“The Anxious Generation” Author: Social Media Is Spreading Mental Illness | Amanpour and Company

well smartphones and social media have altered children's development and our next guest is issuing a call to action in his new book social psychologist Jonathan hey investigates the sudden collapse of mental health among adolescents he joins harri Nason to discuss how parents can manage the negative impacts Jonathan hey thanks so much for joining us your latest book is called the anxious generation how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness and you and I have talked before and you know you have been very careful about not seeming alarmist uh and this book what's fascinating to me about it uh is that you supplement so much of your ideas with empirical data and research that is proving this point what is the epidemic of mental illness and where do we find the data for that when you and I first spoke about this it might have been back in 19 I was not as alarmist because we weren't sure it was clear that something was going wrong with Teen Mental Health we had graphs showing that around 2013 rates of anxiety depression and self harm began Rising rapidly uh but there was an academic debate and there still is there's an academic debate about whether it's caused by social media it's correlated with it girls who use it heavily are three times as likely to be depressed but you know scientists are going to debate is it causal or is it just a correlation since then I have learned a lot I've gathered all the studies I can find including experiments there now a lot of experiments that show that that uh when you randomly assign people to different conditions it causes them to get more depressed or less depressed so we have experimental research but the really shocking thing to me the thing that really made me into I'd like to say an alarm ringer not an alarmist is the discovery that the exact same thing happened to us a in America as happened in Canada Britain Australia New Zealand and Scandinavia at the same time in the the same way hitting girls hardest and young girls even harder so once it became clear this is an international epidemic of Teen Mental Illness it began in the early 2010s um it's hitting girls hardest although the boy story is really interesting and is also very bad it's just a little different uh so that's why I've been in this book uh if you want to say I'm I'm sort of leaving my old self behind and saying we need to act like now like not in 2025 like we need to really make changes this year because otherwise another year of kids is going to be consigned to this phone-based childhood which interferes with development so your argument is not that it's the technology that's bad or that it's the internet that's bad I mean you actually try to draw kind of a timeline from well getting one of these supercomputers in your pocket to the front-facing selfie camera to broadband and then social media I mean what have each of these kind of technological evolutions done to how our brains evolve so the technology that technology is great the internet is great but things really change in the early 2010s and so just to walk you through it uh in 2010 I really go into this in the detail in the book in 2011 only about 20% of American teens had a smartphone kids were still using flip phones they did not have uh uh high-s speeed high-s speeed internet most of them they did not have unlimited data plans you use your flip phone to text or call your friends to get together that that's it kids were still seeing other kids in 2010 that's the beginning of what I call the great rewiring over the next few years the smartphone gets a front-facing camera in 2010 Instagram comes out in 2010 but it becomes super popular in 2012 when Facebook buys it so that's when the girls really Rush on they move their social lives on to Instagram in particular also Tumbl a few others so you get these super viral social media platforms it wasn't like that in 2005 so you get front facing camera high-speed data um oh you get notifications uh the original iPhone didn't interrupt you you pulled it out when you wanted it so what I'm saying is in 2010 there is no sign of a mental health crisis everything's fine so we were all super optimistic in 2011 even up to 2012 but that's when the mental illness illness crisis begins and all the numbers go way up for girls and also up substantially for boys so by 2015 what we have is the Millennials they just barely made it through puberty before they got this so the Millennials were in college or late high school when they adopted this phone based life because we're all doing it we're all dominated by our our technology walk us through the actual harms that's now scientifically connected to kids use and increased use of screens and social media specifically on smartphones so uh first we have to establish the numbers here which are stunning the latest data from Gallup is around 9 hours a day is what they spend on their phones and screens five hours a day of that is social media another 3 to five is all the other stuff that they do so imagine if your child if you take nine or 10 hours out of their day every single day where's it going to come from they spend less time sleeping less time with other kids less time outside less time exercising a lot more time just being sedentary and solitary so for all those reasons oh nobody very little reading of books no Hobbies there's no time there's no time for anything so that's the first thing it pushes out all the good things of childhood that we want our kids to have when you give a kid a smartphone it's likely to move to the center of her life and that's what she's going to do for the rest of her life and so um so that's one of the main ways of harm it just deprives you of everything else um another thing it does is it fragments your attention you and I are probably you know we can pay attention to things we can do our work but it's harder now than it was 10 years ago there's constant interruptions but we're still able to do it but it's a struggle a teenager just starting puberty age 10 11 12 the prefrontal cortex is has not yet rewired for the adult configuration they're not real they're not very good at paying attention and early puberty is when that skill really develops and so to have them trying to develop that skill while being interrupted every few minutes um the average teen now gets one study found 257 notifications a day 257 interruptions every day it's very hard to focus on anything so you get fragmented attention and we don't know how permanent this is um another harm is addiction the brain adapts to that constant level of stimulations that when you're not getting it you're in a deficit mode you're irritable you're unhappy uh you feel terrible so these devices are designed to grab hold of our kids attention and never let go and they're very effective at that I could go on there are so many other avenues of harm but those are some of the big ones that I cover in the book can we talk a little bit about also the data and how it Forks on the impacts to girls versus boys when I started writing the book I thought it was going to be a story primarily about what social media is doing to girls because I've got a lot of data on that and because the graphs as you said are like hockey sticks it's like they're going along there's nothing happening and then all of a sudden one day in 2013 they all start shooting upwards and it's the hospitalizations for self harm that are the most stunning and they're the same in Britain Canada Australia it's absolutely stunning what's happened to girls since 2013 for boys is I couldn't find a Smoking Gun I couldn't say oh well it's video games or it's social media for boys the rise in mental illness is slower and the key thing about boys it's not so much that this Modern Age is giving them diagnosable mental illness what I finally figured out working with my research partner Zack Rous we finally figured out is that for boys the issue is they've been withdrawing from The Real World really since the 80s and 90s they've been spending much more time online they don't go outside they don't wrestle so boys are basically blocked in their development they're not turning into men they're dropping out of school they're dropping out of the workforce um so we're losing a generation of boys it's not as clear for when you look at wealthy educated groups there the gender gap is not so big once you get to sort of middle class and below the girls are doing okay in terms of school and work and the boys are just not so the problems are more diffuse but they're extremely serious for boys now there are so many parents that will tell you that if you take a smartphone away from a child that there's almost like that you've broken this tractor beam that they they've had this lock and they're really generally speaking aggressive it's a very strange uh equation it's like if if it was any other kind of an addictive substance or drug a parent would probably say well let's get that out of the house and not use it the most powerful argument a kid can make is Mom I have to have a smartphone because everyone else has one and I'll be left out I have to have Instagram because everyone else has it and I'll be left out um so that's what's called a collective action problem it's hard for us as parents because everyone else is doing this and so what I'm proposing is that we coordinate we set some Norms um and uh Norms that would be hard to do on our own but much easier to do if we do them together um so just to go to go back to the the parent struggling um struggling to put limits on to maybe give a warning what you were describing is actually uh quintessential withdrawal symptoms from any drug uh when brain circuits are used to getting this stimulation from whether it's cocaine heroin slot machines or or social media if that happens every day when you take the kid off they feel horrible for a couple of weeks it takes two or three weeks three or four weeks actually to detox for the brain to reset so it's vital that we give our kids that we delay the entry into this craziness and that we give our kids time away let deal with some of the reservations that I'm sure you've heard uh you know besides my kid is going to miss out one of the things that I think parents are concerned about is giving their kids devices to be able to get in touch with them in an emergency what are ways to do that without necessarily giving them a full smartphone loaded with social media as a parent of two high school kids I totally understand the desire to be able to reach your children um and the desire for them to reach you if something goes wrong so that's the first thing we're not saying cut them off and don't communicate we're saying don't give them the most powerful distraction device ever invented to have in their pocket all the time including when they're going to sleep when they're in class Etc so give them a flip phone the Millennials had flip phones and they turned out fine my second point though is um uh school security experts say there are procedures in place to deal with a school shooting and and they involve listening and cooperating and working together with the teacher and the administration so where would you rather send your kid I would ask any parents who have this concern and we all have the concern would you rather send your kid to a school in which when there's when there's a potential problem everyone they're silent they follow directions they do what they're supposed to do they follow the procedure would you rather have one where at the first sign of a serious problem everyone pulls out their phone they're crying to their parents they're making a lot of noise they're not listening so again I understand the human urge to talk to your kid if there's a crisis But the teacher has a phone um all the administrators have phones so um we have to let the professionals do their job and not interfere as parents what about the idea that there are so many different types of communities who have found each other over social media in in a section in your book you talk about how ironically some of these communities that might find the most benefit are also the ones who are susceptible to the largest of negative effects by being social media explain that yes so we you know we often confuse the internet and social media what you've described is a problem that the internet largely solved kids were isolated in the 90s they could find you know if you're gay if you're by if you're trans um they could find other kids beginning in the 90s the internet is amazing for that once you start getting communities on social media what you get is a move to the extreme so let's look at mental health Tumblr or mental health Instagram or mental health Tik Tok you might think well it's great if a person has a particular disorder it's great that they can interact with other people to share their disorder I don't think that's true there's uh just increasing amounts of research that social media is spreading mental illness it's just not a good idea to have teenagers hanging out with influencers uh for uh who are who are motivated to be more extreme to get followers so I don't buy the argument that this is somehow good for members of historically marginalized communities um and as I report in the book studies show that while most kids recognize that these platforms are bad for them lgbtq kids are even more vociferous in saying these platforms are bad for us these platforms lead to bullying and harassment um so you know the internet is amazing but social media does far more harm to kids than whatever shreds of benefit you can find from it you have taken this message to social media companies directly are they getting it well there's been no response certainly um they I think they're kind of hemmed in well I should put it this way uh meta did try a small thing they tried hiding the light counter that didn't work have an effect um I've spoken with their research staff there I've spoken with leadership there I do believe that if they could make it healthier and not lose any users they would do it but met in particular has shown it's always prioritized growth over everything else there have been many internal whistleblowers pointing out problems they generally don't respond they don't do the things that would be effective because that would for example kicking off underage users they know how old everybody is but you know when most 11 and 12 year olds have an Instagram account they should be kicked off but meta won't do that um Snapchat won't do that because they'd lose most of their users so they know uh they know what the problems are there have been many internal reports and they don't act and they don't have to because Congress gave them immunity from lawsuits this is one of the most insane things about our country um we have this thing this this this environment that is incredibly toxic for our kids development um and we can't sue them they at a senate hearing uh CEO of meta Mark Zuckerberg uh said quote the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health is he misinformed by his lawyers no he's properly informed by his lawyers that he can point to studies that support that conclusion um he can point to some a few meta analyses that support that he can point to a study uh by the National Academy of Science that came to that conclusion but there is so much evidence on the other side so they're cherry-picking even that National Academy's report that claimed that there's not enough evidence to prove causation in that very report people should read chapter 4 it's an amazing catalog of of the research that shows causality so it's a bizarre report in which the report itself documents dozens and dozens of avenues of harm and dozens and dozens of experiments but yet for some reason the Way It Was Written they said well we can't prove that it's causal um I've collected if you go to my substack after babel.com I've gone through um all of the studies uh what we itemize them we show how the correlational studies come out how the longitudinal studies come out how the experimental studies come out there is a ton of evidence the preponderance of the evidence shows it's not just a correlate it's a Cause Zuckerberg was pointing to the few studies he could but in the long run I believe they're going to lose that case because the evidence keeps mounting and by now everybody sees it um the teachers the parents all those parents we saw at that Senate hearing like were they wrong that their kid uh uh you know that their that their kid um uh is dead because of something that happened on social media were they all wrong about that so at this point in time it just defies belief that social media isn't contributing to this Mental Health crisis do you think that legislation like what Ronda zantis is proposing in Florida or other states are thinking about doing to try to delay or ban the use of social media by a certain age will work I think the disantis bill is great I think the Florida bill is great um we have to delay the age uh at which they get into social media um I think 16 is the right age I mean for health reasons it should be 18 but realistically we're not going to get 18 16 I think is a reasonable compromise at which we can begin treating kids like adults on the internet right now current law says 13 at 13 companies can do whatever the hell they want to your kids they can take their data they can do anything they don't need your permission they can treat them like adults that's current law and there's zero enforcement as long as they don't know your kid is 10 they can do whatever they want to your kid so the current law is horrible it's not enforced the age is too low it's 13 we need to raise that to 16 and enforce and that's what the Florida bill is going to do they have a little carve out so that if parents really want their kid to be on at 14 and 15 they can specifically sign a permission that'll be interesting to see how the tech companies Implement that but I'm a big fan of the Florida bill I hope all 50 states do it because there is no way to make social media safe for middle school children author and Professor Jonathan height thanks so much for joining us thank you [Music] Hari [Music] yeah

Channel: Amanpour and Company

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Keywords: interview, CNN, PBS, Christiane Amanpour, world news, news anchor, news show, news, public affairs, late-night TV, journalist, Chief International Correspondent, Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation, Gen Z, Social Media, Smartphones, Mental Illness

Id: w8MjG_aVwRI

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2024