Young people were becoming more anxious long before social media – here’s the evidence

Thanks to bestselling authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the public has become increasingly aware of the rapid rise in mental health issues among younger people in many western countries. Their warnings about the destructive impact of social media have had an effect, reflected not least in a wave of schools across Europe banning smartphones.

While it’s good to draw attention to the rising rates of depression and anxiety, there’s a risk of becoming fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables like “screen time”. In my book, Why We Worry: A Sociological Explanation, I aim to broaden the discussion.

A hallmark of Twenge and Haidt’s arguments is their use of trend lines for various types of psychological distress, showing increases after 2012, which Haidt calls the start of the “great rewiring” when smartphones became widespread. This method has been criticised for overemphasising correlations that may say little about causality. Another problem is the limited timeframe of these analyses.

Most of the graphs in Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation begin around 2002 and end around 2018. Drawing definitive conclusions from just 16 years of data presents several challenges.

One such challenge is that earlier increases are obscured. For instance, when Haidt shows a rise in psychological distress in Nordic countries starting in 2010, we don’t see what happened before 2002. It risks giving the impression that nothing changed before the spread of smartphones.

However, in Sweden, the Public Health Agency has collected data on mental wellbeing among young people since 1986. Looking at self-reported issues with low mood, it’s clear there has been a longer upward trend since the 1980s.

Similarly, although the 2010s brought a spike among girls, sleep problems have increased long before the introduction of smartphones.

We also see an earlier onset of rising mental health issues in countries like Norway and the UK. According to a review in the journal Psychological Medicine, the reported prevalence of long-standing mental health conditions among four- to 24-year-olds increased sixfold in England between 1995 and 2014 and more than doubled in Scotland between 2003 and 2014.

The US also shows a longer-term increase in mental health issues. Twenge, one of the most prominent critics of youth smartphone use, wrote in 2000 that the “average American child in the 1980s reported more anxiety than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s”.

In 2011, she noted that “almost all of the available evidence suggests a sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and mental health issues among Western youth between the early 20th century and the early 1990s”.

This brings us to a mystery that deepens when we examine the World Mental Health surveys – a series of community psychiatric surveys coordinated by the World Health Organization and conducted in 30 countries.

In 17 of 18 mental problems, there is a consistent pattern of prevalence being lower in the low- and lower-middle-income countries than in high-income countries. This stark difference, which contrasts sharply with patterns in physical health, cannot be explained by smartphone access, as the national surveys were conducted between 2001 and 2011.

So, what can explain this geographical and historical variation beyond the introduction of smartphones and social media?

Numerous academics, including me, have pointed to factors such as an increasing intolerance for uncertainty in modernity, a fixation – both individual and collective – on avoiding risk, intensifying feelings of meaninglessness in work and life more broadly and rising national inequality accompanied by growing status anxiety. However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.

One could contend that all social problems, even those that social science has yet to fully understand, affect mental health. It seems unlikely that the political and social challenges we face wouldn’t influence our wellbeing. Reducing the issue to isolated variables, where the solution might appear to be to introduce a new policy (like banning smartphones) follows a technocratic logic that could turn good health into a matter for experts.

The risk with this approach is that society as a whole is excluded from the analysis. Another risk is that politics is drained of meaning. If political questions such as structural discrimination, economic precarity, exposure to violence and opioid use are not regarded as shaping our wellbeing, what motivation remains for taking action on these matters?