National Academies Misinformation Undermines Concerns about Adolescent Mental Health

The Committee on the Impact of Social Media on Adolescent Health is spreading troubling misinformation in its effort to question the severity of adolescent mental health deterioration.

The treatment of adolescent mental health trends in the recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine titled Social Media and Adolescent Health raises doubts about the methodology, impartiality and priorities of the Committee on the Impact of Social Media on Adolescent Health.

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Overview of Problems

National Academies created a Committee on the Impact of Social Media on Adolescent Health amid concerns over the deterioration of adolescent mental health — such as the doubling of adolescent suicide and depression rates (and outright quadrupling of suicide among girls aged 10-14).¹

Unfortunately there are serious problems with the way the committee treats concerns about adolescent mental health in its report Social Media and Adolescent Health:

• The committee states that public perception has created a corporate crisis for the tech industry but adopts an adversary stance towards the notion that there is an adolescent mental health crisis.

• The committee characterizes youth suicide increases as a ‘spike’ when in reality it is a massive wave composed of a decade-long climb plus at least a seven-year long crest at doubled rates of suicide.

• The committee refers to the rise as ‘apparent’ — thus implying without justification that there are credible reasons to doubt the evidence of increases.

• The committee announces that there is ‘confusion’ regarding the notion of a crisis in adolescent mental health — as if psychologists who deem the current situation to be a crisis were somehow incompetent.

• The committee falsely implies there is a widespread disagreement among psychologists over the notion of an adolescent mental health crisis — and yet fails to point out a single psychologist who questions there is a crisis.

• While undermining the notion that there is an adolescent mental health crisis, the committee omits crucial information about relevant trends, such as the 150% increase in adolescent depression.²

• The committee promotes a counterfactual ‘long-term cyclicality’ theory of adolescent suicide and absurdly declares a false dichotomy between ‘cyclicality’ and 'crisis’.

• The committee portrays youth suicide rises as unremarkable in view of adult trends but withholds crucial facts such as that it took adult suicide two decades to rise by one third while adolescent suicide more than doubled within a 10 years.

• The committee misuses citations to suggest that its own agendas, such as questioning the adolescent crisis, are those of the cited scholars when in reality they are not.

• The committee attacks ‘recent explanations’ of recent (!) phenomena in a manner that verges on pseudoscience.

• The committee insinuates that biased psychologists raise unfounded alarms over adolescent mental health trends in order to unfairly blame social media.

• A key piece of evidence displayed prominently in the report to justify its adversary stance toward the notion of a crisis is Figure 1-4 — a graph in which recent rates of youth suicide are colossally miscalculated:

  

  That graph should in reality should look like this:³

  

  Graph created by David Stein based on CDC WONDER data

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Consensus Study

It is crucial to understand that the report is a consensus study — it is supposed to represent the views of National Academies, not just the views of a few key members of some committee:

For assertions to be evidence-based consensus they must be sufficiently precise and unambiguous and be supported by available evidence.

Yet consider this key section of the Introduction (page 19):

The text above is densely packed with with misinformation, misrepresentation, and misdirection; it is also at times nebulous and outright illogical.

Imagine a National Academies report declares that the opioids overdose epidemic is more an example of ‘long-term cyclicality’ than of a health crisis and supports this with a graph that massively undercounts recent overdose deaths.

Public reaction would be derision and outrage.

Imagine that a Committee on the Impact of Corporate Marketing on Opioid Addiction implies early in the Introduction of its report that it is a mistake to focus on the most obvious and ‘recent’ (!) explanations of the epidemic and gives pain pills marketing as the sole example of such a supposedly mistaken focus.

Public reaction would be derision and outrage.

Or imagine that violence against minors has doubled with murder and rape of girls aged 10-14 quadrupling; and yet a National Academies committee declares that these trends are more an example of ‘long-term cyclicality’ than of a crime crisis and supports this with a graph that severely miscalculates recent rates of violence against minors.

The National Academies would be excoriated across the political spectrum, be it by leftist feminists or by law-and-order conservatives.

The sad truth is that some passages, like the one on page 19, read as if they were written and inserted into the report by a corporate PR department trying to defend the social media industry.

As to the committee, how is it possible that ‘Each report has been subjected to a rigorous and independent peer-review process’ and yet the committee published an egregiously erroneous graph that would have been recognized as massively wrong by anyone familiar with youth suicide trends?

Did really everyone on the committee approve Figure 1-4, which conveniently yet falsely supported its questioning of a crisis? Did no one on the committee get familiar with rudimentary facts about teen suicide trends even though rises in adolescent suicide constituted a major impetus behind the formation of this very committee? Did anyone on the committee truly care about youth suicide?

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A Series of Critiques

In the upcoming days, I will post a series of critiques about the Social Media and Adolescent Health report.⁴

The working titles are as follows:

Manufacturing Dissent: How a National Academies Report Misrepresents Consensus on the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis as Chaotic Discord

Counterfactual Cyclicality: How a National Academies Report Promotes Misinformation on Youth Suicide Trends

Dense Nonsense: How a National Academies Report Relies on Fuzzy and Illogical Arguments to Defend Corporate Interests

Risk Censorship: How the Committee on the Impact of Social Media on Adolescent Health Omits and Distorts Crucial Facts about Links to Harms

Note that the intent of this series of critiques will not be to argue that social media is (or is not) a major culprit behind the deterioration of adolescent mental health. The intent of the series will be simply to show how the National Academies Report undermines both adolescents and science in ways that serve to protect corporate interests.

We need solid science to understand and improve the mental health of adolescents and we need stern criticism when major scientific institutions fail in their mission.

1. See Youth Suicide Rise for details.

2. See Adolescent Depression: Is There Really a Crisis? for details.

3. See Etiology of a Graph Fiasco: How Grievous Misinformation about Adolescent Suicide Spread to the National Academies Press for the origins of the graph.

4. I will ask the project director at National Academies to notify members of the committee about this post, and I will of course update readers if I receive a comment from any member. I may be a harsh critic but I strive to be fair and to allow responses and encourage dialogue.