United States: Bestselling authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have raised concerns about the growing mental health problems among young people in many western countries. They warn that social media is making things worse, which has led to many schools in Europe banning smartphones. 

It is always important to focus on increasing numbers of cases of depression or anxiety, but the discussion may become obsessed with factors that are seen only in terms of technical inputs such as ‘screen time’. In my book, Why We Worry: As what I intend to do in A Sociological Explanation, I seek to expand this issue. 

As reported by the Medicalxpress, one wonders whether it’s productive to argue from trends of various types of psychological distress that have risen after 2012, which Haidt has baptized the moment when smartphones entered the world of the young. This method has been criticized for focusing on the relationship that may take little about causality. The other issue is that these analyses are carried out in the short term only. 

Nine of ten graphs in Haidt’s The Anxious Generation start in 2002 and end in 2018. As it will be seen, using 16 years of data for drawing unmistakable conclusions presents several difficulties. 

There is a challenge in the fact that earlier steep rises are masked. For example, when Haidt pointed at an increase in psychological distress in Nordic countries from 2010 onwards, we do not get to know what went on from 2002 and below. As an outcome, it is possible to get an idea that there were no innovations before the appearance of smartphones. 

But, for example in Sweden the data on mental well-being of youths has been gathered since 1986 by the Public Health Agency. When it comes to rate self-reported problems with low mood, it could be seen from these figures that the upward trend has been longer since 1980s. 

Likewise, although it rose among girls in the 2010s, sleep issues have been rising before smartphones began to occupy children’s lives. 

We also observe that the increase in mental health problems starts at a lower level in countries such as Norway and the UK. A review in the journal Psychological Medicine found that the proportion of four- to 24-year-olds with longstanding mental health conditions rose sixfold between 1995 and 2014 in England and more than doubled between 2003 and 2014 in Scotland.