Yes, Social Media Really Is a Cause of the Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness
The question before us now, on the topic of teens and social media, is this: Are the skeptics correct that we are going through just one more groundless moral panic over teens and tech in which adults are freaking out while the harms are so minimal that they shouldn’t be a cause for worry? Or did the wolf really arrive around 2012, and has been mauling young people ever since via their smartphones and social media accounts? Odgers recently stated the skeptics’ case in an essay in Nature titled The Great Rewiring: Is Social Media Really Behind an Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness? The essay offered a critique of my recent book, The Anxious Generation. Odgers’ central claim is that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that I have “No evidence” that social media is a cause, rather than a mere correlate, of the current epidemic of adolescent mental illness.
Source: Yes, Social Media Really Is a Cause of the Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness
And what about non-teenage mental illness?