Remember the Twitter "ER doctors" who claimed hordes of patients were dying daily of COVID? They were fake…
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Source: Evie
Social Media Is Destroying An Entire Generation Of Kids
By Freya India | April 30, 2021
What are your memories of being 12? Hanging out with your friends, playing sports in the park, dreaming of finally getting older?
For a rising number of Gen Z teens and pre-teens today, their memories will be eerily different. They will be of sitting alone indoors, of soaring screen times, and increasingly, of self-harm and suicidal thoughts.
Gen Z's Mental Health
In recent years, rates of anxiety disorders, depression, and suicide have been rising drastically among teenagers and pre-teens — far beyond the levels of Millennials.
For example, in 2017, one in five girls in the U.S. aged between 12 and 17 suffered at "least one major depressive episode." In America, the suicide rate has risen 34% for teenage boys (as of 2016, compared to the average rate from 2006-2010). For girls, it's risen by a shocking 82%. For the first time in 24 years, in 2011, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.
In the U.S., the suicide rate has risen 34% for teenage boys and 82% for teenage girls.We see similar patterns in the U.K. Here, 1 in 4 girls is clinically depressed by the time they’re 14. The suicide rate for young boys in the U.K. has risen 17% through to 2017, while the rate for girls has increased by 46%.
Coronavirus and the impact of restrictions have no doubt worsened the problem. For instance, from April to October 2020 there was a 24% increase in the number of mental health emergency visits (including suicide attempts) for children ages 5 to 11 in the U.S., and a 31% rise for those aged between 12 and 17.
But, suicidal thoughts in young kids were already on the rise before the pandemic began. For example, the number of children aged between 6 and 12 visiting children's hospitals in the U.S. for suicidal thoughts or self-harm has more than doubled since 2016. Even before the pandemic hit, from 2009 to 2017, rates of depression increased by more than 60% among kids ages 14 to 17.
Aren't Teens Always Miserable?
Dark topics like depression and suicide are often enticing to vulnerable young minds. But today's teens (and increasingly kids) aren't just interested in gloomy topics and gothic music — they're increasingly physically harming themselves, contemplating and committing suicide. For instance, while less than 1% of over-75s have ever self-harmed, 12% of Millennials have done so and one in four Gen Z girls.
Heavy social media usage for young girls is correlated more strongly with anxiety and depression than heroin use.Across 46 children's hospitals across America, the Children's Hospital Association documented "5,485 emergency room inpatient visits for suicidal thoughts and self-harm among 6- to-12-year-olds at these hospitals since 2019, up from 2,555 in 2016." Although the full statistics aren't available yet for 2020, in the first three quarters of the year there were already 3,503 such visits.
The number of visits for teenagers with suicidal thoughts or who had self-harmed also rose from 2016 to 2019 by 44%, compared with a 115% rise for younger children.
Looking at the figures for self-harm and suicide, this clearly isn't just down to Gen Z's greater willingness to talk about their mental health problems, nor just ordinary teenage anguish. Something has clearly shifted.
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