Teen suicide rates around the world and the rise of social media

Part 1, Europe and Asia

As countries around the world consider social media bans for kids under 16, the question has come up again: Is the teen mental health crisis confined to the U.S., or is it international?

There are many reasons to support a social media ban that have nothing to do with mental health. Many parents don’t want their kids using TikTok at 2am, buying drugs or exchanging explicit photos on Snapchat, or comparing themselves to the perfect bodies on Instagram. There are also many reasons to care about the teen mental health crisis apart from the role of social media.

But understanding the scope of the mental health crisis is useful for knowing where teens are suffering more than in generations past and for determining the cause of the crisis. If school shootings were the primary driver of the teen mental health crisis, for example, we would expect depression, anxiety, and suicide to rise in the U.S. but not in countries without the same level of school violence. The same goes for other U.S.-specific explanations, such as the opioid epidemic.

We already have solid data from many sources that anxiety, low life satisfaction, emotional distress, poor mental health, and loneliness have increased among adolescents and/or young adults in many countries around the world.

But what about suicide rates? Critics have often argued that suicide data, in particular, do not fit the narrative of an international crisis in youth mental health. In his review of The Anxious Generation, for example, Tobias Dienlin writes, “the mental health crisis Haidt describes appears to be more specific to certain regions, particularly the United States, rather than a global phenomenon. Data from large-scale international sources show no consistent decline in youth well-being (Marquez et al., 2024) or suicides (Michalek et al., 2024). This discrepancy suggests that the mental health issues Haidt highlights are influenced by regional factors rather than being universally applicable.”

As we’ve already covered, youth well-being is indeed down (including in most of the datasets discussed in Marquez et al., 2024, the report Dienlin cites). And the source he cites for suicides uses the Global Burden of Disease database, which relies on estimates rather than actual data.

What happens if researchers look at actual suicide data, not modeled estimates?

Several articles published in the last year have taken a more detailed look at suicide rates in many countries across the globe. These analyses have taken two steps that many previous analyses did not: 1) they gathered actual suicide mortality data instead of using the Global Burden of Disease or WHO Global Estimates and 2) they report suicide rates broken down by gender and age group. This is crucial, since the rise of social media impacted teen girls and young women the most; looking at overall suicide rates isn’t good enough.

A caveat: More than other mental health indicators, suicide rates can be influenced by many factors outside of teens’ everyday routines and relationships, including access to firearms, the availability of mental health treatment, and suicide prevention programs and helplines. There are also cultural differences and events unique to certain countries or regions. Thus, we wouldn’t expect suicide rates to show exactly the same trends in all countries. If we can discern a pattern, though, it’s worth paying attention to, as suicide is the most tragic outcome of poor mental health. From a methods standpoint, suicide rates are the mental health indicator least likely to be influenced by self-report issues.

To try to find as many relevant articles as possible, I searched all EBSCO databases (including Medline and PsycInfo) for articles published in the last year with “suicide” in the title and the words “youth” or “adolescents” and the word “trend” anywhere in the article record. I focus here on articles presenting suicide data on adolescents and young adults from Europe and Asia; in a future post I’ll cover four English-speaking countries (England and Wales, Australia, Canada, and the U.S.). I’m most interested in data from 2010 to the present, given the rise of social media during that time period.

Let’s start with Spain. Below is the authors’ graph of suicide rates by gender (males on the left, females on the right) and age group.