Are smartphones driving kids mad?
The Great Exaggeration, part two
The incidence of suicide among the young constitutes a major evidential element in Haidt’s book and also a major mobilising argument in what has become a campaign against smart phone use by children and young people. On the inside cover of the UK edition of his book asks “Why have rates of depression, anxiety, self- harm and suicide risen so sharply, more than doubling in many cases?” The answer being “the decline of free play in childhood and the rise of smartphone usage among adolescents other twins sources of increased mental distress among teenagers.”
But Haidt has a huge problem here. It is true that suicide rates in the US have increased significantly, rising by nearly 40% between 2000 and 2021 (they have since fallen back slightly, and especially amongst the young). Men are four times more likely to kill themselves than women, the group with the highest suicide rates is the over 85s and firearms account for half of all deaths (and you may think that in this last stat alone might lie much of the answer, with 962,900 handguns being produced in the US in 2000 rising to 5.5 million in 2020).
However the young people of the UK have also been using smartphones and other screens, while logging into the same social media sites as in the US and over the same period. So, if Haidt’s argument holds and our kids have also been Greatly Rewired you would expect to a big increase in suicides here, right?