The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012

This is not just “Kids these days”

From the first time I wrote about Gen Z in 2015 (with Greg Lukianoff, in our Coddling essay) through my most recent discussion in a December interview with Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal, the main criticism I have heard is that I’m just another old man (I’m 59) shaking his fist and complaining about “kids these days,” when in fact “the kids are alright.” If that’s true, then the first half of the Babel project—on what social media did to childhood and to teen mental health—is fatally flawed. Is the criticism valid? Two responses to that WSJ essay do us the favor of collecting…

related reading

• Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s The Evidence.jonathanhaidt.substack.com
• Yes, Social Media Really Is a Cause of the Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illnessafterbabel.com
• The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood - The Atlantictheatlantic.com
• Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s The Evidence.afterbabel.com
• The Zoomer Question - American Affairs Journalamericanaffairsjournal.org
• Honestly, it's probably the phonesnoahpinion.substack.com
• The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood - The Atlanticweb.archive.org
• We're Not The Anxious Generationjoanganzcooneycenter.org
• The Anxious Generation — from a book to a movementanxiousgeneration.com
• Book Review: The Anxious Generationsubstack.com
• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantictheatlantic.com
• Why American Teens Are So Sad - The Atlantictheatlantic.com