There is an innate conservatism about the Torah world that helps us fight the lure of the new
American adolescents are experiencing a mental health crisis, with teen girls the worst hit. Since 2012, there has been a dramatic rise in depression, suicidal ideation, and self-harm, primarily among teenage girls. Thirty percent of American teenage girls reported contemplating suicide in 2021, a more than 50% increase since 2000.
Jean Twenge, a professor of social psychology and chronicler of generational changes in emotional well-being, was among the first to attribute those trends to smartphones, in a seminal 2017 Atlantic article, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”
Beginning in 2012, she began to notice abrupt changes in teen behaviors and emotional states, unlike anything she had previously encountered in 25 years of charting generational change. In 2015 (the last year of full statistics at the time she first wrote about smartphones in 2017), three times as many adolescent girls and twice as many boys took their lives as in 2007.
What happened in 2012? For one thing, Facebook acquired Instagram, a visual messaging platform. Second, smartphone cameras became front-facing, which made it possible to take and post the now ubiquitous selfies. In short order, smartphone use exploded and the age of first use plummeted.
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