Social media is increasingly blamed for a supposed teenage mental health crisis. Politicians, commentators, and advocacy groups regularly claim that smartphones and social media are making teenagers depressed, suicidal, isolated, and socially dysfunctional. These claims have become a major justification for laws restricting minors’ access to social media, requiring parental control over teenagers’ accounts, limiting teenagers’ ability to communicate with other users, and even proposing outright social media bans for minors.
Researcher Mike Males has analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the Philadelphia Youth Risk Behavior Survey, and international suicide statistics to investigate many of these claims. His research presents a very different picture of teenage social media use and mental health.
In the following video NYRA Members Zane Miller and Ian Golec Interview Mike Males, as he debunks the myths around teenagers, including how social media is not the cause of the youth mental health crisis:
Some of the most common myths surrounding teenage social media use include:
- Teenagers who use social media more are more depressed because social media causes depression.
- Heavy social media use is one of the leading causes of teenage mental health problems.
- The rise of social media caused the increase in teenage suicide in the United States.
- Teenage suicide increased throughout the world after social media became widespread.
- Teenagers would be mentally healthier if they spent less time communicating online.
- Restricting teenagers’ access to social media is therefore an effective way to protect their mental health.
The available research instead supports a much more complicated picture:
- Family abuse, household instability, victimization, and other offline adversities have much stronger relationships with poor teenage mental health than ordinary social media use.
- Teenagers who are already struggling with depression or difficult circumstances may use social media more, creating a correlation that can be mistaken for causation.
- Frequent social media users can report worse mental health while simultaneously reporting fewer suicide attempts than teenagers who rarely use social media.
- Teenage suicide did not rise consistently across countries as social media use increased. In most countries examined by Males, teenage suicide rates declined.
- Online friendships and communities can provide meaningful emotional support, particularly for teenagers who are isolated, marginalized, abused, or unsupported at home.
- Blanket social media restrictions can remove support systems from exactly the young people who may depend on them most.
In the following webpage, the National Youth Rights Association examines the research by Mike Males on the myths of social media use and teenager mental health, and how that research supports the points that NYRA has been arguing: Social media is beneficial for teenagers, and restricting social media is overall more harmful for teenagers.
Table of Contents
- Family Abuse and Adversity Have a Much Stronger Relationship With Teenage Mental Health Than Social Media Use
- Research That Ignores Family Conditions Can Mistake Correlation for Causation
- Teenagers Experiencing More Distress May Use Social Media More Because They Need Support
- Online Communities Can Provide Support That Vulnerable Teenagers Cannot Access Offline
- Social Media Use Can Be Associated With More Depression but Fewer Suicide Attempts
- International Suicide Trends Do Not Support a Global Social Media Suicide Epidemic
- Social Media Provides Real Benefits That Simple Screen-Time Measurements Ignore
- Restricting Social Media May Target a Coping Mechanism Instead of the Source of the Problem
- Blaming Social Media Can Distract From the Much Larger Problems Teenagers Report
- What the Research Actually Supports
The National Youth Rights Association
If you’re interested in Youth Rights, consider volunteering with us. We are always looking for new members and would love to have you on board. If you have a personal story to share, about social media restrictions negatively impacting your life, or about a general youth rights violation, consider sending us an email at nyra@youthrights.org. We’d love to help get your story out to the world.
NYRA’s Research and Advocacy Against Social Media Bans for Minors:
Family Abuse and Adversity Have a Much Stronger Relationship With Teenage Mental Health Than Social Media Use
One of Mike Males’ central arguments is that many studies blaming social media for teenage mental health problems fail to sufficiently account for what is happening in teenagers’ actual lives.
His September 2026 analysis of the Philadelphia Youth Risk Behavior Survey provides one of the clearest examples. Philadelphia surveyed nearly 1,100 students in grades 9–12 from 32 randomly selected public schools and asked unusually detailed questions about parental violence, psychological abuse, domestic violence, being kicked out of the home, parental substance abuse, severe household mental health problems, incarceration, sexual victimization, school bullying, racism, friendships, sleep, and other experiences.
When Males analyzed the factors significantly associated with frequently poor mental health, approximately 50% involved parent and family circumstances. Another 23% involved personal experiences such as rape, concussion, and lack of sleep, while 21% involved school factors including bullying, racism, and lack of friends. Only 7% involved an online factor: cyberbullying.
The differences were even more striking for suicide attempts. Males found that 52% of the identified factors associated with suicide attempts involved parent or family conditions, including being kicked out, violence in the home, and recent violent abuse by parents. The remaining 48% involved personal experiences such as rape, sexual abuse, neighborhood violence, and concussion. None of the significant factors in his analysis involved social media or other online experiences.
This reinforces a point NYRA previously made in “The Harms of Social Media Restrictions and Bans for Minors.” Policies restricting teenage social media use are frequently built around the assumption that teenagers’ distress is coming primarily from the internet. But for many young people, the major source of distress may instead be their home environment, bullying, discrimination, abuse, poverty, isolation, or other circumstances that cannot be solved by reducing screen time.
The Philadelphia findings strengthen that argument. If the strongest factors associated with poor mental health are concentrated in teenagers’ homes and offline lives, removing social media does not remove those problems. It may instead remove one of the few places where a teenager can temporarily escape them or communicate with someone outside of the environment causing their distress.
Research That Ignores Family Conditions Can Mistake Correlation for Causation
Males’ research also illustrates why correlations between social media use and poor mental health can be misleading. The Philadelphia data initially appear to support the conventional argument against social media. According to Males’ analysis, approximately 14% of teenagers who rarely or never used social media reported frequently poor mental health, compared with about 21% of the most frequent users. Frequent users were also more likely to report very short sleep.
If the analysis stopped there, it would be easy to conclude that social media caused the difference. However, those same teenagers differed dramatically in their exposure to abuse and other adversity. As Males explains in his analysis of the Philadelphia data, deleting family adversity from the analysis causes social media use to appear much more important than it does when those experiences are included.
This creates what is known as confounding or an omitted-variable problem. For example, imagine that teenagers living in abusive or unstable households are more likely to experience depression. Those teenagers may also spend more time online because they are trying to talk with friends, distract themselves, find emotional support, or escape an unpleasant home environment.
A simple study may identify:
More social media use → more depression
when the underlying relationship could instead be partly:
Family adversity → more depression
and:
Family adversity → greater reliance on social media.
Males reached a similar conclusion using the national 2023 CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey. His analysis found that teenagers experiencing frequent or severe family abuse and adversity were approximately seven times more likely to report frequently poor mental health than teenagers experiencing little or none.
The CDC itself has found extremely large relationships between adverse childhood experiences and teenage mental health. Its analysis of the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey estimated that exposure to one or more adverse childhood experiences was associated with population-attributable fractions of 65.6% for persistent sadness or hopelessness, 85.4% for seriously considering suicide, and 89.4% for suicide attempts.
This context is critical whenever statistics about teenage social media use are discussed. A correlation between social media use and depression cannot establish which caused which—and it certainly cannot establish that social media is more important than abuse, family dysfunction, sexual victimization, school experiences, or other factors unless those conditions are adequately considered.
Teenagers Experiencing More Distress May Use Social Media More Because They Need Support
Males’ research also provides evidence for a causal direction that is often almost completely absent from public discussions: teenagers may use social media more because they are already struggling.
NYRA has previously argued this in “Social Media for Teenagers Has More Benefits Than Harms.” The article describes how online communication can be particularly valuable for teenagers who lack strong support systems in person. Teenagers living with controlling parents, experiencing bullying, living in geographically isolated areas, struggling to make friends at school, or belonging to marginalized groups can use social media to find people who understand their experiences.
Males’ research provides an important empirical context for that argument.
In his September 11 analysis, “The newest major Youth Risk survey contains a deadly warning,” Males compared mental health and social media use in Philadelphia and identified an apparent paradox: teenagers using social media frequently reported somewhat higher levels of poor mental health, yet they reported substantially fewer suicide attempts.
According to his analysis, Philadelphia teenagers who used social media seldom—never to weekly or less—were approximately 2.3 times as likely to report a suicide attempt as teenagers who used social media daily to hourly. Males reports that the same general pattern appeared across demographic subgroups.
That finding does not prove that social media prevents suicide. There may be additional differences between teenagers who rarely use social media and those who use it frequently, and an observational survey cannot determine causation by itself. But it creates a serious problem for the assumption that greater social media use necessarily creates greater suicide risk.
Males proposes that the pattern may exist because teenagers who are already depressed or living through serious difficulties are deliberately seeking connection online. In that case, their higher depression levels are not necessarily the consequence of their social media use. Their social media use may instead be one of the ways they are trying to cope with the conditions causing their depression.
This is consistent with NYRA’s earlier argument that increased social media use among vulnerable teenagers should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that the internet harmed them. Sometimes it can be evidence that they need what the internet provides.
Online Communities Can Provide Support That Vulnerable Teenagers Cannot Access Offline
The connection between offline adversity and increased social media use is particularly important for teenagers living in abusive, controlling, or unstable homes. NYRA previously documented this problem in “The KIDS Act Will KILL Kids – Firsthand Story From a Teenager.” The article featured teenagers who described online friends as critical sources of emotional support while dealing with abusive households, parental conflict, bullying, homeschooling isolation, rejection, and other serious difficulties.
One teenager described becoming socially isolated after experiencing bullying and later being homeschooled. After eventually joining online communities, they developed friendships with people who listened to their problems, shared similar experiences, and helped them feel less alone. The teenager described those online friends as giving them reasons to continue living while they were dealing with severe problems at home.
A personal story cannot prove how social media affects teenagers as a population. But Males’ findings show why stories like this cannot simply be dismissed as unusual exceptions.
His Philadelphia analysis found that parent and family problems were the largest group of identified factors associated with poor mental health and suicide attempts. His national CDC analysis similarly found an extremely strong relationship between serious family adversity and frequently poor mental health. And his later Philadelphia social media analysis found that teenagers who frequently used social media attempted suicide at lower rates than those who rarely used it.
Together, these findings provide a plausible population-level context for something NYRA has previously documented through individual experiences: some of the teenagers spending the most time online may be doing so because their offline circumstances are the problem.
Taking away their online access would not remove an abusive parent, end bullying at school, give a homeschooled teenager nearby friends, provide transportation, or make an unsupportive community accepting. It could simply make the teenager more isolated within the environment already contributing to their distress.
Social Media Use Can Be Associated With More Depression but Fewer Suicide Attempts
One of the most significant findings in Males’ research is the distinction between reporting depression and actually attempting suicide. Anti-social-media arguments frequently combine depression, suicidal thoughts, suicide plans, self-harm, emergency-room treatment, and suicide deaths into a general category of worsening youth mental health. But these are different outcomes, and they do not always move together.
Males has repeatedly examined an unusual pattern in CDC surveys: frequent social media users can report higher levels of depression or suicidal thoughts while reporting lower levels of suicide attempts or serious self-harm.
He discussed this pattern using the CDC’s 2021 survey in “How social media access prevents teen suicide – particularly by younger teens,” and later found a similar pattern in the Philadelphia data. He argues that this is consistent with teenagers using online communication as a coping mechanism.
The data shows that the relationship is much more complicated than the commonly presented model:
more social media → more depression → more suicide.
If frequent users can simultaneously report more emotional distress and fewer suicide attempts, social media use cannot simply be treated as a linear measure of psychological harm.
This also supports NYRA’s concern in “How the KOSA and KIDS Acts Will Harm Vulnerable Teenagers” that restricting communication with people outside teenagers’ immediate offline circles could disproportionately affect young people who use online communities as informal support systems. If distressed teenagers are turning to social media specifically to find people to talk to, limiting those interactions could eliminate a potential protective factor without addressing the conditions that made them distressed in the first place.
Teenagers who are already experiencing depression due to outside circumstances such as abusive homes tend to turn to social media—explaining why social media users have higher rates of depression. However, the support they receive from social media actually helps them, and oftentimes prevents them from suicidal measures, which is why the suicide and self harm rates are lower.
International Suicide Trends Do Not Support a Global Social Media Suicide Epidemic
Another major argument blaming social media for teenage mental health problems is based on timing.
Smartphones and social media became widespread during roughly the same general period that teenage suicide rates increased in the United States. This correlation is sometimes used to argue that social media must be responsible.
But if a worldwide technological change caused a worldwide mental health crisis, one would expect broadly similar patterns across countries exposed to that technology.
Males examined whether this actually occurred. In “There’s No Global Increase in Teenage Suicide,” he compared teenage suicide trends across countries during the period in which internet and social media use dramatically expanded. Rather than finding a nearly universal increase, he found that suicide rates declined across most of the countries he examined.
He later expanded the analysis in “The ‘global increase in teenage girls’ suicides’ driven by social media is a hoax.” Using data from 41 countries from 1995 through 2023, Males reported that 27 of 41 countries experienced declining suicide rates among girls ages 15–19, while 30 of 41 experienced declines among girls ages 10–14.
Declines were even more widespread among boys. Males found that 27 countries experienced declining suicide rates across both sexes and both age groups, while only four experienced consistent increases.
These countries were not disconnected from modern technology. Teenagers in countries where suicide declined also gained access to smartphones, social media, messaging applications, streaming platforms, and the internet.
This does not demonstrate that social media has no effect on suicide. Different societal factors could potentially offset or amplify an effect in different countries. But it does undermine a much simpler claim that social media spread across the world and consequently created a global teenage suicide epidemic.
The more useful question becomes why teenage suicide increased substantially in some countries, including the United States, while declining in many other countries exposed to the same technologies.
That shifts attention back toward differences in family conditions, health care, education, poverty, substance abuse, violence, social support, public policy, and other national circumstances rather than treating technological exposure as a sufficient explanation.
Social Media Provides Real Benefits That Simple Screen-Time Measurements Ignore
Another problem with research focused simply on how many hours teenagers spend on social media is that it treats fundamentally different activities as though they were identical.
A teenager scrolling passively through videos for five hours, a teenager discussing a personal problem with a close friend, a teenager learning animation from YouTube tutorials, and a teenager participating in an online community with other LGBTQ+ youth may all be categorized as social media users.
But the effects of those activities can be completely different. NYRA previously argued in “Social Media for Teenagers Has More Benefits Than Harms” that discussions of social media frequently minimize three major benefits: access to information, communication with other people, and freedom of expression.
Online platforms allow teenagers to maintain friendships outside of school, meet people with common interests, obtain educational information, learn skills, create art and media, participate in public discussions, advocate for causes, and find communities that may not exist in their immediate geographic area.
These benefits become particularly important when teenagers have limited independence offline. A young person who cannot drive, lacks public transportation, lives far from friends, has restrictive parents, is homeschooled, or faces age restrictions on public spaces does not necessarily have an equivalent offline social environment waiting for them when social media disappears.
Males’ research strengthens this argument because it demonstrates that the teenagers most distressed offline may also be particularly likely to use social media. Their heavier use should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of damage. It can also reflect greater need for the communication and support that online platforms provide.
Restricting Social Media May Target a Coping Mechanism Instead of the Source of the Problem
The policy implications of this research are significant. NYRA argued in “The Harms of Social Media Restrictions and Bans for Minors” that government restrictions often approach teenagers’ social media access as though removing access itself will improve their well-being.
Males’ findings suggest why that assumption can be dangerous. Consider a teenager living in a healthy home with supportive parents, strong friendships, reliable transportation, and access to mental health care. Reducing excessive late-night social media use might genuinely improve that teenager’s sleep or well-being.
Now consider a teenager living with an abusive parent, isolated through homeschooling, rejected because of their identity, unable to independently access therapy, and reliant on online friends as their primary emotional support system.
The same restriction can affect these two teenagers in radically different ways. Males’ Philadelphia research indicates that severe family and personal adversity has a much stronger relationship with mental health problems than online factors. His follow-up analysis found substantially higher reported suicide attempts among teenagers who rarely used social media. Those findings are enough to challenge the assumption that reducing teenage social media access can automatically be treated as a mental health intervention.
NYRA raised precisely this concern when discussing KOSA and the KIDS Act. In “How the KOSA and KIDS Acts Will Harm Vulnerable Teenagers,” NYRA argued that restrictions on messaging and communication with people outside a teenager’s existing offline circle could disproportionately affect young people whose online communities exist precisely because their offline social environments are inadequate.
Males’ research makes that concern more significant. If troubled family environments are among the strongest predictors of teenage mental health problems, and some distressed teenagers turn toward social media for outside connections, then giving parents greater power to control those connections can be particularly harmful in the exact families where young people most need independent sources of support.
Blaming Social Media Can Distract From the Much Larger Problems Teenagers Report
Perhaps the most important conclusion from Males’ research is that focusing overwhelmingly on social media can distract from the conditions teenagers themselves consistently report experiencing.
The CDC’s research on adverse childhood experiences documents powerful relationships between abuse, household dysfunction, and suicidal behavior. Males’ national analysis found an enormous relationship between severe family adversity and poor mental health. His Philadelphia analysis again found parent and family factors accounting for the largest share of significant associations with poor mental health and suicide attempts.
Meanwhile, his international research shows that teenage suicide did not rise consistently throughout the world as social media became ubiquitous. Together, these findings make it difficult to sustain a simple explanation in which social media suddenly caused an otherwise unexplained teenage mental health crisis.
Teenagers live within families, schools, communities, and economic systems. They experience abuse, discrimination, bullying, poverty, loneliness, sexual violence, family substance abuse, parental mental illness, rejection, and restrictions on their independence. All of these factors can affect mental health.
NYRA has repeatedly argued that online communities can be particularly valuable precisely because young people have limited control over these offline circumstances. Unlike adults, teenagers often cannot simply move away from an abusive household, drive somewhere else, independently obtain medical treatment, choose another school, or relocate to a more accepting community. The internet can provide access beyond those boundaries.
What the Research Actually Supports
The research discussed here supports a more nuanced conclusion when it comes to teenagers and social media use, debunking many myths that are pushed by the media in an effort to enforce age restrictions online.
Teenagers who use social media frequently can report more depression without social media necessarily being the cause. Teenagers dealing with abuse and other serious adversity are substantially more likely to experience poor mental health, and those same circumstances can also influence how heavily they rely on online communication. Frequent social media users may report fewer suicide attempts despite reporting greater emotional distress. International suicide trends do not show a universal increase corresponding with the spread of social media. And online communities can provide meaningful support to young people who do not have comparable resources offline.
These findings closely reinforce what NYRA has previously argued about teenagers’ internet access: social media is not simply something being done to young people. It is also something young people actively use to communicate, learn, express themselves, build friendships, seek help, and cope with circumstances they often have little power to change.
For some teenagers, reducing certain forms of social media use may be beneficial. For others, losing access to online communities could increase isolation and remove an important source of support.
That is why teenage mental health should not be reduced to screen time. If policymakers genuinely want to improve youth mental health, the evidence suggests they should pay much greater attention to abuse, violence, household instability, bullying, victimization, inadequate mental health care, isolation, and the other conditions teenagers report experiencing—rather than assuming that taking away social media will make those problems disappear.
