Googling “Facebook and depression” brings up a long list of pages, including a chat board titled “I think Facebook makes me depressed.” MissingGirl, who gives her age as 16 to 17, writes, “Definitely it makes me depressed. All my friends share the fun details of their glamorous lives and it makes me feel like ****. Kinda hate FB.” A poster on Reddit wrote, “Scrolling through my feed, seeing [my friends] being happy makes me sad. Also because . . . I get no messages . . . . The sight of a message box with no notifications gives me a really sad, gut wrenching feeling of loneliness. Facebook depresses me, so I’m going to stop using it.”
Depression is not just a sad mood: if it leads someone to contemplate suicide, it can be physically dangerous as well. The YRBSS (the high school survey administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) assesses suicide risk, measured by answering “yes” to at least one of the following: feeling very sad and hopeless for two weeks, seriously considering committing suicide, making a plan to commit suicide, or having attempted to commit suicide. Once again, the link between screen time and mental health issues is distressingly clear: teens who spend more than three hours a day on electronic devices are 35% more likely to have at least one suicide risk factor (see Figure 3.9). That’s much more than the risk related to TV watching, suggesting that it’s not just screens but new media such as smartphones, games, and social media that are behind the link. Nonscreen activities such as exercise instead lower suicide risk factors. So teens who spend a lot of time looking at their phones aren’t just at higher risk of depression—they are also at an alarmingly higher risk for suicide.
Figure 3.9. Relative risk of having at least one suicide risk factor based on time spent on screen (black bars) and nonscreen (gray bars) activities, 9th–12th graders. Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, 2013–2015. (Electronic devices include smartphones, tablets, video games, and computers.)
These analyses show that three hours of screen time a day increases the chance that a teen will be at risk for committing suicide. So how much screen time is too much? Risks start to increase with screen time of two hours or more a day and go up from there, with very high levels of use (five or more hours) linked to considerably higher risks of suicide and unhappiness (see Figure 3.10). This suggests that moderation, not necessarily a complete elimination of electronic devices from teens’ lives, is the key.
Figure 3.10. Percentage with at least one suicide risk factor and percentage unhappy by hours a day spent on electronic devices or online (exposure-response curve), 9th–12th graders (Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System), and 8th, 10th, and 12th graders (Monitoring the Future), 2013–2015.
Why is electronic device use linked to such heightened odds of suicide risk? It’s not demographics; the odds look virtually identical when gender, race, and grade are taken into account. It could be that teens at risk for suicide are drawn to electronic devices. Perhaps, but you’d think that those teens, who are often depressed, would be more drawn to passive activities such as TV rather than interactive ones such as social media and computer games. So what, specifically, is so bad about electronic devices that is so much worse than TV? One factor is cyberbullying.
Bullying has always been one of the biggest risk factors for suicide among teens, so it’s not surprising that kids who are bullied at school are twice as likely to have at least one suicide risk factor such as considering suicide or making a suicide plan. However, cyberbullying—electronic bullying via texting, social media, or chat rooms—is even worse (see Figure 3.11). Two-thirds (66%) of cyberbullied teens have at least one suicide risk factor, 9% more than those who were bullied offline at school. Teens who are cyberbullied often say that there’s no way to get away from their tormentors—unlike with in-person bullies, they can’t just avoid certain people. Unless they give up their phones entirely, the bullying continues.
Figure 3.11. Risk of having at least one suicide risk factor based on cyberbullying (black bar) and school bullying (gray bar), 9th–12th graders. Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, 2011–2015.
“They said, ‘Nobody likes you, go kill yourself,’ ” 15-year-old Sierra from Virginia said in American Girls about the girls who cyberbullied her. She received one Instagram comment that read, “You have no ass girl, stop trying to take pictures like you have one, it’s not cute, you look like a ho. You look stupid . . . that outfit makes you look like a cheap prostitute that stands on the corner.” The constant bullying sent Sierra into a tailspin. “I started eating ice cream all the time to not let it all get to me, but I don’t want to get fat. So I just solved it by cutting,” she said, referring to self-injury (which involves purposefully cutting yourself with a knife or razor blade, usually on the legs and arms). Eventually, she tried to kill herself, first by swallowing as many pills as she could find and later by jumping in front of an oncoming car. A friend grabbed her and pulled her back.
David Molak was a high school sophomore at Alamo Heights High School in San Antonio, Texas, when his classmates began relentlessly bullying him through text messages, denigrating his physical appearance and hurling other insults. On January 4, 2016, he committed suicide. “I saw the pain in David’s eyes three nights ago as he was added to a group text only to be made fun of and kicked out two minutes later,” his older brother Cliff wrote in a Facebook post. “He stared off into the distance for what seemed like an hour. I could feel his pain . . . . David had been enduring this sort of abuse for a very long time. In today’s age, bullies don’t push you into lockers . . . they cower behind user names and fake profiles from miles away constantly berating and abusing good, innocent people.”
Even when cyberbullying doesn’t lead to suicide, it can certainly lead to unhappiness or depression. Even famous and successful iGen’ers are not immune. Gabby Douglas, the Olympic gymnast who won gold in the all-around competition at the 2012 Games, was cyberbullied after a disappointing performance in 2016. “I wonder how many times I cried. Probably enough to fill so many gallons of water. And it would be like, deep, emotional cries because I was so hurt,” the 21-year-old told People magazine. One set of studies by the Cyberbullying Research Center suggests that cyberbullying has become more common, with 34% of teens in 2016 affected, compared to 19% in 2007. Teens’ entire lives are online, and one out of three is being bullied right where he or she lives.
There’s one last piece of data that indirectly but stunningly captures the move away from in-person activities and toward solo, online interaction. Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. The steady decline in teen homicide from 2007 to 2014 looks very similar to the decline in in-person social interaction (see Figure 3.12). As teens have spent less time with one another in person, they have also become less likely to kill each other. In contrast, teen suicide rates began to tick up after 2008. The rise looks small on the graph because of the scale, but it’s not—46% more teens killed themselves in 2015 than in 2007. The rise occurred just as new-media screen time started to increase and in-person social activities began to wane. In 2011, for the first time in twenty-four years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate. The gap grew larger from 2011 to 2014, with the suicide rate 32% higher than the homicide rate by 2014—the largest gap since records have been kept (the gap remained high, 30%, in 2015).
Figure 3.12. Homicide and suicide rates out of 100,000 population among 15- to 19-year-olds, 1980–2015. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The astonishing, though tentative, possibility is that the rise of the smartphone has caused both the decline in homicide and the increase in suicide. With teens spending more hours with their phones and less with their friends, more are becoming depressed and committing suicide and fewer are committing homicide. To put it bluntly: teens have to be with each other in person to kill each other, but they can cyberbully each other into suicide through their phones. Even if bullying is not involved, screen communication can be isolating, which might lead
to depression and sometimes suicide. Of course, there are many causes of depression and suicide—too much technology is clearly not the only cause (after all, the suicide rate was even higher in the 1990s, long before smartphones existed). At the same time, it is distressing, and unacceptable, that so many more teens are killing themselves than did just a few years ago.
Caveman Brains, FOMO, and Soft Skills
All in all, in-person social interaction is much better for mental health than electronic communication. This makes sense: humans are inherently social beings, and our brains evolved to crave face-to-face interaction. In hunter-gatherer times, people who got kicked out of the tribe often died because they had no one to share food with (and no one to reproduce with—being a hermit was literally bred out of us). The legacy of this era lives in our brains, which are exquisitely attuned to social acceptance and rejection. I’ve studied this myself: I spent my postdoctoral fellowship researching the effects of social rejection in a series of projects led by the prominent social psychologist Roy Baumeister. We found that even a brief, randomly assigned experience of being socially rejected sent people into a tailspin, increasing aggression, creating feelings of hopelessness, and (my personal favorite) causing them to eat more cookies. Neuroscientists have found that when people are left out of a game by other players, the brain region involved in physical pain is activated. Apparently it’s not a coincidence that many terms for social pain mimic those for physical pain, including “hurt feelings” and “heartbroken.” (It’s more as though your brain is broken, but the term comes from ancient times when people believed that the heart was the source of our thoughts and feelings.)
With our brains—perhaps especially teen brains—so attuned to social rejection, texting and social media are fertile grounds for negative emotions. Even when things go well, the cadence of electronic communication can be problematic. Unlike in face-to-face interaction, electronic communication often involves a delay between your side of the conversation and your friend’s reply. Think about what happens when you send a text. If the other person doesn’t write back right away, you might wonder why. Is she mad? Did he not like what I said? The same happens when you post something on social media—everyone wants to see the likes, and if they take too long to come or don’t come at all, anxiety can follow.
One study had college students interact in one of two ways: online or in person. Those who interacted in person felt emotionally closer to each other, which makes sense given the conditions under which our human brains evolved. Think about it this way: humans experienced approximately 99.9% of our evolution when the only way to communicate with someone else was in person. Compared to a warm person right in front of you, electronic communication is a pale shadow.
Many iGen’ers say that their online lives make them feel they are walking a tightrope. “I find [social media] really stressful, actually,” 19-year-old Sofia Stojic told the Australian newspaper The Age. “It’s just the knowledge that it’s there in the background. It’s very hard these days to switch it off and be with your thoughts.” The other iGen’ers interviewed in the article all said that they try to turn off notifications or their phone entirely so they can concentrate on other things, such as talking to a friend in person. But they find they can’t, because they fear missing out. “It’s not like you can ever get away from it. You can switch off your phone but it’s still there,” said Amy Bismire, 19.
Even when time on social media goes well and make us feel included, it is no substitute for actual, face-to face interaction. As 17-year-old Kevin says, “If you have contact person to person, you actually get true emotions if you hang out with them. If you do something together, accomplish something together, it just feels good, you know? You get to share emotions, like fighting and making up. You can’t really get those kinds of feelings with social media.”
iGen’ers still yearn for in-person interaction. Nearly all of the 18- and 19-year-olds in the SDSU freshman survey said they would rather see their friends in person than communicate electronically. “It is much more fun to have a conversation in person,” wrote Bailey, 19. “When you are actually with someone it feels so much more personal and loving. Memories are created through experiences and that can’t happen on the phone or computer,” wrote Julian, 18.
For parents, teachers, student affairs professionals, and businesses, the big question is this: Will the decline in in-person social interaction lead to iGen having inferior social skills? Some preliminary evidence suggests it will. In one study, 6th graders spent five days at an overnight nature camp with no access to computers, cell phones, or TV. A control group continued their usual technology activities. All of the kids then took two social skills tests, naming the emotion (happy, sad, angry, fearful) expressed in a series of photos of people’s faces or watching no-sound videotapes of social interactions. The kids who had spent five days away from screens improved their social skills significantly more than the control group did.
Athena, 13, thinks that today’s kids are missing out on experienes that develop their social skills. “We grew up with iPhones,” she says. “We don’t know how to communicate like normal people and look people in the eye and talk to them.” Her middle school drama teacher tells students, “Put your phone in the box, we’re learning to look people in the eye.” Athena thinks that phones have affected teen speech as well: “Sometimes it makes us, like, aliens. We don’t know how to talk to people anymore.”
Just as playing the piano takes practice, so do social skills. iGen’ers are not practicing their in-person social skills as much as other generations did, so when it comes time for the “recital” of their social skills, they are more likely to make mistakes onstage when it matters: in college interviews, when making friends in high school, and when competing for a job. Life’s social decisions are still made primarily in person, and iGen gets less experience with such situations. In the next decade we may see more young people who know just the right emoji for a situation—but not the right facial expression.
Chapter 4
* * *
Insecure: The New Mental Health Crisis
UC Berkeley student Ilaf Esuf was home on a break from school when it hit. Returning from a shopping trip with her mother, she felt overwhelmed with sadness and began to cry. “I pulled into the driveway, my sleeves soaked from subtly wiping away my tears,” she wrote in the Daily Californian. “My mom stood there, dumbfounded. She clutched my arm and asked me why I was crying, but I couldn’t tell her. My unexplainable, occasional sadness lingered like my worried mother who stood by the door, heartbroken, waiting for things to make sense again.” Ilaf isn’t always sure why she feels depressed, and she struggles to explain her feelings to her parents. “I don’t know what’s wrong and I don’t know why I feel this way, but I promise I’m fine and it will pass. That’s what I tell myself when I’m walking down the street and I feel tears rolling down my face.”
iGen’ers look so happy online, making goofy faces on Snapchat and smiling in their pictures on Instagram. But dig deeper, and reality is not so comforting. iGen is on the verge of the most severe mental health crisis for young people in decades. On the surface, though, everything is fine.
Everything Is (Not) Awesome
You know what’s awesome? EVERYTHING!
—“Everything Is Awesome” from The Lego Movie
The Internet—and society in general—promotes a relentless positivity these days. Social media posts highlight the happy moments but rarely the sad ones: everyone is smiling in their selfies, unless they’re doing a duck face.
This positivity has its roots in a trend begun by the Boomers, refined by Generation X, and brought to full force by the Millennials: the growing individualism of American culture. Individualistic cultures focus more on the self and less on social rules. Individualism is behind most fundamental cultural changes of the last few decades, from trends usually considered good (the growth of equality based on race, gender, and sexual orientation) as well as tho
se seen as more negative (the sense of entitlement displayed by so many people). Individualism also encourages people to feel good about themselves—not just as good as they should but even better than might be justified. Positive self-views are one of the hallmarks of individualistic cultures, which encourage self-promotion and self-esteem. As the tide of individualism rose throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Millennials quickly gained a reputation for overconfidence and unrealistically high expectations—one justified by their more positive self-views, higher narcissism, and heightened aspirations compared to previous generations. Those trends tapered off with iGen’ers, who are not the overconfident optimists Millennials were at the same age. iGen’ers score lower in narcissism and have lower expectations, suggesting that the outsize entitlement displayed by some Millennials might be on its way out. Because overly positive self-views are mostly Millennials’ story, not iGen’ers’, those trends are discussed in the appendix instead (see Appendix E).
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