Is Economic Deprivation the Real Cause of The Adolescent Mental Health Crisis?
Today we have a cross-post from Jean M. TwengeSubstack, Generation Tech. Jean was among the first psychologists to identify the move from flip phones to smartphones loaded with social media apps as a major cause of the adolescent mental health crisis as she was doing research for the 2017 book iGen. She received a great deal of pushback from other researchers at the time––and ever since––who claimed that she was mistaking correlation for causation. Skeptics of the smartphone theory generally offer their own alternative explanations, usually that something out in the world changed in the early 2010s (e.g., school shootings and lockdown drills), so, of course, the kids are depressed! Jean addressed 13 alternative explanations in an earlier cross-post at After Babel. She is a master of finding the right data to test these hypotheses, and none of them fit (except for the loss of play, which we all agree is a major contributor).
In today’s essay, Jean does it again. She addresses yet one more alternative theory, this one offered by Candice Odgers in a review of The Anxious Generation, published last week in Nature. Odgers said that I, too, had mistaken correlation for causation and that I had no evidence of causation. (That is not true, as I showed in this brief response and in several earlier posts at After Babel). Odgers then defended one of the alternative theories — that a substantial driver of the crisis could be the delayed effects of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. She acknowledges that Jean has shown that unemployment was going down all the while that depression was going up, yet she suggests that this might not have lifted the spirits of those at the bottom of the income distribution:
