Thanks to bestselling authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the public has become increasingly aware of the rapid rise in mental health issues among younger people […] Their warnings about the destructive impact of social media have had an effect, reflected not least in a wave of schools across Europe banning smartphones.

While it’s good to draw attention to the rising rates of depression and anxiety, there’s a risk of becoming fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables like “screen time”.

[…]

A hallmark of Twenge and Haidt’s arguments is their use of trend lines for various types of psychological distress, showing increases after 2012, which Haidt calls the start of the “great rewiring” when smartphones became widespread. This method has been criticised for overemphasising correlations that may say little about causality.

[…]

Numerous academics […] have pointed to factors such as an increasing intolerance for uncertainty in modernity, a fixation – both individual and collective – on avoiding risk, intensifying feelings of meaninglessness in work and life more broadly and rising national inequality accompanied by growing status anxiety. However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.

[…]

It seems unlikely that the political and social challenges we face wouldn’t influence our wellbeing. Reducing the issue to isolated variables [such as the use of smartphones], where the solution might appear to be to introduce a new policy (like banning smartphones) follows a technocratic logic that could turn good health into a matter for experts.

The risk with this approach is that society as a whole is excluded from the analysis. Another risk is that politics is drained of meaning. If political questions such as structural discrimination, economic precarity, exposure to violence and opioid use are not regarded as shaping our wellbeing, what motivation remains for taking action on these matters?

  • Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org
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    5 hours ago

    I don’t really have much to go off of other than my own experiences, but I don’t think social media caused me more anxiety than normal except for one exception. During the beginning and early years of the pandemic, reddit usage did sometimes cause me more anxiety. Especially when people were hateful/disregarded other people.

    Otherwise, the main things that cause me anxiety are a lack of community + a lack of third spaces. Feeling like I have no purpose other than being a cog in a machine/wealth disparity/alienation from my labour. Governments that don’t care for the people they’re supposed to serve. A general feeling of not being able to get ahead in life.

    That’s been the major cause of anxiety for me for the past 12 years

    I think it really depends on how people are using the internet/ social media. I’m sure we all use it differently, and it might cause more or less anxiety.