With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit • Hacker News Board

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#111

Post by agumonkey » Sun, Jan 28, 2018, 9:44 PM UTC

deckard1 wrote: post #12

They did a study using Facebook. But I'm more curious about Instagram. "Look at all these rich beautiful people with millions of followers sailing around the world on their yachts." Ten minutes on Instagram is enough to fill any sane person with existential dread and bring about severe depression.

Depends on the person. I don't respond to material wealth, I would probably end up annoyed by their lifestyle more than anything else. Facebook and similar on other hand rubbed my lack of social skills wound so much I deleted it really long ago.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#112

Post by askafriend » Sun, Jan 28, 2018, 9:44 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #99

katrinamo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I've carefully tailored my feed so it provides me with a huge amount of dog photos. Now every time I get on there my mood is usually boosted seeing cute dog photos and videos.

That's not using Instagram in general anymore though, that's heavily censoring Instagram towards very non-typical streams. It's as if responding to someone that said that one can never find any positive stream on Instagram, when people actually complained about what Instagram, at its majority, and as is used by most, is.

Everyone's Instagram feed is different and that's by design. Everyone curates differently for themselves. I don't think the point you're making is really that strong.

Media broadly is what you make of it. Turn on the TV and flip to CNN, I'm sure you'll be depressed within a couple minutes. At some basic level the burden of information curation rests on you - the human. You can't keep blaming CNN, Instagram, Facebook, Buzzfeed, etc etc ad infinitum.

At some point you have to step back and take the responsibility of information intake into your own hands.

That's not to say you don't have a valid point. You absolutely do have a valid point. But it's not as useful of a point as you're suggesting imo.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#113

Post by mkagenius » Sun, Jan 28, 2018, 9:44 PM UTC

jotm wrote: post #19

randomname2 wrote: post #9

Is it possible this is also in part due to EMFs from their phones (and environment) and circadian rhythm disturbances from screens? Some studies suggest the radiation can be risky to kids: Christ A, Gosselin MC, Christopoulou M, K’uhn S, & Kuster N. (2010 Jan.). Age dependent tissue-specific exposure of cell phone users. Physics in Medicine and Biology, 55: 1767-1783. Retrieved from http://iopscience.iop.org/0031-915…

Ah, whatdya know, I said the same thing a while ago - we don't actually know the effects of long term exposure to so much radiation. But I think it's mostly the Internet - too much information, endless info streams, endless mindless entertainment, endless feeds of successful people (so it seems that everyone is successful, or making 50K/year, or pretty, except you and your family/friends/hometown).

We may be able to draw a correlation with pre television era and an introduction to television — for cardiac rhythm and mindlessness entertainment effects among others.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#114

Post by whatshisface » Sun, Jan 28, 2018, 9:45 PM UTC

lsc wrote: post #67

Tuesday, this was the theme at my toastmaster's debate club[1] - I got stuck arguing that social media doesn't make you depressed. And... my problem with my argument wasn't that it was untrue, but that it was kinda mean. I don't feel jealous of the lives of almost anyone I went to high school with; quite the opposite. A lot of them post "racist memes with spelling mistakes" - which is sad on many levels; If nothing e…

If you really do look down on your old friends and acquaintances like that (so that you see their posts as all about being poorer and less articulate than you), then you're probably the one making posts that depress them.

Imagine yourself as if you went to highschool in the society where you now work (so that now, the people you used to know are twice as educated and lots of them are far more wealthy), or perhaps imagine what it would be like to have stayed in your old town while someone else went to SV!

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#115

Post by dpark » Sun, Jan 28, 2018, 9:46 PM UTC

ebbv wrote: post #69

zimablue wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair to be off-hand sceptical without digging into the details of the paper. Since we don't really understand depression, it seems fairly obvious that it would be nigh on impossible to control for causes we don't know.

No, it is never fair to react to a peer reviewed scientific study with off hand skepticism.

While “correlation is not causation” is a tired refrain, I agree that default skepticism is the generally appropriate response. There are peer reviewed scientific studies showing essentially everything and anything you could want to believe. Relatively few hold up to scrutiny or repeat experiments.

There is undoubtedly an opposing study that shows increased screen time correlates to happiness.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#116

Post by root_axis » Sun, Jan 28, 2018, 9:46 PM UTC

yakitori wrote: post #61

Thank god for our daily "social media" is evil propaganda. I hope one day someone looks into who is pushing this and why. It would be very interesting. At this point, all the outrage and propaganda really comes off as manufactured and fake. Maybe it's a generational thing. When I was a child, it was south park, simpsons and gangsta rap that was ruining kids mental health. And video games were responsible for school s…

Your comment feels like cynical contrarianism. Just because everyone says social media is bad doesn't mean its not. The observed increase in suicide rates among teens is real and this study presents evidence that social media might explain this rise including careful controls for other factors. Is this study the end of the story on social media? Of course not, but it shows that there is some there there.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#117

Post by Spooky23 » Sun, Jan 28, 2018, 9:47 PM UTC

MIKarlsen wrote: post #25

deckard1 wrote: post #12

They did a study using Facebook. But I'm more curious about Instagram. "Look at all these rich beautiful people with millions of followers sailing around the world on their yachts." Ten minutes on Instagram is enough to fill any sane person with existential dread and bring about severe depression.

Not as much as LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a fairytale-land for adults, and it's bizzare (to me) that anyone wants to participate. It's not even humblebragging anymore. It's "Look what I made, and what I achieved" packed into casual "Oh this thing? Yeah it's just my perfect life"-packages...

LinkedIn is like baseball cards when I was a kid.

There’s two metrics for dick-measuring contests, size of network and quality of network. Linkedin is there to show, yeah I’m a badass who got the to link to me, or look at me, I have lots of cards.

There is some actual stuff happening there, but the bread and circus that brings the crowd are those two metrics.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#118

Post by aqsalose » Sun, Jan 28, 2018, 9:47 PM UTC

lsc wrote: post #67

Tuesday, this was the theme at my toastmaster's debate club[1] - I got stuck arguing that social media doesn't make you depressed. And... my problem with my argument wasn't that it was untrue, but that it was kinda mean. I don't feel jealous of the lives of almost anyone I went to high school with; quite the opposite. A lot of them post "racist memes with spelling mistakes" - which is sad on many levels; If nothing e…

>I live in a world where most people I spend time interacting with are smarter and wealthier and more successful than I am on several other axes

Maybe this is a relatively rare situation. I'd assume for most people, their FB life and "real" life social spheres coincide quite much.

(And because I love speculating, maybe you are the odd one out in your FB circles, the cool successful hacker living in SV and who interacts daily with the super-smart-super-wealthy people, not stuck in a life situation where "posting racist memes with spelling mistakes" is sensible use of their time.)

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#119

Post by PeterisP » Sun, Jan 28, 2018, 9:48 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #32

davito88 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

correlation does not imply causation

What does imply causation?

Strong, persistent correlation between A and B generally implies that it's one of three scenarios: A->B, B->A, or C->A + C->B.

In cases where it's not possible to do proper experiments to explicitly test A->B hypothesis, you'd say that correlation implies causation in the (not that rare) scenario where you have strong reasons to believe that B->A is not possible (e.g. the increase in teen suicides IMHO did not cause the increase in screen time) and you have thoroughly went through all the plausible confounders (C's) and have argumentation/evidence why that's not the case. In that case it's still not solid proof, but it's certainly a good implication and worth considering as likely true until further analysis or evidence.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#120

Post by cwar » Sun, Jan 28, 2018, 9:49 PM UTC

eat_veggies wrote: post #78

cwar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think many teens (13-18) are doing much deep thinking about those things. I was a teenager about a bit more about than a decade before this time period, so maybe things were just so great then I didn't consider these things. But it seems like a stretch to me that a middle school or high school student is depressed because they are worried about retirement. Things like that were far too abstract to be contribu…

Am teenager. I'm not too worried about my future because I have some decent development skills. However, a lot of my friends are depressed because a lot of these issues really aren't so far in the future as to be "too abstract." It doesn't take a huge mental leap to realize that the college educations we're about to drop $50k+ on might not help us get jobs in the near future, or that working until we die will sort of…

Sounds like you guys are way more in touch with this than we were. I guess it could make sense with how fast information gets around. When I was 13 the only way I would get this information would be through newspaper or TV news, which I didn't have time for.. I was playing hockey with my friends and playing video games if our parents didn't kick us outside.

I regret saying too abstract, I intended more to say this stuff was too far into the future that it would really worry me. I figured we were smart enough that by the time I got older we'd figure out a way to make life easier for everyone.

Maybe I was just dumb!