The Anxious Generation: US psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s ‘urgent and essential’ new book

At the start of the 2010s, rates of teenage mental illness in the US, the UK and many other Western countries took a sharp upward turn, said Sophie McBain in The Guardian. “And they have been rising ever since.” 

In all these places, diagnoses of depression and anxiety have sky-rocketed, as have rates of self-harm and suicide. The US psychologist Jonathan Haidt reckons he knows what lies behind this trend. Apple released the world’s first smartphone in 2007 – and Haidt thinks the mass adoption of these devices, together with the advent of social media, is driving an unprecedented teenage mental-health crisis. 

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