When Jonathan Haidt testified before the American Senate, he presented specific data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (‘CDC’) that showed how sharp and sudden the increase had been for hospital admissions for teen girls who had intentionally harmed themselves, mostly by cutting themselves. This was serious and sudden stuff in other words. The numbers were stunning, particularly for young girls and serious, though not as drastic for young boys.
He noted that “emergency room visits for self harm increased very rapidly among teen girls beginning in 2010.”
One of the most interesting things about all of this data was how fast it rose. As he said, “The crisis came on suddenly, in the early 2010s.” In other words, things were fine before 2010 and then incidents shot up! What happened after 2010 was not just a continuation of what had started before then. Something caused this rapid rise that could not be explained on the basis of prior conditions! As he said to the Senate,
The curves you can see in the Adolescent Mood Disorders Google Doc are not just the continuation of trends already in evidence for the Millennial generation (born 1982 through 2016). They are more like “hockey sticks,” with a long relatively flat period before the early 2010s, and then a sharp upturn or elbow. This is rare in mental health data. It suggests that something changed in the lives of American teens around 2010
The next thing Jonathan Haidt explained to the Senators was that these numbers were big. As he said,
“The increases in mental illness are very large. When you compare rates in 2009 –before most teens were daily users of social media––to 2019––the last full year before Covid made things even worse––the increases are generally between 50% and 150%, depending on the disorder, gender, and subgroup.”
After that he testified that “The crisis is gendered. He explained to the Senators what this meant:
The collapse of mental health has hit both sexes, and on many measures, boys and girls are up by roughly similar percentages. However there are two important caveats: A) the base rate for mood disorders is always higher for girls than boys, particularly after puberty, which means that a doubling of the rate produces far more additional sick girls than boys, as you can see in Figure 2 below, and B) there are some disorders and age groups for which girls are up far more, especially for self-harm, which is a much more common way of manifesting anxiety in girls than in boys.
In specific terms, “rates of major depression roughly doubled, for boys and for girls, from 2010 to 2020”. I must repeat this with emphasis. The rates for major depression doubled for boys and girls in 10 years! This is serious stuff! Serious and sudden.