On any measure related to anxiety or depression, girls have higher absolute rates (the total number of individuals), often two or three times higher, as you see in Figure 1. For suicide it’s the opposite: as a new research brief from AIBM makes clear, the rates for boys are much higher, and their high rate is the deepest sign of a crisis for boys.

But what about the relative change since 2010? For the data shown in Figure 1, the answer is that the rate of reported depression for girls was up by 145 percent, while boys are up 161 percent. That’s right: the relative change since 2010 was actually slightly larger for boys. (Again, a similar but opposite trend can be seen in suicide rates.)

From a public health standpoint, the change for girls is more serious because it includes a much larger number of girls, just as the rise in suicide rates among boys has a much bigger absolute impact.

But from a researcher’s point of view, trying to understand causal factors, the relative change is also important. It tells us that something changed in the early 2010s that impacted boys at least as much as girls.

[The problems are not identical, Haidt argues, but similar — the creation of fantasy spheres for socialization. Girls are more attracted to social media platforms to live in unreality, while gaming environments are the bigger issue with boys. The solutions are probably going to be closely related, too … getting kids and teens out of the online world. That’s a lot easier said than done. — Ed]