Don’t let politics cloud what’s going on with teens, depression

Last year, a study came out showing that left-leaning adolescents were experiencing a greater increase in depression than their more conservative peers. Indeed, while girls are more likely to be depressed than boys, the study, by a group of public health researchers at Columbia, showed that lib- eral boys had higher rates of depression than conservative girls.

Because I wrote quite a bit about the dire psychological fallout of Donald Trump’s abusive presidency, I was immediately interested in the study, titled “The Politics of Depression.” It’s long been known that liberals tend to be more depressed than conservatives, which you can interpret as either a cause or an effect of their unhappiness with the status quo. But innate factors couldn’t explain why, among the 12th-graders the study examined, the gap in depressive symptoms between liberals and conservatives appeared to be growing. Nor could those factors explain why, after several years in which liberal girls and liberal boys endured roughly equal rates of depression, girls who identified as liberal had started having a much harder time.

The study speculated that left-leaning girls might simply be reacting to the political environment. “Broad-reaching phenomena, such as worsening climate change or school shootings, may impact mental health for all adolescents, while social injustices like sexism, which gained media attention through the #MeToo movement, may be felt most acutely by those personally affected,” it said. The notion that Trump’s America was a psychologically unhealthy place for young women resonated with me, and I considered writing about it.

But as I looked closer at the data, I saw that the inflection point for liberal adolescent depression wasn’t 2016, but around 2012. That was the year of the devastating Sandy Hook mass shooting, but it was not otherwise a time of liberal political despair. Barack Obama was reelected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended same-sex marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.

One person I hoped could make sense of the study was Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of the 2017 book “iGen,” about the deleterious psychological effects of social media. When I spoke to her last year, Twenge had preliminary data showing that liberal teenagers spent more time on social media than their conservative peers. Girls also use social media more than boys do, though boys tend to spend more time on screens, largely because of video games.

Twenge pointed out that “The Politics of Depression” found increases not just in depression but in loneliness among liberal teenage girls. “Why would they feel lonely because of the state of politics?” she asked.

I couldn’t answer that question, and since I lost faith in my initial interpretation of “The Politics of Depression,” I never ended up writing about it . ...

Clearly, kids are in terrible pain. In trying to understand why, many conservatives have embraced ideas about the damaging effects of social media championed by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University working on a book about social media and adolescent mental illness, and Twenge. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley cited Twenge’s work in calling for a ban on social media use by kids under 16.

... the steep decline in young people’s mental health around 2012 isn’t just an American problem: It also shows up in Britain, Canada and Australia.

Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word “selfie” entered the popular lexicon . ...

The idea that unaccountable corporate behemoths are harming kids with their products shouldn’t be a hard one for liberals to accept, even if figures like Hawley believe it as well. I’m not sure if banning social media for young people is the right way to start fixing the psychic catastrophe engulfing so many kids. But we’re not going to find any fix at all if we simply start with our political priors and work backward.