Everything may seem broken, but that was just as true when I was growing up in the 1970s and when my parents were growing up in the 1930s. It is the story of humanity. If world events played a role in the current mental health crisis, it’s not because world events suddenly got worse around 2012; it’s because world events were suddenly being pumped into adolescents’ brains through their phones, not as news stories, but as social media posts in which other young people expressed their emotions about a collapsing world, emotions that are contagious on social media.
