the women we study: jean twenge

There is a special kind of expertise that the culture finds deeply inconvenient: the kind that arrives early, with evidence, and names a problem that powerful institutions have every incentive to deny. Jean Twenge has spent the better part of a decade inhabiting that position — not as an activist or a critic, but as a researcher who looked at longitudinal data on the mental health of young Americans and reported, with increasing precision and increasing urgency, what that data showed.

What it showed was a generation in crisis, and what made the crisis legible, in her reading, was a rectangle of glass and metal that had been placed in the hands of adolescents without any serious consideration of what it would do to them.

Twenge is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University who has spent thirty years studying generational change. Her method is not ethnographic or anecdotal, Jean works with large longitudinal datasets — surveys tracking the attitudes, behaviors, and psychological wellbeing of millions of young Americans over decades — and she looks for the patterns that emerge when you step back far enough to see the shape of a generation rather than the texture of an individual life. She published Generation Me in 2006, tracking the millennial generation's rising individualism and anxiety, and spent years building the database that would eventually produce her most consequential work.

The data began to shift around 2012. Mental health indicators among American adolescents — rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicidal ideation — had been declining or stable for years. Then, in the space of a few years, they reversed. The change was not subtle, it was steep, consistent across multiple independent datasets, and concentrated among a specific demographic: teenage girls.

Twenge looked for the variable that had changed at the same moment — the answer, in the data, was the smartphone. The year that smartphone ownership crossed 50% among American adults was the same year the mental health trends among teenagers began their sustained deterioration. The timing was not coincidental, the device had restructured adolescent social life in ways that were measurably damaging to the people whose brains were still in the process of forming.

She published her findings in the Atlantic in August 2017 under the headline "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" It was one of the most widely read and widely disputed pieces of journalism that year. Parents recognized in it something they had been watching in their own homes and had not had language for. Researchers questioned her methodology, her conflation of correlation with causation, her framing. The tech industry, whose products she was indicting, funded counter-narratives and commissioned studies designed to complicate her argument. She was a single researcher at a public university without a communications team or a lobbying operation. She had the longitudinal data and the willingness to say clearly what it showed.

She published iGen later that year, laying out the full picture. The generation born between 1995 and 2012 was, by every measure she could find, safer than any generation before it in terms of physical risk. They were less likely to drink, to drive unsupervised, to have sex, to get into physical fights. They were spending more time at home and less time in the kinds of unsupervised social environments that had historically alarmed parents. By the metrics that previous generations of adults had worried about, they were model teenagers.

They were also, by every psychological measure she could find, more miserable than any generation on record. Rates of loneliness had climbed sharply beginning in 2012. Rates of depression had risen steeply, faster among girls than boys. Rates of anxiety had increased across every demographic subgroup she examined. Rates of suicide among adolescents, which had been declining since the 1990s, had reversed course and were rising. The generation that was physically the safest was psychologically the most fragile, and the inflection point in nearly every trend line corresponded to the years in which smartphone ownership among teenagers had become near-universal.

She was especially precise about girls. The mental health deterioration she documented was larger, faster, and more severe among teenage girls than boys, and it was specifically concentrated in the behaviors that visual social media platforms produce and reward. Social comparison. Appearance-based feedback. The continuous, low-grade surveillance of one's own image and its reception. Instagram had built a machine for delivering exactly the kind of social experience that adolescent girls were most psychologically vulnerable to, and it had done so at a scale and with an efficiency that no previous technology had approached. When Frances Haugen walked out of Facebook years later with the company's internal research, what those documents showed was what Twenge had been arguing from the outside: that Facebook's own scientists had reached the same conclusions she had, had reported them to leadership, and had watched leadership make a different calculation.

Her broader argument went deeper than screens, and it is the part of her work that the culture has been slowest to absorb. She argued that the mental health crisis among young people was not only about what smartphones had added to adolescent life but about what they had displaced. The hours spent on devices were hours not spent in face-to-face socialization, in unstructured play, in the experience of boredom that teaches a young person to tolerate their own interior life. They were hours not spent in conflict and repair, in the slow and difficult work of learning how to be in relationship with other people when the relationship is not going well. She has said plainly that children need to learn that it is sometimes necessary to feel bad — that difficulty and discomfort and the experience of failure are not problems to be solved but conditions to be inhabited, and that a generation that has been shielded from all of them has been deprived of the very experiences that build psychological resilience.

This is an uncomfortable argument because it implicates not only the tech platforms but the adults who handed their children the devices and the culture that had decided, somewhere along the way, that protecting young people from discomfort was the same thing as protecting their wellbeing. It turns out those are not the same thing. The research says so. The campus mental health crisis says so. The suicides say so.

The Cornell deaths — seven students in the span of a year on a campus that had invested heavily in mental health resources and still could not contain what was happening — are not explicable by any single variable. But they are legible in the context that Twenge's work provides: a generation that arrived at college having spent their entire adolescence in an environment that maximized social comparison and minimized the development of internal resources, that had learned to manage their social lives through a screen rather than through the friction of in-person relationship, and that found themselves, for the first time, in an environment where the screen was no longer sufficient and the friction was everywhere.

The response to her work over the years has followed a predictable pattern. Initial dismissal. Then partial acknowledgment. Then gradual institutional adoption of conclusions that had been available in the data for years while the institutions were still funding the counter-narratives. The surgeon general of the United States issued an advisory on social media and youth mental health in 2023. Congress began holding hearings. States began passing legislation restricting smartphone use in schools. The platforms announced policy changes. All of it arrived years after the data had made the case, years after a generation had grown up inside an environment that nobody had tested and nobody had designed with their development in mind.

Twenge did not change course during any of it, but rather she updated her data, refined her methodology, engaged with the critics, and continued reporting what the numbers showed. She did not have the resources of the institutions disputing her findings. She had the longitudinal record and the willingness to follow it where it led, even when where it led was somewhere that the most powerful companies in the world had every incentive to prevent her from going.

The women we study in this series are the ones who understood something true before the institutions around them were willing to acknowledge it. Jean Twenge looked at thirty years of data on how young Americans were changing, identified the moment the trajectory shifted, named what had caused the shift, and spent years in the uncomfortable position of being right about something that powerful people needed her to be wrong about.

She was not wrong…. The cost of not listening has been paid by an entire generation, in anxiety and loneliness and depression and, in the most devastating cases, in lives that ended before they had fully begun.

We study her because she followed the numbers where they led and refused to soften the conclusion because the conclusion was inconvenient. And because the children she was trying to protect deserved at least that much from the adults who were supposed to be paying attention.