The suicide rate for ages 10–24 increased 62% from 2007 to 2021. For ages 10–14 specifically, the rate tripled between 2007 and 2018 — from 0.9 to 2.9 per 100,000. The rate was stable from 2001–2007, then turned sharply upward.
Rates of major depression among US teenagers roughly doubled from 2010 to 2020. The crisis is gendered: girls' depression rates rose from ~12% to over 25%, while boys' rates rose more modestly. The divergence begins in 2012.
Self-harm hospitalisation rates for Australian girls aged 15–19 rose from 374 per 100,000 in 2008–09 to a peak of 703 in 2020–21 — an 88% increase. Boys' rates rose more modestly. The inflection is visible from 2013 onward.
Student suicides in Japan hit a record 529 in 2024 — the highest since records began. The number of young people aged 15–29 who died by suicide has exceeded 3,000 for five consecutive years. The upward trend accelerates from 2019–2020 onward, with COVID as an accelerant on a pre-existing trend.
The PISA dataset — the one global survey given to adolescents across all regions — shows a sudden, simultaneous increase in loneliness at school beginning between 2012 and 2015 in every region of the world: English-speaking countries, Latin America, Europe, and East Asia. This global simultaneity rules out country-specific explanations and points to a global technological cause.
The timing correlation between mass social media adoption and the deterioration of teen mental health is precise, simultaneous across multiple independent national health systems, and consistent with a dose-response relationship. The causal argument is strong enough that it has been accepted by the US Surgeon General, the UK Children's Commissioner, the Australian eSafety Commissioner, and the governments of at least 30 countries that have enacted or proposed social media age restrictions.
Establishing individual-level causation is methodologically difficult. Some researchers argue that pre-existing mental health conditions drive higher social media use, rather than the reverse. However, experimental evidence (deactivation studies), the global simultaneity across regions where US-specific explanations cannot apply, and the dose-response relationship collectively make the reverse-causation explanation increasingly difficult to sustain.
The crisis is substantially worse for girls than boys across all countries with available data. This is consistent with social media's primary mechanism of harm — social comparison, appearance-based content, and cyberbullying — all of which disproportionately affect adolescent girls. Girls who use social media for 5+ hours per day are approximately 3× more likely to have depression than non-users (Twenge et al.).