A Teen’s Journey Into the Internet’s Darkness and Back Again & More Latest News Here – Up Jobs

Puberty hit C early — in the fourth grade — and hard: acne, breasts, attention, humiliation. C found refuge in the internet.

Every night, often well past midnight, C lay in bed with an iPod Touch they received from their grandparents as a 10th birthday gift. (C, who is being identified by their first initial for privacy reasons, is gender nonbinary and takes the pronoun “they.”) On the new device, C made friends on social media and uploaded selfies. Viewers posted compliments on a photo of C standing in an orchard, holding an apple and “looking like a full adult,” C said.

Less welcome were the comments from men who sent pictures of their genitals and asked C for nude images and for sex. “I had no idea what was happening,” C, who is now 22 and lives in Salt Lake City, said. “What do you do when someone’s just, like, sending you gross stuff in your inbox? Nothing. Just ignore it.”

That plan did not work out. The internet seeped into C’s psyche; severely depressed, they found kinship online with other struggling adolescents and learned ways to self-harm.

“I don’t want to blame the internet, but I do want to blame the internet,” C said. “I feel like if I was born in 2000 B.C. in the Alps, I’d still be depressive, but I think it’s wildly exacerbated by the climate we live in.”

A yearlong series of articles by The Times has explored how the major risks to adolescents have shifted sharply in recent decades, from drinking, drugs and teen pregnancy to anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide. The decline in adolescent mental health was underway before the pandemic; now it is a full-blown crisis, affecting young people across economic, racial and gender lines.

The trend has coincided with teenagers spending a growing amount of time online, and social media is commonly blamed for the crisis. In a widely covered study in 2021 first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Meta (formerly Facebook) found that 40 percent of girls on Instagram, which Meta owns, reported feeling unattractive because of social comparisons they experienced using the platform.

The reality is more complex. What science increasingly shows is that virtual interactions can have a powerful impact, positive or negative, depending on a person’s underlying emotional state.

“The internet is a volume knob, an amplifier and accelerant,” Byron Reeves, a professor of communication at Stanford University, said.

But there is a lack of reliable research into how technology affects the brain, and a shortage of funding to help ailing teens cope. From 2005 to 2015, funding from the National Institute of Mental Health to study innovative ways to understand and help adolescents with mental health issues fell 42 percent.

“The federal funding, or lack thereof, has contributed enormously to the place we’re at,” said Kimberly Hoagwood, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at NYU Langone Health and former associate director for child and adolescent mental health research at the N.I.M.H. “We’ve sort of put our blinders on.”

Dr. Joshua Gordon, the current director of the institute, said, “We don’t have tremendous insights into why it’s happening.”

But there are powerful clues, experts said. They widely posit that heavy technology use is interacting with a key biological factor: the onset of puberty, which is happening earlier than ever. Puberty makes adolescents highly sensitive to social information — whether they are liked, whether they have friends, where they fit in. Adults face the same onslaught, but pubescent teens encounter it before other parts of the brain have fully developed to handle it.

“On a content level, and on a process level, it makes your head explode,” said Stephen Hinshaw, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “You want to make it stop — cutting yourself, burning, mutilation and suicide attempts.”

The ability of youth to cope has been further eroded by declines in sleep, exercise and in-person connection, which all have fallen as screen time has gone up. Young people, despite vast virtual connections, or maybe because of them, report being lonelier than any other generation. And many studies have found that adolescents who spend more time online are less happy.

Still, many questions remain. This is partly because the internet experience is so vast and varied, health experts say, which makes it hard to generalize about how screen time — and how much of it — leads to anxiety and depression.

“That doesn’t mean there’s not a relationship,” Dr. Reeves said. “There are so many effects that are totally idiosyncratic to individual kids.” He added, “Each of their experiences are so radically different.”

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