Pay phones remaining in the US

As pay phones have disappeared from American streets, antidepressant use among adults has risen with a correlation so tight it makes you wonder whether the phone booths were load-bearing emotional infrastructure. Twenty-one years of data show these trends moving in opposite directions with the precision of a seesaw operated by forces that have no idea the other exists. Perhaps there was something therapeutic about inserting quarters into a slot and hearing a dial tone. Perhaps we have simply replaced one form of connection with another.

Pay phones declined from about 2.1 million in 2002 to fewer than 100,000 by 2022, rendered obsolete by mobile phones. Antidepressant use among US adults grew from about 7 percent to over 13 percent during the same period, driven by reduced stigma around mental health treatment, broader diagnostic criteria, direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, and—it must be said—a genuinely more anxious and isolated society. The smartphone that killed the pay phone also created the conditions that drive some of the anxiety: constant connectivity, social media comparison, and the erosion of the kind of casual public interaction that pay phones, for all their inconvenience, at least required you to have in person. Both trends track the transition from analog public life to digital private life.

Twenty-one data points of pay phones disappearing and antidepressants rising is a correlation that lands uncomfortably close to meaning something, which is rare on this site and therefore worth noting. The pay phone did not prevent depression, and the smartphone did not cause it, but the world that eliminated one and necessitated the other is the same world. The dial tone is gone. The prescription persists.