The common denominator in this demographic (affluent youth) is social media. In my generation you judged yourself against the people in your school. How you look, how good your grades are, how well you can perform etc. The small pond made it easier to garner and sustain self-esteem and to measure growth. With social media the best in the world in each category is available to see with no insight into the advantages that got them there, just the stark reality of how far away from them you are. Seeking validation on social media leaves most teens severely self conscious. My daughter has been hospitalized for suicidal ideation and how she was treated by peers in social media was the reason.

If we think of church as a safer alternative, try scaling Sunday mass up to the size of Instagram or TikTok and it would get this toxic too. Who has the beat clothes, who's the most devout, who's the best mom, who has the best kids... Virtue signalling is what church is all about and that's just as competitive. Our brains are not wired to understand the scale of the internet in general and less developed brains even less so. Compounding that with the competitive nature of late capitalism is a recipe for higher suicide rates.

Also, let's tak on religion. Do you want to know which was the actual meeting spot for people in Spain? Not the Church. Often, the taverns, wheat fields or the 'plaza' in the middle of a village. People didn't had the same blind faith as in the US. It was more like a social tradition than actual rites, a showoff to display your wealth in holidays and how good you were against the village.

Also, the psychologyst forgot a clear point: back in the day people was drugged as fuck in order ot not kill itself:

- A pint of beer for breakfast, or a glass of wine. Totally fine to do against hard work, a meeting, or even for lunch.

- Women took mental related pills like M&M's in order to survive family duties.

- The weeked arrived, whohoo, everyone did the classical bar-roaming bar-shifting with 5 or 6 tiny glasses of wine before lunch. These might have been small, ok, now do the sum, Barry/Juan.

So, yes, people killed themselves less, but because you were swimming into alcohol without realizing. And, in Spain, alcohol it's the 'social oil lubricant'.

"losing spiritual purpose". Ah, yes, right, the existencialist crisis again. Which year is it, 1830?

A geek/nerdy mind wont seek any meaning. It either discovers fun things, or creates something totally new and brilliant.

On the supposed "Catholic" Europe, Catholicism in Spain was utterly dead since we already suffered a Fascist regime straightly built from the Church, so we got fed of it really fast.

>High individualistic - France

>Less individualistic - Spain

Aaaaand another non-South European spreading bullshit. Europe it's a continuum, and lots of parts of Spain are highly individualistic, calm, non-partying and very close to France and the UK because, you know, commerce and trading goods by the sea has been since forever.

In Spain you can have huge gaps on behaviour, customs and traditions; even under small provinces themselves.

Even in the same family. My mother's education it's polarly opposite to the one of my aunt, the last one it's far less assertive and more prone to not gettings steamrolled by traditions and nonsense.

On Europe itself, you have a split on Belgium, a Bible Belt on The Netherlands and even differences on Prussians vs Bavarians.

I appreciate the work this team is doing and they have significantly impacted my views on teenage girls using smartphones.

That said, I find their inquiry to mirror a pattern of ignoring the known drivers of childhood trauma & the impact on self-reporting (upon which all of this depends) by people in religious communities.

Until those factors are more thoroughly explored, I’m deeply skeptical of their main conclusion and the explanatory power of their analysis.

This is in part because I have significant personal experience with religious communities across a spectrum of wealth. Mental health issues were hidden systemically & the ingroups were cognizant of the need to under-report their issues on surveys like this.

But far more significantly this smacks of the same analysis that argued that children who had non-conforming sexual identities were in danger of mental health issues and therefore there was a causal link. With time we learned that a lack of acceptance of their non-conformity had far more explanatory power for their subsequent issues.

As convenient as it may be to explain poor mental health as a “rich, liberal” person’s problem, that’s also the group much more likely to be aware of their issues, share them openly, and seek help for them.

Mental health is a crisis and a rising one, but phones are not the only reason our children have less social/play time. Our schools & parents’ regimented approach to childhood development are as culpable, if not more so.