Top all-time · #1279
Jonathan Haidt
Personal blog · jonathanhaidt.substack.comculturehealthother
Jonathan Haidt writes After Babel, a personal blog at jonathanhaidt.substack.com about culture and health. Since 2023, 58 different Hacker News readers have linked it 102 times, most often “Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-13, and you can follow it by feed.
A free weekly newsletter where Jon Haidt and his team make sense of how technology is reshaping society — and offer practical guidance on how we can respond. Click to read After Babel, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls22 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2023-02-22
- Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-03-09
- The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 20126 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-02-08
- Why Some Researchers Think I’m Wrong About Social Media and Mental Illness4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-04-19
- Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-05-15
- The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Is International, Part 1: The Anglosphere3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-03-29
- 13 Other Explanations for Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None Them Work3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-10-24
- The new CDC report shows that Covid added little to teen mental health trends2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-02-16
- /2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-04-08
- The Case for Phone-Free Schools2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-06-07
What Hacker News says?
The kid's mental health improved when she gave up her phone. So there is that and also some research that justifies the causation [1]. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
Comment linking /p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic
on “Taking away iPhone made daughter a better person”Submitted Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls as a story · 167 points
HN discussionan earlier newsletter shows this distressing graph of teen suicides and, shocker, boys are doing terribly, a suicide rate at least three times more than girls, but the author seems to find the 34% delta less distressing. the data is unsettling, but the author doesn't remotely confront the question about why 2017 is a post-2010 maxima for both boys and girls. (which would probably change the boys delta to at least 60…
Comment linking /i/101249738/increases-in-suicide
on “Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls”Submitted Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health as a story · 61 points
HN discussionThe author discussed suicide in his previous article [1], also discussed here on HN [2]. Boys succeed more often than girls due to choice of method but hospitalizations for self harm in general are far more prevalent among girls. See section four and five as well as his collaborative doc. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707734
Comment linking /p/the-teen-mental-illness-epidemic
on “Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls”Submitted Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest as a story · 16 points
HN discussion> It's not one society, it's every society in which smartphones and social media are available. It's simply implausible to suggest that every society on Earth nearly simultaneously became more anxiogenic for no common reason. The common reason very clearly seems to be social media. It does not make sense: social media, and even more smartphones, can be used in a lot of different ways, and is strongly liked to social…
Comment linking /p/why-some-researchers-th
on “Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health”Submitted The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Is International, Part 1: The Anglosphere as a story · 9 points
HN discussion> Again, there are a lot of identically possible explanation: the whole society has changed and became globally more anxiogenic It's not one society, it's every society in which smartphones and social media are available. It's simply implausible to suggest that every society on Earth nearly simultaneously became more anxiogenic for no common reason. The common reason very clearly seems to be social media. > the meas…
Comment linking /p/why-some-researchers-think-im-wrong
on “Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health”Submitted Academic Pressure Cannot Explain the Mental Illness Epidemic as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI commented this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating because actually reading the author's arguments (granted, in other writings, not OP) will allow you to see he's considered this point and is will to accept that causation works the other way around. It's a fair point. But what explains the uptick in depression and mental health issues starting around 2012, disproportionately impacting pre-teen girls and not contai…
Comment linking /p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic
on “Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health”Submitted The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe author, Jonathan Haidt, has considered the global financial crisis but doesn't believe it explains the data [1], he writes "It’s not because of the Global Financial Crisis. Why would that hit younger teen girls hardest? Why would teen mental illness rise throughout the 2010s as the American economy got better and better? Why did a measure of loneliness at school go up around the world only after 2012, as the glo…
Comment linking /p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic
on “Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health”Submitted A Zoomer explains her generation's malaise to older generations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionTo those who dismiss with "correlation is not causation", you should share with them Haidt's in-depth article showing multiple experimental studies regarding social media and mental health, and how more social media use causes lower mental health: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill... Key paragraph is: "In sum, we found six quasi-experiments that looked at real-world outcomes in real-world…
Comment linking /p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic
on “Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health”Submitted The Insidious Lie That We Can’t Understand Each Other as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFrom folks making the correlation vs causation argument here, I would like to hear their rebuttal to the points the author already laid out in this article https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill... , especially the section on quasi experiments. Do we just think that because it is probably impossible to conduct pure double-blind RCTs in human populations, it is therefore impossible to reasonably…
Comment linking /p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic
on “Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health”Submitted Do the Kids Think They’re Alright? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionJonathan Haidt has done a great job advocating this problem and is writing a book coming out this next year called "The Anxious Generation": https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/phone-free-schools https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-repor... https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill... This isn't something that can be solved with "better tech". It is something that is solved wit…
Comment linking /p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic
on “Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds”Submitted Algorithms Hijacked My Generation. I Fear for Gen Alpha as a story · 2 points
HN discussionEveryone, read the articles in Jonathan Haidt’s substack. He has done an enormous amount of amazing work on the topic. Results speak for themselves: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/13-explanations-mental-...
Comment linking /p/13-explanations-mental-health-crisis
on “Ex-Meta employee says his warnings of Instagram's harm to teens were ignored”Submitted 13 Other Explanations for Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None Them Work as a story · 2 points
HN discussionRead https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-g... . In the last few years, a lot of parents have struggled with children having bad thought patterns that lead to mental health problems. Including me. I am fine with my kids disagreeing with me politically. I encouraged them to explore the world, and encounter different ideas. I didn't realize the full extent of what they were encountering until the…
Comment linking /p/mental-health-liberal-girls
on “US Confidence in Higher Education Institutions Continues Long Decline”Submitted The Insidious Lie That We Can’t Understand Each Other as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere's been a significant increase in anxiety and depression among adolescents since ~2012. It's not just business as usual, and it's significant enough that the same increase is visible in hospital admissions for self-harm. Social Media seems to be the only explanation that fits the timing and scale of the issue: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/13-explanations-mental-...
Comment linking /p/13-explanations-mental-health-crisis?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
on “Meta Sued by States over Harmful Youth Marketing on Facebook, Instagram”Submitted Play Deprivation Is a Major Cause of the Teen Mental Health Crisis as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm not as pessimistic as you. There is more and more evidence ( https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/13-explanations-mental-... ) that social media companies have essentially engineered a harmful addictive drug - at some point they will be held accountable. I do think we are going through the tobacco company phase, where the CEO's will stand before Congress and solemnly state they think their product is not harmful…
Comment linking /p/13-explanations-mental-health-crisis
on “Meta Sued by States over Harmful Youth Marketing on Facebook, Instagram”Submitted AI Will Soon Make Social Media More Harmful to Liberal Democracy and Children as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's true. This meta-analysis was posted a while back on HN with this key quote: "In social media research, we focus on “how much social media did a person consume?” and we plan our experiments accordingly... Most don’t even distinguish between platforms, as if Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok are just different kinds of liquor. " Like I wrote in a comment back then, it's like blaming "computers" or "the in…
Comment linking /p/why-some-researchers-think-im-wrong
on “Social media can be a ‘profound risk’ to youth, surgeon general warns”Submitted Why Some Researchers Think I’m Wrong About Social Media and Mental Illness as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
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