Meta’s $17 billion multistate legal settlement ushers in mandatory changes for Instagram and Facebook aimed at reducing social media addiction and, ultimately, protecting teenagers’ mental health. These steps follow widespread school bans on cellphones in recent years, implemented across the United States in the hope that such measures would be a cure-all for our youth mental health crisis.
Public concern about child mental health issues surged during Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, along with the belief that exposure to social media was the leading cause. At least 13% of school-age U.S. children have a diagnosed mental health condition, and many more are presumed undiagnosed.
But as more countries restrict youths’ social media access and Meta implements limits, we should be realistic about the scope of the youth mental health crisis and what cellphone and other restrictions can accomplish.
While a variety of programs to ban phones in schools are being evaluated, results so far suggest only modest effects. A National Bureau of Economic Research study published this summer looked at schools that use locking magnetic pouches to restrict student cellphone use during the day. The short-term effects on discipline and well-being were actually negative, it found, including a 16% increase in suspensions. Such effects faded out over time, but after three years, there was no evidence that phone bans significantly improved mental health.
The fact that phone bans have so little impact on child mental health shouldn’t be surprising — because the mental health crisis among U.S. children predates the use of cellphones and social media.
In 1970, the Joint Commission on the Mental Health of Children warned — in a report to Congress titled “Crisis in Child Mental Health: Challenge for the 1970s” — that an estimated 12% of U.S. children had a serious mental health condition. By 1990, suicide had become the third-leading cause of death among American adolescents, after unintentional injuries and homicide. In 2000, Surgeon General David Satcher called for action while warning that 11% of American children were affected by serious mental health conditions.
In other words, the child mental health crisis has been with us for decades. For the most part, we just didn’t talk about it — until the pandemic.
The good news is that several measures that could make a bigger difference are already known, though they’re not as simple as locking a phone in a pouch. One is providing mental health services at school. Two decades ago, Minneapolis began rolling out school-based mental health services: placing licensed mental health clinicians in schools in addition to the school counselors and social workers already there. A study looking at the schools before and after they received a counselor found increased use of mental health services and a 15% decline in suicide attempts.
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Janet Currie
Janet Currie is the David Swensen professor of economics and co-director of the Tobin-Cowles Health Economics and Policy Program at Yale University.
