{"id":161346,"date":"2026-05-07T10:55:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T17:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?p=161346"},"modified":"2026-06-02T10:56:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T17:56:24","slug":"everything-were-told-about-teenage-suicide-and-bullying-is-wrong-part-1-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?p=161346","title":{"rendered":"Everything we\u2019re told about \u201cteenage suicide\u201d and \u201cbullying\u201d is wrong (part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everything we\u2019re told about \u201cteenage suicide\u201d and \u201cbullying\u201d is wrong (part 1)<\/h1>\n

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| May 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s begin with \u201cteenage suicide,\u201d which I\u2019ve written about before, with some new information on how derelict authorities are on this life-or-death issue.<\/p>\n

The first lie:\u00a0suicide rates among teens are skyrocketing<\/a>\u00a0along with social media use,\u00a0every<\/em>\u00a0news article<\/a>\u00a0and every quotable \u201cexpert\u201d trumpets.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s half true. Social media use has been growing. From\u00a02018<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a02024<\/a>, the proportion of high school seniors telling\u00a0Monitoring the Future<\/a>\u00a0they 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%.<\/p>\n

If social media drives teen suicide (as the universal political and media\u00a0mantra declares<\/a>, no dissent permitted), we should have seen teens killing themselves in record legions by 2024.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This reality is the diametric opposite of the message by psychologist\u00a0Jean Twenge<\/a>, who exploits the \u201ccorrelation proves causation\u201d fallacy to become the most famous advocate for banning teenagers from using social media.<\/p>\n

Twenge\u00a0fixates on the 2007-2017 period<\/a>, when MTF shows teens\u2019 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\u2019s question changed after 2017, rendering pre-2018 trends incomparable.) Therefore, social media use\u00a0must be<\/em>\u00a0what caused more teens to commit suicide, Twenge and her colleagues like\u00a0Jonathan Haidt and minions<\/a>\u00a0declare over and over to\u00a0fawning media<\/a>\u00a0and political attention.<\/p>\n

Putting aside all other factors (such as the explosions in\u00a0parent-age drug\/alcohol overdoses and deaths<\/a>\u00a0over that period), it is bizarre that no one asks Twenge what happened since 2017 \u2013 many years and major events ago.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Figure 1. Does social media use prevent suicide by teens?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Source:\u00a0Centers for Disease Control<\/a>, 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.<\/h5>\n

Why are we even talking about social media?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Table 1. Percentage of teens who self-harm and who attempt suicide by how much they\u2019re subjected to parental\/adult abuses and adverse behaviors<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
Source:\u00a0CDC, 2023<\/a>. For method, see\u00a0\u201dAlarming New Analysis\u201d substack<\/a>.<\/h5>\n

To any sensible person, Table 1 looks really bad, but it\u2019s also a no-brainer. No one fell out of their chair in shock at what it shows.\u00a0Of course<\/em>\u00a0more abusive, troubled parents are going to have more self-harming, suicidal teens. Any idiot would guess that.<\/p>\n

But, you see, authorities act like they don\u2019t know that, even though their own surveys are dramatic. Violent, abusive, severely troubled homes couldn\u2019t 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\u00a0denial<\/a>\u00a0by authorities and quoted experts.<\/p>\n

You won\u2019t 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\u2019 poor mental health.<\/p>\n

But wow will you find a lot of tearful emotings about the tragedy of teen suicide\u2026 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.<\/p>\n

That grotesque attitude reached an abysmal low when advocates wildly celebrated a\u00a0Los Angeles civil trial verdict<\/a>\u00a0awarding $6 million to a\u00a0parent<\/a>\u00a0whose years of\u00a0violent, shaming, and abandoning abuses<\/a>\u00a0drove one of her daughters to suicide, all because viewing social media images could be blamed for her second daughter\u2019s unhappiness.<\/p>\n

Note that none of the advocates or news reports on the verdict\u00a0even mentioned the first daughter\u2019s suicide<\/em>\u00a0at all, nor the parental abuses. That\u2019s not the \u201cteen suicide tragedy\u201d authorities want to discuss.<\/p>\n

Rather, it is\u00a0because<\/em>\u00a0teen suicide \u2013 and adult suicide, which occurs at much higher rates \u2013 are tragedies that authorities\u2019 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everything we\u2019re told about \u201cteenage suicide\u201d and \u201cbullying\u201d is wrong (part 1) Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| May 2026 Let\u2019s begin with \u201cteenage suicide,\u201d which I\u2019ve written about before, with some new information on how derelict authorities are on this life-or-death issue. The first lie:\u00a0suicide rates among teens are skyrocketing\u00a0along with social media use,\u00a0every\u00a0news article\u00a0and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=161346"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161347,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161346\/revisions\/161347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=161346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=161346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=161346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}