Are modern screens and social media causing an epidemic of youth self-harm? Increasingly, evidence from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says “no.” In recent years, emergency-room visits for self-injuries, particularly among teenage girls, have plummeted even as screen use remains at all-time highs. Unfortunately, most of the public and policymakers don’t realize this, and have blundered ahead with failing policies likely to harm free-speech rights for teens and adults alike.
In “The Anxious Generation,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt used data from self-harm-related emergency-room visits among 10- to 14-year-olds to argue that social media had caused an epidemic of mental illness. Haidt said this data was a “good way” to examine rising rates of youth mental illness due to social media by looking for data “not self-reported by teens.”
Yes, worrying trends existed. Rates of self-injury for adolescent girls appeared to have tripled from 2010 to 2020. Suicide rates rose sharply across the board. Haidt claimed these rises were caused by smartphones and social-media use.
But a recent June 2026 CDC report examining emergency-department visits for suspected suicide attempts — the data Haidt said would put critics to rest — demonstrated clear declines from 2021 through 2025. Among adolescents aged 12-17, the proportion of ED visits for suspected suicide attempts fell 20.8%. Adolescent girls made up the largest decrease in ED visits of any group (22.3%).
Even before these new trendlines emerged, the evidence linking social media and mental health was always weak. Multiple meta-analyses of correlational and experimental studies, including work we conducted in our role as researchers, have found effects were routinely near zero. Post-2010 concerns related to youth mental health coincided with many other changes: rising rates of adult distress, increases in academic pressure, rollout of Obama’s Common Core State Standards Initiative of 2008, and the expanded willingness to label ordinary adolescent struggle as clinical disorder.
A closer look at the CDC’s own patterns reveals another inconvenient truth for the increasingly settled public narrative about social media. Youth suicidality and related ED visits rise and fall with the American school calendar. Rates climb during the academic year and drop in summer. When schools closed in spring 2020, the usual seasonal peak vanished, and rates fell, despite adolescents still having phones and social media.
Studies using national data have repeatedly documented this school-year association. This is also true of research from England and Australia. Stressors inside the building, such as the rollout of Common Core, increased academic demands, social hierarchy, and sleep disruption, appear more tightly linked to the timing of distress than smartphones or tablets. Undoubtedly, however, schools would love to shift the blame to cellphones and screens.
This is not the first time adults found a new technology to blame for growing concerns of youth well-being. Comic books, pinball machines, school radio, rock music, and video games each produced similar public narratives, congressional hearings, and calls for prohibitive bans on the new technology. In every case, claims of impending doom to kids did not pan out as evidence grew. The social-media panic is following a similar script.
Of course, some teenagers are really struggling, and the tech companies have an obligation to respond to credible risks. Focusing policy and parental energy almost exclusively on social media crowds out more challenging conversations about the schooling system, family conflict, trauma, abuse, and neglect, economic pressures and the mental health of the adults raising today’s youth.
The recent CDC declines occurred without nationwide social-media bans or specific age-gating practices in the US. Yet, social media companies are also now being fined hundreds of millions through court orders claiming that design features are addictive to youth, even as the research has not established a simple, population-wide story supporting the notion such technology is harmful. Still, many youth outcomes, such as violence, substance use, and teen pregnancy, have improved during the smartphone era.
We can’t have it both ways. As new data continues to counter panic about social media and smartphones, a responsible response for policymakers and influencers with large platforms may be to ask better questions about what actually impacts youth well-being.
Will Dobud is a senior lecturer of social work at Charles Sturt University in Australia. Christopher J. Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University.
