What if social media isn’t to blame?

It’s a powerful message. It’s also, for McGorry, a deeply troubling one. “It’s an easy target. A simple explanation,” he says.

It is easy for parents to believe social media is the total cause of their kids’ poor mental health. “But no experts in the youth mental health field believe that. And government did not listen to us when this policy was being formulated,” McGorry said.

If McGorry is right, that raises a difficult question. If Facebook isn’t to blame, what is?

The link between social media use and poor mental health is seductive in its simplicity.

Modern social media was born in a Harvard dorm in 2004, and has emerged and multiplied into a multi-tentacled monster devouring our attention.

At the very same time, young people’s mental health has dramatically declined. The prevalence of diagnostic-level mental disorders in Australians among people aged 16 to 24 jumped 50 per cent between 2007 and 2022; nearly 50 per cent of young women have a diagnostic-level condition.

Thirty-two per cent of this cohort now qualify as having medically diagnosed anxiety, up from 15 per cent in 2007.

Importantly, this is not self-report data, but from a study using an interviewer with a standardised World Health Organisation questionnaire.

“The data backs us up. We are not softer. Life is tougher,” said Milly Bannister, the 28-year-old founder of mental health charity ALLKND. “The conditions are quite chronic, and so is our mental unwellness. We’re completely overstretched.”

The same trend is visible in other wealthy Western countries, such as the US or Denmark. It seems unrelated to the pandemic; data from Western countries suggest it began early last decade.

When epidemiologists measure big changes in disease trends, the first question is usually: have we changed how we measure? Some scientists argue efforts to raise awareness of mental health problems actually pushed young people to interpret mild distress as mental illness.

A clever study published in The Lancet in 2023 pushes against this. It compared two waves of young people, almost 20,000 in total, born in the UK 10 years apart, in 1991-92 and then 2000-02. Parents were asked to assess their kids’ emotional and mental health and behaviours via a 25-question survey. Were they often unhappy, downhearted or tearful? Were they nervous, clingy or easily scared?

The two cohorts, separated only by a decade, displayed very different mental health trajectories. At age eight, the latter cohort began to experience a steep rise in emotional problems. By age 11, the difference was substantial and increasing.

“Every generation, their mental health is worse than the previous one,” said Professor Jennie Hudson, head of child mental health at the Black Dog Institute. “There are additional pressures that are being placed on young people.”

In his 2024 book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt coined a term for this deterioration: the “great rewiring of childhood”. Haidt notes that youth mental health conditions have worsened at almost exactly the same time social media has emerged.

The Anxious Generation has been enormously influential, and Haidt’s work has been positioned as key scientific support for Australia’s social media ban. “The science is settled,” South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas – a key backer of the ban – said last year.

But a prescient review in prestigious science journal Nature noted: a) Haidt’s hypothesis was “not supported by science”, and b) the book was going to sell a lot of copies anyway.

Young people are heavy users of social media. They also suffer from mental ill-health. This does not mean the former causes the latter; we lack robust data showing that relationship. Correlation does not mean causation. “It is,” McGorry said, “a gross oversimplification.”

‘We have effectively been institutionally gaslighting a whole generation of children and young people by telling them the problem lies between their ears, rather than in our economic and social policies.’

Kerry Hawkins, chief executive Community Mental Health Australia

A study published in Nature in 2022 suggests, confusingly, that social media use may slightly improve life satisfaction at some ages and worsen it at others. Other reviews find these associations are typically very small, and explain a fraction of mental health symptoms. And a meta-analysis of experimental studies, in which people were asked to give up social media for a time, suggested no difference in mental health outcomes.

“You’re feeling hopeless and seeing news that makes you feel hopeless. It contributes to that feedback loop,” said Sydney-based university student Jack Tran. On the other hand, social media is the key to maintaining – and even starting – relationships for his generation, he said. “If you limit your use of social media, the only thing you’re doing is limiting your connection to other people.”

Where mainstream media largely support the government’s ban, 140 Australian and international experts signed an open letter to Albanese opposing the ban. So did – and this is an extraordinary fact – many of Australia’s leading mental health organisations, including the Black Dog Institute and Beyond Blue.

“There are harmful effects of social media. But it is by no means the main story,” McGorry said. “It is an easy target.”

If it’s not social media, what is driving the youth mental health crisis? Here, McGorry admits to being on shaky ground. “We can’t prove it, it’s still a theory,” he said. “But we think there is something very fundamental going wrong in society.”

McGorry’s hypothesis is at least three huge structural forces are reshaping the world young people are entering into: a housing crisis, a crisis of job insecurity and a crisis of global heating. “Everything in their life is more fragile,” he said. “Conditions are stacked against them.”

Lani Finau moved out of home at 21 – an experience becoming less common among her peers. What happened next shows why. “That would be one of the most stressful periods of my life,” she said. “Figuring out how I could cover my rent week to week while I was trying to start my business. It got to the point where I couldn’t hack it.”

Safe shelter is among our very-most-important psychological needs. But the way young people access homes has changed dramatically. Since 1947, every birth cohort tracked by demographers has been less likely to own a home at every age point. Falling housing affordability affects all age groups, but it affects young people the most: over the past 30 years, young people have, on average, paid more and more of their wage in housing costs.

“My capacity to buy a house and have children, that looks very far-fetched,” said Ged Moriarty, a 25-year-old community ambassador for Movember. “I don’t think that pipeline – of finishing school, working for a few years, having a house, and then having a family in that house – is a bit of a foreign concept for people my age.”

Housing insecurity translates directly into poor mental health. Dr Christiern Rose’s work has shown every time someone misses a rent payment their mental health gets slugged. “It’s basically chronic activation of a stress response,” he said.

But renting itself does not seem inherently bad for us; having no security seems the real villain. Remarkable research co-authored by Dr Emma Baker shows people who rent insecurely experience faster genetic ageing; those with security of tenure do not. “There is something about that failure to be able to plan for the future,” she said.

And this is something we can fix “with the stroke of a pen”, Baker said. To improve mental health, we don’t need to help young people buy houses. We just need to give them secure multi-year rental tenures. “If you can give security of tenure, that’s equivalent to home ownership, you don’t see a [mental health] difference.”

For generations, young people have been urged to go to university to get a higher-paying job. This is still true. But a huge boom in university qualifications has led to “credential inflation”: even low-paid jobs often require a degree now. The wage-premium for people with a masters degree or higher dropped 21.5 per cent between 2011 and 2021. Average student debt has risen 145 per cent over the past 20 years.

“We have effectively been institutionally gaslighting a whole generation of children and young people by telling them the problem lies between their ears, rather than in our economic and social policies,” said Community Mental Health Australia chief executive Kerry Hawkins.

Then there’s AI. AI company Anthropic is predicting 50 per cent of entry-level white-collar jobs will be extinct in five years. The US is already seeing increases in long-term unemployed college graduates. “We have a very insecure job market flooded by AI – that’s enough insecurity to drive anyone of any age into an existential crisis,” Millie Bannister said.

But here, the evidence is less clear-cut about the risks to mental health.

Young people have always experienced insecure work, as they are just starting their careers. There’s no evidence this has changed, said Professor Roger Wilkins, the deputy director of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, even as youth mental health has worsened.

But employment insecurity tends to be more perceived than actual. If young people are being told their career prospects are worse – or about to be eaten by AI – that can cause them to feel their jobs are more insecure, even if “that gulf hasn’t increased”, Wilkins said.

“Bollocks!” That’s the response British psychotherapist and climate researcher Caroline Hickman has when asked on Zoom if social media is to blame for the youth mental health crisis, and whether this crisis is limited to the West.

Loading

She points to qualitative research – also published in The Lancet – that shows 76 per cent of young people in Australia think the future is frightening. Half think humanity is doomed. The figures are even worse in the Philippines, India, Portugal and Brazil.

“It may perpetuate it,” Hickman said of social media. “As in, young people are numbing themselves. But you have to look at other factors.”

Feeling dismissed or ignored by adults were common themes among those interviewed by Lancet researchers. “It’s a culture of uncare that’s gotten us into this mess,” Hickman said.

Hickman is one of a growing number of mental health professionals who are convinced growing up with climate change is an “adverse childhood experience”, akin to a direct or indirect experience of war or terrorism.

“With other global threats, how does humanity stay positive? Everyone imagines rebuilding. But we cannot rebuild from the climate crisis because you cannot reverse the effects. Even if we went to zero carbon emissions tomorrow, heat would continue to rise. The amount of flooding would increase,” she said.

Western Sydney medical student Usha Makkena is clear about her time volunteering at Headspace workshops. “Climate change and climate anxiety was the No.1 topic,” she said. “The stress and helplessness people felt was real. We’re being handed a crisis we didn’t create, but we’re expected to solve it.”

For Makkena, who was 17 during the 2019-20 bushfire season – when smoke clouded the sky for days on end – the most disheartening thing about climate anxiety was being dismissed by adults.

“Too often, in my experience, I’ve been met with, ‘You’re overthinking it, don’t worry, everything will work out.’ It’s well-meaning, but invalidating,” she said.

At its core, climate anxiety is a sense of fear and distress about the future effects of climate change. While not a formal medical diagnosis, it is recognised that negative emotions can trigger panic attacks and sleep disturbances, particularly in young people.

Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht said healthcare professionals and climate researchers need to adopt new language to effectively respond to what’s unfolding.

“Trauma. Dread. I can think of much worse things than anxiety that people are thinking about in relation to the future,” he said.

Albrecht has been writing about “psychoterratic” distress – powerful emotions triggered by environmental events like floods and fires – for decades. The term “psychoterratic” comes from combining the Greek word psyche (mind) with the Latin terra (earth).

More recently, he’s coined a new term: solastalgia. That is, nostalgia for a sense of solace.

“It’s the inability to find solace in a world that’s being eroded day by day,” Albrecht said. “It’s typically chronic, not acute. Your life becomes desolated. We’re not going to get our way out of solastalgia with therapy or medication. None of that’s going to work because solastalgia is caused by negative structural changes to our home, the Earth.”

The solution, Albrecht said, was a radical shift in not just thinking, but the way society is fundamentally organised and operates.

He’s dubbed this new era the Symbiocene – a new industrial revolution, one based on bioscience. Think of a zero-pollution future where plastic packaging is made from algae, and buildings from mycelium, the fibrous structures belonging to fungi.

Meanwhile, Hickman, the British psychotherapist, said it was time to stop ignoring or dismissing children’s fears about a changing climate.

Loading

“You can bloody well talk to your kids about it. That makes a difference to their mental health,” she said.

So how young is too young? Well, children as young as five or six are already absorbing information from the news and schoolyard, Hickman said. She then reaches past the edge of the Zoom screen to retrieve two puppets, an elephant and a wolf.

“You give the child the puppet and you say, ‘What does the elephant know about climate change? How does climate change affect elephants?’ They’ll tell you everything, and they won’t be scared and upset because children love to talk, tell stories.

“There is no way we should avoid talking about it. But of course, you’ve got to make it acceptable and tolerable.”