The Decline of Mental Health Among Adolescent Girls Linked to Social Media and Smartphones: Expert Analysis

This does not concern the coincidental coincidence in time of two developments, but a causal relationship: more smartphone use and more social media use cause a greater decline in psychological well-being in girls, but not in boys. This has led researchers to consider what makes girls vulnerable in this regard.

One of those researchers is Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist, professor at New York University and author of the impressive ‘The anxious generation’, which addresses the question ‘why is it that in countries like ours recent there is an epidemic of psychological problems, especially among adolescent girls?’.

Haidt attributes this to four factors. First, girls are more strongly influenced by what he calls visual social comparison and perfectionism. Becoming an adult is accompanied by feelings of insecurity and a strong tendency to compare yourself to others. Girls place more emphasis on this than boys because their social position is more strongly determined by external beauty and sex appeal. On social media they are judged more than boys and confronted with beauty standards that are more difficult to achieve. That is why girls are less satisfied with themselves than boys.

The second factor is that girls’ aggression is mainly relational in nature. If a girl wants to hit a girl, she does so by trying to hit her in her relationships. By gossiping about her, turning her friends against her, creating disagreements among themselves. If this threatens to destroy her reputation and acceptance, her anxiety level rises, she becomes more likely to become depressed and often even suicidal.

Suicide attempts, as my own studies also show, are considerably more common among girls than among boys. The third factor is that girls share emotions and problems more easily with other girls and that negative feelings are more contagious than positive ones. If a girl becomes depressed, the risk of depression among her friends increases significantly. There is hardly such a contamination effect among boys.

The fourth factor is that girls are more often exposed to coercion and pressure when it comes to sex and are more often the target of sexual desires and coercion from (adult) men on social media. But they are also more likely to be victims of school or group culture in which boys or men literally and figuratively ‘expose’ them (via nude photos or banga lists). To avoid or ward off feelings of fear and shame, girls feel forced to conform or isolate.

Social media and smartphones harm girls more than boys. That has to stop.

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