Regular readers know I have not been kind to NY Times’ columnist Michelle Goldberg when I thought here columns were absurd or truly awful. On the other hand, I’ve tried to give her credit when she gets it right as she did recently in a column about campus cancel culture. Today she has another column in which she actually explains how she avoided a knee-jerk progressive reaction to recent news about teen depression.
If you’ve missed the backstory to this, it involves recent evidence that teens, especially girls are really struggling with mental health. Academic and author Jonathan Haidt is working on a book about this and last week the CDC published new data which found that 1 in 3 high school age girls have seriously. That’s a 60% jump from a decade ago.
As with everything else, this debate immediately became political with Haidt and some on the right blaming smart phones and social media and some on the left blaming right-wing politics and even “late stage” capitalism.
Enter Michelle Goldberg who was initially drawn to the story thinking it was about how the Trump era had made teen girls suicidal.
Last year, a study came out showing that left-leaning adolescents were experiencing a greater increase in depression than their more conservative peers. Indeed, while girls are more likely to be depressed than boys, the study, by a group of epidemiologists at Columbia, showed that liberal boys had higher rates of depression than conservative girls.
Because I wrote quite a bit about the dire psychological fallout of Donald Trump’s abusive presidency, I was immediately interested in the study, titled “The Politics of Depression.” It’s long been known that liberals tend to be more depressed than conservatives, which you can interpret as either a cause or an effect of their unhappiness with the status quo…
The study speculated that left-leaning girls might simply be reacting to the political environment.
The impulse to blame Trump for everything is strong but in this case it didn’t really make sense.
As I looked closer at the data, I saw that the inflection point for liberal adolescent depression wasn’t 2016, but around 2012. That was the year of the devastating Sandy Hook mass shooting, but it was not otherwise a time of liberal political despair. Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today…
Clearly, kids are in terrible pain. In trying to understand why, many conservatives have embraced ideas about the damaging effects of social media championed by Haidt and Twenge. The Republican senator Josh Hawley cited Twenge’s work in calling for a ban on social media use by kids under 16. “Depression and social media use go hand in hand,” he wrote in The Washington Post.
Here’s a bit more of what Hawley wrote last week:
Goldberg argues that the evidence for a connection between social media and teen mental health problems is pretty strong.
Technology, not politics, was what changed…around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word “selfie” entered the popular lexicon…
A 2022 study in The American Economic Review, for example, took advantage of the fact that Facebook rolled out on different college campuses at different times. “The introduction of Facebook at a college had a negative impact on student mental health,” it found, presenting evidence that Facebook fostered “unfavorable social comparisons.”
She concludes that progressives shouldn’t be quick to dismiss the idea that social media is a problem from teens “even if figures like Hawley believe it as well.” She’s on to something. It helps no one to go with a knee-jerk partisan reaction. Sometimes it pays to look at the actual evidence. So in this case, kudos to Goldberg for doing that.
While her column is focused on various research for and against, her commenters seem to agree with her conclusions based on their own personal experiences. As always I’m selecting from the comments with the most upvotes from other Times’ readers.
As a high school teacher, I can see that teenagers are consumed by social media. They have a near zero awareness of politics, since the algorithm on whatever they are using is generally focused on non-political content (sports, clothes, comedy, makeup, etc.) They are consumed instead by comparing themselves to influencers who have huge followings are appear to be perfect. Teens live in a social media bubble and are largely oblivious to the larger existential crises around them (political and economic issues).
Another one from a mental health professional in Connecticut:
As a parent of teens and a mental health professional, I agree that social media is having a profound effect on mental health. I ask about social media usage in all of my intake interviews, and most of my teenage and young adult clients (all genders) respond that they don’t believe social media is good for their mental health. What’s encouraging to me is that many of my Gen Z clients seem to be self-correcting and making efforts to limit or cut ties completely with social media. Those who have done so have reported experiencing an uncomfortable period of withdrawal followed by significant feelings of relief.
One more from a progressive reader in LA:
I’m progressive, and I think Sen. Hawley’s right on this one. Why doesn’t the government survey these adolescents and ask them what’s making them depressed? I think the answer is clear. I wasn’t popular in middle or high school. If I had Instagram or another social media platform reminding me daily, I’d have been suicidal. I was a thin, beautiful, sensitive, and studious girl, but I had low self esteem and was occasionally bullied. If I faced online bullying, I’d have been suicidal. Why are we as liberals, so reluctant to blame the social media platforms? Like the poor kid who has to wear a school uniform in class, not having to worry about affording the right clothes, is a huge relief. Not having to compete in a space where you’d surely come up short would be a huge relief for teens and tweens.
We’re probably going to see a lot more arguments about this before anything is done about it. Hopefully, in the meantime, wise parents are paying attention to what their kids are experiencing online.
