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

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

#181

Post by malux85 »

JCharante wrote: post #174
malux85 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Comp-Sci/Electrical Engineers - I've never seen any of them without a smartphone, or even heard them talk about their friends switching.

Sounds like a good idea though :)

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

#182

Post by macspoofing »

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...

It's not the same. LinkedIn is a network for recruiters, job-seekers, execs and folks from biz-dev and sales. They dynamics are different. It's very work oriented.

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

#183

Post by vlasev »

ouid wrote: post #133

Teenagers get depressed when they are in love, their love is unrequited, and they are constantly reminded of that fact. Facebook facilitates all of these conditions. Why is love never mentioned in these studies as a primary motivator in teen suicide?

I'm not sure if it exists, but it would be a good idea to implement something like a temporary "ex block" for a whole device - everything posted by a specific person would be filtered out for you ON ALL platforms. You wouldn't see their facebook, instagram, twitter or any other profiles for a predetermined amount of time. I know it may approach a Black Mirror kind of vibe, but still...

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

#184

Post by johnvega »

Subtle accumulative micro attention brain hijacking that turns into detrimental habits. Overtime, it can be catastrophic. Perhaps it's less than 50 percent, but it's happening in a massive scale, so the actual number can be staggering.

http://www.timewellspent.io/problem Our society is being hijacked by technology

https://youtu.be/C74amJRp730 ... tech companies control billions of minds ...

https://youtu.be/nay5w-FC08Q?t=5m ... how we're steering 2 billion people's thought ...

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

#185

Post by rdm_blackhole »

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…

So religious people never get depressed? What a stupid argument! Believing that some (unproven and nonexistent) entity is going to solve all your problems is completely delusional.

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

#186

Post by xupybd »

sologoub wrote: post #163
xupybd wrote: post #161

> For example, while conducting research for my book on iGen, I found that teens now spend much less time interacting with their friends in person. Interacting with people face to face is one of the deepest wellsprings of human happiness; without it, our moods start to suffer and depression often follows. I think this is really the key. The lack of face time is really hard. Social media is a poor replacement for real…

> Interacting with people face to face is one of the deepest wellsprings of human happiness; That varies from person to person. There are enough introverts around who are completely drained by excess human interactions and need time to process and recharge. As a blanket statement this is very misleading. For those who tend more extroverted, it’s likely very true, but doesn’t make it true for everyone.

Introvert here. It took me a long time to realise the role that face to face interaction had in my emotional well being. I was awkwardly shy and confused by most social interaction. I'd also get down a lot.

Over time I learnt that I'd feel better if I made the effort to spend time around people and develop relationships. I'm still not great at this and would like to get better. But it's kind of like exercise yeah some people naturally enjoy it and some hate it but most will feel better for it.

Perhaps this is not true of everyone. But I'd be surprised if it wasn't true for a very significant proportion of the population.

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

#187

Post by psb31 »

This research is highly debated and is by no means a sure thing. The research so far has been correlational, inconsistent, and weak. Twenge hugely overstates the confidence we should have in the findings.

See https://medium.com/@OrbenAmy/social-media-and-suicide-a-crit... and https://twitter.com/shuhbillskee/status/955070356091555840 for some critiques of the work.

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

#188

Post by rock_hard »

pixelperfect wrote: post #167
limaoscarjuliet wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my son (17 y.o.) it is online games and phone use in general. He has - I hope - mild depression, which - I believe - is caused by his online habits. His mom and I thought taking his PC away from him would fix it. But then he falls into school-sleep cycle, that looks like full-blown depression. Yes, his grades are affected and in not a good way. What works for now is to participate in his life with him. As of now…

When I was around that age I also had my PC taken away from me. My recommendation would be to see if you can kickstart some hobby by spending a few hundred dollars on something as a substitute for the PC. Something of his choice than is more constructive than video games. When my PC was taken away and not replaced with anything, I just got bored and didn't know what to do with my time.

Same with me when I was a kid.

My parents also missed tons of opportunities to help me start other hobbies such as learning to play a instrument which I would have loved.

So I stayed with the PC...lots of gaming initially, which lead to learning about hardware and how to build computers myself (gotta overclock that CPU)...but I also have to admit that it sparked the interest to make my own games early which led me to pick up programming and that opened up a ocean of opportunities later in life.

It’s really hard to know what skill will be useful later in life...so now that I have kids in my own I try to support their natural interests which also allows my wife and I to moderate thins like gaming to some reasonable degree.

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

#189

Post by goialoq »

limaoscarjuliet wrote: post #129
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.

For my son (17 y.o.) it is online games and phone use in general. He has - I hope - mild depression, which - I believe - is caused by his online habits. His mom and I thought taking his PC away from him would fix it. But then he falls into school-sleep cycle, that looks like full-blown depression. Yes, his grades are affected and in not a good way. What works for now is to participate in his life with him. As of now…

He was playing on the computer too much so you are training him to be a pervert?

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

#190

Post by goialoq »

madaxe_again wrote: post #177
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 a…

http://www.momminitup.com/emily-thinks-shes-funny/objects-in...

Nothing new under the sun.

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