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This past Monday, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General of the United States, issued a call for warning labels on social media, similar to the warning labels found on cigarettes. There has been remarkable push-back. In a front-page article for the New York Times, multiple scholars in the field noted that association does not prove causation and argued that the surgeon general's warning is too broad and not grounded in good science (click here for a free link to that article). In an article for The Atlantic, Caroline Nyce insisted that "Instagram is not a cigarette" and pointed out many issues not addressed by the surgeon general. For example, what exactly is social media? Is YouTube social media? Fortnite? Roblox? What exactly would the warning say? Click here for a free link to that article.
But the most interesting response came from another columnist for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson, who is perhaps best known for creating the term "workism" to describe the 'religion' of people who make their work their top priority in life. In his latest article, Thompson makes the crucial observation that suicide rates have declined in France, Germany, and Italy and indeed in most of continental Europe in the years since 2012 - the same period during which suicide rates and other measures of depression have risen for teens in the United States and other Anglophone countries. Thompson notes that Haidt overlooked this fact in his book The Anxious Generation. Kids in Germany and France and Italy are just as likely to have smartphones and social media as American kids are, but German and French and Italian kids aren't getting depressed. They may even be less depressed than they were 12 years ago. It's true that the rise in depression and suicide is seen in Canada and the UK and Australia, but those countries share our language and much of our culture. Thompson argues that the rise in depression and suicide may be due to cultural factors rather than smartphones.
I think Thompson is on to something. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association revised the diagnostic criteria for psychiatric disorders, making it much easier to diagnose ANYBODY with ANYTHING. At the time, I wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal warning that the new criteria would likely lead to an explosion in psychiatric diagnoses (click here for a link to my article, or click here for just the full text). I can tell you that doctors in Germany and France pay no attention to the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic criteria. But doctors in the United States do. That's one factor. Thompson explores other factors as well which are unique to English-speaking countries.
In other words, the problem may be that American culture has just become more toxic, with more people diagnosed with everything, over the past 11 years. Smartphones and social media may be spreading the virus, but the root cause maybe isn't so much smartphones and social media, but the toxicity of English-speaking culture. Is it time to move to Dusseldorf?
I was on Fox News this past Tuesday talking about the Surgeon General's proposal, but it's hard to get much across in four minutes. Still I thought you might be amused to watch the clip, if only to see how the fake bookcase behind me wiggles in the breeze.
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