Surgeon General Vivek Murthy acknowledged (buried in a 2022 report) that “76% of LGBTQ+ high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness and 74% reported emotional abuse by a parent, compared with 37% and 50% of heterosexual students, respectively.”
That’s not “acceptance;” it’s an incredible level of abuse and official dereliction in confronting it, associated with terrible outcomes. Of the LGBQ youth (transgender youth weren’t separated) who told the CDC survey they were often violently and/or emotionally abused by parents and household adults, 90% reported persistent sadness, 70% considered suicide, 42% attempted suicide, and 15% were medically treated for self harm.
Now, here’s the astounding puzzle the 7,000-subject CDC survey (the only one that asked such comprehensive questions) revealed. Both the 300+ teens who report rarely or never using screens and the 3,300+ who are online 5+ hours a day report fascinating, seemingly contradictory results, consistent for both sexes, all ages, and gay/bi or straight.
For LGBQ teens, compared to those who never/rarely go online, those who spend the most time in front of screens (5+ hours per day) are:
• MORE likely to report poor mental health (57% vs 45%), persistent sadness (76% vs 61%), and considering suicide (48% to 42%).
• LESS likely to report actually attempting suicide (22% vs 39%) or self-harming (5% vs 9%).
• LESS likely to report being victimized at school (8% vs 27%), raped (17% vs 44%), getting in fights (18% vs 30%), missing school due to fear (15% vs 33%), being physically inactive (33% vs 64%), getting less than 6 hours of sleep per night (41% vs 56%), and other major risks.
In short, Jean Twenge, Jonathan Haidt, Vivek Murthy, and others wrongly assume that because teens who are online a lot also report being more depressed and sad, therefore, online teens must also be more suicidal, self-harming, sleepless, and otherwise endangered.
That might seem like a logical assumption – but it is dramatically contradicted by CDC survey and direct vital statistics data as well as mounting longer-term research.
In fact, the safest LGBQ and straight teens are those who are online (3-4 hours a day on average seems the ideal), even though they report more sadness and depression. In contrast, the teens most at risk of actual harm are those who are not online, even though they report less depression.
This huge paradox parallels others. For example, liberal teens self-report the most depression, but teens in conservative areas suffer much higher actual suicide rates that rise along with conservative political dominance.
Another complication could help explain these paradoxes: LGBQ teens who use screens the most are also much more likely to be abused by parents (39% vs 18%), a pattern also found for straight teens. Or, stated in reverse (correlations can be both backward and forward), teens who are abused by grownups are the most likely to be online a lot.
We don’t know whether grownups abuse teens more today (one would hope the very high levels of abuse teens, especially girls and LGBQs, reported in 2021 were not the norm), but we do know that 25-64-age grownups’ deadly and injurious abuse of alcohol and illicit drugs has skyrocketed to many millions of annual cases during exactly the period teens reported becoming more depressed.
It's years past time for those who blame social media for teen problems to stop ignoring and denying-by-nitpicking these glaring contradictions. We don’t understand the diverse array of things that teens mean by “poor mental health,” “depression,” “sadness,” or “unhappiness.” We are asking the wrong questions, poorly specifying variables, then drawing simplistic conclusions reinforced by some low-association “experiments” and “studies” that fixate on social media as if it were the only factor affecting teens’ behaviors rather than a relatively minor one.
