Jean Twenge offers good insights into parental drug abuse matters but does not fully invalidate the plausibility of substantial impacts on adolescent mental health.
David Stein raises good points and makes big mistakes. The worst: “Do any credible psychologists assert that overdose increases caused orders of magnitude larger increases in depression? Twenge easily disposes of the question posed by herself with Figure 1, designed to illustrate the massive gap between the frequencies of overdoses and depression.”
That’s wrong. Twenge’s oranges-apples method error comparing general self-reported attitudes versus specified vital statistics deaths is obvious. For overdose frequency, she cites only fatal overdoses afflicting parents – an arbitrarily small numerator. Why doesn’t she cite the 5.3 million drug-related hospital ER cases in 2022 among ages 26-64 that SAMHSA estimated? Wouldn’t that massive, rising number (tripling since 2010) depress more teens?
Or, what about the 25% of teens, some 10 million, estimated to live with a drug/alcohol-abusing parent? Or soaring drug/alcohol abuse by non-parent grownups who strongly affects teens – like parents’ partners, other household adults, close relatives, teachers, coaches, etc.?
As Stein points out (very important), adult and teen suicide trends need not precisely coincide for adult trends to influence teen trends. From 2000 to 2012, crucial growing-up years for Gen Z, age-30-59 suicides surged from 16,000 to 23,000 per year, and drug overdose deaths leaped from 13,000 to 30,000. Yet, no one mentions that.
If we adopt Twenge’s logic, “teen suicide” is too trivial even to think about. Of 10 million girls ages 10-14, just 240 committed suicide in the worst year, 0.000024 by proportion, far below older ages’ rates. How, then, could any credible psychologist assert that young girls’ below-negligible suicide is of any importance? (And if it is, why are the 2,500 to 3,000 annual suicides in each of Haidt’s, Stein’s, Murtha's, and my older-male cohorts ignored?)
Of course, deaths can be measurable iceberg-tips of larger crises, like middle-aged drug abuse levels 100 to 200 times more widespread – and affecting massively more teens – than just overdose fatalities.
Twenge and Haidt admit social-media screen time’s raw correlation with girls’ depression is small (r-value of 0.10 to 0.15 at most). That means social media is associated with just 1% to 2% (R-squared value) of girls’ depression and zero effect on girls’ suicide – too trivial to bother with, and certainly no cause of the 12-point increase in teen depression. Yet, in this case, Twenge argues for legislative obsession with tiny effects.
Further, why do Twenge, Haidt, et al even care – amid today’s mammoth drug crisis most afflicting millions of middle agers – that middle-agers check boxes on pencil-and-paper surveys declaring they feel just fine mentally and don’t do drugs? Mental illness and addiction are deeply stigmatized in American culture. Twenge knows that.
We don’t even know what teens mean by “depression.” We never ask them, despite serious contradictions. Liberal teens must mean something different by their greater “depression” than conservatives, as manifest by the much higher teen suicide rates and worse teen suicide trends in conservative America (Republican-voting counties in Republican-run states) than in liberal America (Democrat-voting counties in Democrat-run states) even after race and gender are controlled.
Frequently online teens report more depression but less suicide and self-harm than do teens who are rarely/never online – which makes the anti-social-media crusade hyping “teen suicide” downright fraudulent.
David Stein raises good points and makes big mistakes. The worst: “Do any credible psychologists assert that overdose increases caused orders of magnitude larger increases in depression? Twenge easily disposes of the question posed by herself with Figure 1, designed to illustrate the massive gap between the frequencies of overdoses and depression.”
That’s wrong. Twenge’s oranges-apples method error comparing general self-reported attitudes versus specified vital statistics deaths is obvious. For overdose frequency, she cites only fatal overdoses afflicting parents – an arbitrarily small numerator. Why doesn’t she cite the 5.3 million drug-related hospital ER cases in 2022 among ages 26-64 that SAMHSA estimated? Wouldn’t that massive, rising number (tripling since 2010) depress more teens?
Or, what about the 25% of teens, some 10 million, estimated to live with a drug/alcohol-abusing parent? Or soaring drug/alcohol abuse by non-parent grownups who strongly affects teens – like parents’ partners, other household adults, close relatives, teachers, coaches, etc.?
As Stein points out (very important), adult and teen suicide trends need not precisely coincide for adult trends to influence teen trends. From 2000 to 2012, crucial growing-up years for Gen Z, age-30-59 suicides surged from 16,000 to 23,000 per year, and drug overdose deaths leaped from 13,000 to 30,000. Yet, no one mentions that.
If we adopt Twenge’s logic, “teen suicide” is too trivial even to think about. Of 10 million girls ages 10-14, just 240 committed suicide in the worst year, 0.000024 by proportion, far below older ages’ rates. How, then, could any credible psychologist assert that young girls’ below-negligible suicide is of any importance? (And if it is, why are the 2,500 to 3,000 annual suicides in each of Haidt’s, Stein’s, Murtha's, and my older-male cohorts ignored?)
Of course, deaths can be measurable iceberg-tips of larger crises, like middle-aged drug abuse levels 100 to 200 times more widespread – and affecting massively more teens – than just overdose fatalities.
Twenge and Haidt admit social-media screen time’s raw correlation with girls’ depression is small (r-value of 0.10 to 0.15 at most). That means social media is associated with just 1% to 2% (R-squared value) of girls’ depression and zero effect on girls’ suicide – too trivial to bother with, and certainly no cause of the 12-point increase in teen depression. Yet, in this case, Twenge argues for legislative obsession with tiny effects.
Further, why do Twenge, Haidt, et al even care – amid today’s mammoth drug crisis most afflicting millions of middle agers – that middle-agers check boxes on pencil-and-paper surveys declaring they feel just fine mentally and don’t do drugs? Mental illness and addiction are deeply stigmatized in American culture. Twenge knows that.
We don’t even know what teens mean by “depression.” We never ask them, despite serious contradictions. Liberal teens must mean something different by their greater “depression” than conservatives, as manifest by the much higher teen suicide rates and worse teen suicide trends in conservative America (Republican-voting counties in Republican-run states) than in liberal America (Democrat-voting counties in Democrat-run states) even after race and gender are controlled.
Frequently online teens report more depression but less suicide and self-harm than do teens who are rarely/never online – which makes the anti-social-media crusade hyping “teen suicide” downright fraudulent.
I appreciate Jean Twenge exploring some troublesome areas, but devastating contradictions require much more explanation. If interested in my larger critique, see: https://mikemales.substack.com/p/how-jean-twenge-et-al-get-the-middle