Youth mental health metrics show 2010-2015 inflection in anxiety and suicide rates

Paul Bloom's post at smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net contrasts objective gains in safety and parental time since the 1980s with post-2010 rises in isolation, anxiety, and suicide. Bloom cites fabricated 1980s lists of generational complaints and Pinker's Enlightenment Now to argue that despair is perennial, yet he reproduces Haidt's graphs showing the 2010-2015 acceleration in 10-14 suicide rates from 1.5 to 2.8 per 100,000. The post underweights the specificity of the timing relative to smartphone penetration crossing 80% and daily social media use exceeding two hours among teens.

Haidt's The Anxious Generation assembles Twenge's Monitoring the Future surveys and CDC mortality files to isolate the inflection. Pre-2010 trends were flat or declining; post-2015, emergency department visits for self-harm among adolescent girls rose 189% by 2019. Bloom correctly notes that earlier decades also featured moral panics, but the current data set includes objective behavioral measures such as reduced sleep and face-to-face interaction that align with device adoption curves rather than economic or policy shifts.

Operationally, the pattern implies that schools and regulators treating phone access as a controllable variable can test causality. States enacting classroom phone restrictions after 2023 now provide natural experiments against districts without such rules. Bloom's historical framing correctly cautions against overgeneralizing decline, yet it leaves the narrow 2010-2015 window and its device correlation unexamined.