Adam Omary is a psychologist and research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.
As a member of Gen Z, I have studied the effects of social media on adolescent mental health from a perspective most psychology researchers lack: I grew up under its influence.
Between ages 12 and 17, I was obese, socially isolated and addicted to the fantasy video game RuneScape. I was home-schooled, lived with just my mother and rarely went outside. I logged over 10,000 hours in that game alone, nearly a third of my waking life during those years.
That doesn’t include countless additional hours I spent on other video games, television and, of course, social media. I made friends through online chatrooms and pen pal websites because I had none in real life. I averaged well over 10 hours a day on devices.
If ever there were a case study for the claim that screens destroy young minds, I would seem to fit it. And yet here I am as a 26-year-old developmental psychologist with a doctorate from Harvard. I am in good mental and physical health, with deep friendships online and off.
Maybe I’m the exception. Or maybe the harms are overblown.
Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book “The Anxious Generation” argues that smartphones and social media have “rewired” childhood and caused an epidemic of mental illness. The book has helped inspire social media restrictions in Australia and several American states, and shaped how a generation of parents thinks about technology.
Restricting screen time and social media access are reasonable aspirations for child-rearing. But as a matter of public policy, the case for regulation rests on a scientific foundation far weaker than its proponents claim.
Haidt’s argument relies on the observation that adolescent mental health indicators worsened around 2010, when smartphones and social media apps popular with young people — such as Instagram and Snapchat — started becoming widespread. But correlation is not causation, and research suggests that some of the supposed mental health crisis is an epidemic of overdiagnosis. Wealthy Western democracies with the highest smartphone adoption rates have also seen expanded access to psychiatric services and a cultural shift toward identifying and labeling psychological distress, as Abigail Shrier argues in her 2024 book “Bad Therapy.”
Meanwhile, youth have been doing better on many other outcomes: less crime, less smoking, less drug use, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer high school dropouts. If social media were truly “rewiring” the adolescent brain, we would expect the damage to be more consistent than a selective worsening on some measures and improvement on others.
Many studies have reported on how social media use is associated with mental health problems among the young. However, a 2024 analysis in JAMA Pediatrics of 143 studies featuring data from over 1 million adolescents worldwide found that links between social media use and poor mental health among youth were small, inconsistent across studies and drawn mostly from nonclinical community samples.
One reason studies report mixed findings is because many fail to account for factors such as personality traits and social support that independently predict heavy screen use and mental distress. For example, social media use may be associated with anxiety and loneliness, not because it causes them, but because socially anxious individuals are more likely to seek out connections online. Statistically controlling for such factors often accounts for the relationship between social media and mental health.
I am not dismissing the possibility that some children are harmed by some content in some contexts. Many in my generation have had online exposure to graphic, violent and sexual imagery that no child should encounter. But the blanket claim that social media use drives generational mental illness does not align with the evidence.
Screens didn’t cause my problems. They were coping mechanisms for preexisting problems: loneliness, family instability, social anxiety, an absent father. The variables that predict youth mental health are not hours spent on social media but social support, resilience and a sense of belonging. To help struggling adolescents, the evidence points toward strengthening those capacities, not confiscating phones.
During my most isolated years, online connections were the only positive relationships I had. Internet forums helped me navigate college applications and taught me about calorie-counting, which sparked a weight-loss journey that changed my life. Even in RuneScape, I built discipline and goal-setting habits that I later transferred to academics and research.
Concerns about social media are well-intentioned. But sincerity is not proof. The dramatic assertions that children’s lives would be transformed by reducing social media exposure are more akin to moral panics over past technologies and obsessions — from radio to comic books to video games — fueled by weak social science and strong public emotion. In the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, youth mental health has been improving recently, despite no change in access to social media. The simplest explanation might be that social media is not as harmful as people think.
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