It's not social media, life is just worse

It has been pretty trendy for the last little while to notice that mental health problems are on the rise, and also social media use is on the rise, and so probably mental health problems are on the rise because social media is an attention sucking monster.

I have been pointing out for a while that research on the topic doesn’t seem to find any obvious connection between the two.¹ But apparently Jonathan Haidt has now complained about it in enough books to turn some kind of sanctimony corner? So lots of other people are finally writing about this too.

And they do a good job! What they don’t typically do, though, is suggest what actually might be causing the rise in mental health issues, nor, really, do they suggest many ways to address it. So I will run you through the ‘social media isn’t actually that bad’ thing then give you some other things to stress about instead.

¶The two things don’t really seem that related

You could skip this section, and just go check out Amy Orben’s group, researchers who spend most of their time looking at this exact issue. She, and they, do lots of press stuff, so you don’t need to dig through the journal articles. Or just look at this enormous meta-analysis.² If that doesn’t convince you the argument for a relationship is tentative, I don’t know what will.

But, let me spell it out anyway.

Stuart Ritchie, of Science Fictions fame, actually does the best job of explaining why the research around this sucks. To start:

Everyone who understands basic statistics knows that, for “correlation-isn’t-causation” reasons, you’re not allowed to imply that one thing causes another just because they happen at the same time. As it is, these graphs are little more than innuendo.

And:

[the study counting of, e.g. Haidt] doesn’t take into account the quality of the studies. In a world where twenty tiny, low-quality studies say X is true, and a single, large, well-designed study says not-X is true, I’d go with not-X any day. Science isn’t a democracy where one study gets one vote: sometimes a study is so bad it doesn’t get to have a say.

And:

Or at least, if they had strong, clear, results they’d allow us to say that. As we’ll see, the data from the available studies is rarely so clear-cut.

He then picks apart some of the studies to demonstrate that many, including the hallmark Facebook ones, are problematic, and the good ones are equivocal. Peter Gray talks in much more depth about the equivocal nature of the findings.³

So, there is a trend of mental health issues, particularly in young people, going up, and there is also a trend of social media use going up, but tying the two trends together is not really working. From Peter Gray:

Reviews of studies aimed at correlating time on social media with mental suffering among teens have shown mixed results with no consistent overall conclusion … Cross-nation studies fail to show a consistent relation between the widespread use of smartphones or social media and teen mental suffering.

¶Is life just worse?

As a fun and not at all alarming exercise, I just walked through the top level headings on ‘contributing factors’ in my first year psychopathology textbook from a decade ago to see which ones have gone up. Here are some other correlations for you to chew on:

• Income Inequality: Widening income inequality is a pretty well-documented trend in many countries over recent decades, and there’s certainly an empirical correlation between more income inequality and more mental health issues, usually depression and anxiety.
• Job Insecurity: There’s also a well-documented correlation between economic downturns, job insecurity, and higher rates of psychological distress and mental health disorders. This might be a stretch—go ask an economist—but trends towards gig economy employment, increased automation, and short-term contracts suggest to me something like growing job insecurity. Certainly the rate of striking in the UK over zero-hour contracts, wages, and reduction of labour hours seem like at least convenient anecdotal evidence in my favour.
• Urbanisation: More people live in cities than ever before, not just because people are moving there, but also because the populations in cities rise faster than in less urban areas. Several studies have highlighted the correlation between urban living and higher stress levels, social isolation, and mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression.
• Climate Change: Are people still doing climate change denial? Well, if so, this won’t cut much ice with you, but for the rest of us, increasing evidence points to a correlation between environmental stressors related to climate change (like natural disasters) and mental health issues, including PTSD, anxiety, and depression.
• Work Overload: There’s evidence for a correlation between increased work demands facilitated by technology and higher levels of stress, burnout, and anxiety. Productivity tech, remote work, and increased connectivity is only on the rise, as I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn as you read this in between checking your emails before bed.
• Information Overload: Some studies indicate a correlation between high levels of information exposure, particularly through digital media, and increased stress and anxiety and the internet isn’t getting any less information dense.
• Family Dynamics: While the structure of families has been changing, it’s more complex to determine a clear upward trend directly correlating with mental health issues. But certainly social isolation and single-parent households have increased. Correlational studies love to link unstable family environments to higher incidences of mental health issues, particularly in children and adolescents. I’m fairly sure researchers hate single mothers.
• Reduced Physical Activity: Heaps of studies correlate sedentary lifestyles with increased anxiety, depression, and other mental health concerns. We’ve been agonising over this since the 70’s, and it’s only getting worse.
• Expectations and Comparison: There seems to be a pretty strong correlation between societal pressures for perfectionism and increased levels of anxiety and depression, particularly in adolescents and young adults. The main theoretical angle on this is that there is an increasing trend towards social comparison, facilitated by digital technology.
• Stigma Reduction: Increasing awareness and reduction in stigma around mental health almost certainly contributes to higher reported rates due to increased recognition and diagnosis, though no one really seems to be sure to what extent this is true.
• Genetic Predispositions: Any given mental health issue has some kind of genetic component—a biological predisposition to respond maladaptively to the world. Now, genetic factors don’t really ‘increase’ over time. You’d expect them to remain relatively constant with a population. But the way we measure genetic factors is with heritability—a measure of how much of the variation in something in a population can be attributed to genetic differences among individuals in that same population at a given time. If all these other things are getting worse, then it stands to reason that our genetic predispositions to respond maladaptively might start to poke their little heads out more frequently as all these other problems are increasing.
• Substance Use: Trends in substance misuse are pretty complex, varying by region, substance, and population group. However, certain substances, with an emphasis on opioids and synthetic drugs, have seen increased misuse in recent years. There is a stark correlation between more substance misuse and higher rates of mental health problems like depression, anxiety, and psychotic disorders. I should probably point out that this isn’t always that drugs are causing the issues. Often it’s a symptom, or a coping strategy. But drug misuse surely does cause some of them, and the opioid crisis surely caused enough for everyone to be happy with this comparison.

Now, some of these are probably exacerbated by social media. Information overload is something I myself have complained about a couple of times. Reduced physical activity is almost certainly associated with screen time. And I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that much of the rise in comparison/perfectionism effects were highly influenced by social media, although research seems equivocal about that too. But that still leaves a lot of room.

Frankly, it doesn’t really seem like social media is the problem here. It just seems like life in general is getting worse.⁴

¶A rise in mental health issues isn’t entirely a bad thing

Before we start to panic, it’s worth a quick digression. We tend to read the words ‘mental health issues’ and make the assumption that this is a very bad thing. And certainly people who are struggling with their mental health because of this laundry list of societal decline are people we should be worrying about. But not all of this rise in mental health concerns is necessarily a problem.

Firstly, let’s return to the thing about stigma. Some proportion of this rise is simply us getting better at detecting mental health concerns. We’re more aware, on average. We’re more free with institutional support, on average. And so we tend to diagnose more, on average. What this almost certainly means is that we are doing more treatment on average too—or at least opening a possibility for treatment where before there was none. You can’t treat a problem that you can’t detect. This seems good!

But also, psychopathology isn’t really that straightforward to classify. There are four rough models we use to help us determine what kind of behaviour is abnormal:

• The cultural model: do the people around you think it’s weird;
• The statistical model: is it statistically rare;
• The danger model: is it likely to cause harm; and
• The distress model: is it getting in the way of you functioning normally.

The reason we have four is because none of them really capture any problem entirely. For example, something might be societally strange or statistically rare, but that doesn’t mean it’s a problem. Or, something might be fine for you, but causing harm to others.

All human behaviour comes from the need to respond to our environment, and even the stuff we like to toss off as psychopathology has some kind of basis in an environmental need. In particular, there are a great many clinicians and researchers who will point out that plenty of ‘abnormal’ behaviours are reasonable coping strategies under certain circumstances. To quote myself there:

Basically, they argue that depressive symptoms are an adaptive evolutionary response to characteristic challenges of adverse life events. They suggest that as we go through life, a number of events are likely to crop up repeatedly. We’re going to fail. We’re going to lose people we love. We’re going to have our hopes dashed. It makes sense, then, that we may have developed stereotypical responses to these common events: automatic survival mechanisms. The implication of this account is that the kind of stressful life event we have will determine what kind of sad we get. … low mood (sad-type feelings) is a motivator to “conserve resources and reconsider options”. These kinds of feelings are triggered by a loss of- or some kind of perceived threat to things that matter to us … the research … seems to show that … specific patterns of feelings are quite stable in relation to the type of situation … For example guilt, fatigue, and pessimism seem to come after we’ve failed at something. Crying and sadness seem to follow social losses (like a death in the family) … Guilt- and fatigue-type symptoms are thought to encourage us to take time to reflect more conservatively on our failure and so make us more successful in future. The crying and sadness after a loss motivate us to seek out social support and draw others to us

We might not like that people are out there experiencing negative emotions. And we probably should be looking to address all these rising correlates of negative emotions. But we should also recognise that at least some of this rise in mental health issues that we’re seeing is just the product of people’s normal coping strategies, and not a problem in and of themselves. We only actually need to deal with the problematic problems.

¶The problematic problems of social media

There’s no doubt that doomscrolling feels problematic. There’s something very unnerving about TikTok’s (or whatever’s) capacity to hold our attention. It seems pretty uncontroversial to claim that social media companies are bad. And I think it’d be pretty weird to find out that their product, social media, wasn’t causing anything. In particular, the claim that there is ‘no evidence’ for something:

is our scientific method telling us that we should accept alternative explanations. An excellent solution, unless of course, we never tested that thing in the first place, in which case our claim of no evidence has no particular meaning at all.

The number of papers on the topic of social media are almost entirely conducted on Facebook and Twitter, because these are the easiest platforms to scrape for data. As Kevin Gurney points out:

when we encounter these new media the world serves up, these new causes, we shouldn’t automatically be asking whether the effects of these new causes are the same as the old effects of the old causes. There’s simply no guarantees that old data or theories are relevant to the new world. We should instead think about what these new things are — and what they might cause.

So perhaps different kinds of social media influence different things, and our current set of research findings just aren’t capturing those because we aren’t being particularly thoughtful about what we’re looking for.

For example, a longitudinal project on adolescent wellbeing I briefly worked on published a particularly interesting overarching finding:

Users of YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat reported more body image concerns and eating pathology than non-users, but did not differ on depressive symptoms or social anxiety.

Which kind of makes sense. Maybe you wouldn’t expect depression and social anxiety from visually-based platforms. Maybe you’d expect visually-based pathologies instead. If we take our example from earlier—a rise in social comparisons, and corresponding perfectionism is associated with negative wellbeing outcomes—visual platforms are fabulous places to find opportunities to compare yourself to pretty people and find yourself wanting. But, troubling this interpretation, they also found that in the same group of kids:

those experiencing higher life satisfaction and lower internalizing symptoms perceive themselves, and are perceived by others, to be more attractive relative to those with lower life satisfaction and higher internalizing symptoms

Internalising symptoms are problems for the person (e.g. sadness/anxiety), as opposed externalising ones which are problems for others (like hyperactivity or aggression). Essentially, they went in asking the question ‘are these kids judging themselves to be less attractive, and that’s making them feel bad’? This is what we’d expect—we compare ourselves, find ourselves wanting, and feel bad about it. Instead they found that kids who feel bad judge themselves as less attractive. This is the wrong way around.

This kind of thing should make us wonder about something that very few people are talking about––there’s an important question about directionality here. Is social media use influencing our wellbeing, or is our wellbeing influencing our use of social media?

It might very well be the case that our growing societal malaise is making us seek out stimuli that make us feel better—a life less frightening. When we find sad kids using social media, maybe they’re using social media because they’re sad, not that the social media is making them sad. Maybe social media is just the most obvious manifestation of our attempts to cope with what’s going on.

Almost certainly, this wouldn’t be entirely true. Probably it’s bi-directional. Probably social media is influencing some stuff. And probably it’ll all come out in the wash. But I think it’s reasonable to assume that social media isn’t quite the demon it’s made out to be.

This isn’t all that encouraging, I suppose. If you’re a parent worrying about how much screen time to allow, or a TikTok addict worrying that you’re ruining your self-esteem online, then the current state of the research isn’t going to help you much. But, the extent to which social media is causing our behaviour rather than acting as a manifestation of it actually doesn’t always need to matter. Let me show you what I mean.

The case for social media contributing to the increasing polarisation of people is, like the rest of the social media stuff, hotly debated. Inconclusive. I myself have noted both that:

We cluster ourselves in social networks, which cluster our beliefs correspondingly. Our trust in certain sources of information is then narrowed to those in those circles—the ones that make us feel understood and seen. As a net bonus, we get consistency in the worldview we are exposed to, which is nice and increasingly necessary in an increasingly fractured society. And since adopting that worldview better integrates us into our community, we adopt them and make that identity our identity … The attractor state that comes with the ideas floating around the people you associate with. It’s much easier to adopt them than to think too hard about them.

But also that:

perhaps we’ll be even less likely to fall for minsinformation, on average. So take, for example inoculation theory: a theory from the 60s around how beliefs can be made resistant to persuasion. It’s seeing an incredible resurgence of interest now as the prevailing lens for exactly this kind of issue. Just like disease inoculations, the idea is that weak counter-arguments to our beliefs make our beliefs stronger in the face of stronger counterarguments. We could think about email scams like this (and social scientists have). We have a set of beliefs about scammy emails (e.g. Nigerian Princes with money troubles). We see a pretty high volume of shitty email scams, which makes us more resistant to more convincing email scams. Following the logic, it seems likely that the only people who fall for [misinformation] will eventually be the same people that fall for email scams now.

We will almost certainly be exposed to opportunities to sink ourselves into comfortable, or manufactured bubbles. But, equally, the internet (as I pointed out before) is a torrent of different kinds of information. It’s one of its main flaws, but it also exposes us to the opportunity to become increasingly weird and heterogeneous. Many researchers are dumbfounded by the sheer number and variety of online communities and interests.

Both options are available to us. The same is probably true of any other interaction between social media and our predispositions to behave. As far as anyone can tell thus far, it’s not up to social media to shape you, it’s up to you to shape social media.

Special thanks to Elena Zevgolatakou for sparking the train of thought that inspired me to finally write this one.