausible explanations before declaring such speculative conclusions, but no. Haidt nowhere mentions the massive increase in student debt (550% in real dollars) as one major factor in students’ justifiable feeling that outside forces are hampering their efforts to get ahead, or that mushrooming debt might affect male and female, or liberal and conservative, students in different ways,
Figure 4. Average American college student loan debt in constant, inflation-adjusted 2024 dollars, 1990-2024.
Source: Education Data Initiative, 2025.
From 2007 to 2022, student debt as a percentage of graduate-job income rocketed from 39% to 61%. So, yes, students are right: “something” is “stopping” young people from “getting ahead” today that wasn’t happening 40 years ago.
No matter. Haidt’s and Twenge’s 1980s generations graduated from college virtually debt free, so why should they care? Their older generations certainly don’t want to pay higher taxes to fund universities as their parents and grandparents paid for their education and to slash student debt like students of the past enjoyed. So sure – just blame social media for young people’s problems.
The United States, United Kingdom, and Australia indeed suffer mental health crises
It’s not young people.
Today’s aging official brains, susceptible to the feel-good allure of those who blame teens and social media for our crises, manifestly lack the normal concern parent/grandparent generations have for the young. Haidt, Twenge, and their fellow escapists symbolize what has gone drastically wrong, but they are far from driving the larger crisis.
Has anyone followed the money with Haidt? I usually wouldn’t put much weight on funding sources of a famous pop-pseudoscience author, but his thesis just seems to every so perfectly manufacture consent for these “internet safety” bills that the world’s governments love so much. He also just exudes a puritanical undertone that tries to cover up with “progressive” sounding language. It is all just so convenient that everything that spills out of his mouth continues to prop on the rugged individualism that our late-stage capitalism system requires for fuel.
Unfortunately I read the DAWN report. The five million number is an extrapolation, not actual visits, however there were two footnotes:
- DAWN does not collect identifiable information from ED visits, so an individual with multiple drug-related ED visits was
counted as a separate visit each time.
- DAWN has a limited sample size with 60 hospitals reporting.
This article implies that 5+M people went to ED - “the entire population of state of North Carolina”. No. A fraction of the population of NC.
In SF we have a phenomenon called “frequent fliers”, where a single person can have 20-50 visits per year.
Top 1-5% of patients create 20-40% of all visits particularly in large urban hospitals; the actual number of people may be drastically reduced. Who knows?
If the hospital sample base were skewed to large urban hospitals, the % of frequent fliers might lower the total individual number drastically. Who knows?
There’s a more interesting problem than suicide rate people aged 45-64 - (I dont know anyone my age group who has teenage children BTW. Not sure why that’s relevant to the thesis)
The new statistical problem which is occurring is parental supervision failure.
Pre-social media, when children physically socialized, there were generally adults from the community nearby. At each other’s houses, school, malls, sports, you name it. Bad actors and bad behaviors would be short circuited. With each additional parents and child in a community parental burden went down.
After social media, parental time supervising children goes up - drastically. In social media space, adults are not present, and innumerable bad behaviors and bad actors surface. In fact, burden goes up exponentially because of network effects.
Each parent has intense burden supervising a child, and attempting to do so across all identities and all platforms.
Not possible. Parents burn out, and children are exposed to a universe of bad actors.
Considered that fact?