How long will authorities keep ignoring the devastating effects of parents’ soaring addictions and abuse on “teenage mental health”?
Blaming social media for teens’ depression is a distraction. The real crisis is household grownups.
In 2007, the year “experts” who blame social media for teenagers’ and young adults’ growing depression and anxiety start with, the teenage suicide rate stood at its lowest point ever reliably recorded. Since then, teen suicide rates rose to a peak in 2021.
Now, look at something none of the experts (and none of the studies they cite accusing “social media”) considered: what was happening with parents during the time teens got more depressed and anxious.
Suicides and drug/alcohol overdose deaths
Year ……….. Teens and young adults (age 15-24) …………. Parents (age 35-64)
2007 ………………………………………………………… 7,785 ………………………………. 42,202
2012 ………………………………………………………… 8,415 ………………………………. 48,548
2019 ………………………………………………………..10,676 ………………………………. 68,364
2022 ………………………………………………………..12,598 ………………………………. 94,181
Rate per 100,000 population
2007 ……………………………………………………………18.0 ………………………………….. 35.2
2022 ………………………………………………………….. 29.2 …………………………………..74.2
Rate change ……………………………………………+ 62% ………………………………….111%
Source: Centers for Disease Control, 2023.
During the last 15 years, overdoses and suicides among teenagers’ parents rose twice as fast to a level 2.5 times higher than among teens and young adults. Overdose deaths among middle-aged parents skyrocketed 350% in just 15 years, from 19,282 to 67,158.
Middle-aged male commentators are on particularly dubious grounds depicting teenaged girls as some special problem. It should be the other way around – girls should be voicing loud alarms about their fathers’ generation. Among men ages 35-64, suicides and overdose deaths have rocketed upward the fastest of all, faster than for teenaged girls to a level seven times higher than among 15-24-year-old females.
Tens of thousands more parent-age suicides and overdose deaths indicate hundreds of thousands or even millions’ more accidents, injuries, hospitalizations, arrests, court cases, imprisonments, medical interventions, and related disruptions in American families every year.
And more violence and abuse. Teens reported to the CDC’s definitive Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences survey that violent victimizations by parents and household adults doubled and emotional abuses quadrupled from 2008 to 2021. That’s the same period teenagers’ depression rose.
Did the experts – from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, political leaders of both parties, professional associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychological Association, and American School Counselor Association, major academic authorities, and the ”experts” and media commentators in the Atlantic, New Yorker, National Public Radio, The Conversation, Washington Post, Fox News, and on and on – bother to examine whether skyrocketing addiction, death, and domestic abuse afflicting American parents could be making teenagers understandably more depressed and anxious?
Did any ask whether, instead of rushing to blame easy targets (phones and social media) and push easy remedies (restricting teenagers’ online lives), leaders and experts should assess whether more troubled parents and household grownups hitting, violently injuring, cursing, berating, overdosing on drugs and alcohol, and inflicting injuries and fatalities on themselves might be driving the “teenage mental health crisis”?
Did any experts consider that the mountain of solid research over decades (including the comprehensive 2022 CDC survey) linking parents’ abuses to teenagers’ troubles is far more impressive than low-association social-media studies that don’t even include abuse?
Apparently not.
None of them even mention it.
Of course, it's more popular and satisfying to blame easily-demonized social media and powerless teenagers than to confront serious troubles afflicting powerful middle-aged adults and the venerable American family.
So, in effect, today’s experts are telling us that teens are more damaged by getting a snarky cellphone message or seeing online images of skinny, pretty, rich, or (god forbid) happy people than by actually being beaten, kicked, or cursed out by grownups, or seeing their real-life parents o.d. and die or get hauled off by police.
Surgeon General Murthy does admit, down in an obscure report, that abuses by 74% of their parents might account for the very high rates of mental distress among LGBQ teens, but he is silent on how household victimization affects the 50% of abused straight teens. Murthy and other authorities fail to explore the appalling levels of household abuse revealed in the CDC survey, or that abused and depressed teens (especially younger ones) are especially likely to use social media for needed connections, including getting medical and mental health help.
America’s teenagers are not suffering a “mental health crisis.” Teens are responding normally to more depressing and anxiety-causing conditions. Rather, the United States in the 2010s and 2020s has sunk to a cynical low in the refusal of grownups, institutions, and authorities to confront the most glaring threats to the young.
Mike Males is senior researcher for YouthFacts.org .
That's the (pink) elephant in the room.