The wildly overhyped “teen/social media” frenzy is preventing attention to crucial dangers that really do affect teenagers’ mental health

Parents’ and family troubles drive teens’ mental health, followed by personal and school issues. Social media, barely a blip, serves as an easy scapegoat for officials to dodge real responsibility.

When Surgeon General Vivek Murthy blamed social media for possibly causing some unknown amount of teenagers’ depression, and their studies showed “a positive correlation” (no matter how unadmittedly tiny and compromised) between social media use and depression, social-media blamers fell over themselves to grab sensational media attention and demand policy action. Too often, they’re winning both.

But when the Centers for Disease Control issued a pair of 2024 analyses of the best survey of teens ever compiled (20,000 participants, 107 questions) associating screen time with less than 10% (at most) of teens’ depression while linking parental troubles (led by emotional abuse, depression, and addiction) to 66% to 89% of teens’ depression and suicide attempts, social-media blamers went silent. They also ignored the Surgeon General’s 2024 advisory on widespread parental/adult crises.

The social-media-blaming movement has devolved from raising some good questions about internet and cultural changes needing investigating 10 to 20 years ago into today’s destructive stampede that is wrecking reasoned analysis of what really harms young people and adults.

A flood of worthless “studies” (I see three more today) treat social media as the ONLY factor that could POSSIBLY be causing teens’ problems (and STILL find absurdly low-level effects the authors then tout as apocalyptic in fawning press stories). None venture anywhere near the real, rising household crises driving teens’ depression.

Enough nonsense. These are serious issues.

The CDC surveyed teenagers on 51 factors potentially affecting teenagers’ mental health: parental and household conditions, social media use and cyberbullying, school issues, external personal factors the teenager can’t change (like being gay), and internal personal factors the teenager can change (like smoking pot). Others are welcome to download the CDC survey and choose and classify factors themselves. They will get much the same results I did.

Of these 51 factors, standard regression analysis identifies 23 that significantly (p<0.01) affect teenage mental health. Collectively, these factors correlate well with teens’ mental health (r=0.570, Cohen’s d=1.387, good for a social science study) but still indicate the need for better specification of existing variables and inclusion of as-yet-unknown factors. What we don’t know about factors driving teenagers’ mental health exceeds what we do know.

The table shows these 23 significant factors categorized by classification (ie, family, personal, school, social media), with each factor’s effect sizes ranked (far-left column) as measured by Cohen’s d value, and each factor’s unique negative contributions to teens’ poor mental health (as shown in the far-right column).

Source: CDC, 2024.

This is what teenagers are telling us: parents’, household adults’, and domestic problems powerfully drive teenagers’ depression (70% of known association), an understandable reaction to the rising adult addictions and troubles in their homes. In 2009, 600,000 people ages 30-59 (the parents, parents’ partners, relatives, etc., to teens) suffered fatal and ER-treated drug and alcohol overdoses, self-harm injuries, and suicides; in 2021, 1.3 million, just the iceberg tip of soaring drug/alcohol and mental health problems among household grownups.

To a much lesser extent, teens’ mental health is affected by their own individual situations and behaviors, both ones they can change (like better diet) and those they can’t (like being gay). Getting more sleep is in between. Some important variables are subsumed in others. Drug-alcohol-abusing and jailed parents/adults also tend to be depressed; homelessness and hunger are subsumed in caring adult presence; etc.

Not feeling close to others at school (whether peers, teachers, other personnel, or everyone is not specified) also strongly affects mental health. Rather than obsessing over smartphones, officials need to scrutinize their own school environments. Social-media-blaming has become an easy escape from facing more difficult issues.

The bottom line for current debate is that social media is barely relevant, once the other vastly more crucial factors in teens’ lives are accounted for – as the studies touted by social-media-blamers and in the press never do. Nor does the zero-sum dichotomy between online (unsafe!) and physical (safe!) worlds fantasized by social-media-blamers exist in real life. Teens suffering troubles and abuses in the physical world also have problems (far fewer and less serious ones) in the social-media world. Getting sunburned is evidently more depressing than being cyberbullied.

The powerful influence physical-world experiences have on teens’ online experience, whether we can believe self-reports, and what factors not being explored should be will be examined next.