Do phones ruin childhoods? This academic says so

Bestselling author and professor Jonathan Haidt thinks the combination of smartphones and a loss of unsupervised play is creating an anxious generation, he tells Will Hosie

- Will Hosie

JONATHAN HAIDT has never been interviewed by a Gen Z journalist before. "You are the first!" the bestselling author and NYU professor exclaims, with distinctly academic excitement.

No doubt he is eager to test his theory that my peers and I are chronically stressed and depressed, though by the end of our chat it is he who seems more despairing, as he laments the death of Western democracy at the hands of technology and extremism: the latter buoyed by the first, and a sure-fire sign that Trump is likely to win the 2024 election unless something is done urgently to change how social media works. "Trump would not have won in 2016 were it not for Twitter," Haidt says.

Haidt is one of those rare culture warriors whose brand hinges on no-nonsense centrism. His 2019 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, examined the culture of safetyism and tribalism that emerged on college campuses around 2014. It turned Haidt into a mouthpiece for moderate liberals who felt alienated by the Left.

Despite his aversion to the bombast and tunnel vision of the fringes, Haidt can flirt with similarly one-sided and flamboyant statements. Western society suffers from spiritual devolution, he tells me today; we are plagued by a culture of overdiagnosis; and the mimetic effect of social media has led girls to parrot each other's mental health disorders.

As a professor, he has had girls come up to him saying, "All my friends are depressed and anxious, so I have to act like I am too" (he paraphrases). In our collective effort to destigmatise mental illness, we have unwittingly started to "valorise" it - an unfashionable view recently echoed by Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, who suggested that having 20,000 people out of work each month due to mental ill-health was a sign that mental health culture had gone too far.