I’m a young woman, and people keep telling me the internet has ruined my brain. Is this helpful? | Isabel Brooks

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Recently I read Girls®, a new book seeking to explore the problems posed by digital and social media to young women’s mental health. It has been praised by reviewers as “punchy” and “a starting place for young women seeking guidance”. As a young woman always open to improving myself, I rolled my sleeves up.

Written by 26-year-old Freya India, it encourages young women to “look past what you’re being TOLD and see what you’re being SOLD”. Big tech, the book says, is preying on the insecurities of its users; the recent mental health crisis in young women should be chalked up to social media, the internet and our addiction to it.

The book is a litany of all the different ways in which young women have been ruined. “We wasted our childhoods chasing something that does not exist.” “We forever damaged what little love we had for ourselves.” “We are vain and insecure.” Reading it, I agreed with many of its points, but I also felt myself bristle against the tone – one shared by many other commentators, such as Jonathan Haidt who, when thinking about young people, can only see the damage done by the scourge of social media. It paints young people as passive participants of the world, and is also reductive – as if a single great immoveable curse has been landed on my generation.

I, too, was born in 1999 and recognise most of the online phenomena that India references. I, too, dabbled in the Kylie Jenner lip challenge. But I simply can’t recognise this narrative: that my adolescence was spoiled and my brain has been curdled by the time I’ve spent online. It doesn’t match up to my experience – not only of myself, but also the young women and girls I know who have grown up with the internet. Not only does this narrative not feel real, it feels damaging.

Yes, social media can be harmful – but it surely isn’t the only thing causing the deterioration of mental health in young people (and girls in particular). I see it as part of a wider problem; a loss of agency in the way we narrate our lives. First, the increase in poor mental health in young people predates the arrival of the internet. Some studies show that this downward trend started as early as the 1980s, even if it has been accelerated by recent technologies.

One explanation could be reduced childhood independence – the generation who now find it the hardest to land on their feet financially through employment and leave their parental homes were also the generation who increasingly weren’t allowed to leave their parental homes as children. There has been a significant and steady rise of the age at which parents think it’s safe for their children to walk home alone from school. The area within which kids play has also become smaller. A study conducted in England found that only 33.2% of children surveyed played outside unsupervised near their homes, compared with 80% of children half a century ago. Technology has also changed the nature of supervision – while adults may not be physically present, children are now far more heavily surveilled.

Independent play and exploration are crucial for building autonomy in childhood. Psychologists have argued that without this, it is difficult for children to develop an “internal locus of control”, or the idea that their own actions affect the world around them. On the other hand, an “external” locus of control, or the idea that external factors have the biggest impact on their lives, is associated with higher anxiety and higher depression.

And how else is this sense of external control formed? Surely through the narratives we are immersed in. If the narrative is that sensitive feminine brains are susceptible to harm on social media, then it could help perpetuate powerlessness: encouraging young women to think that everything is outside their control and that we are passive victims with no choice in the matter, other than to accept our brains are fried or to simply drop out of the internet altogether (hardly an easy option).

But is it really such a binary choice? Studies tend to suggest that it’s not whether we are using social media at all that will contribute to loneliness, but whether we are using it passively. Autonomy is the main thing; if there is a crisis, it is one of empowerment – young people are hyper-aware of the negative aspects of their own situation, partly due to excessive and doom-mongering news coverage, and they aren’t being given the tools to escape it.

A girl playing hula hoop on a street in the 1960s.

The material, economic situation for young people is the most pressing issue in our lives. We’ve lost a huge amount of material independence. To home in on social media when it comes to young women’s mental health is to be unable to see the catastrophically burning wood for a few singed trees.

To doomsaying commentators, gen Z are beyond help, and so the focus has moved to the under-16s (and outright social media bans). But we need a lot more discussion about how to have a relationship with social media that is empowering rather than enfeebling. The internet is an apparatus primarily focused on economic gain, not the mental health of its users. It is important, therefore, to adopt a distinctly feminist approach to the internet: a powerful, considered and compassionate one – without shame.

I know many young women who are vibrant, curious, happy and easily spend nine hours a day on TikTok. I also know very depressed young women who have never used social media. I regularly deactivate and activate Instagram, as do other people I know. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.

And while I know it is important to discuss online harms, a detailed catalogue of all the horrible things that have happened to young women on the internet isn’t useful and isn’t invigorating. It’s doom-mongering. It’s a lightning-rod argument and, as of recently, a bit of a grift. Pundits like India may ask us to look past what we’re being told to see what we’re being sold – but the vision of doom sells. This narrative is profitable.