IS IT THE PHONES?

The tantalizing power of the theory that screens are harming teens.

- BY MOLLY FISCHER

In nearly 2021, the journalist Matt Richtel spoke to a father who was a few weeks into a nightmare. Tatnai Burnett was a doctor, his wife was a therapist, and, until middle school, their daughter Elaniv had seemed to be the happy beneficiary of loving parents and a stable home. Then, without apparent external cause, she became depressed and began cutting herself. Her parents sought treatment, including medication and therapy, but on March 4, 2021, Elaniv took an overdose of pills. She arrived at the hospital conscious, then started hallucinating and having seizures, before going into cardiac arrest and being placed on life support. She died on March 5th, shortly before her sixteenth birthday. Later that month, her father tried to make sense of what had happened while talking to a reporter.

Richtel was at work on what would become “The Inner Pandemic,” a 2022 series for the New York Times about American teens’ mental health—which, by many measures, had been deteriorating for some time. “I could barely hold it together,” he writes in his new book, “How We Grow Up” (Mariner), recalling his harrowing conversation with Burnett. “I was a journalist, yes, but more than that a father of two children who themselves were on the verge of adolescence.” Richtel’s response was visceral. “I desperately wanted to understand,” he writes.

In recent years, a seductively intuitive hypothesis to explain stories like Elaniv’s has taken shape: