Chapter 1 Summary

• Between 2010-2015 most teenagers in most countries started to live their lives through smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games and other internet-based activities. With it came a tidal wave of mental illness.

• Those most affected were going through puberty when they got their hands on a smartphone. They are referred to as ‘Gen Z’.

• Girls fared worse than boys. Pre-teen girls fared worst of all.

• Adolescent suicide rates started to rise in 2008, gaining real momentum after 2010.

• Feelings of alienation in school rose after 2012.

• Aside from the theory that tech has caused this decline in mental health (smart phones and social media in particular), no other plausible theory has been put forward to explain the unprecedented rise.

A Tidal Wave

Life has become dominated by technology. And it happened remarkably quickly.

With that shift, family life has changed too. Traditional rituals, like eating a meal together, talking about the day, simply being in the same room and paying attention to one another have become harder to protect when everyone's eyes are drawn towards a screen.

Virtually every parent will have had some form of disagreement with a child about tech use when trying to introduce rules or boundaries about screen time. But these arguments are taking place against a much bigger backdrop.

Something changed around 2012

Between 2010 and 2015, researchers began to see a remarkably synchronised increase in adolescent anxiety and depression across a number of countries, social groups and demographic backgrounds. The rise peaked around 2012.

The increase affected both boys and girls. While some of the data can make it appear that girls were affected more severely, this is only because boys were starting from a lower baseline. During this period, rates of adolescent depression increased by around two and a half times.

It’s worth mentioning COVID. The mental-health crisis among young people did not begin with the pandemic. Certainly, the pandemic made life more difficult for many people, and there was a further deterioration around 2021, but the research shows the underlying trend was already well established before COVID arrived. 

We need to be clear about what the problem is we are talking about

There is a lot of discussion about ‘mental health’, but not always a lot of clarity. Jonathan Haidt makes an important point when he says: before we can hope to solve a problem, we need to “understand who is suffering from what beginning when”?

One aspect he researched was internalising versus externalising disorders.

For clarity, internalising disorders involve distress that is largely directed inward. These include anxiety, fear, sadness, hopelessness. They often go hand in hand with overthinking, rumination and withdrawal from social life.

Externalising problems, by contrast, involve distress being directed outward. For example, anger, aggression and violence towards others, or certain forms of risk-taking.

Typically, females internalise more and males externalise more, but since around 2010, both sexes have shown a significant increase in internalising disorders. This matters, because it suggests that something may have changed not simply in how young people behave, but in how they experience themselves and their relationships with the world around them.

How are we defining ‘anxiety’?

While fear is the emotional response to a real or perceived imminent threat, anxiety is the anticipation of a future threat.

From an evolutionary perspective, human beings developed unusually large brains and an extraordinary capacity to form complex social groups. This has given us enormous advantages, but it has also made us highly sensitive to social threats.

For much of human history, being rejected, excluded, shunned or humiliated by your group could have meant death; we are not designed to live in isolation. For this reason, we have evolved to be exquisitely attuned to social acceptance and rejection.

Research has found that adolescent brains are especially sensitive to social exclusion. At exactly the stage of life when belonging, friendship, approval and social status matter enormously, young people have suddenly found themselves carrying around a device in their pocket that is capable of delivering a constant stream of social comparison, judgement and potential rejection.

This is the beginning of the story about why Meta is on trial this week. 

The rise in self-harm and suicide

Unfortunately, the changes seen after 2010 were not limited to anxiety and depression.

Rates of non-suicidal self-harm such as cutting among younger teenage and pre-teen girls nearly tripled between 2010-2020, and doubled for girls who were 15-19 years of age at the time. Curiously, it went down for those over 24.

At the same time, rates of suicide among young people rose significantly after 2010; for boys by 91% and girls by 167%. For girls the increase started in 2008 and surged after 2012, though suicide remains more common in boys than girls.  

The smartphone fundamentally changed kids’ lives

Those of us from Generation X, and older, will remember the arrival of the internet. It limped in via a modem that sounded like aliens having a knees-up! Most homes had it by 2001, and yet the data shows no decline in teen mental health over the next 10 years.

Teenagers of that period - largely Millennials, or Gen Y, as they are sometimes known (i.e. born between around 1981-1996) - experienced puberty with computers, internet access and mobile phones, BUT there was an important difference: their phones were not ‘the internet’. They could go online, sure, but they were not online all the time.

It was only after smart phones were introduced in 2007, enabling kids to be online ‘all the time’ that teen mental health began to collapse.

By around 2012/ 2013, large numbers of teenagers were carrying the internet around in their pockets. And that changed childhood. The daily experience of a 13-year-old born in 2000, carrying a smartphone in 2013, was profoundly different from that of a 13-year-old born in 1994, carrying a flip phone in 2007. One had a phone. The other had a portable, personalised social universe.

By 2016, research suggests that 79% of teens, and 28% of children aged 8-12 years, owned a smartphone, offering constant access to the internet, an endless supply of apps and an almost continuous stream of notifications urging the recipient to check what everyone is saying and doing. As Haidt points out in his book, “This kind of connectivity offers few of the benefits of talking directly with friends [and] for many young people, it’s poisonous.”

From looking outwards to constantly looking at ourselves

Things were made significantly worse with the arrival, in 2010, of the front-facing camera and selfie-based social media. Instagram, originally designed as a smartphone-based app, rapidly expanded, from 10 million to 90 million users, after Facebook acquired it.

The combination of smartphones, front-facing cameras and social media platforms created the perfect storm for social comparison and for mental health to catastrophically implode.

Suddenly, adolescence became not only increasingly documented and photographed, but, with the introduction of powerful filters and editing apps, filtered and edited, too, before being publicly displayed.

By around 2012, many teenagers, particularly girls, could reasonably have felt that everyone was getting a smartphone, everyone was joining Instagram and everyone was looking at everyone else. Or, if we are to be precise, looking at a carefully selected version of others so that the girl looking in the mirror was comparing herself not simply with other girls, but with edited, filtered, posed and carefully curated versions of other girls.

The real self was increasingly being measured against the unreal self.

Meanwhile, boys were disappearing into a different kind of digital world

The experience was not identical for boys and girls.

Haidt writes that while the girls were all comparing their real selves to the unreal selves of their friends and influencers, the boys were disappearing into a virtual world of multiplayer video games, YouTube, Reddit and hardcore pornography.  

The crucial issue was not simply that these things existed, but that they became constantly accessible. The boundary between being online and being offline began to disappear.

Research has found teenagers generally spend around 7 hours a day of ‘leisure’ time (excluding school and homework) on their screens. Within those 7 hours, those with a social media account spend around 2 hours a day on it. The remaining 5 hours is spent on other ‘screen media’, including playing video games, and watching videos on Netflix, YouTube or pornography sites.

By 2015, around one in four teenagers reported being online ‘almost constantly’. By 2022, that figure had almost doubled. So even when young people appear to be engaged in the real world (sitting at the dinner table, apparently having a meal with the family; sitting in a classroom; talking to a friend), part of their attention may well be monitoring (and probably worrying), about events unfolding in the digital metaverse:

Has someone messaged me? Why haven't they replied? What are they saying in the group chat? Did I miss something? Why did she like that post but not mine? What is everyone doing without me?

The physical world is still here, but our young people are not quite in it.

It seems the smartphone has not simply changed what young people do; it appears to have changed the quality of their attention.

The end of a play-based childhood

Haidt’s central tenet in the book (and the focus of next week’s post) is that the loss of a play-based childhood, in favour of a phone-based childhood, is what lies at the root of the mental health crisis our young people are currently experiencing. He describes the period between roughly 2010 and 2015 as marking the transition point.

For previous generations, childhood was largely organised around the physical world. Children played outside. They spent time with friends face-to-face. They had arguments, made up again, got bored, invented games, fell out of trees and gradually learned how to navigate risk and the complicated business of human relationships.

Through screens, however, social interaction has become something that can be photographed, posted, commented upon, rated, compared and even ignored. Groups can be joined and left ‘at will’. People can be ‘blocked’ at the click of a button. And you don’t even have to reveal who you are. Ironically, for all the chat about how ‘connected’ we all are now, far from our increased connectivity reducing loneliness, reports of feeling lonely and friendless at school began to increase sharply after 2012.

Once smartphones and social media became a regular part of adolescent life - including during breaks between lessons - it appears that young people often found it harder, not easier, to connect with the people physically around them.

The problem is not that technology is inherently evil, nor that every young person who owns a smartphone is destined to become anxious or depressed. Technology has brought enormous benefits. The question is whether we have introduced an extraordinarily powerful set of technologies into the lives of children and adolescents without fully appreciating what those technologies might do to attention, relationships, identity, esteem, sleep, social development and mental health, when the brain is still developing in fundamentally important ways.

Questions for you to ponder between now and the next ‘drop’ (Part 2: What Children Need To Do In Childhood); Who gets to shape a child's attention? Who gets to influence their sense of identity and belonging? And how do we make sure that, in an increasingly digital world, our children still have enough time to grow up in the real one?

We will see what Mark Zuckerberg has to say as the weeks roll on.