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The Complicated Relationship Between Screen Time and Depression
Blaming smartphones and social media for mental health issues in teens distracts from deeper problems
Much has been written about Palo Alto’s teen suicides, which is four or five times the national average. My daughter was 13 in 2009, attending Terman Middle School in Palo Alto, when her friend Natalie (name changed) ended her life. “Nat was gone forever,” my daughter wrote in an essay she shared with me recently. “She and I had been talking all summer. I had taken her emotions in our correspondence lightly. Too lightly.”
Depression and anxiety among youth are rising. A nationwide study found that adolescents reporting symptoms of clinical depression increased by 37% between 2005 and 2014, and the suicide rate of youth aged 10–19 years rose by a devastating 56% between 2007 and 2016.
California parallels the nationwide trend. The number of youth hospitalizations for mental health reasons has been rising since 2007, according to the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. There were 34,176 youth patients hospitalized for mental health episodes in 2007, and 48,258 in 2016 — a 41% increase.
Some experts think that the rise in mental health problems in youth can be tied to an event in 2007: The introduction of the iPhone. Psychologist and author Jean M. Twenge wants us to believe that the “iGen”, the generation shaped by smartphones and social media use, born between 1995 and 2012 is “on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades.” Much of this deterioration, she writes, can be traced to their phones. Twenge drew evidence from a nationwide study examining the relationship between screen time and psychological health among 40,000 children and adolescents in 2016.
Twenge’s theories and analyses have been widely criticized, most insistently, by psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh on Medium, as being too alarmist, too biased, not contextual enough, and too correlational. “These studies leave open the possibilities that such associations are due to smartphones causing depression, depression symptoms causing greater use of smartphones, or a third variable, such as the number of extracurricular activities, causing both to rise and fall…
