Collaborative Review Docs

Publicly visible “collaborative review” documents to acquaint yourself with the research literature.

By: Jonathan Haidt

February 20, 2024

Collaborative Review Docs

When I began to study the effects of social media on teen mental health, in 2019, I found it impossible to keep track of the many conflicting studies. I started collecting the most important ones in a Google document, then I started organizing them by method, and then I invited other academics to tell me what I had missed or gotten wrong. These publicly visible “collaborative review” documents make it easy for anyone to acquaint themselves with the research literature on the many topics listed below. They offer the abstract and a direct link to each study. I invite any academic researcher to request editing permission for any of the docs and then add studies, comments and objections. Most are curated by Zach Rausch and me, sometimes along with an expert on that topic.

A) Major Collaborative Review Documents

  • Adolescent Mood Disorders Since 2010: A Collaborative Review

    This document collects and organizes dozens of published studies documenting changes in adolescent mental health in the USA and UK in the 21st century.

  • Social Media and Mental Health: A Collaborative Review

    This document collects and organizes dozens of published studies addressing whether social media is a major cause of the rapid rise in adolescent depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide in the USA and UK since the early 2010s.

  • Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review

    This document collects and organizes more than a hundred published studies that address the question of whether social media is a major contributor to the rise of political dysfunction and the decline of democratic health that occurred in the USA and other Western democracies in the 2010s.

  • What is Happening to Boys? A Collaborative Review
    This document collects and organizes more than a hundred published essays and studies that address what is happening to the mental health [and well-being] of boys and young men in the U.S. and how are these changes related, if at all, to the mass migration of social life onto digital platforms since the early 2000s?

    This is the beginning of a collaborative review; we have not yet sent it out for contributions and critiques from other scholars.

  • Free Play and Mental Health: A Collaborative Review

    This document collects and organizes the published studies addressing the question: would more free play, especially in elementary school, reduce rates of depression and anxiety disorders? The decline of free play may be a large part of the backstory of the teen mental health crisis that began around 2012. This is the beginning of a collaborative review; we have not yet sent it out for contributions and critiques from other scholars.

  • The Effects of Phone-Free Schools: A Collaborative Review

    This document collects and organizes the published studies and essays addressing the questions: (1) What do we know about phone-free schools’ social, educational, and mental health impacts? And (2) how can elementary and middle schools best manage smartphone use during the school day?

  • Social Media Reforms: A Collaborative Review

    This document collects and organizes the citations and summaries of current and proposed social media reforms, both at the policy and platform levels. This also includes beneficial apps and tools, developed to mitigate the adverse effects of social media.

B) International Coddling Documents

After I wrote The Coddling of the American Mind (with Greg Lukianoff), I wanted to know if the trends we identified were happening around the world. So I created collaborative review docs for some countries that I visited, and for world regions as Zach and I found good datasets. So far, we can say with confidence that the trends we describe in the book are spreading throughout the major English-speaking countries: paranoid parenting, overprotection, safetyism, social media immersion, “walking on eggshells” in universities, and rising rates of teen depression, anxiety, and self-harm. For Zach’s report on the mental illness epidemic in all the Anglosphere countries, see here.

C) Documents in Development

These are preliminary. Please do browse, and add content!

D) Other Useful Documents

Beyond the Book

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The Evidence

The Anxious Generation begins by examining adolescent mental health trends. What happened to young people in the early 2010s that triggered the surge of anxiety and depression?

March 2, 2024

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