D9. More Evidence Against the Smartphone Theory of Declining Teen Mental Health

A new global study reveals no consistent relation between Internet access and teen mental health.

Dear friends,

In previous letters in this D (Digression) series I reviewed evidence against the popular belief that the rise in suicides and other indices of declining mental health among US teens, since about 2008, is largely the result if increased use of digital technology, particularly smartphones and social media, over this period. Now I add some new evidence.

Review of Previous D Letters

In letter D6 I showed that the great bulk of studies correlating use of such technology to measures of mental health—especially the larger and better controlled studies— have failed to show correlations large enough to be meaningful, neither for boys nor for girls. I also showed there that longitudinal studies and experiments have failed to demonstrate a causal relationship between smartphone or social media use and detriments in mental health. In Letter D7 I showed that experience sampling studies fail to show either the short-term or long-term negative effects of social media use on teens’ moods claimed by those who argue that social media should be banned for teens.

In Letter D8 I presented evidence, from Eurostat data, that the countries of the European Union taken as a whole, unlike the United States, did not show an increased rate of teen suicides over the years that smartphone and social media use increased. I also referred there to a study involving 36 mostly European countries showing no overall change in life satisfaction among teens over the years from 2002 to 2018. In Letters D5 and D8 I reviewed evidence that teens themselves, in the United States, attribute their anxiety largely to stress associated with high-pressure schooling and fears about their future and explained why such pressures and fears might be lower in most of Europe.

New Report on Global Studies of Internet Use and Mental Health

Now, a newly published article by Matti Vuorre and Andrew Psrzybylski provides further evidence against the hypothesis that introduction of Internet technology results in declining mental health in teens. These authors conducted two studies involving large international data sets.

The first study used data from the Gallup World Poll (GWP) that assessed subjective wellbeing for citizens of 168 countries, aged 15 or older, and data from the International Telecommunications Network on Internet growth within each country, over the years from 2005 to 2022. The results, overall, revealed no general decline in life satisfaction and no correlation, over time or within any given year, between the measure of life satisfaction and Internet use. This lack of relationship held for both males and females and for teens of both sexes as well as adults.

The second study used prevalence rates of anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, and self-harm for each country, as estimated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study, for 204 countries from 2000 to 2019. Again, they found no consistent change in these measures over time and no meaningful relationship between these measures and growth of Internet use within or across countries. This finding, likewise, held up for both males and females and for teens of both sexes as well as adults.

Reflection

It is possible to find some nations outside the US in which mental health problems among young people rose over the same years that smartphone and social media use increased (see examples here and here), but the research to date indicates that this is not true for most nations. Within any given nation many other societal changes occurred over the same period that use of digital technology increased, and, as I explained for the US in Letter D5, these other changes could well be the major source of change in young people’s mental health. The fact that teen mental health has not declined with increased smartphone usage in most countries that have been studied is evidence against the general theory that smartphones are an inevitable or general cause of teen mental health decline.

A recent article in the After Babel substack criticized the Vuorre and Pryzbylski research on the grounds that they used GBD data, which derive from estimates rather than direct measures and may not be accurate. However, that article failed to mention that Vuorre and Przbylski report is on two studies, only one of which used GBD data, and findings from the two studies were essentially the same. That article also ignores the Eurostat data showing no increase in teen suicides in the EU during the years when smartphone and social media rates were increasing, which I presented in Letter D8. Eurostat reports that those data “are derived from the medical certificate of death, which is obligatory in the Member States.”

By picking and choosing, by deciding on arbitrary grounds what counts as meaningful data and what doesn’t, it is possible to build an argument that social media reduces the mental health of teens. But when you look at all the evidence, and as ever more evidence accumulates, that argument becomes increasingly weak.

Further Thought

Please note that I am not claiming, in any of these D letters, that smartphones and social media are totally benign for teens or anyone else. Indeed, in Letter D7 I presented evidence that these can have both positive and negative effects, and I suggested some ways to maximize the positive while minimizing the negative. My main reason for detouring from my primary substack theme in these D letters is to show that scientific evidence does not support the popular belief that smartphones and social media are a major cause of the rise in anxiety, depression, and suicide among young people. I fear that, to a considerable degree, we as a society are scapegoating social media because we lack the courage to confront the real causes and make the social changes we should be making.

As always, I welcome your thoughts and questions in the comments section below. They will add to the value of this letter. If you aren’t already subscribed to this substack, please subscribe now. If you can afford it, please consider making your subscription a paid one (at $50 for a year). All funds I receive through paid subscriptions are used to support nonprofit organizations I’m involved with that are involved in bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives. So far, I’ve used these funds to provide support for Let Grow, Defending the Early Years, the National Institute for Play, the Alliance for Self-Directed Education, the Alternative Education Resources Organization, and the Evolution Institute.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter