“When school closures and social distancing were implemented in 2020, teenagers had already lost most of their social life to their phones,” according to Jonathan Haidt.
Atlantico: In France, a 53-year-old teacher was fatally stabbed during a lesson by one of her 16-year-old students in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. We seem, in recent years, to witness an upsurge in acts of violence perpetrated by young adolescents. Do the numbers back it up?
Pierre-Marie Seve: The general impression given by these news items is indeed clearly confirmed by the available statistics: the number of minors implicated by the police has increased from 132,000 in 2000 to 217,800 minors in 2017. And the seriousness of these charges cause has even increased even faster: attempted homicides have increased by 144% since 1996, assaults by 124% and sexual assaults by 315%!
Yes, adolescent violence is growing almost exponentially and it’s a real problem – one more – for the public authorities to deal with.
While the teenager would have psychiatric problems, can we also think that there is a lack of support for these young people from a psychiatric point of view? How much of a mental health issue is there?
Pierre-Marie Seve: Whether it concerns minors or adults, the management of mental problems is in deep decline in France. The number of beds in psychiatric hospitals, for example, has increased in 15 years from 96 beds per 100,000 inhabitants in 2003 to 83 beds per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017. And this figure continues to fall.
Mental health problems have little reason to be more serious than 20-30 years ago, even if we know that migratory movements change the distribution of mental illnesses within a population, since each population has its own prevalence of mental illnesses.
What is certain, however, is that the general management of mental illness is on the decline, and this is very worrying.
You can find Jonathan Haidt’s article ici.
Jonathan Haidt : Let us mention the publication by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of certain dhe results of its Youth Risk Behavior Study (YRBS), one of the long-running, nationally representative studies that Jean Twenge and I rely on in our research on Generation Z. The CDC released this 89-page summary of trends from 2011 to 2021 data collection, which took place in the fall of 2021 and has just been published. The survey is administered every two years, so the changes seen between 2019 and 2021 are perhaps the clearest evidence we have on how covid has affected American teens. I will leave out the questions on drug and alcohol use (mostly down, some by a lot, see p.28) and violence (mostly unchanged, see p.431). I will focus only on the 6 mental illness items that were published in this report, five of which have increased since 2019, as you can see in Figure 1:
Figure from CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey, 2011-2021. The percentage of students with symptoms of mental illness. The trends have steadily worsened over time.
I’m glad to see that the report has been widely covered by the US media, but I want to point out a flaw that I see in much of the report: Many articles attribute much of the problems faced by adolescents to covid and to its restrictions. It’s logic. We should certainly expect that school closures and constant messages of fear (including the loathsome parting phrase “be safe”) will have an impact on adolescent mental health.
But look closely at Figure 1 and you’ll see there’s not much evidence of a covid effect. What I see in Figure 1 is just a continuation of the teen mental health epidemic that began around 2012, as I documented in my previous post.
Here’s the CDC’s graph of responses to the first point, regarding persistent sadness:
The percentage of female and male students who experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased between 2011 and 2021.
If we start with the girls, we see a steady increase since 2011, with an acceleration in the 2019 administration, and then, if you squint, you can see a slight acceleration beyond that in the 2021 administration. We can call this acceleration added the covid effect. For the boys, we don’t see any covid effect at all. The big jump took place between 2017 and 2019, and the increase slows down between 2019 and 2021.
We see the same pattern in the CDC graph for responses to the question regarding serious consideration of suicide: no sign of a covid effect for boys, and a small one for girls:
Why hasn’t covid caused a greater increase in mental illness among teenagers?
Jonathan Haidt : When school closures and social distancing were implemented in 2020, teenagers had already lost most of their social lives to their phones. You can see the dramatic loss of time with friends in this graph of time use data by age group:
The average daily time spent with friends has dropped considerably for 15-24 year olds. From 155 minutes per day in 2003 to around 40 minutes per day in 2021.
Here you can see a clear covid effect from 2019 to 2020, for all age groups 25+. You can see how the lines curve downwards between 2019 and 2020. But look closely at the line for the youngest group, the 15-24 year olds, in blue. This age group used to spend 2 hours a day hanging out with their friends, as they are teenagers and young adults. Most are students, few are married. These two hours a day were therefore the norm until teenagers traded their flip phones for smartphones in the early 2010s. They then moved their social lives to a few major social media platforms, including Instagram, Snapchat and, later, Tiktok. They spent a lot more time online, even when they were in the same room as their friends, which meant they had a lot less time for each other (in face-to-face interaction or in physical play).
I think this is why the effect of covid restrictions on teenage mental health was not very large: The in-person social lives of Gen Z were decimated by technology in the 2010s. were already socially distanced when Covid arrived.
Why are Covid restrictions hurting girls more than boys?
Jonathan Haidt : Because Covid restrictions have sent girls ever further into the arms of social media, which is the biggest cause of the teenage mental health epidemic that began around 2012. Screen time has increased for both genders during the Covid pandemic. But boys don’t use social media as much; they spend much more time than girls playing video games and watching videos on Youtube. Boys don’t do well either, as Richard Reeves has shown, and as I’ll explain in a later post, but their problems are different from those of girls. Boys fail to grow into socially competent and ambitious men, although they also suffer from increased anxiety, depression and suicide, as I showed in my previous article, and as you You can see it in the Adolescent Mood Disorders Collaborative Review. So in the YRBS dataset, which only has items related to depression and suicidal ideation, we see larger increases among girls.
In my next article, I’ll show the evidence that social media is a major cause, and not just a correlate, of the epidemic of teenage mental illness that began around 2012. There are now many different types of studies, including two categories of experiments, which demonstrate causality. (There are real experiments using random assignment, and natural experiments that leverage the staggered deployment of Facebook or high-speed internet).
I think it’s vital that people – especially journalists – stop saying that the evidence is “just correlational”, or that the correlations are too weak to matter. These were reasonable things to write regarding in 2019, but not in 2023. We now have dozens of experiments, as well as very consistent and incriminating patterns in the hundreds of correlational studies.
If the tragedy that occurred in Saint-Jean-de-Luz might be used for something, what immediate measures should be taken to stop the downward spiral?
Pierre-Marie Seve: Unfortunately, this is a race for time: the problem has been getting worse for decades and it will take several years to save the situation.
However, it seems to me that a global strategy must be put in place to empower adolescents, their parents and above all to restore authority and certain immediate measures might have their effect.
To restore authority, it is necessary to punish more than today. Our Justice has a tendency never to want to punish, the long-term consequence is very bad. To better punish, it is possible, for example, to reduce the age of criminal majority to 16 years. This is already the case in Denmark or in the Benelux.
To punish, it is also necessary to lock up: for this, the construction of more closed educational centers is essential. Unfortunately, Emmanuel Macron had promised to increase their number from 50 to 100 in 2022, but today there are only 70. We will clearly have to speed up.
Among other measures, it would also be possible to create a specific offense to hold parents accountable. When their child has committed a crime or misdemeanor and the judge feels that these parents were too negligent, they might be sentenced.
