So … what IS making teens more depressed?

We’re learning, slowly, after wasting so much time on authorities’ pointless obsession with social media. We still need to ask better questions.

As a rule, the loudness with which social science findings are proclaimed varies inversely with their validity. Studies usually don’t find much. Psychologists Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt explain why: “the fields of personality and social psychology … rarely produce reliable correlations above 0.30. Human beings and societies are complicated; behavior has multiple causes, and small effects (around r = 0.10, or smaller) are … ubiquitous."

Social science studies’ “ubiquitous” raw correlations of 0.10 and, rarely, as high as 0.30 mean their findings are associated with 1% to 9% of variations (R-squared) in the behaviors studied. That’s true of studies Haidt and Twenge rely on -- ones that actually show how little social media affects teenagers’ mental health.

You’d think their own admission of complications, multiple causes, and small effects would produce responsible scientific caution and humility. But no. Haidt and Twenge indulge wild claims that social media is “rewiring childhood” and “destroy(ing) a generation” and demand mass social media bans and restrictions on tens of millions of teenagers. All based on what they admit is next to nothing in the way of evidence.

As we ask better questions, we’re getting better answers … finally

The Centers for Disease Control’s 107-question 2023 survey of teens ages 13-18 asks 25 questions on factors that affect mental health, many of them new. When these question are combined in a regression analysis, 20 emerge as significant for all teens, offering patterns as to which contribute the biggest percentage to known factors affecting teens’ mental health:

Source: CDC 2024. *Parents’/adults’ other personal troubles include severe depression, drug/alcohol abuse, jailing, domestic violence, and absence; School issues include lack of closeness to others, poor grades, bullying, injury, and fear. Columns are not additive due to differing numbers of teens responding to different survey questions.

Notice how similar the factors associated with teens’ mental health are, regardless of gender, age, or sexual orientation. Parent, household, and school issues, along with lack of sleep, sports concussion, and sunburn (didn’t expect that one, but it’s understandable), account for nearly all teenaged depression. Social media, including cyberbullying, explains just about nothing, especially for younger teens.

So, newer, better surveys and studies have pretty well figured out teen mental health, right? Not exactly. There’s a big caveat.

The above 20 factors produce correlation values (raw correlation, r=0.54, R-squared effect size=0.30) five times higher than usually found in social science. But together, they explain just 30% of variations in teen’s mental health. A similar analysis of factors in teens’ suicide attempts is even less explanatory: the 15 significant ones are associated with just 21% of the variation.

That means 70% to 80% of the factors affecting teenagers’ mental health remain unexplained. Yes, people are complicated, mental health is multifactorial, etc., but after decades of studying this issue, we social scientists should be doing better than 20% to 30%. That’s why we get paid the big bucks (!), right?

Authorities’ obsession with popular culture-war issues like social media has wasted researchers’ time and crowded out serious inquiries that could really help young people. The sunny image on Haidt’s and Twenge’s websites (repeated by leaders and media commentaries) that parents and influential adults are healthy and merely need to crack down on their teenagers’ social-media use is delusional.

Even with recent improvements, the CDC and others need to expand and refine questions further to elucidate reasons for teenagers’ unhappiness and anxiety. A big part of that may be long-outmoded prejudices against adolescents combined with the feeling that adults in power must be flattered.

Haidt, Twenge, and too many others simply assume teenagers, especially girls, are shallow, mean, and greedy, caring only about looks, clothes, possessions, status, popularity, and belittling peers. That’s clearly not the case for Generation Z (or previous generations), which is showing major interest in larger issues like global conflicts and climate change, many of which are depressing. That may be one reason conservatives in particular strive to ban teens from social media and challenging information. Future posts will suggest some questions we should be asking.