Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence. post 
, hn
* CDC’s bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey pdf
⇒ Mental Health and Suicidality
> which showed that most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011). Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller.
* Feb. 16 Substack post
> the big surprise in the CDC data is that COVID didn’t have much effect on the overall trends, which just kept marching on as they have since around 2012. Teens were already socially distanced by 2019, which might explain why COVID restrictions added little to their rates of mental illness, on average. (Of course, many individuals suffered greatly).
Karrot_Kream via hn :
I'm not convinced how any of this shows Causation. Probably the strongest point in this substack pointing to causation is the use of longitudinal studies. Haidt is using a meta-analysis of long-term specific (as opposed to short term studies which display no effect, there's merit here as a longer longitudinal study is probably better) longitudinal studies to make this point, so essentially saying that a meta-analysis of long-term longitudinal studies is required to show that causation can be established; this is all indirect. I still think that to prove this point we need to make an experiment that actually attempts to show causation.
I'm also not sure if it's worth discussing this on HN because this topic tends to attract commenters of one opinion, but I also think it's worth making opposition known. I fully expect this opinion to be unpopular.
EDIT: Indeed, doing a shallow dive into the referenced longitudinal study links shows that none of them establish any form of Control. One of the studies linked has an intervention model but doesn't split the initial cohort in order to establish the causal effect.
> Social media is not the only cause; Jonathan Haidt's larger story is about the rewiring of Childhood that began in the 1990s and accelerated in the early 2010s.
Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence. post
, hn 
⇒ Social Media and Suicide ⇒ Face and Honor
* CDC’s bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey pdf
⇒ Mental Health and Suicidality
> which showed that most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011). Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller.
* Feb. 16 Substack post
> the big surprise in the CDC data is that COVID didn’t have much effect on the overall trends, which just kept marching on as they have since around 2012. Teens were already socially distanced by 2019, which might explain why COVID restrictions added little to their rates of mental illness, on average. (Of course, many individuals suffered greatly).
Karrot_Kream via hn
:
I'm not convinced how any of this shows Causation. Probably the strongest point in this substack pointing to causation is the use of longitudinal studies. Haidt is using a meta-analysis of long-term specific (as opposed to short term studies which display no effect, there's merit here as a longer longitudinal study is probably better) longitudinal studies to make this point, so essentially saying that a meta-analysis of long-term longitudinal studies is required to show that causation can be established; this is all indirect. I still think that to prove this point we need to make an experiment that actually attempts to show causation.
I'm also not sure if it's worth discussing this on HN because this topic tends to attract commenters of one opinion, but I also think it's worth making opposition known. I fully expect this opinion to be unpopular.
EDIT: Indeed, doing a shallow dive into the referenced longitudinal study links shows that none of them establish any form of Control. One of the studies linked has an intervention model but doesn't split the initial cohort in order to establish the causal effect.
* essay in The Atlantic post
by Derek Thompson
⇒ Rewiring of Childhood
> Social media is not the only cause; Jonathan Haidt's larger story is about the rewiring of Childhood that began in the 1990s and accelerated in the early 2010s.