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Social media isn't the disease. It's the symptom you can see. The sad kids on TikTok are there because they're sad, not sad because they're there.
Everyone’s worried about social media and mental health. Jonathan Haidt sold two million copies telling us smartphones rewired our children’s brains. Thirty-five US states passed phone restriction legislation off the back of it. But when you look at the research—really look—the evidence for social media causing mental health problems is shockingly thin. What isn’t thin is the evidence that life, structurally, is getting worse in a dozen measurable ways. Maybe we’re blaming the screen because the alternative is harder to fix.
A brain scientist talking about (better) patterns of thought, of feeling, and of action. One pattern, one podcast—you see if it works for you. The btrmt. lectures, with Dr Dorian Minors. (btrmt.—said "betterment.")
Welcome
Welcome to the Betterment Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian
Minors, and if there's one thing I've learned as a brain
scientist, it's that there's no instruction manual for
this device in our head. But there are patterns. Patterns
of thought, patterns of feeling, patterns of action---
because that's what brains do. So let me teach you about
them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works
for you.
The last few episodes have been a kind of pop-neuroscience
debunking run. I covered
the amygdala,
I covered
cognitive bias,
I covered how people use neuroscience to
over-engineer calming down.
So I wanted to do something a little different from the
brain science today. I wanted to talk about something more
social, more structural---something I think a lot of
people are getting wrong in a way that's starting to have
real consequences and no good solutions.
Before I was at Sandhurst, before I was a brain scientist
even, I was a clinician. A crisis counsellor. And one of
the things I dealt with a lot was people's digital
hygiene---_technostress_, as it seems to be getting called
these days. The idea that people are struggling with their
digital habits, their screen time management,
doomscrolling, whatever you want to call it.
I think we all have this distinct sense that the digital
world is a perilous place. This economy of shame, outrage,
yearning, and terror that floods our media streams.
Algorithms designed to suck us in and drain us dry.
Algorithms that, famously, the creators won't use
themselves or let their kids use. And I want to talk about
it, because I think the social media problem is actually a
bit of a distraction.
So let's get into it.
The story everyone's heard
Here's the story you've probably heard. Mental health
problems are on the rise, particularly in young people.
Social media use is also on the rise. So, probably, social
media is causing the mental health crisis.
There are some fun graphs around this. Social media use
starts ticking upward around 2010, and around the same
time you have this spike in mental health concerns. _Ipso
facto_, et cetera.
It's hard not to draw that conclusion, because it _feels_
right. You've probably felt it yourself. Doomscrolling at
midnight, closing the app feeling worse than when you
opened it. I remember distinctly, in the final weeks of my
PhD, finishing a day of writing at four in the morning and
being perversely addicted to watching car crash reels on
Instagram until the sun rose. Try getting a good night's
sleep for the next day of writing after that.
Or watching your kids---or someone else's kids---glued to
their phones or their iPads in a way that just seems
unhealthy. There was this Tumblr post that said if aliens
came to Earth, they'd think we were the slaves of the
little black boxes we carried around in our hands while
sitting, or walking, or even driving our cars.
And there's a figurehead for this concern now. Jonathan
Haidt, a social psychologist, who pivoted through some
excellent work on moral psychology in the early 2000s---
stuff I actually teach in my classes today---into some
slightly more questionable complaints about how emotionally
fragile our society is becoming, and most recently into a
book called _The Anxious Generation_. It sold over two
million copies. Spent a year on the bestseller list. The
argument: smartphones have rewired children's brains. We
evolved for a play-based childhood and we've replaced it
with screens. We can't handle this new world of social
media.
Off the back of this book---and the broader anxiety it
represents---thirty-five US states have passed phone
restriction legislation. Australia, dearer to my heart, has
banned social media for under-16s. Other countries are now
considering the same thing. This very mainstream craze
around forcing people to do less social media.
And I should say, the concern is very understandable.
Social media companies aren't really benevolent creatures.
Algorithms are explicitly designed to hold your attention.
It's very easy to look at TikTok or Instagram and think,
yeah, that can't be good for a fourteen-year-old.
But understandable isn't the same as correct. I've been
writing about this
for a while, pointing out that the research doesn't really
support the story. And more pressingly, everyone has been
writing and podcasting about how Haidt seems to have got
himself caught up in increasingly shrill moral panicking.
What's good is that since I wrote my article, the research
has moved on quite a bit. So today, let me do a little
update.
What the research actually says
Let's start with what the research actually says, because
the gap between the public narrative and the scientific
evidence is kind of troubling.
In 2024, Christopher Ferguson published a meta-analysis of
46 studies looking at youth social media use and mental
health. A _meta-analysis_ is an analysis that collects
studies examining a phenomenon and then looks at trends
across those studies. He took 46 of them, looked across
them, and what he found was that the effect of social media
use on mental health was "not statistically different from
zero." That's not the same thing as "small." That's
academic speak for _nothing_. And there are
two forms of nothing
academics can talk about: no evidence because we haven't
looked yet, and no evidence because we've looked and
couldn't find any. Here, Ferguson is saying the latter. He
looked across 46 studies and didn't find any evidence.
He then explicitly warned that policymakers and
professional guilds---psychology bodies, medical
associations---are misleading parents with unsupportable
claims about the harms of social media.
That same year, Amy Orben's group---
she runs a lab at my old department at the University of
Cambridge that basically does nothing but study this exact
question---published the biggest meta-analysis yet. 143
studies. Over a million adolescents. The correlation between
social media use and mental health problems? 0.08. For
context, a correlation of 0.08 is almost indistinguishable
from zero. If you put it in percentage points, where a
correlation coefficient of one is 100%, it means social
media use explains less than 1%---0.8%---of the variation
in mental health outcomes. Less than a per cent.
So all of that happened in 2024, when I first wrote the
article on this subject. Now, more recently, an umbrella
review came out covering 72 reviews, including 20
meta-analyses. An umbrella review looks at the trends
across studies _and_ the meta-analyses of studies. What they
found: general social media use showed "weak and
inconsistent associations" with mental health. The only
thing that _was_ consistently associated with worse outcomes
was what they called "problematic" use---essentially
addiction-pattern behaviour. Not using social media, but
_being addicted to_ social media. Which is a very different
claim. We'll talk more about that in a moment, but I want
to tease out what's happening here first.
Stuart Ritchie, who wrote a fantastic book called
_Science Fictions_,
makes an excellent point about why the research looks like
this. Basically, people claiming that social media is
causing problems are cherry-picking. They're counting
studies that favour their hypothesis. And the problem is
that in science, you can't just count studies. Twenty tiny,
low-quality studies saying X is true can't outweigh one
large, well-designed study saying it isn't. Science isn't a
democracy where one study gets one vote. It's the
methodology that matters.
And that seems to be what's happened here. A lot of
low-quality correlational work that seems to point in one
direction, drowned out by the careful studies that don't
find much of anything. Yet thirty-five US states legislated
on this evidence base. And Australia banned under-16s.
If you listened to my
lecture on atavism,
you'll recognise the pattern. People got scared of
technology. They noticed something is going wrong. The
obvious solution is to go back to the old ways---ban the
modern problem, eliminate it. Panic led to policy. And the
problem is left unresolved, because atavism is almost
never the answer. People aren't defenceless against the
modern world. What it requires is a little bit of thought.
Life is actually getting worse
So the question becomes: if it's not social media causing
the problem---because mental health problems _are_ going
up---then what _is_ going on?
There's an important answer I'm not going to speak to in
detail here, which is the quality of our testing for mental
wellbeing. I'll link to something on this in the show
notes. But one of the things that's definitely happening is
we're spending more time diagnosing people with mental
illness and spending more effort as a society treating them
with care. That accounts for part of it, but sadly not
everything.
So I did an exercise for
the article version of this.
I walked through the top-level headings on "contributing
factors to mental illness" in my first-year psychopathology
textbook from about a decade ago and checked which ones
have gone up. Nearly every single one has. Let me give you
a few.
Income inequality and the cost of living. This one's
hard to miss. Widening income inequality is well documented
across most developed countries, and there's a clear
empirical correlation between more inequality and more
mental health problems---depression and anxiety, mostly. A
paper in the _Lancet_ in 2023 modelled the health effects
of the cost-of-living crisis and found it threatens both
physical and mental health, disproportionately for
vulnerable households.
Housing specifically has got much worse. A Dutch
longitudinal study found that housing unaffordability
increased sharply, almost entirely within the rental
sector, and that it's clearly linked to poorer mental
health---particularly in younger adults. If you're under
35 and renting, you're the demographic being squeezed
hardest. And the mental health data shows it.
Job insecurity. The gig economy, zero-hour contracts,
short-term work. It's pretty clear that work is changing
and turning ever more towards instability. A charitable
interpretation is that we're moving towards flexibility,
and that's also true---but flexibility is definitely a
trade-off with stability. Just looking at the rate of
striking in the UK over wages and working conditions over
the last few years, you've got pretty good anecdotal
evidence that something's off. And the correlation between
job insecurity and psychological distress is one of the
most robust in the occupational health literature.
Urbanisation. More people live in cities than ever
before. Several studies highlight the correlation between
urban living and higher stress, social isolation, and
mental health disorders. City living is just hard on
people, even with all the advantages it confers over living
more rurally.
Information overload. Now, this one does involve social
media, but not in the way Jonathan Haidt would have you
believe. It's not that Instagram is rewiring your brain.
It's that the sheer volume of information we're all
processing is completely unprecedented---and it's still
increasing.
There's this book by Neil Postman from the 1980s called
_Amusing Ourselves to Death_.
I think it's still well worth a read. What he said, in
short, is that in a technologically connected world, rather
than getting information about your local area---people and
places and events you can engage with and do something
about---more and more, we're getting information "from
nowhere" and "to no one." You can't do anything about the
war in Ukraine, but you're fed information about it. You
can't do anything about the situation in Iran, but you're
fed information about it. Postman was talking about
television, but the internet made that problem much, much
worse.
Sedentary lifestyles. We've been agonising over this
since the 70s, and it's only getting worse.
And I could keep going. Substance misuse, climate anxiety,
family dynamics---I
just wrote an article on how much cultural turmoil is
happening around family dynamics. Almost all of the
headings from this textbook seem to be problems that have
been increasing in recent years. When you lay all of this
out, social media becomes this tiny thread in a much bigger
tapestry.
A really comprehensive review came out just last year
arguing exactly this. They call it "a paradigm shift in the
global political economy which has largely passed under the
radar." Neoliberal policies producing fragmentation and
inequality, and _that's_ what's driving the youth mental
health crisis. Social media is just one item in a long list
of contributing factors---nowhere near the headline.
And the most authoritative review I've found on the
subject, published in _World Psychiatry_ in 2024, is a
comprehensive treatment of the social determinants of
mental health. Income, housing, neighbourhood, education,
employment, discrimination. All structural. All far
out-shadowing the effect of social media. The stuff that's
hard to legislate against in an afternoon.
The directionality problem
Here's the bit I think is the most interesting, and it's
something I speculated about in the original article. But
there's now actual data behind it.
The question is this: is social media making people sad, or
are sad people using more social media?
We should ask this, because all of the research is trying
to associate increased social media use with mental health
concerns. A _correlation_ describes a relationship: as one
goes up, what does the other one do? And with any study
that's just correlational, the relationship could go both
ways. Social media could be doing what Jonathan Haidt
thinks it's doing---making people worse, rewiring their
brains. But since the literature doesn't really pan out on
that, maybe it's going the other way. Maybe people with
mental health concerns are doing something different with
social media.
Amy Orben's group---again, my
old department at Cambridge---published a paper in _Nature
Human Behaviour_ last year. This was a _registered report_,
which means they described the methodology and had it peer
reviewed before they collected the data.
The reason that matters is because recently---well, over
the last fifteen years---we've run into what's called the
_replication crisis_.
A lot of famous psychology studies
can't be replicated. They were done once, and when people
try to do the exact same study again, they don't find the
same result. One reason for this is that researchers have
an idea, collect data, run their analysis, don't find what
they hoped, and then mess about with the data until they
find something that supports the conclusion they wanted.
Obviously that's difficult to replicate. It's fraud, right?
So one of the solutions now is registering your methodology,
having it peer reviewed, and then collecting the data and
running the analysis exactly as planned. Much less room for
messing around.
That's what Orben's group did. They looked at a nationally
representative UK sample of over 3,000 adolescents with
proper clinical assessments. And what they found is that
adolescents who _already have_ mental health conditions
spend more time on social media, do more social comparison,
and are more affected by feedback on their posts. The kids
who are already struggling are the heaviest users.
A Spanish study found the same pattern from the other
direction. Escapism as a motivation for using social media
predicted more _internalising_ symptoms---that's what we
call it when you direct your psychological distress
inwards: anxiety, depression, withdrawal, somatic
complaints like headaches or stomach aches with no medical
cause. Contrast that with _externalising_, where you turn
your distress outwards---aggression, rule-breaking,
substance use. So, escapism predicted more internalising
symptoms, which in turn predicted more social media use. A
reinforcement loop, a vicious cycle. But the starting point
was the distress itself, that motivation to escape---not
the social media platforms.
And remember: with correlational studies, you can't tell
which is influencing the other. Does social media cause
people to feel bad? Does feeling bad cause people to use
more social media? Or is some third thing causing both?
The solution is a causal study, and I won't get into the
detail for time. But there's one big UK longitudinal study
I think is interesting. It found very little evidence for a
causal relationship between social media use and mental
health problems over two years. Most of the apparent effect
was mediated by self-esteem---and when you controlled for
that, the relationship washed out. Self-esteem was the
thing driving both: increasing mental health concerns _and_
increasing social media use.
So here's how I'd put it. Social media seems to be acting
as something closer to a thermometer---a measure of the
problem. And smashing the thermometer isn't really likely
to do anything about the weather.
When we find sad kids on TikTok, maybe they're on TikTok
because they're sad. Maybe social media is the most visible
manifestation of people trying to cope with a world that
is, in all these structural ways, getting harder to live
in.
What does this mean for you
So what does all of this mean for you?
I think three things.
First, we should probably be more honest about why we feel
this impulse to scapegoat screen time. The structural
factors I've been describing---inequality, housing, job
insecurity, urbanisation, information overload---these are
enormous, slow-moving, politically inconvenient problems.
You can't fix income inequality in a legislative session.
You can't reverse urbanisation with a policy paper. Not
least because it doesn't really serve politicians to do so.
But you _can_ ban phones in schools. You _can_ pass an age
restriction on social media. These things are visible, they
have an impact on individuals, and it feels like we're
doing something. It's the same pattern I talked about in
the
atavism lecture.
Legitimate concerns about the modern world, real yearnings
for an idyllic past---but because we don't work like that,
and because the past was never as uncomplicated as we like
to make out, we end up with the wrong diagnosis and the
wrong prescription.
Second, this isn't a lecture about social media being
harmless. It's certainly not nothing. But the research is
increasingly clear that _what_ you do on social media
matters much more than _how long_ you spend. Passive
consumption of weight-loss content is associated with body
image problems. Active social use---talking to friends,
maintaining relationships---can actually be protective. A
really nice review in the _Journal of Child Psychology and
Psychiatry_ put it well: "social media use is not a
monolith." It's more like a diet. The question isn't
whether you eat. It's what you eat.
And third---and this is the bit that matters most---it's up
to you to shape your relationship with social media. Not
the other way around. As far as anyone can tell from the
evidence we have, social media isn't doing something _to_
you. You're doing something _with_ social media. And the
thing you're doing with it is shaped by everything else
going on in your life.
If your life is good---if you've got stable housing, decent
work, and people around you who actually care about
you---social media is probably going to be just fine. But
if your life is hard, social media might be where you go to
cope. And it might not always be the healthiest coping
strategy. But the answer to that isn't taking away the
coping strategy. The answer is to fix the thing that's
making life hard.
And that honestly seems like a pretty good place to leave
it.