Joe Rogan on social media: what the evidence says · JRE #2143
SUBJECT: SOCIAL MEDIA
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
and Jonathan Haight's work on this has been really interesting. His book, The Coddling of the American Mind is a great one. And it's all about what you could see, like exactly when social media is invented, all this self-harm and all the suicidal thoughts, suicidal ideation and suicide all goes up for girls.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
A CDC-authored study published in JAMA (Mercado et al., 2017) found that emergency department visits for nonfatal self-inflicted injuries among adolescent girls rose sharply starting around 2009, while rates for boys stayed flat: for girls aged 10 to 14 the rate climbed 18.8 percent per year, from 109.8 per 100,000 in 2009 to 317.7 per 100,000 in 2015, and girls aged 15 to 19 rose 7.2 percent per year. This objective self-harm trend is the kind of evidence Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge cite when arguing that adolescent-girl mental health worsened as smartphones and social media became widespread. Rogan's core point that these measures rose for girls around the time social media became widespread is supported by the data. Two caveats: the phrase exactly when social media is invented is loose (the inflection is roughly 2009 to 2012, and the causal link to social media remains debated among researchers), and the argument Rogan describes is in Haidt's later work (The Anxious Generation and his 2021 writing), not The Coddling of the American Mind.