Everything we’re told about “teenage suicide” and “bullying” is wrong (part 1)

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| May 2026

Let’s begin with “teenage suicide,” which I’ve written about before, with some new information on how derelict authorities are on this life-or-death issue.

The first lie: suicide rates among teens are skyrocketing along with social media use, every news article and every quotable “expert” trumpets.

That’s half true. Social media use has been growing. From 2018 to 2024, the proportion of high school seniors telling Monitoring the Future they spend 3 or more hours per day using social media sites rocketed from 35% to 58%, those using social media 5+ hours a day leaped from 19% to 29%, and those spending 7 or more hours a day on social media leaped from 10% to 15%.

If social media drives teen suicide (as the universal political and media mantra declares, no dissent permitted), we should have seen teens killing themselves in record legions by 2024.

Yet, during that same period, the rate of suicide among teens fell by 18%. A small increase occurred during the COVID pandemic (as for adults), but overall, the teen rate decreased.

This reality is the diametric opposite of the message by psychologist Jean Twenge, who exploits the “correlation proves causation” fallacy to become the most famous advocate for banning teenagers from using social media.

Twenge fixates on the 2007-2017 period, when MTF shows teens’ daily social media use rose from 54% to 83% and suicide rates among teens rose from 8.6 to 15.2 per 100,000 teens. (MTF’s question changed after 2017, rendering pre-2018 trends incomparable.) Therefore, social media use must be what caused more teens to commit suicide, Twenge and her colleagues like Jonathan Haidt and minions declare over and over to fawning media and political attention.

Putting aside all other factors (such as the explosions in parent-age drug/alcohol overdoses and deaths over that period), it is bizarre that no one asks Twenge what happened since 2017 – many years and major events ago.

What happened is that teen social media use continued to skyrocket, but teen suicide rates fell along with suicide ideation. That suggests either that social media was not the cause of changes in teen suicide rates, or if it was, that teens have now adapted admirably to avoid whatever the problem was before 2017.

Figure 1. Does social media use prevent suicide by teens?

Source: Centers for Disease Control, 2026. Note that I use the misleading graphing here common to nearly all news and advocacy presentations, which radically truncates the vertical axis to make trends look far more dramatic than they are.

Why are we even talking about social media?

The second officially unmentionable fact is that suicide and self-harm rates skyrocket the more teens are subjected by their parents and household adults to violent abuse, emotional abuse, household violence, drug/alcohol abuse, severe mental health problems, and jailing.

Table 1. Percentage of teens who self-harm and who attempt suicide by how much they’re subjected to parental/adult abuses and adverse behaviors

Source: CDC, 2023. For method, see ”Alarming New Analysis” substack.

To any sensible person, Table 1 looks really bad, but it’s also a no-brainer. No one fell out of their chair in shock at what it shows. Of course more abusive, troubled parents are going to have more self-harming, suicidal teens. Any idiot would guess that.

But, you see, authorities act like they don’t know that, even though their own surveys are dramatic. Violent, abusive, severely troubled homes couldn’t possibly be why some teenagers feel depressed, and a fraction of those teens harm themselves and attempt suicide to get attention, declares the universal silence and even denial by authorities and quoted experts.

You won’t find parent/grownup abuses cited in any major media, official report, or political forum, except very occasionally buried in a list of factors causing teens’ poor mental health.

But wow will you find a lot of tearful emotings about the tragedy of teen suicide… yet, mysteriously, that grief is reserved only for very rare cases in which authorities, politicians, and media reporters believe they can blame social media messages and cyberbullying.

That grotesque attitude reached an abysmal low when advocates wildly celebrated a Los Angeles civil trial verdict awarding $6 million to a parent whose years of violent, shaming, and abandoning abuses drove one of her daughters to suicide, all because viewing social media images could be blamed for her second daughter’s unhappiness.

Note that none of the advocates or news reports on the verdict even mentioned the first daughter’s suicide at all, nor the parental abuses. That’s not the “teen suicide tragedy” authorities want to discuss.

Rather, it is because teen suicide – and adult suicide, which occurs at much higher rates – are tragedies that authorities’ playing with the issue to popularize themselves, profit, and feel good evidences an adult society refusing to meet its most basic obligations to the young.