Have smartphones created an anxious generation Z?

Teenagers’ widespread use of smartphones is causing a mental health crisis. 

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By  Hugh Breakey Deputy Director Institute for Ethics, Governance and Law, Griffith University.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation delivers an urgent call for action.

Haidt argues that the evidence is in. Teenagers’ widespread use of smartphones is causing a mental health crisis. Individual, collective and legislative action is required to limit their smartphone access.

Haidt begins his book with an allegory. Imagine someone offered you the opportunity to have your ten-year-old child grow up on Mars, even though there is every reason to believe that radiation and low gravity could greatly disrupt healthy adolescent development, leading to long-term afflictions. Surely, given the risks, you would refuse the offer.

A decade ago, parents could not have known the threats lying within the shiny new smartphones they presented to their excited teenagers. But the evidence is mounting that the children who grew up with smartphones are struggling.

Haidt calls the period from 2010 to 2015 the “great rewiring”. This was a period when adolescents had their neural systems primed for anxiety and depression by extensive daily smartphone use.

Haidt’s two central claims are that Gen Z is suffering from a major mental illness epidemic and that smartphones are largely to blame.

Readers should be wary about both these claims – not in the sense that we should resist believing them, but rather we should not be too eager to embrace them. After all, it is perilously easy to believe that the kids aren’t alright. Elders routinely despair of the younger generation.

Read: Here is what Gen Zs and millennials want to read

Haidt explicitly acknowledges that other experts have argued against claims of widespread teenage anxiety. In response, he cites recent evidence from a host of different sources: not just self-reports of problems, but hard data on self-harming, suicide rates, diagnosed mental disorders and mental health hospitalisations.

While Haidt focuses on the US, he observes concurrent shifts in youth mental health in many Western countries, including Australia. But do these findings constitute an epidemic demanding society-wide responses? Here the book would have benefited from systematically drawing together the science in easily understandable terms.

Haidt’s marshalled evidence consistently shows a rise, beginning around 2010 and starting with girls, in a host of adolescent mental health disorders and wellbeing concerns. Broadly speaking, the figures in the US show mental health issues that previously plagued around 5-10 percent of adolescents growing to afflict around twice that amount.

On the one hand, these data suggest the term “anxious generation” is somewhat misleading. A large majority of Gen Z do not have anxiety disorders – and of those who do, almost half would have done so irrespective of smartphone usage.

On the other hand, the numbers remain concerning. No parent would be comfortable handing their child any substance they knew had a one-in-ten chance of causing the child a mental disorder within a few years. There are also data suggesting that, even among those without disorders, children increasingly suffer from loneliness and other concerning outcomes.

Perhaps the most alarming part of the steep curves and precipitous falls in Haidt’s many graphs is not the current figures, but the current trajectories. In almost all cases, things are getting worse. It is possible we may be in the early days of an unfolding catastrophe.

If we accept there is a serious problem, then the question arises as to its cause. Again, we must resist intuitively appealing answers to this question. The worry is that we will all look into a “witch’s mirror”, seeing what we want to see or what our preferred ideology tells us we should expect. I am old enough to remember panics about heavy metal music and Dungeons & Dragons.

Indeed, it is possible that Haidt himself fell into this trap, at least in part. In a previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff argued that harmful worldviews and beliefs prevalent in US educational settings were priming young people for worrying mental health outcomes.

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Haidt thinks this coddling remains a factor, but now recognises the hypothesis fails to fit the data. Specifically, he acknowledges the plummeting mental health of adolescents is evident in many countries, and across all educational levels and social classes.

Are there alternative hypotheses that fit this data? Perhaps kids today are anxious and depressed because they should be anxious and depressed? After all, they inherit a world facing runaway global warming, systemic injustices, insecure work futures and more. Yet Haidt rightly observes that past generations with dire prospects did not show similar mental health outcomes.

Ultimately, the problem is likely to stem from a mix of factors. Haidt argues the current situation was not caused exclusively by smartphone use. Recent decades have also seen the rise of “safetyism” – a term he and Lukianoff coined to describe the preferencing of individual safety ahead of other values – and helicopter parenting. These phenomena have increasingly shielded children from the vital development provided by physical play and unsupervised exploration of the real world.

The writer is a deputy director of the Institute for Ethics, Governance and Law, Griffith University.