Thanks to best-selling authors such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the rapidly increasing number of mental health problems among young people in many Western countries. Ta. Their warnings about the destructive effects of social media are having an impact, reflected in waves in schools across Europe in particular Ban on smartphones.
While it is good to draw attention to rising rates of depression and anxiety, there is a danger of becoming fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the problem to technical variables such as “screen time.” In my book Why we worry: A sociological explanationWe aim to expand the discussion.
A distinctive feature of Mr. Twenge and Mr. Haidt’s discussion is that they use trend lines for different types of mental distress, which have increased since 2012, but Mr. Haidt calls this a trend line for different types of mental distress, which has been increasing since 2012, when smartphones became widespread. He calls it the beginning of “the great rewiring.” This method is criticized Because it overemphasizes correlations that may say little about causation. Another problem is the limited time period of these analyses.
Most of the graphs in Haidt’s book, An Anxious Generation Starts around 2002 and ends around 2018. Drawing definitive conclusions from just 16 years of data presents several challenges.
One such challenge is that early gains are obscured. For example, when Haidt shows that psychological distress has increased in the Nordic countries since 2010, he does not know what happened before 2002. There is a danger of giving the impression that nothing has changed since before smartphones became popular.
However, in Sweden, public health agency We collected data about Youth mental health since 1986. Looking at the stocks in self-reported low moods, it’s clear that there has been a longer-term upward trend since the 1980s.
Similarly, sleep problems spiked among girls in the 2010s, but sleep problems were on the rise long before smartphones were introduced.
We also see the rise in mental health problems starting earlier in the following countries: Norway and England. According to a magazine review psychiatrythe reported prevalence of long-term mental health conditions among 4- to 24-year-olds increased sixfold between 1995 and 2014 in England, and by two times in Scotland between 2003 and 2014. It has more than doubled.
Mental health problems have also been shown to be on the rise over time in the United States. Twenge, one of the most prominent critics of smartphone use among young people, said: Written in 2000 “The average American child in the 1980s was more anxious than a child psychiatric patient in the 1950s.”
2011she points out that “nearly all available evidence suggests that anxiety, depression, and mental health problems rose sharply among young people in the West from the early 20th century to the early 1990s.” I did.
As you investigate, you will find a mystery that deepens even further. World Mental Health Survey – A series of community psychiatric surveys coordinated by the World Health Organization and conducted in 30 countries.
17 out of 18 psychological problemsthere is a consistent pattern of lower prevalence in low-income and lower-middle-income countries than in high-income countries. The national survey was conducted from 2001 to 2011, so this apparent difference clearly contrasts with patterns in physical health, but it cannot be explained by access to smartphones alone.
So what, beyond the adoption of smartphones and social media, can explain this geographic and historical variation?
Many scholars, including myself, point to factors such as increased intolerance. uncertainty in modern timesattachment to both the individual and the group. in avoiding risksa growing sense of meaninglessness At work and expand your life and Growing national inequality accompanied by Growing status anxiety. However, it is important to emphasize that social science has so far been unable to provide definitive answers.
Some might argue that all social issues affect mental health, even those that social science does not yet fully understand. It is hard to believe that the political and social challenges we face do not affect our well-being. Reducing the problem to individual variables when introducing new policies (such as banning smartphones) appears to be the solution follows technocratic logic that can turn health into a problem for experts. Masu.
The risk with this approach is that society as a whole is excluded from the analysis. Another risk is that politics will lose its meaning. if political questions Structural discrimination, economic insecurity, exposure to violence, and opioid use are not seen as shaping our well-being, so what motivates us to take action on these issues? ?
