This is one of the least surprising yet still somehow shocking statistics you'll see today:
Correlation does not equal causation.
BUT, if you don't think handing young people without fully developed minds literal porn machines and constant unrestricted screen time in order to interact with friends, post on social media, and read all sorts of nonsense on Tumblr and Reddit contributed to this, I've got a bridge to sell you.
From the article:
What effect did the pandemic have on teen mental health? Based on a representative survey from spring 2021, the CDC found that a stunning 44% of American teens said they felt sad or hopeless during the last year.
What might be more surprising is this: 37% of teens reported feeling sad or hopeless in spring 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. That's up from 26% in 2009. Suicidal thoughts also increased between 2009 and 2019 (see Figure 1). Thus, the pandemic led to more mental health issues among teens, but this was not a sudden sharp uptick or a reversal of previous positive trends — teens started to report more sadness starting 10 years ago.
Then we come to the above chart:
This survey is not alone in showing the pattern. Major depression (clinical-level depression that requires treatment) doubled between 2011 and 2019 among American teens. It then continued increasing into 2020 for girls, though it stayed the same for boys from before to during the pandemic (see Figure 2).
This trend corresponds with major increases in suicide and self-harm.
The author of the article comes to this conclusion:
These trends show that something began to go wrong in the lives of teens about 10 years ago. Although the pandemic led to much-needed attention to the issue of teen mental health, the increases in mental health issues among teens predate the pandemic by years — and in fact, some mental health indicators didn't change at all between 2019 and 2020. That means we need to look elsewhere for the original cause.
