The surgeon general has released an 81-page report on loneliness. The Associated Press reports: “Technology has rapidly exacerbated the loneliness problem, with one study cited in the report finding that people who used social media for two hours or more daily were more than twice as likely to report feeling socially isolated than those who were on such apps for less than 30 minutes a day.”

The New York Times’ Matt Richtel reports that young people are experiencing a sharp increase in mental distress. Between 2011 and 2020, the number of emergency room visits for mental-health issues by people ages six to 24 nearly doubled, from 7.7 percent to 13.1 percent. Perhaps most stark is the rise in suicide-related issues which increased “to 4.2 percent of all pediatric emergency room visits in 2020 from 0.9 percent in 2011.”

“In 2019, the American Academy of Pediatrics issues a report noting that ‘mental health disorders have surpassed physical conditions’ as the most common issues causing ‘impairment and limitation’ among adolescents,” Richtel notes. And yet treatment hasn’t caught up.

It’s no coincidence that this decline in mental-health coincides with the ascent of the smartphone and social media. Clare Coffey has an excellent piece at The Bulwark on this subject:

Just as the commercial conquest of life was formerly limited to physical fronts, developing pathological interests and capacities used to take a lot more work than it does now. Sure, a young person in past years could, if they so desired, fall in with their local chapter of some crank organization and become radicalized in strange and unhealthy ways. But this path involved action: You had to seek it out, as you once had to seek out pornography and look someone in the eye while paying for it. You were not funneled into it by an omnipresent stream of algorithmically curated content — the ambience of digital life, so easily mistaken by the person experiencing it as fundamentally similar to the non-purposive ambience of the natural world.