Here’s a video featuring Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, discussing data showing that a whole lot of depression and anxiety disorders among girls (less so among boys) were soaring at the same time social media (which, for the time-frame they’re talking about, is mostly Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) were taking off.
Jonathan Haidt: “Something weird happened in 2014. Greg Luciano, my my friend who runs the Foundation for Individual Rights of Expression, he noticed it too, he came to talk to me. Something had changed among the students. There was a new kind of new morality driven by anxiety and fragility.”
JH: “So we wrote an Atlantic article called ‘The Coddling of the American Mind.’ We turned that into a book in 2017, we went much deeper.”
JH: “Writing that book in 2017, we have a page where we say, you know, the timing is right for social media. Like social media comes in just at the right time to maybe have contributed, but we don’t really have evidence so that’s it, that’s all we said.”
JH: “2019: I’m collecting evidence, because now it’s clear it’s not just America.”
JH: “First we saw it in all of the Anglophere countries. When you look at levels of internalizing disorders…This is important. It’s not all mental illnesses, it’s not schizophrenia, it’s internalizing disorders, which is preeminently anxiety and depression related disorder.”
JH: “They’re pretty stable, from the late ’90s all the way through 2010, 2011 there’s really no trend in the United States or in the other English English speaking countries. And then, all of a sudden, there’s an elbow like around 2012, 2013 there’s an elbow, and the rates go up very sharply for girls, with more of a curve for boys, and that’s a clue, the different shape is an important clue. But for girls 2011, 2012 no sign of a problem, 2014, 2015 it’s off to the races with depression, anxiety. We see the same thing in self harm.”
JH: “So that’s that was the empirical puzzle that came to us as college professors, and that came to us in the national data, and that’s what that’s what launched me on this book.”
Jordan Peterson: “It’s an important coda that you mentioned there, that it wasn’t only rates of self-reported depression and anxiety. Because I know there was a criticism directed at your work by a psychiatrist who pointed out or claimed that the self-report data might be unreliable.”
JP: “But you pointed out, quite rightly, I thought, that you saw the same data in episodes of self harm, particularly among young women, which is a much more direct behavioral measure of that proclivity for negative emotion.”
JP: “I should point out clinically, just for those who are watching and listening, that anxiety is a response to the the threat of destruction, psychological or physical. Depression is more of a pain response, and it’s got two aspects: It’s heightening of negative emotion, withdrawal in particular, that causes cessation of activity, but also decrease in positive emotion, which is more associated with demoralization and and lack of motivational impetus to move forward. And you describe those as the internalizing disorders.” Not psychosis fragmentation or manic depressive disorder.
JP: “This is quite a particularized, let’s say, epidemic.”
JP: “What drove you to the conclusion, or even to investigate the possibility, that this had something to do with technology generally, and with social media more particularly?”
JH: “Jean Twenge was really the first person to call attention to this. Jean Twenge has been studying generations for 20 years, and she had an article in The Atlantic, in 2017 where The Atlantic chose the title ‘Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?’ And so Jean laid out the evidence. It was all correlational, which doesn’t prove it. But the patterns are so consistent, there’s a correlation in time, which is when this new technology is introduced, around 2012.”
JH: “In 2010, teenagers almost all have a flip phone or a basic phone. The iPhone exists, but it’s not very common. The front-facing camera comes out on the iPhone 4 in 2010. Instagram becomes super popular in 2012, so that’s the period where teen social life is changing radically from using a phone to call your friend saying ‘Hey let’s get together this afternoon,’ to spending all day swiping and scrolling and commenting and posting. 2010 to 2015 is the great rewiring of childhood.”
JH: “The increases we’re talking about are are generally between 50 and 100% increases in these measures of of psychopathology for pre-teen girls. You sometimes get 200% increases and for self harm. 10 to 14 year old girls did not used to cut themselves, it was very, very rare before 2012. You get over 200% increase in hospital visits for self harm, so the historical correlation is there. It doesn’t prove it, but there’s no other alternative. And then you have the correlation in time use, that is the people who are heavy users of social media in almost every study are doing much worse.” Until they take kids’ smart phones away, and they show dramatic improvement in mood in one to two weeks.
Though barely touched on in this interview, while this is happening, we see a dramatic increase in during the same time, again disproportionately among girls and women, of an epidemic-like spread of the woke social justice mind virus. Victimhood and cancel culture escape from their initial reservoirs of infection in academia and the Democrat Party and spread among the general population. Many have theorized that women are far more driven by consensus and conformity to social pressure from other women, and that this tendency to knuckle under to woke groupthink, combined with the vector for infection that was social media, explains how quickly the irrational psychosis of social justice spread.
And thus the social media explosion of 2010-2015 primed the pump for full blown epidemic of Trump Derangement Syndrome in 2016…