The New Yorker:

We know that social media is bad for young people, who need more time—and freedom—offline. But the collective will to fix this problem is hard to find.

By Jessica Winter

The exact causes of the Gen Z mental-health emergency will be parsed for years to come, but the severity of the crisis itself is, at this point, beyond question. Members of Gen Z, who were born between the mid-to-late nineties and the early twenty-tens, tend to be lonelier than the members of previous generations. They are more anxious and depressed; they get less sleep. They more commonly think that their lives hold no meaning. They are more likely to harm themselves or experience suicidal ideation. (Suicide deaths among children ages ten to fourteen more than doubled between 2007 and 2017.) They are more wary of, or just less interested in, the things that were once milestones of freedom: drinking, dating, having sex, getting driver’s licenses, moving out of their parents’ houses.

“On average,” the social psychologist and N.Y.U. professor Jonathan Haidt writes in “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” “people born in and after 1996 were different, psychologically, from those who had been born just a few years earlier.” From childhood, Haidt suggests, they suffer from a weak “psychological immune system—the ability of a child to handle, process, and get past frustrations, minor accidents, teasing, exclusion, perceived injustices, and normal conflicts without falling prey to hours or days of inner turmoil.” This immunosuppression persists into adolescence and beyond, fostering higher proportions of nervous, avoidant young adults.

Go to link