Kurth wrote: ↑Mon Feb 27, 2023 11:27 pm- Many of the comments about other potential causes of kids being depressed (e.g., Sandy Hook) were addressed in the article. In fact, Michelle Goldberg specifically started from the perspective that an increase in school shootings may be a cause, but the timeline and the data didn't seem to support that.
Perhaps she is simply wrong. The study she references outright ponders these same factors. She is the one claiming a timeline fit and offering an opinion. She pretty much talks us through a process of magical thinking. It is weak stuff. I'll quote her analysis.
The study speculated that left-leaning girls might simply be reacting to the political environment. “Broad-reaching phenomena, such as worsening climate change or school shootings, may impact mental health for all adolescents, while social injustices like sexism, which gained media attention through the #MeToo movement, may be felt most acutely by those personally affected,” it said. The notion that Trump’s America was a psychologically unhealthy place for young women resonated with me, and I considered writing about it.
But as I looked closer at the data, I saw that the inflection point for liberal adolescent depression wasn’t 2016, but around 2012. That was the year of the devastating Sandy Hook mass shooting, but it was not otherwise a time of liberal political despair. Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.
Look closely at what she is doing there. It is a bit illogical to look for an effect relative to her feelings about the existence of some generalized "liberal political despair". Aka magical thinking. Worse she then talks about the impact of specific events occurred. The kids don't worry about school shootings because Obama was re-elected? Or the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights? How is this a serious analysis? I'm genuinely asking how this is persuasive at all. It's not the greatest piece of analysis I've ever read.
That's not to say there aren't legitimate questions such as this one.
Twenge pointed out that “The Politics of Depression” found increases not just in depression but also in loneliness among liberal teenage girls. “Why would they feel lonely because of the state of politics?” she asked.
I couldn’t answer that question, and since I lost faith in my initial interpretation of “The Politics of Depression,” I never ended up writing about it. Now, however, with a roiling debate about what’s causing the downward spiral of kids’ mental health, it’s worth revisiting why the notion of teenage depression as a sort of internalized protest against an unjust society doesn’t hold up.
But only a little further she then potentially overstates the case or potentially cherry picks data.
I agree with Donegan and Valenti about the horrifying toll that sexist violence takes on girls and women. But sexual assault and political backsliding can’t be the whole story behind soaring rates of adolescent anguish. Sexual violence has been consistently bad in America: According to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, in 2011, 12 percent of girls reported that they’d been forced to have sex, only two points fewer than in 2021. American politics didn’t take a severe right turn until 2016. And regardless, the steep decline in young people’s mental health around 2012 isn’t just an American problem: It also shows up in Britain, Canada and Australia.
I followed the links to the underlying data. The link to the British survey has data for only 2 years - 2009 and 2018. It also only covers girls. The Canadian source she links shows some of the potential effect but is a little data starved. The age group is 15-30 which is pretty wide but potentially still a good fit for "young people". The Australian data starts in 2012. We have no reference to other time period. In other words, it's a bit disparate, not well aligned, and potentially cherry picked to fit her argument. Which is possibly a side effect of searching for data that fits the argument instead of collecting broad data and backing into an analysis. A potential classic mistake. In any case, the Australian data is still the best source and it does show some impacts but there are unfortunately no theories of causation discussed.
Back on the domestic front though she puts a stake in the ground stating that politics didn't take a severe right turn until 2016. That is fairly subjective to say the least. Did it take a hard right turn in 2016 or was that when the frog was boiled enough for us to finally notice?
Anyway, I'm not going to spend too much more time picking this apart but it's not the strongest case IMO though there is definitely evidence that social media is definitely in the mix and potentially a hazard to mental health of young people. However, this fixation on it alone is probably a mistake.
Edit: I lied. I re-thought through this and put my finger on what was wrong at root of the analysis. I give her some credit to being transparent about how she thinks about it but I think it exposes fundamental flaws in composition. When I deconstruct her analysis, IMO she is building a model on a house of cards rooted in belief in "big rocks". Trump was elected in 2016 - the nation turns hard right. Facebook buys Instagram in 2012 and social media usage skyrockets. A few other nations are supposedly seeing the same thing. None of these rocks are particularly good fits individually and compositionally I think it is a mess. Still it did it's job, it got folks arguing and somehow no one notices that it's fairly shoddy. It's easy to rile us up nowadays.
- I don't get the "moral panic" takes. What seems like "magical thinking" to me is to imagine that our kids are depressed and existentially bothered by the political and social issues that we obsess about.
Do I really need to pull up the many surveys of school age children over the last decade talking about how they are worried about political and social issues such as school shootings and climate change?
Here is one for good measure. 37% of school age children are anxious about climate change and 33% are afraid. Not a majority but that's a lot of kids. And like Michelle Goldberg I'll pull out some international studies
showing that there is a lot of dread with young people with 57% of people 15-25 across 10 countries believing that humanity is doomed. Grim stuff. Now to be clear I haven't dug into these to see if there are issues with these studies too. There might be. I'm just pointing out that there is some evidence that kids are pretty aware and worried about the state of the world. And it ultimately boils down that this issue is probably a lot more complicated than this notion that social media is breaking the kids. I'm not even getting into the need to also explore questions about whether part of the problem is social media displacing healthier activities like in-person socializing or disrupting sleep.
Sure, these middle schoolers might be depressed because they have crippling concerns about the job market they face when they get out of school . . . Maybe they're on Macro Economics TikTok. Or maybe they're getting fed a steady stream of content filled with vile shit that's making them question their own self worth.
This is where I'm wondering what is going on here. Are you really listening here or just reflexively defending? Social media has definite potential to contribute or be a major source of issues for young people. It is also possible that it is the amplification of what is already there, to wit a country with massive issues. It is strange to me to argue they aren't aware of them, worry about them, or see the general pessimism in our nation. Even if just for all the indirect effects like hunger, poverty, and general insecurity they face. 2008-2016 were years with high childhood rates of each of the former in the United States. Then a pandemic happened and re-started that cycle. There are a lot of suspects here and the arguments that Goldberg and Hawley put forward aren't the best at proving the case to say the least.
Anyway, nothing is likely to come of this in the end, so I'm feeling pretty safe in not having to ever own up to agreeing with Josh Hawley on anything that matters.
True enough.