No social media driven depression epidemic in Hungary
Testing an Anglosphere trend outside the Anglosphere
There is much talk of a mental health crisis in American (and some other Western) media. For example, deaths of despair – suicide, drug abuse or alcoholism – are on the rise among poor Whites in the US, a trend that clearly started before social media took off and appears to be US-exclusive.
Some trends, however, appear to be linked to the spread of social media and woke discourse in the media and in politics. A famous analysis was published by David Rozado, who demonstrated that the use of strange woke terms such as “transphobia” or “equity” exploded in the latter half of the 2010s in English-speaking media (but not only there). Another trend is the explosion of mental health problems, such as depression and suicide, among young people, especially young girls. This is documented extensively by Jonathan Haidt, who claims that social media indeed has a causal negative effect on the mental health of young girls. Just one of his many charts to illustrate:
He says that claims to the contrary – such as this paper – are wrong because they conflate all form of digital use and don’t focus on the girls, while the mechanism at work here is very specific: “a phone-based childhood which blocks normal human development by taking time away from sleep, play, and in-person socializing, as well as causing addiction and drowning kids in social comparisons they can’t win”, mostly harming girls who are more sensitive to peer pressure and the downsides of peer competition. Blogger Cremieux also had some words to say about this towards the middle of his massive Brief Data Post.
I’m basically convinced by Haidt’s arguments, but – as he himself agrees – to be really able to say that “social media makes young women mentally ill” we should see similar trends in all countries and cultures where social media took off in the 2010s, which, I guess, is every country in the world. The vast majority of data comes from the Anglosphere. If the trends exist everywhere else, it is a very big deal. If they don’t, it might still be that social media impacts mental health in the US and UK, but we have to start thinking about why this is only happening there.
I was interested in this question, so I pulled a few strings and managed to take a look at a Hungarian database called the Hungarostudy. Hungarostudy is a series of population-representative surveys of people in Hungary which has been going on since the 1980s – I had access to waves after 2002. It is repeated every few years, with surveys of typically 5-10 thousand people completed in 2002, 2006, 2013 and 2021. It consists of hour-long interviews completed by people in their homes, with many psychological measures and custom questions about attitudes, mental and physical health. Hungarostudy is not longitudinal, so not the same people are surveyed across the years, but it still is a snapshot of the mental state – and many other things – of the population across two decades.
And, as it happens, it is a great tool to assess mental health trends during the spread of social media in a country that is definitely different from the United States.
Unfortunately the 2002 survey was a bit different than the newer ones, but I found three different measures of mental health that were surveyed in both the 2006, 2013 and 2021 waves:
- A 9-item version of the Beck Depression Inventory. These are self-report questions about basic symptoms of depression, such as hopelessness, sleep problems or low energy.
- The WHO’s 5-item Well-Being Index. This is a self-report of positive feelings and being full of energy.
- Four items intended to measure anomie. These ask you if you agree that you need to break rules to get ahead, that making long-term plans is impossible, that things change so fast that you can’t know what to believe, and that you find it hard to navigate everyday life. Anomie is very fitting because it was specifically proposed as a name for the technology-drive disconnection from normality that makes modern people miserable. Haidt also refers to the inventor of this term, Émile Durkheim.
The three variables are correlated, but not too strongly (r=0.22-0.44), showing that while these constructs overlap they aren’t quite the same thing so it makes sense to replicate analyses with all three.
By looking at trends between the 2006, 2013 and 2021 Hungarostudy waves we can replicate the changes in mental health seen in the United States in a different country. A lot of things developed in different directions in these two countries over the course of the last 16 years, but the spread of social media use is a global phenomenon so its negative mental health effects should also be global. Note that in retrospect the sampling years are not great choices: 2006 is fine for a pre-social media snapshot, but social media use was relatively widespread by 2013 and 2021 was affected by Covid (although data collection happened in the summer when there were no lockdowns anymore). Still, we are mostly interested in young women, so we can use young men and other people as controls. They should be all affected by Covid and other things in the same way, but social media use should be specific. Formally, we are interested in a triple interaction effect: age group*year*sex. Did mental health scores change over the years in a different way than for other demographic groups?
Here are the stats for BDI (depression) scores:
The trend over the years (compared to 2006) is not significant. (I used years since 2006 as a continuous variable.) There is a highly significant sex effect: women, coded as 2, are more depressed than men, as in just about every study on this topic. Young people (at most 24 years old) are less depressed, sort of (p=0.027). The only other things that is significant is the year*sex interaction – but the coefficient is negative, suggesting a closing depression sex gap over the years. Our most interesting interaction at the end is clearly not significant. Here are the trends for the visually-minded:
For sex, 1 is men and 2 is women.
WHO (well-being, so now higher is better) scores look like this:
The year trend is very strongly significant: Hungarians in latter waves reported higher wellbeing. Once again there is a big sex and youth gap: men and young people are happier. Now the sex gap seems to be widening over the years though! The triple interaction is not significant. Visually:
And for anomie (lower is better), the stats look like this:
Once again we see a strong effect of year – Hungarians in latter waves said that modern life is less hopeless and chaotic. Women reported worse feelings again, but the gap was less pronounced (p=0.028 with over 10000 observations). Nothing else was significant. Visually:
So, overall, in this Hungarian dataset there is not much evidence for a social media-induced mental health crisis, either for the population in whole or for young women selectively. Mental health seems to have improved in Hungary over these years – even though the last wave was just after the lockdowns – which is reflected by objective data on suicides:
(Data is from KSH, the national statistics office. The male-female ratio is important because a decreasing ratio could indicate worsening mental health in women - but this is not what we are seeing here.) Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find data on suicide by age group, which would have been the real test of our hypotheses, and it would have also overcome a major limitation of Hungarostudy, which is that it only contains data from people over 18 years old. Clearly a lot of the social media effects should also be there in younger girls. However, I found multiple sources (all in Hungarian) that claim that suicides have been decreasing in all age groups. They also cite KSH, but the data is not there in the referred documents, so I can’t double-check it.
I don’t think this disproves the hypothesis that social media use causes poor mental health in teenage girls (or other people), but it certainly suggests that this effect is not universal. There are lots of reasons trends may be different in Hungary, one of which is that there was so much room for improvement in mental health that other trends dwarfed the negative effect of social media. Hungary is traditionally a very suicidal country (perhaps best symbolized by international hit Gloomy Sunday back in the 1930s). During Communism, our suicide rate was one of the highest in the world, and the very rapid drop of the past 20 years is a novel phenomenon which merely brings us back to what is still the higher end of normal suicide rates of Western countries.
It is never easy to explain large social trends, but the most logical one here is that after the double disasters of the Treaty of Trianon after World War I and the destruction of the country and Soviet occupation in World War II Hungarians saw themselves as a defeated people, not unlike Native Americans or less educated rural American Whites, a comparison also made by Steve Sailer. However, the past two decades saw both a very large improvement in living standards and a resurgence of a less defeatist mindset across society. This is very subjective but I feel that traditional Hungarian pessimism is increasingly associated with left-wing, anti-Orbán political stances – just go read r/hungary if you want to know what I mean.
Another possibility is that social media is just used differently. I’m probably too old to be in the know about how Hungarian teenagers use the internet, but I do notice that while in the US even serious older people get into toxic Twitter debates, arguing with others on the internet is seen as very déclassé by Hungarians and Twitter as a platform never really took off in the first place. The most frequently used platform is Facebook, and it is mostly used for communicating with friends, reading news or at worst sharing things like family photos.
Whatever the reason is, it appears that the negative impact of social media on the mental health of young women was not universal. We must think of more specific reasons why this effect is there in the United States, the UK and possibly other countries.
Hi, I would be very interested in discussing this. I am from Hungary, I have a good knowledge of many trends here.
My first comment is that the whole history of the last three decades was completely different here, and in all neighbouring nations. Indeed after the fall of communism there was a decline in everything: standard of living, and various measures of mental and bodily health. The local minimum was reached around 2010, the last big recession hit us strongly. Afterwards things started to improve starting from 2010. The whole region was a big winner of the last decade. All neighbouring countries. In effect, fertility rates increased, marriage rates increased, divorces, abortions, suicides went down.
My conjecture is that this trend counters the effects of social media.
Also, I conjecture that the negative effects of social media will eventually show up.
Note that tiktok use started later here, and it is not yet as widespread. But it is happening.
I wonder what the data look like if you stratify by race & ethnicity.