Are smartphones driving our teens to depression?

It's an older article, but here's a quote that seemed worth saving in case the smartphone teen depression discussion comes up again. (archive):

Here is a story. In 2007, Apple released the iPhone [...] the nature of childhood and especially adolescence was fundamentally changed [...] between 2010 and 2015 mental health and well-being plummeted and suffering and despair exploded, particularly among teenage girls.

[...]

Here is another story. In 2011, as part of the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a new set of guidelines that recommended that teenage girls should be screened annually for depression by their primary care physicians and that same year required that insurance providers cover such screenings in full. In 2015, H.H.S. finally mandated a coding change, proposed by the World Health Organization almost two decades before, that required hospitals to record whether an injury was self-inflicted or accidental — and which seemingly overnight nearly doubled rates for self-harm across all demographic groups. Soon thereafter, the coding of suicidal ideation was also updated. The effect of these bureaucratic changes on hospitalization data presumably varied from place to place. But in one place where it has been studied systematically, New Jersey, where 90 percent of children had health coverage even before the A.C.A., researchers have found that the changes explain nearly all of the state’s apparent upward trend in suicide-related hospital visits, turning what were “essentially flat” trendlines into something that looked like a youth mental health “crisis.”

Could both of these stories be partially true? Of course: Emotional distress among teenagers may be genuinely growing while simultaneous bureaucratic and cultural changes — more focus on mental health, destigmatization, growing comfort with therapy and medication — exaggerate the underlying trends. (This is what Adriana Corredor-Waldron, a co-author of the New Jersey study, believes — that suicidal behavior is distressingly high among teenagers in the United States and that many of our conventional measures are not very reliable to assess changes in suicidal behavior over time.)

The rest of the article reviews the evidence. I'm not going to get into it, but I think it rounds to the situation being rather complicated. When multiple things are happening at once, it can be hard to understand what the statistics are saying.