Social Media, Therapy, And The Future Of Human Capital
Jonathan Haidt and Abigail Shrier's new books document how the twin addictions of social media and therapy are crippling the mental health, cognition and resilience of younger generations.
Marco Annunziata - Jun 29, 2024
This article is republished from Just Think with permission from Marco Annunziata.
In my previous blog I noted that even though discussions of productivity tend to focus on technology and innovation, human capital plays an even more important role. And the future of human capital does not look bright.
I have already shown how the latest OECD PISA report documents a drop in education outcomes. Even more alarming is the decline in the mental health, cognitive abilities and resilience of younger generations, highlighted by two recent books: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, and Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier.
Anxious, depressed, unhappy
The data are depressingly clear: they show, in Haidt’s words, “A synchronized international increase in rates of adolescent anxiety and depression” starting between 2010 and 2015, accompanied by climbing adolescent suicide rates. A sudden sharp spike, not a gradual gentle rise.
According to the World Happiness Report, since 2006-2010 in North America young people’s happiness has declined so steeply that they are now less happy than adults and the elderly. (This is a remarkable reversal of a long-standing global regularity: the normally observed pattern is for happiness to be high when we’re young, drop with middle age, and rise again as we get blissfully older.) Happiness among young people has dropped in Western Europe as well. At a global level, the report shows lower happiness for people born after 1980.
Blame smartphones and social media
Jonathan Haidt lays the blame squarely on smartphones and social media. He argues that once social media have become accessible always and everywhere on smartphones and tablets, they have proved as addictive as drugs, causing sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and social isolation. This has driven a spike in anxiety and depression which coincides exactly with the wide adoption of smartphones and social media.
Haidt highlights a paradox: starting in the 1990s, we have become overly protective of kids in the real world, to the point that it’s now rare for kids to walk to school by themselves, or to play outside without constant adult supervision. At the same time we have allowed them unfettered and unprotected access to the virtual world, ignoring the risks they face online. Governments have failed us on both counts, argues Haidt: they have done next to nothing to protect kids online, while “literally criminalizing the play-based childhood that was the norm before the 1990s” through various “neglect laws,” he says.
As a consequence, the virtual world has rapidly replaced the real world, depriving children and adolescents of opportunities for play and physical interactions. Studies have shown that the constant presence of smartphones can sabotage human interactions even when we spend time face to face. Lost in their virtual worlds, kids fail to develop the emotional intelligence crucial to interpersonal relations, and find it much harder to pay attention in school and concentrate on studies.
Haidt concludes:
The Great Rewiring of Childhood, in which the phone-based childhood replaced the play-based childhood, is the major cause of the international epidemic of adolescent mental illness.”
Big tech companies are the biggest culprit. Haidt quotes plenty of evidence (see for example “the Facebook files”) that tech and social media companies have deliberately exploited adolescents’ psychological vulnerability with increasingly addictive features — from the ubiquitous “like” button to the TikTok-style hyper-short videos. These companies’ advertising-driven business model pushes them to monopolize our conscious attention, and what better way than to hook young people when they are most defenseless and impressionable?
Blame therapists and counsellors
Abigail Shrier lays the blame squarely on therapists, counsellors and teachers. There are important and telling similarities with Haidt’s stories.
Haidt notes how the previously normal play-based childhood has been curtailed and criminalized. Shrier highlights how previously normal kids’ behaviors (like getting distracted or throwing the occasional temper tantrum) have been systematically labeled as pathologies to be addressed with therapy and drugs.
Haidt underscores how the revenue model of social media companies pushes them to turn young people into digital addicts. Shrier points out that psychologists, therapists and assorted counsellors have a powerful economic incentive to claim every single kid as a forever-patient/client. As she pithily puts it:
No industry refuses the prospect of exponential growth, and mental health experts are no exception.
There is an important difference in emphasis, however. Haidt argues that the ubiquitous diffusion of smartphones and social media is the most compelling explanation for a youth mental health crisis that has exploded simultaneously across different geographies and cultures. Shrier by contrast claims that the youth mental health crisis predates the diffusion of smartphones — though she agrees that smart devices and social media have played a major role.
Bad Therapy provides a damning and compelling criticism of the mental health industry. Shrier kicks off by highlighting that abundant evidence shows therapy is often useless and can easily cause damage in adults and even more so in children.
Shrier notes that therapists have a powerful vested interest to over-diagnose, coming up with an ever-growing list of pathologies that qualify for treatment. In line with this, mental health experts now seem to believe that the majority of US kids have mental issues, to be cured with therapy and drugs. And therapy never really seems to cure the patient — it becomes a permanent crutch.
Subscription-addiction
Just like social media, therapy becomes an addiction, driven by powerful economic incentives. This fits a broader pattern in the modern economy, where the subscription model has become widespread and the ideal customer is an addicted one.
Shrier notes that in the US since 1986 mental health expenditures have doubled nearly every decade. Yet, even as treatment has become more widely available, more sophisticated and better funded, adolescent anxiety and depression have ballooned — whereas in other cases like breast cancer and child mortality the increased availability of diagnosis and treatment has caused morbidity rates to fall.
As further evidence of the mental health industry’s bad faith, Shrier notes that none of the professional associations of therapists and psychologists ever issued warnings against the use of smartphones and social media — in fact if anything they seem to have encouraged it. Similarly, they never issued any warning on the predictable damage kids would suffer from ill-advised pandemic school closures.
A central point of Bad Therapy is how schools and therapists have hijacked the raising of children. This has been partly enabled by parents who have come to doubt their ability to raise their children without the ever-present advice of an “expert.” But schools and mental health experts have made a conscious and structured effort to sideline parents, even arguing that the parents might themselves constitute a threat to the mental well-being of the child.
The book offers a shocking litany of examples of school counsellors, therapists and doctors asking young children leading questions that seem designed to elicit the confession of some mental health problem even when no telltale signs have been detected — and without the parents’ knowledge and consent. The book opens with an example of her own, where having taken her son to the hospital for a stomachache, she is asked to leave the room so that a nurse can ask the twelve-year old a series of scripted questions on whether he has recently wished he was dead, thought his family would be better off if he were dead, ever tried to kill himself or thought about it, or is thinking about killing himself now.
This is perhaps the most disturbing insight of Bad Therapy — and one that offers a further parallel with The Anxious Generation. Governments and public health authorities in the US (and some other countries like the UK) have deployed a structured strategy to place children and adolescents at the merci of therapists — just like they have criminalized the once normal play-based childhood. The CDC ranks high on the list of culprits (surprise, surprise…).
Call to action - or call in the robots…
These two books together represent an urgent call to action — and both include concrete recommendations. Haidt proposes four key priorities: no smartphones to kids before they start high school; no social media before they turn sixteen; no phones in schools; and far more unsupervised play and independence for kids in the physical world. Shrier urges parents to take back control of their children’s upbringing, wrestling it away from therapists and counsellors. Raising kids, she says, is about instilling values and building character. That’s something parents should do, and schools should focus again on their primary mission: to teach. Whether you have children or not, if you care about the future, these are two very important books you should have on your reading list.
We are undermining the mental well-being and cognitive potential of new generations, as well as their ability to become fully functional members of society. Unless we reverse this trend, the destructive impact on human capital could negate any productivity benefits from technological innovations.
Or we can just hope that AI and robots will take over.