DOOM SCROLLING

Social media and the teen-suicide crisis.

- ANDREW SOLOMON

Lori and Avery Schott wondered about the right age for their three children to have smartphones. For their youngest, Annalee, they settled on thirteen. They'd held her back in school a year, because she was small for her age and struggled academically.

She'd been adopted from a Russian orphanage when she was two, and they thought that she might possibly have mild fetal alcohol syndrome. "Anna was very literal," Lori told me when I visited the family home. "If you said, 'Go jump in a lake,' she'd go, 'Why would he jump in the lake?"" When Anna was starting high school, the family moved from Minnesota to a ranch in eastern Colorado, and she seemed to thrive. She won prizes on the rodeo circuit, making friends easily. In her journal, she wrote that freshman year was "the best ever."

But in her sophomore year, Lori said, Anna became "distant and snarly and a little isolated from us." She was constantly on her phone, which became a point of conflict. "I would make her put it upstairs at night," Lori said. “She'd get angry at me." Lori eventually peeked at Anna's journal and was shocked by what she read. "It was like, I'm not pretty. Nobody likes me. I don't fit in,'"" she recalled.

Though Lori knew Anna would be furious at her for snooping, she confronted her. "We're going to get you to talk to a counsellor," she said. Lori searched in ever-widening circles to find a therapist with availability until she landed on someone in Boulder, more than two hours away. Anna resisted the idea, but once she started she was eager to keep going.