The smart phone is not to blame for the 'epidemic' of anxiety in young people

What the psychologist Jonathan Haidt gets right, and wrong

In 2010, the Monitoring the Future Project at the University of Michigan Survey Research Center identified a significant increase in high school students who ‘strongly agreed’ with the statement: ‘Life often feels meaningless.’ Multiple studies also show that over the past 15-20 years, depression rates have surged among girls and young women. The rise is more gradual among boys, but it is still evident. The situation in the UK mirrors this trend. Here, too, young people report suffering from poor mental health in ever greater numbers.  

There are, of course, caveats. The last few decades have seen the destigmatising of mental health issues, with high-profile figures like Prince Harry opening up about his psychological difficulties on global TV shows, rather than suffering in silence like previous generations. Definitions have also become expansive. In times past, the seriously afflicted would have received a diagnosis from a medical professional for a specific malady, but today ‘mental health’ encompasses a spectrum that extends from conditions like acute depression to self-diagnosed feelings of melancholy.

Indeed, the Oxford psychologist Lucy Foulkes raises a thought-provoking concern: well-meaning efforts to discuss mental health with young people might be inadvertently steering them towards negative outcomes. By constantly engaging in conversations about mental health, we risk framing everyday challenges and difficulties as symptoms of poor mental well-being. Rather than encouraging them to navigate the normal ups and downs of life as part of the human experience, we teach them to view these struggles as indicators of issues requiring immediate diagnosis and intervention. There is also a degree to which poor mental health has become an identity, making it difficult for those who suffer to move on from it.

But even taking the medical grade inflation into account there is little doubt that the generational anxiety is real. It is not possible merely to tell young people to shrug it off, pull yourself together, snowflake; get grip. The kids are not all right.  

Enter Jonathan Haidt, the American social psychologist, whose recent works: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, examined the dynamics of political and cultural polarisation. In his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewriting of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness he identifies the influences at play in the problems of the iPhone generation. It is extensively researched, if reliant on small empirical studies that prove his point, and provides a comprehensive account of current social and psychological and evolutionary theories, the science of the brain, and the many, many academic papers on the impact of new technology. 

But his intellectual lodestar is the French sociologist Emile Durkheim and his concept of ‘anomie,’ or normlessness, which arises from an absence of stable and widely-shared norms and values in society. While Durkheim, writing in the nineteenth century, attributed anomie to disruptions in the social order, modernity, and the weakening of traditional religion, Haidt narrows in on the use of the ‘smartphone and the continuous access to social media’ and the ‘decline of play-based childhood,’ which, he says, is ‘transforming childhood.’

Haidt’s brilliant insight is that kids are over protected off-line but under protected online. The young generation, he argues, spends too much time on their screens, and concurrently, a culture of ‘safetyism’ means they spend much less time than they used to running about outdoors without adult oversight.

However, so determined is he to isolate the two causes, focusing on the use of smartphones, which, he argues, is ‘the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness,’ that he misses the broader picture.

One problem with Haidt’s account is that correlation is not causation. His mental health Year Zero, 2007, when the first iPhone arrived, is also one year before the global financial crash. The subsequent great recession, and widespread economic uncertainty, happened around the same time. This cohort are also the Greta Thunberg generation, who have been bombarded with the threat of environmental catastrophe. They are constantly warned by adults that the end of the world is nigh, indeed, they have to ‘save it’ from ‘ the era of boiling’ . It’s hardly surprising that they are anxious. As the signs held up at a climate school strike put it, ‘We won’t die from old age, we will die from climate change’ and ‘Why should I study for a future I won’t have?’

Causation is hard to prove when it comes to factoring out some influences and isolating others. Depression and anxiety are rarely explained by singular or dual forces. Furthermore, while Haidt's selected studies may suggest a one-way, one-outcome link between smartphones and anxiety, it's crucial to note that numerous credible studies do not support this conclusion.

The psychologist Pete Etchells, author of Unlocked: the Real Science of Screen Time (and How to Spend it Better), disputes the direct relationship and concludes that the impact of technology depends more on who is doing what, and why. Or, as another paper puts it: it’s not what you do it’s the way that you do it. As the academic and founder of founder of Data & Society, Dana Boyd summarises, in It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens : ‘The internet mirrors and magnifies the good, bad, and ugly.’

Throughout history, technological advancements have often sparked social anxieties. When television emerged, concerns swirled that it would dismantle the fabric of the family unit. In the 1980s, video arcades and violent video games came under fire, accused of nurturing a generation of psychopathic youth. The trial of Jamie Bulger's killers in 1993 sparked speculation that the "video nasty" Child's Play 3 might have played a role in their actions. Similarly, the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 was attributed by some psychologists to video games.

This is not to say that technology has no impact, but rather that its influence is contingent on the social context into which it is introduced. Much of the research that disputes the direct line between smart phone use and anxiety, does not suggest that the use of social media has no impact, more that it’s important to look at how it is used.

For instance, as Jean Twenge has shown, girls tend to use social media and new technology differently to boys. They are more likely to post pictures of themselves whereas boys tend to play games with their friends. Even if it’s shooting monsters or villains, these games are more sociable than posing for likes which can be a vicious feedback loop of insecurity. Twenge also documents the decline in offline socialising: like going to the mall to films with friends, which has been replaced by virtual socialisation. The point here is what is happening offline is as important as what is happening online and most studies concentrate on the latter.

It is also the case that whilst the new generation faces particular challenges at a particular time in their life, so too has every generation before them. Those who came of age during the French Revolution, the First or Second World War, or experienced the world teetering on the brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or lived through the energy crisis in the 1970s, did not grow up amidst safety and security. This does beg the question, why this problem with this generation now?

Amidst the psychological studies lies a gaping oversight. Across generations, a prevailing sense of pessimism towards the future permeates society. In research conducted by the scholar Werner Mittelstaedt, participants were asked the question: ‘Is the world continually getting better?’ Shockingly, 70 percent responded with a resounding ‘no,’ while 20 percent hesitated before conceding a ‘yes,’ and 10 percent offered no response at all. The once widely held belief that things would continue to improve has crumbled.

Historian Russell Jacoby delves into this societal shift in his perceptive The End of Utopia, suggesting that without a unifying vision of a better tomorrow, societal change becomes elusive. In the absence of a belief in the possibility of a different world, the idea of its demise becomes disturbingly easy to envision.

Today, the younger generation is consistently confronted with the disheartening notion that their future hangs in the balance. On top of which they are bombarded with narratives depicting the past as an unsettling realm rife with horrors and pervasive prejudice. Their future has been cancelled whilst the past has been cordoned off as providing no lessons. To explain away you people’s concerns as mere byproducts of excessive screen time is shortsighted technological determinism that fails to take into account a bigger picture. There's a deeper malaise at play here, one rooted in a pervasive disillusionment with the trajectory of society.

Haidt’s recommendations for addressing the anxiety epidemic in the young have some merit but they veer into the realm of impracticality or miss the core issue entirely. He is right, of course, to advocate unsupervised play and childhood independence; but banning social media for the under-sixteens and depriving young people of their digital devices is not going to happen. Even if it were possible to turn the technological clock back, turning off the screens won’t solve one underlying problem he correctly identifies: a crisis of meaning in young people’s lives.

Haidt’s remedy for anomie involves a return to individualised spirituality based on a pick-and-mix assortment of ancient teachings, religions, and well-being fads. He suggests following the world’s ‘major religions’ in how they ‘advise us to turn down the judgment and turn up the forgiveness’. He commends Buddhism, mindfulness, and finding ‘awe’ in nature.  This at best lacks conviction but is mostly insufficient.

Haidt has done sterling work in identifying and analysing the nature of the contemporary scourge of anxiety in the young. But the questions of meaning and how to foster a more optimistic society —one that the younger generation wish to grow up into —require a more profound response than pointing the finger at technology. We need to address more fundamental questions. He needs to switch off his obsession with the smartphone and think bigger.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewriting of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness is published by Allen Lane.