Is It The Phones?

The Studies Show - Stuart Ritchie in the sidebar - just discussed the mental health crisis and the rise of social media. I signed on big for Jonathan Haidt on this topic years ago, and his book with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, the premise of which is that we have a mental health crisis among our youth, caused largely by social media and omnipresent smartphones. Well if you believe the mental health numbers, which I 75% did until hearing the podcast, and you see kids focused on their phones and know that you yourself are using the things more than you would even have predicted, it seems a reasonable conclusion. So reasonable, in fact, that both conservatives and liberals are all up in arms about it, wanting them limited or even banned for children younger than a particular age, and all sorts of regulations put in place to stop Bad Things From Happening.

I had previously signed on medium big on Haidt's moral foundations theory right from the start, though I also noticed early that there was some failure of imagination that led to him overstating his conclusions.* But later I backed off even more, in the face of other criticisms.  So I guess I should be more suspicious.  Ritchie and Chivers like some of Haidt's other work, and they are almost apologetic about going after him on this one. But it all rests on two premises: that there is a current mental health crisis, and that it is caused by something, something, in the area of screen time or social media. They are not convinced of either.  They still believe both are possible, but the initial evidence has holes in it, and the newer evidence based on stricter studies shows less effect or none at all.  If fact, the better the study - more participants, better blinding, preregistered, etc, the less the effect. Also, Haidt has doubled down (though with all the proper demurrers) that it is no longer possible to assert that it is correlational only, the studies now show that it is causal.  That is a much higher standard, and when researchers go there as the evidence is questioned, it is not a good sign. To be responsible as the numbers are going down, one has to say something more like "Okay, we are still seeing a significant effect, but something else is happening as well, let's figure out what that is."

I will give you the very brief synopsis of the evidence weakening, but I have an observation of my own that is why you come here. The mental health (anxiety/depression/suicide) crisis among teens is not happening in other countries that have ubiquitous phone use. Much of the increase in suicide is among middle-aged males, and the suicide rate is still 4x higher among males, despite our continuing focus on how this is just killing our teen girls on social media. They are actually among the lowest suicide groups, and their increase, though real, could be do to other factors. Doctors report things differently on the ICD-10 vs the ICD-9. We used to protect families from the stigma of suicide, but now some are more likely to want to "raise awareness." (There's more on the podcast.)

So the doubt is there, and you can do what you want with that.

I find it interesting that here we have another iteration, very noticeable in the Reviving Ophelia era but which I recall at least as far back as my own school days, that there is a panic because the young fertile females are all upset. This is often paired with a panic that the healthy young males are becoming less fit and more crazy, as in Otaku, internet porn, video games, Dungeons& Dragons, watching TV, reading sensational dime novels,  and the like. I'm not saying there is no problem there.  Birth rates and especially marriage rates are down, way down. It puts the whole tribe in a panic.  It probably has real evolutionary significance. We are probably hardwired for this. Someone tell those girls We Care!  Pay them money to have babies! Tell them to suck it up, life has always been hard and look what your great-grandmother went through! There is more sexism now!You look fine, stop worrying about it! When the girls are sad, we have this urge to Do Something.  And this pairs with our solution of trying to fix the boys by doing Something Else. They need to get off their asses and get a job! Well what do you expect the way those girls are acting? Those porn sites make it too easy. It's all those negative messages in the schools/movies/commercials! 

As with the environmentalism, below, it's not that we shouldn't do anything, it's that we should have some clear idea of what to do.  UNESCO wants to ban smartphones for those under 16. The evidence is...? As for the MH crisis to begin with, how much of it is self-fulfilling in an artifactual way.  If you were sixteen and deeply unhappy in 1954 you might think it was transitory, related to school work or that redhead who wouldn't give you the time of day. You might actually have been depressed then and benefited from some sort of attention, but we've done pretty well at "raising awareness" and sometimes we get false positives on this.  Scott Alexander at ACX, a psychiatrist who I deeply respect, has advocated for a Mental Health Unawareness Day. We are in danger of falling off the other side of the horse now.  And it's not doing kids any favors to convince them that their problems are worse than they are.

We have always had bullying, including girls bullying girls, but it now has a different form.  Is it worse?  Is ther more of it?  How would we know? We are in a panic that girls compare themselves to other girls on Instagram and get discouraged. Ummm...my junior prom date in 1970, stunningly pretty, thought she was unattractive because one eyelid drooped when she got tired, which I never noticed. You want to talk bullies, let me tell you about Ray Hudon at my school, who was a Mike Tyson type sent away to YDC and became a Golden Glove boxer quite young (died of drug overdose later). Jeezum Crow he had everyone's lunch money. Kids don't how to work now? My sons all worked harder than I ever did. 

Keep your eye on this tribal panic - and you can see it in a lot of history as well.  Oh my god, the girls are all upset!  Oh my god, the boys are being irresponsible! Well, those are problems, yeah, in every generation and we are right get be hyperalert about it. But try to put some thought into this before passing laws about it. And as I noted above, I was one of the ones who started screaming about this one first, so I'm not talking down to anyone here.

*He posited that conservatives operated from five (now six) moral axes, while liberals thought most of those unimportant and applied only two. On purity/degradation he noted that conservatives were much more bothered about using an American flag to clean the toilet even if it was all you had, and tended to follow authority more. But I claimed that liberals had their own purity bugaboos, like a newspaper with an MLK photo when you were out of TP, and a lot of environmentalism, vegetarianism, anti-hunting, while they also could be strongly influenced by authority - just different from the older authorities like the church or the local police.