Rob Thomas, the American screenwriter, said that he created the character of Veronica Mars — 17 years old, fiercely intelligent, unafraid to speak her mind — to help teenage girls, who are “the most self-conscious people on the planet”.

It turns out that teenage girls are not just self-conscious, but profoundly lonely. A new study by the World Health Organization has found that almost a quarter of teenage girls say they are lonely, the highest of any group.

Being a teenage girl has always been a fraught, challenging time. Adolescence means suddenly having to navigate a world of raging hormones and complex social dynamics and hierarchies. Girls, in particular, find that they are now defined by how they look rather than what they do, and will inevitably be sexualised, whether they are ready for it or not.

Yet these relatively timeless struggles do not explain why we are going through a more recent “happiness recession”. A quarter of British 15-year-olds now report having poor life satisfaction, the highest in Europe, while between 2015 and 2022 happiness levels among girls in the UK also declined more sharply than the European average.

Physical inactivity may play a significant role: only one in 10 15-year-olds get 60 minutes of physical activity a day, with girls far more likely to do no exercise at all. Yet the fact that this decline accelerates around 2015 suggests that, once again, screen time and social media are to blame.

It’s well established that girls spend more time on their phones. One Swedish study found that 60% of teenage girls reported excessive smartphone use, compared to only 35% of boys. Research also shows that boys are more likely to use their screen time gaming (which has a more social element), whereas girls consume more social media, which, ironically, is anything but social.

Social media algorithms, too, are known to push very different content depending on your sex. Girls, in particular, are more likely to be shown information related to self-harm, eating disorders, and body image; even briefly engaging with fitness-related images can lead them down a rabbit hole of weight-loss content.

However, it is not just the more extreme types of content that are spreading this epidemic of loneliness and depression among teenage girls. The stereotyping, self-limiting nature of social media algorithms is also an important catalyst. For example, one study found that 68% of teenage girls said that their social media interests were limited to beauty, fashion and reality television. None of these are “dangerous” per se, but they are far more likely to negatively affect their self-esteem than the boys’ reported interests: sport, technology, politics and business.

Of course some girls will be actively seeking out this kind of content, but how can we tell what is intentional and what is imposed by an algorithm assuming this is “what girls like”? Anecdotally, when I speak to my students it seems that teenage boys primarily engage with content because it is funny: they enjoy watching pranks and stunts, witty interviews, comedians doing stand-up. For girls, the content is much more emotionally loaded: make-up tutorials, outfit “hauls”, gym workouts, vlogs of sun-kissed influencers “living their best life”. Again, it may not be dangerous, but it certainly changes one’s perception of what life ought to look like. Since most people’s lives do not resemble online perfection, it’s no wonder young girls become disillusioned with the real world. Disconnection and loneliness, then, are never far behind.

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Kristina Murkett is a freelance writer and English teacher.

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