Did Facebook Hurt Our Mental Health? Probably

Causality, Selection or a Little Bit of Both?

Introduction

Please indulge me in writing a steam of consciousness explainer as it’s been a long day and I need to let off some steam. After foolishly feeding a family of five feral cats for the last year and watching two of them get picked off by unknown predators, I ended up hiring a “cat whisperer” to help me catch them, take them to the vet, and bond them to my two cats. It’s about to be Brady Bunch up in here — my family of 3 is about to be a family of 6, and 8 when the girls here. Which is a nice segue I think to starting a substack about the causes of mental health.

Before I do, though, I want to set you up with what to expect here. First, I want to lay out my emerging “philosophy” so to speak regarding evidence and estimation. And second, I want to discuss a new paper on social media and mental health that was published last winter in the fl…