There’s no “global increase in teenage suicide.” In fact, 29 of 32 Western nations saw teen suicide DECREASE as social media use rose

How on earth have crusaders to ban teens from social media gotten away with fabricating the impression that social media use fosters more teen suicide?

Regarding my last substack, watch Candice Odgers’ full TED talk. She argues succinctly to refute misleading and outright false statistics used to whip up national panics over teens using social media.

Which brings us to another flat-out falsehood of the many incredible myths that ban-teens-from-social-media crusaders have sold to political and media authorities: that the social media era spawned a “global increase” in teen suicide.” While some have confined the claim to girls’ suicides — an interesting refinement since boys account for three-fourths of teen suicides, one that seems to escape attention — even that is open to discussion.

The overall trend is clear, dramatic, and the opposite of what is publicly proclaimed. As social media use by teenagers skyrocketed across all Western nations since the mid-1990s, here’s what did happen:

· 3 nations – the United States, Japan, and Singapore – showed increases in their rates of suicides by teens.

· 29 nations – led by Germany, France, Korea, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Canada, and Australia – showed decreased teen suicide rates.

Teen suicide trends shown by the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation statistics (less-complete United Nations’ World Health Organization tabulations show the same trends) demolish ban-teens advocate Jonathan Haidt’s statistician Zach Rausch’s. The Economist’s, and others’ simplistic, aggregated trends in total suicide changes. The problem with crude aggregation is that the United States and Japan, 2 countries that did show increased teen suicide, are large nations that together account for nearly two-thirds of the West’s entire suicide total.

Worse still, crusaders’ analyses exploit only those few, select nations and often inconsistent, incomplete time periods cherry-picked to confirm their claim of increased social-media-driven teen suicide. And in the few cases where there are suicide increases, they simply blame social media without looking at more crucial factors such as many nations’ rising, widespread drug abuse among grownups. The energy they put into avoiding this issue is painful to behold.

The real question, given that teens in all the dozens of Western nations showed exploding increases in social media use in the post-1995 period, is this: why did 3 nations show an average increase in teen suicide rates of 46%, while 29 nations showed an average decrease of 38% during the same period? Not exactly a subtle difference, and one crucial to examine – assuming one wants to prevent suicide rather than exploit it to indulge culture-war panics.

What is the “social media era”?

The Economist and Raush pick the post-2003 period. Psychologist Jean Twenge, instrumental along with Haidt in inflaming panics over social media, fixates on the post-2010 period and some weird time-period breakdowns, apparently to go after smartphones.

This is seriously misleading. In 2003, U.S. Census data revealed that three-fourths of U.S. 12-17-year-olds were going online, up from 62% in 2000. By 2010, 93% of American teens age 12-17 were already using social media, 63% every day, Pew Research reported; Monitoring the Future found 56% of 8-10^th graders and 63% of 12^th graders used social media every day. You can’t analyze the effects of the internet and social media on teens by comparing periods in which the vast majority of teens were already online.

The latest, most logical year defining the pre-social-media era would be 1995, when the best estimate from crude surveys is that maybe 10% of teens went online regularly. Social media first appeared in 1997 (remember “Six Degrees,” “Classmates,” and “Lunar Storm”?) One could pick a somewhat earlier year or later year, but the results will be the same – most nations experienced decreased teen suicide rates accompanying the rise of the social media era.

The bottom line is that from 1995 to 2010 or so, social media use among teens grew from very low levels to 90%-plus use across the Western world. In the post-2010 period, social media use grew little but did include smartphones, which offer nothing more than portable, small-screen internet access.

My analysis

I define the post-1995 period as the internet and social-media era. I rely on the University of Washington School of Medicine’s definitive Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which provides consistently collected data on dozens of countries (I cite the 32 countries with near-complete death registration systems) for every year. No method is perfect, but this one at least standardizes often inconsistent national mortality reporting, and as mentioned, WHO statistics yield very similar results.

One initial issue is that teen suicide is very rare, much rarer than suicide by grownups, a reality dodged by the many professionals and media reporters who obey primitive American cultural norms stigmatizing suicide. In the United States and Japan, for example, fewer than 1 in 60,000 girls ages 10-14 commit suicide in any given year; in Germany, fewer than 1 in 100,000; in the UK, just 1 in 400,000. Small numbers naturally fluctuate and are vulnerable to even small changes in death classification procedures.

So, I don’t pick just this arbitrary year to compare to that arbitrary year to affirm my prejudices (had I indulged that bamboozling, I could have shown ALL 32 countries had “decreases” in teens suicides!). Instead, I use neutral regression analysis that incorporates all years and suicide numbers in the entire 28-year time period into one consistent trendline. Table 1 shows the results.

Table 1. Change in numbers of suicides by persons under age 20 in 32 Western countries during the period in which social media use by teens increased

Source: Global Burden of Disease, University of Washington School of Medicine Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (2026), Data Tool. Suicides are deaths from “self-harm.” Rates are suicides per 100,000 population age 10-19 by country. “Social media era” is 1995 through 2023, with all countries supplying data for all 28 years.

Given that social media use increased sharply among teens across the Western world during the 1995-2023 period, the fact that teen suicide rates declined in 29 of 32 nations normally would indicate overwhelming evidence that social media’s effects – if any – would be to deter, not promote, suicide.

Spanish girls’ suicide trends – an illustration

Ban-teens-from-social-media crusaders have famously made a special issue of trends in Spain – more correctly, distorting them.

So, let’s sum up what happened in Spain as tabulated by University of Washington School of Medicine scientists during the social media era regarding supposedly skyrocketing suicide by teenaged girls:

· Among 2.4 million Spanish teenaged girls, annual suicides fluctuated from 12 (2009 and 2010) to 31 (1995 and 1996) and wound up at 24 (2023) – an averaged 28-year rate decrease over 1995-2023 of 7%

· Among 2.6 million teenaged boys, annual suicides ranged from 39 to 92, with a 28-year rate decline of 40%

· Among women of age to be mothers of teenaged girls (age 40-49), annual suicides ranged from 91 to 196, with an average rate increase of 14%

· Among men of age to be fathers of teenaged girls (40-49), annual suicides ranged from 420 to 810, an average rate increase of 13%.

In the most recent year available (2023, more than a quarter-century after social media first took hold), there were 174 suicides among Spanish women and 575 among men of age (40-49) to be their parents – compared to 24 among teen girls (including 3 among girls age 10-14). It’s understandable to lament suicide as the tragedy it is, but let’s have some perspective before creating mass panics.

Analysts could have started with the obvious summary fact that the large majority of countries show teen suicide declines during the social media era. I plan to follow up with examinations of suicide rates by gender and more detailed age and the drug-abuse epidemic that afflicted mainly over-25 adults (parent-age groups) during this period. Even where trends differ, there is no evident reason to blame social media and every reason to stop ignoring other vital trends in teens’ lives.