Social media and suicide

The recent death of a young girl in Japan has brought attention to the fact that suicide is the leading cause of death among teenagers in that country. Japan is not the United States, of course, and no doubt there are unique cultural expectations and dynamics that its teenagers have to navigate. But the West is not immune to the kind of despair that leads to such tragic consequences.

Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with young people in America knows that anxiety and depression are everyday fare. Abigail Shrier and Jonathan Haidt are merely two of the more well-known cultural analysts who have pointed to the problems generated by the increasingly online, disembodied, and thus disconnected existence that many teenagers now experience as normal daily life. Suicide rates among teenagers may not be as catastrophic here as in Japan, but everywhere there seems to be talk of a teenage wasteland of despair and anxiety, and anecdotal evidence of a mental health crisis on college campuses is not hard to find.

Given the comparative affluence and stability of many Western societies today, this problem should be a cause for concern. No young person in the United States, for example—especially not the typical college undergraduate—lives in daily fear of being bombed by the Luftwaffe, as my father did as a small child in England during the Second World War. Nobody is being drafted to serve in an overseas war. And yet this does not make the anxiety of young people any less real.

Take just one important difference: The world I grew up in was one where I had friends who were a real, physical presence in my life. Nobody’s opinion of me counted. Indeed, I had no way of knowing what others that I had never seen and didn’t really know thought of me. Functionally, their opinions simply didn’t matter—in a practical sense, they didn’t even exist. A falling out with someone I did know was costly and could easily end with fists flying. It didn’t happen very often, but when it did, it was rarely of any great duration.

Today, social media makes members of the pool of approvers or disapprovers vast. Insults come cheap. Indeed, the very medium incentivizes nastiness and despair and helps to fuel the anxiety and insecurity of young people for whom their online image is sometimes, perhaps often, the most real thing in their minds. More than once, online bullying has contributed to tragic teenage suicides in the United States in recent years.

Social media is, of course, not the only cause. The forces driving this social sickness are complicated and vast, and the situation can press Christians toward despair of any solution. Yet Christianity is nothing if it is not a religion that repudiates despair and is supposed to embody its opposite. Reading the New Testament, and especially the letters of Paul, it is clear that—amid all of the chaos he experienced, the church disputes that kept him awake at night, and the persecution he endured—hope lay at the theological and experiential heart of his ministry.

That is where Christians today need to engage in serious self-examination. The forces that have created teenage angst and catapulted young people toward suicide may be beyond our power to change at a macro level, but Christian witness offering hope to those around us can be influential. We all exert some influence on the people in our congregations and even those who read our social media accounts. And such a witness needs to eschew the idioms of anger and despair that are infused into our culture and point by way of contrast to something better.

It is sobering to ask ourselves how much Christian hope—hope in God’s sovereign purpose of redemption—characterizes the public statements of those whose social media platforms lay claim to the name of Christianity. Anger at the desecration of God’s world is certainly in order—combined, of course, with humble acknowledgment of our own complicity in this. But our hope must be obvious to all. If we do not have the solution to the despair that leads young people to decide life is not worth living, then who does?