Teenage girls who use social media daily are less likely to harm themselves and attempt suicide – one of many unmentionable realities major health surveys show

Officials’ and professionals’ dismissals and distortions of the worst menaces to teenagers’ mental and physical health are inexcusable.

Let’s embark on a logical sequence I hope will illustrate, yet again, just how dishonest and destructive our debate over social media and teenagers is.

I use the two definitive 2021 and 2023 Centers for Disease Control biannual surveys of thousands of American teenagers – the surveys everyone cites but grossly distorts.

These are the only surveys that ask teens about risks, family conditions, and social media use. Authorities clearly don’t like teens’ answers. The ban-teens-from-social-media lobby superficially hypes girls as suffering the most from social media, then deceptively cuts off discussion.

First, their case

Step 1 presents their case – the point every American and their Shihtzudoodle knows and media incessantly hypes: Girls who use social media more are more likely to be depressed:

Source for all tables: CDC 2023.

Looks like the ban-teens-from-going-online lobby has a point, right?

Read on

Correlations, like dominos, can fall both ways. Suppose girls depressed by other things in their lives are more likely to use social media – say, to seek contacts and help?

None of the ban-teens commentators or their media worshippers ever mention the highly relevant fact that teenage girls have the lowest suicide and fatal overdose rates of any adolescent or adult age group or gender – far lower than the older, much more suicidal and overdosing luminaries who incessantly disparage girls’ mental health.

So, how would we know whether it’s social media or other things making girls depressed? If social media is the culprit, we’d expect social media use also would be driving girls to serious manifestations of depression, such as suicide and self-harm:

Girls who never or rarely (weekly or less) use social media are substantially more likely to attempt suicide and harm themselves compared to girls who use social media several hours a day. The ideal seems to be 1 to 4 hours a day rather than fewer or more.

This surprise should have generated intense interest among mental health practitioners. However, it seems to be treated as a threat. Ban-teens advocates ignore and distort this startling trend to assert that social media makes teens more prone to suicide attempts and self-harm.

That social media use accompanies more depression but less inclination to suicide and self-harm suggests social media may be the wrong factor to focus on. So, let’s look elsewhere.

What else might be making girls depressed?

The scientific method to assess the importance of potential factors is regression analysis. We’ll see why ban-teens advocates universally avoid this standard procedure.

Here’s my standard multivariate regression ranking the top 10 of 25 potential factors in girls’ depression in the CDC survey (4,598 girls ages 13-18 replied to all questions):

Source: CDC 2023 (regression analysis is mine; d values calculated from r values).

Regression analysis incorporates correlated factors into the most important factor, so that “parents’ psychological abuse” will eliminate related factors like parents’ violence, addiction, criminality, etc., as well as proportions of sexual assault attributable to adult family members.

Note that parental abuse and parental depression are the biggest factors, accounting for 88% of the known factors driving girls’ poor mental health. In contrast, the two social media factors, cyberbullying and social media use, together account for less than 1%. This small effect size is typical of all social media studies.

My findings are similar to the CDC’s, whose analysis finds’ parents’ abuses and poor mental health the major factors in two-thirds of teens’ depression and 84-89% of teens’ opiate abuse and suicide. Social media? Almost none for depression; nothing for suicide.

Yet, again, psychologist Jonathan Haidt has pushed his dangerous “no screens before 16” crusade with a new claim that the damaging effects of social media use equate with maltreatment victimizing children and teenagers. Even using his own examples, that’s a gross statistical deception, duly dismembered below.

Normally, analysts would study the most important factors

Step 2. Let’s examine the overall factors that tower above the others in their association with girls’ depression: parental abuse and its correlates, household adults’ violence poor mental health, drug/alcohol addiction, and criminal behavior (jailing).

In both the 2021 and 2023 CDC surveys, teenagers who reported being abused by parents and/or household adults comprised three-fourths of teens who reported frequently poor mental health, five-sixths of teens who contemplated suicide, and nearly 90% of teens who seriously harmed themselves and attempted suicide.

So, if you assume these teens are lying or exaggerating parental abusiveness and family problems – or should just be ignored – then you’d be tossing out the entire basis of the teen “mental health crisis.”

Now, let’s apply the same test used for social media use above to whether parents’ abuses and trouble families are also associated with girls’ moving to more rash behaviors:

No contradiction or ambiguity here. Parental/family abusiveness and unhealthy conditions are associated with substantially more suicide attempts and self-harm by girls.

Younger girls are especially endangered by social media bans

The CDC survey shows girls under age 16 are particularly menaced by family abuses and by increasing official bans on their social media use. The next table compares younger girls with frequently abusive parents and troubled households to those whose parents are never abusive and families are untroubled across several dimensions of well-being:

Note that girls who are abused at home by parents are 5 to 6 times more likely also to be bullied at school and online – a crucial pattern officials ignore.

Many readers may be thinking, “well, duh. No shocker that girls from Sybil families – younger ones in particular, who are more trapped – are going to be more messed up than girls from Modern Family families.”

That’s exactly my point. All we hear from popular psychologists such as Haidt and Jean Twenge, media commentators, and political leaders who push “no screens before 16” is the pretense that family abuses and troubles don’t exist; parents and adults around teens do not suffer drug/alcohol, mental health, violence, or crime problems; teenagers’ real problem is just their social media use.

Example: Haidt’s latest deception

In a particularly misleading claim, Haidt mentions “child maltreatment” – the first time to my knowledge he’s ever admitted child abuse exists – in his latest substack declaring “mountains of evidence” prove “social media’s many harms to adolescents.”

His mountains are the same old molehill, newly topped by his especially misleading citation falsely equating the Population Attributable Fraction value from an Australian study to the minimal d value commonly found in raw correlations of social media with depression.

In fact, the Australian study’s PAF of 0.22 for child-maltreatment/depression is 10 to 15 times more powerful than Haidt’s weak d value of 0.22 for social-media/depression, the latter of which would correspond to a trivial PAF of around 0.01 to 0.02.

But who important cares? Blaming social media and the villainous moguls who run major platforms is fun; talking about domestic violence, child abuse, addicted and troubled parents, and real crises officials are failing to solve… bummer.

Haidt’s worshipful political and media followers who treat his pronouncements as gospel never challenge his reliance on trivialities and inaccuracies. Government after government is advancing bans, “age verification,” and like repressions to force teenagers’ abstinence from social media.

Official obliviousness is dangerous

Let’s move to step 3, which combines steps 1 and 2. This is the one everyone makes sure not to investigate: the same teenagers on the same CDC survey who report having been abused by parents/adults are more likely than non-abused teenagers to report using social media:

That abused teens are both more likely to be depressed and more likely to use social media makes it APPEAR (to those who leave out the abuse factor) that social media is the culprit making teens depressed.

My analogy (sorry, long-term readers for repetition) is that if you leave out cigarette smoking, you can prove listening to country music causes lung cancer. After all, older, rural White men listen to country music and also get lung cancer more. Just ignore that they also smoke a lot.

So, parents, officials, and ban-teens lobbies, if you want teens to use social media less, a big, big step would be to reduce family abuses and troubles – which would also do wonders for their mental health.

So, let’s face the reality of what this landfill of official deception and dereliction tells us: they don’t care about teenagers’ well-being. What their own official surveys tell them is irrelevant. Their goal is repression of political views and information sources officials and allied repressors disapprove of. “Mental health” is just the subterfuge, and teenagers are just the beginning.