What IS making teenagers more depressed? Part 3.

Our most massive, comprehensive surveys and analyses explain less than one-third of teens’ poor mental health. What explains the rest?

The latest Centers for Disease Control survey of 20,000 teenagers finds 30% report suffering frequently poor mental health, including 41% of girls, 20% of boys, 29% of teens under age 16, and 52% of LGBTQ students.

Concern about the increase in and level of teens reporting unhappiness is understandable. The stampede to scapegoat easy culture-war targets like social media and smartphones based on flimsy evidence is not.

Tiny “effect sizes” – that is, explanatory values – plague social science. Standard regression analyses of the CDC survey (both by CDC analysts and myself) agree that social media use (including cyberbullying) explain around 1% of the variance in teen mental health. In my analysis, parent/adult abuses and family troubles explain 23%, school issues 3%, and a half-dozen other factors such as lack of sleep, sports concussion, and sunburn another 3%.

That is, 25 plausible factors from our best, largest surveys still fail to explain 70% of what drives teenagers’ depression. A 30% hit actually is terrific for social science research. Those studies driving wildly hyped panic against social media typically explain 1% to 3% at most, far too small even if accepted at face value to drive sweeping policies.

But still, we social scientists can do better than 30%. It’s time to ask teenagers some new questions. One major area is to expand and detail family abuses and troubles, perhaps adding divorce/separation, unemployment, and related difficulties. These are not issues political leaders or social-media-blaming lobbies want explored. CDC scientists deserve congratulations for venturing into this important minefield.

Assumptions = Conclusions about teenagers

Many authorities and social-mediaphobes reflexively dismiss teenagers, particularly girls, as shallow, concerned only with looks, clothes, status, material envy, and being mean. Psychologist Jean Twenge exemplifies this ephebiphobia (hostility toward youth): teens are body-obsessed, appearance-obsessed, popularity-obsessed, selfie-obsessed, self-destructive, endangered by their own stupidity, and “cruel,” she declares. This mindless bigotry is of the type applied to race, gender, religious, and ethnic differences. It exposes the shallowness of authorities who I assume are really describing their own values (if they can assume, I can assume).

In fact, a growing array of research of which these authorities and social-mediaphobes remain ignorant shows many teens – particularly girls – are indeed concerned with larger issues like climate change, global conflicts like Gaza’s, social justice, and politics. “Transcendent thinking” among teenagers is a new area of study, building on Lawrence Kohlberg’s moral reasoning index.

Recent research is discovering most teens – half to over two-thirds in international surveys – are responding strongly to larger social issues. Teens who are aware of larger issues tend to hold more liberal views and also use social media more, and they find older generations’ derelictions and inaction depressing. Naturally, psychologist Jonathan Haidt and social-mediaphobe colleagues dismiss greater depression among liberal girls as caused merely by their greater social media use. His anecdotal scorn for teens’ concerns for global issues indicates that we should add Gretaphobia and Malalaphobia to these authorities’ maladaptions.

Female and liberal teens, the leading edge of a Gen Z the UK’s PLOS Global Health and Columbia University’s Social and Spatial Epidemiology Unit find “more attuned to political events than prior generations,” are more likely to say things are NOT good. Newer research is finding that what we term “depression” and “despair” seem to motivate many modern teens, young women in particular, to stunning achievements in education, career fields, and global activism, especially surrounding climate change — hardly markers of debilitating depression. The internet connects these teens with broader communities. Four times more liberal than conservative teens use social media for activism, Pew Research reports.

There’s a more sinister side to efforts to suppress teens from social media

Certainly, politically-tainted motivations underlie congressional Republicans’ and Democrats’ zeal to prevent young people from accessing TikTok, which many lawmakers and lobbies accuse of “anti-Israel bias” and seek to forcibly confiscate the platform and relocate it to conservative media ownership.

TikTok and YouTube, the main platforms used by young people, do indeed carry user-generated podcasts and outlets showing brutalities of the Gaza occupation, ones mainstream media generally refuses to publicize. Younger Americans skew more pro-Palestine, repeated surveys show, and older people are more pro-Israel – both favoring the media that tends to validate their views.

However, the arguments are not symmetrical. Much of the motivation to “ban or sell” TikTok, evident in congressional hearings and lobbying, is admittedly political censorship aimed at suppressing TikTok’s younger, more liberal, and specifically pro-Palestinian user base. In particular, Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin admits his spearheading of the ban stemmed from anger that the platform “brainwashes” young people against Israel.

In contrast, no one on the pro-Palestine side I’m aware of is arguing for banning platforms, or viewers from platforms like CNN, the New York Times, or even AIPAC and ADL websites because of pro-Israel bias. (I hold pro-Palestine-rights views myself, and I would strongly oppose any efforts to censor pro-Israel platforms, network freedoms, or young viewership.) Yet, we see repeated, powerful, top-level efforts to censor pro-Palestinian advocacy driven by high-level disapproval of young people’s views. A future post will explore whether Haidt’s own political views on Israel influence his advocacy for using “mental health” to shut young people off from social media he disagrees with.

A similar anger surrounds climate change, another issue on which young people have stronger pro-environment views. Rumblings are surfacing that social media fosters “climate change anxiety” among young people, which some authorities brand as a mental illness. A recent article in The Lancet reported that young people “feel betrayed … by government inaction and dismayed when told they are overreacting to what they see as an existential threat. More than half of the 16- to 25-year-olds in the Lancet survey said they believe humanity is doomed. And close to 40 percent said that fears about the future have made them reluctant to have children of their own.”

One study found “eco-anxiety related to CC was associated with depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, lower self-referred mental health, and function.” “Climate change is fuelling a mental health 'eco-anxiety' crisis among our children and young people, some of it fuelled by social media and much by a feeling of powerlessness,” a World Economic Forum analysis declared; “…67% of Americans aged 18 to 23 are somewhat to very concerned about the impact of climate change on their mental health.”

But is agreeing with the consensus of climate scientists really “mental illness” or “depression” as clinicians define the terms? Researchers find young people’s views “incredibly sad” but also a “‘super-fuel’ to generate positive change. Anger can be hugely motivating … when it is based in a real sense of injustice, it shows that your conscience is alive, that your sense of being morally transgressed is intact.” A realistic view that social and environmental conditions are dismal and require urgent remediation is not “poor mental health,” but the opposite.

Clearly, questions on global issues need to be added to surveys and assessed for their relationship to teens’ mental health. More than that, authorities need to refine their prejudicial attitudes against young people and their simplistic insistence that any time teenagers are unhappy, that means they are mentally ill.