Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theconversation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 456 posts

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

#171

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

malux85 wrote: post #107
cteague wrote: post #100

Many of you are speaking about the social aspects of smartphones and social media, but I think a big issue is also the cognitive impact of short-term gratification due to internet/tech addiction. Happiness often comes from feeling competent. If teens attention spans are dwindling due to this addiction, they are going to grow up without the grit to persist and develop skills.

I see this in the students I mentor. Every single one of them cannot focus on a single task for longer than 60 seconds, which is severely hampering their ability to think deeply about abstract programming and data science problems. It's very frustrating, but they just cannot stop checking their phones for updates

I had this issue. A combination of the pomodoro technique and forced daily reading made a massive difference in my short-term attention span.

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

#172

Post by jotm »

ars wrote: post #37
jotm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't actually know the effects of long term exposure to so much radiation. Don't you mean so little radiation? The sun puts out far more radiation than a phone, and now people are getting less sun, and thus less radiation.

Yes, that's the most overused argument. But the artificial radiation is on top of the natural one. I'm counting not only cell towers and Wifi, but power lines and transformers, and the infra and ultrasound all around us.

It's probably just a blip, though, and it's probably the always-connected aspect that has way more profound effects.

I can only say that a few days in the countryside without electricity was one of the most relaxing experiences ever.

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

#173

Post by verbify »

Teen suicide isn't going up in Europe generally or specifically in the UK.

It seems more likely to me that the uptick is due to a 2004 FDA black-box warning on antidepressants indicating that they were associated with an increased risk of suicidal thinking, feeling, and behavior in young people. It seems likely that prescriptions for antidepressants would go down and people avoiding taking their antidepressants would go up a few years after the warning.

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

#174

Post by JCharante »

malux85 wrote: post #107
cteague wrote: post #100

Many of you are speaking about the social aspects of smartphones and social media, but I think a big issue is also the cognitive impact of short-term gratification due to internet/tech addiction. Happiness often comes from feeling competent. If teens attention spans are dwindling due to this addiction, they are going to grow up without the grit to persist and develop skills.

I see this in the students I mentor. Every single one of them cannot focus on a single task for longer than 60 seconds, which is severely hampering their ability to think deeply about abstract programming and data science problems. It's very frustrating, but they just cannot stop checking their phones for updates

What types students are you mentoring? I've observed that groups of the best-performing students look down on those "addicted" to their phones and some have switched to flip phones.

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

#175

Post by thomasz »

walshemj wrote: post #126
arkades wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various possible con founders were discussed at length in the article. The obvious one, depression leading to social Media use: “Two followed people over time, with both studies finding that spending more time on social media led to unhappiness, while unhappiness did not lead to more social media use. A third randomly assigned participants to give up Facebook for a week versus continuing their usual use. Those who av…

isn't this just bias some of the original time and motion studies that the act of changing something effected the results found? The example my course gave was first increasing lighting production went up then when the reduced the lighting production went up not down as expected

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

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

#176

Post by xupybd »

throwaway2801 wrote: post #153
lumberjack wrote: post #62

Too quick to blame, "the screen". Is it really just the existence of social media that caused this, or is it maybe a change of culture that emerged with the spread of the Internet and social media? For example, today a child from a religious community might encounter atheism at 12 or 13 whereas previously they would encounter it when they went off to college. Maybe that child happens to be suffering from depression a…

> having discovered atheism at such a tender age , they are left hopeless and desolate . (emphasis mine) What?? As if atheists were monsters. As an atheist (more agnostic actually - I cannot be sure no gods exist), your answer feels interesting but also surprising, very saddening and actually chocking. Let's not make atheists look like evil people who make children depressed. This is not OK. I never needed to have an…

Perhaps the original post was not saying atheists are monsters but to encounter a massive challenge to their world view at a young age, may disrupt the comfort of children? Children are wrapped in the bubble of comfort by the boundaries they're raised in. When you mature you question those boundaries and find your own way in the world. But during your early years you may lack the maturity to challenge the foundation of your world view. Being exposed to other ways of thinking may lead to anxiety. It's only a recent thing that people have been so easily exposed to ideas from outside of the creed they were raised in.

But I don't really know, just playing the devils advocate.

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

#177

Post by madaxe_again »

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.

There should be a health warning to the effect of: “Objects seen on instagram are faker than they appear.”

They may be beautiful, they may be on a yacht - but the thing has been chartered for an hour for an instagram shoot, they’re staying in a backpacker’s hostel, that methuselah of champagne was bought empty and filled with water, and they’re not actually called Montague Herostache, but rather Duane Dibbley. It’s all artifice.

Source: I watched gaggles of instagrammers faking the lifestyle at Royal Phuket Marina during a yacht show last year, paying to pose on megayachts. It was rather sad - like caged birds primping their plumage.

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

#178

Post by darkstar999 »

throwaway2801 wrote: post #153
lumberjack wrote: post #62

Too quick to blame, "the screen". Is it really just the existence of social media that caused this, or is it maybe a change of culture that emerged with the spread of the Internet and social media? For example, today a child from a religious community might encounter atheism at 12 or 13 whereas previously they would encounter it when they went off to college. Maybe that child happens to be suffering from depression a…

> having discovered atheism at such a tender age , they are left hopeless and desolate . (emphasis mine) What?? As if atheists were monsters. As an atheist (more agnostic actually - I cannot be sure no gods exist), your answer feels interesting but also surprising, very saddening and actually chocking. Let's not make atheists look like evil people who make children depressed. This is not OK. I never needed to have an…

I think you're taking it the wrong way. Perhaps they feel hopeless and desolate because they are stuck in the religious group after learning about other things.

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

#179

Post by rdiddly »

cwar wrote: post #156
rdiddly wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still affects them - what if their parents (or parent, single) can't afford to move them into a decent school district, for example?

The article says this is not limited to an economic class

The article says that about the effects of smartphones. We're talking about the effects of the housing market right here.

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

#180

Post by jimmaswell »

TheDong wrote: post #169
jimmaswell wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous. Depressed and filled with existential dread over seeing pictures of rich people on yachts, really? Do you feel that way every time you pass by a large house or see an expensive car on the road too?

As silly as it sounds, strangers on the road or houses you pass by aren't human Social media / instagram / etc allow the other party to feel human to you, at which point you can easily get into the thought of "They're not really better than me, are they? Why is their life so gilded"..

I knew kids with huge houses and rich parents as a kid and I didn't feel more strongly about it than "this house/pool/whatever is pretty cool". Maybe "gee I wish I had every video game console too" at most. In high school too mosy people I knew were materially better off. It never gave me a complex about it. It's just life, almost everybody can find examples of people with more money.
Post reply on HN