The Collapse of Attention: How Social Media Is Rewiring Youth Mental Health

We’ve been measuring the decline of youth mental health like it’s a mystery. It isn’t.In Episode 9, we stop treating social media as a "choice" and start treating it as what it actually is: public health infrastructure. Drawing on the work of Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, we unpack how dopamine-driven design and attention fragmentation are reshaping adolescent development in real time.This isn’t a lecture on screen time—it’s an autopsy of system design. If we continue to treat this as an individual behavior problem, we will continue to miss the intervention point. The question is no longer if social media is the driver; it’s whether we are prepared to regulate it.Subscribe to The NextGen Public Health Brief → [nextgenpublichealthconsultancy.com/newsletter]Explore advisory work → nextgenpublichealthconsultancy.com