The relationship between heavy social media use and depression and anxiety

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, has been voicing concern over the mental health crisis of teenagers, and in particular over the skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide, which are especially affecting girls.

Already back in 2015 Haidt, together with Greg Lukianoff, wrote a popular essay in The Atlantic called The Coddling of the American Mind, in which they observed that upon the arrival of the first true “social-media natives” something strange started happening in America’s colleges and universities. They also noted that “rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades”.

In 2018 the authors expanded the article into a book titled The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, in which they continued on the same topic arguing that overprotection is having a negative effect on university students and that the use of “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” does more harm than good.

Haidt has been talking about depression and anxiety among teenagers in several podcasts too, for example on Pivot with his NYU colleague Scott Galloway (Tech addiction and how it might be ruining Gen Z, Jan 11, 2019) and on Making Sense with Sam Harris (ep #204, May 18, 2020).

In the Making Sense episode Haidt brings up new findings, which consistently show that that there is a relationship between heavy social media use and anxiety and depression, especially among girls. He also mentions that experiments show that when people stay away from social media they tend to get happier, something many of us have experienced first-hand when taking breaks e.g. from Facebook and Instagram.

It would be interesting to learn more about the new research Haidt referred to. It makes perfect sense that heavy social media use (especially usage bordering to addictive behavior) is linked to negative emotions, but I would have assumed that boys and girls are almost equally affected. Perhaps that just shows how little I understand about teenagers’ psychology. In any case, it brings up the question what can be done about the problem – and what the role of parents, schools, and society in general (including Big Tech) should be in all of this?