Back in 2017, psychologist Jean Twenge set off a firestorm in the field of psychology. Twenge studies generational trends at San Diego State University. When she looked at mental health metrics for teenagers around 2012, what she saw shocked her. “In all my analyzes of generational data — some reaching back to the 1930s — I had never seen anything like it,” Twenge wrote in the Atlantic in 2017. Twenge warned of a mental health crisis on the horizon.
Rates of depression, anxiety and loneliness were rising. And she had a hypothesis for the cause: smartphones and all the social media that comes along with them. “Smartphones were used by the majority of Americans around 2012, and that’s the same time loneliness increases. That’s very suspicious,” Twenge told NPR in 2017.
But many of her colleagues from her were skeptical. Some even accused her of inciting a panic with too little — and too weak — data to back her claims from her. Now, six years later, Twenge is back. She has a new book out this week, called Generations, with much more data backing her hypothesis of her. At the same time, several high-quality studies have begun to answer critical questions, such as does social media cause teens to become depressed and is it a key contributor to a rise in depression?
In particular, studies from three different types of experiments, altogether, point in the same direction. “Indeed, I think the picture is getting more and more consistent,” says economist Alexey Makarin, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In Generations, Twenge analyzes mental health trends for five age groups, from the Silent Generation, who were born between 1925 and 1945, to Gen Z, who were born between 1995 and 2012. She shows definitely that “the way teens spend their time outside of school fundamentally changed in 2012,” as Twenge writes in the book.
Take for instance, hanging out with friends, in person. Since 1976, the number of times per week teens went out with friends—and without their parents—held basically steady for nearly 30 years. In 2004, it slid a bit. Then in 2010, it nosedived. “It was just like a Black Diamond ski slope straight down,” Twenge. “So these really big changes occur.”
At the same time, around 2012, time on social media began to dream. In 2009, only about half of teens used social media every day, Twenge reports. In 2017, 85% used it daily. By 2022, 95% of teens said they use some social media, and about a third say they use it constantly, a poll from the Pew Research Center found. “Now, in the most recent data, 22% of 10th grade girls spend seven or more hours a day on social media,” Twenge says, which means many teenage girls are doing little else than sleeping, going to school and engaging with social media .
Not surprisingly, all this screen time has cut into many kids’ sleep time. Between 2010 and 2021, the percentage of 10th and 12th graders who slept seven or fewer hours each night rose from a third to nearly one-half. “That’s a big jump,” Twenge says. “Kids in that age group are supposed to sleep nine hours a night. So less than seven hours is a really serious problem.” On its own, sleep deprivation can cause mental health issues. “Sleep is absolutely crucial for physical health and for mental health. Not getting enough sleep is a major risk factor for anxiety and depression and self-harm,” she explains. Unfortunately, all of those mental health problems have continued to rise since Twenge first sounded the alarm six years ago.
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