At the start of the 2010s, rates of teenage mental illness took a sharp upward turn, and they have been rising ever since. Among US college students, diagnoses of depression and anxiety more than doubled between 2010 and 2018. More worrying still, in the decade to 2020 the number of emergency room visits for self-harm rose by 188% among teenage girls in the US and 48% among boys. The suicide rate for younger adolescents also increased, by 167% among girls and 91% among boys. A similar trend has been observed in the UK and many other western countries. The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes this mental health crisis has been driven by the mass adoption of smartphones, along with the advent of social media and addictive online gaming. He calls it “the Great Rewiring of Childhood”.
Children are spending ever less time socialising in person and ever more time glued to their screens, with girls most likely to be sucked into the self-esteem crushing vortex of social media, and boys more likely to become hooked on gaming and porn. Childhood is no longer “play-based”, it’s “phone-based”. Haidt believes that parents have become overprotective in the offline world, delaying the age at which children are deemed safe to play unsupervised or run errands alone, but do too little to protect children from online dangers. We have allowed the young too much freedom to roam the internet, where they are at risk of being bullied and harassed or encountering harmful content, from graphic violence to sites that glorify suicide and self-harm.
