As has been widely reported, the Australian government has introduced a ban on people under 16 years of age using various prescribed social media. The ban is based on the proposition – widely accepted – that social media are harmful to teenagers, and in particular, cause suicide.
So I thought I would have a look at the numbers to see whether this is true.
It is not.
The figures are at https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/resources/download-data-tables. They run from 1907 to 2023, and it is possible to extract the suicide figures for teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19. Here is a graph of those data. Blue is the boys, orange is the girls, and green is both of them.
As we can see, the numbers remained pretty constant until about 1970, and then rose quite sharply for boys until 1990. Since then, the number has gone up and down, but today, the number of teenage suicides is rather less than it was during the 1990s.
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