U.S. teen suicide rose much faster to much higher levels in conservative than liberal areas
Widely-quoted psychologist Jonathan Haidt and right-wing pundits claim social-media-driven liberal teens suffer the worst depression. So, why do conservative areas have the worst teen suicide by far?
Popular psychologist Jonathan Haidt and gleeful conservative commentators argue that because surveys show liberal teenagers, led by girls, are more likely to report being depressed than conservative teens, social media and liberalism must be damaging – including making teens more suicidal. “Liberal girls simply use social media more than any other group,” Haidt speculates, harmful behavior that “liberals embraced… more than conservatives.”
As usual, Haidt and conservatives left out an inconvenient complication: the real world. Boy – and girl – did they.
The time periods Haidt and others selectively cherry-pick to evaluate are 2007 to 2021 (when teen suicide rose the fastest) and 2010 to 2021 (when teen depression on Centers for Disease Control surveys increased). If Haidt’s speculation is correct, we would expect teen suicide to rise faster in the country’s most liberal areas and much less in conservative areas.
For both time periods, the diametric opposite is the case (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Suicides per 100,000 population age 10-19, Republican counties in Republican-governed states vs Democrat counties in Democrat-led states,* 2007-2021
Source for figures: Centers for Disease Control, 2024.
Teen suicide rose 230% faster over the last 11 to 14 years to a level 180% higher in conservative areas than in liberal areas,* with mixed-government areas in between. Demographics don’t explain these trends. White teens also show much faster increases and higher rates of suicide in conservative areas (Figure 2).
Figure 2. White (non-Hispanic) teen suicides per 100,000 population by politics, 2007-2021
Haidt and others especially target teen girls, particularly middle-schoolers – the group with the most social media use, and, unexpectedly, the lowest suicide rates of any demographic group (except children) by far.
Girls’ suicide rates, once similar in the past in liberal, conservative, and mixed counties, have risen much faster in recent years and are now 33% higher in conservative areas (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Teenage girls’ suicide rates per 100,000 girls by politics, 2007-2021
While liberalism may be a personal ideological anathema to Haidt, it is connected to less, not more, teen suicide in real life.
Further, the latest, 2022 CDC figures show teen girls nationwide are 60% less likely to commit suicide than teen boys or their middle-aged mothers and 88% less likely to commit suicide, as well as 97% less likely to take fatal drug overdoses, than their middle-aged fathers, uncles, teachers, grandfathers, etc., Haidt’s age:
Suicides
14-year-old girls, 75
60-year-old men, 678
Fatal overdoses of illicit drugs
14-year-old girls, 42
60-year-old men, 1,490
Teenage girls would be much more justified in demanding restrictions to rescue older men from their own self-destruction than the other way around.
If Haidt and other social-media blamers are serious about teen suicide, then surely they’d agree only the best, most accurate scientific information should be applied to preventing it — not wildly embellished hype and prejudicial political quips ill-grounded in factual contexts.
Trends and figures like those shown here, so far banished from discussion, should become standard features of debate.
*Republican area means a Republican-voting county in a state controlled at the executive and legislative levels by unitary Republican rule (age 10-19 population, 5.16 million); Democratic area is the same for Democrats (age 10-19 population, 6.71 million); and Mixed Area refers to a county that votes the opposite of its state ruling part or is in a state with a mixed-party government (age 10-19 population, 8.87 million).