Thread by @mcmullarkey

One trope coming out of the Big Tech & mental health discussions is the presumed weakness of self-reported well-being

Folks don't have perfect insight into what impacts their mental health

And how folks perceive their own well-being is more important than any "objective" metric

https://twitter.com/jonathanstray/status/1446185372392689672

I've found this thought exercise helpful

A close friend tells you they're having a hard time getting out of bed every day and feeling really down

They get a new Not-Theranos blood test that "detects depression" and test negative

Do you believe your friend or the blood test?

This dynamic is what makes most mental health diagnoses simultaneously much trickier and much easier than most physical health diagnoses

Even if we don't expect perfect insight, how people feel about their lives often matters more than any "objective" test

There are real critiques of self report measures, and I've written some of them!

But the outcome data evaluated by Big Tech in the original WSJ article wasn't weak because it was self-reported. It was weak because of mismatches between the research design and the conclusions

I will also note that some predictors of interest in this space like screen time aren't well assessed by self-report *at all*

I'm talking about not underrating validated outcome metrics of well-being, depression symptoms, etc.