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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

#211
The existential challenge for most teens is "Do I belong with peers?" I had a hard enough time with that, with only a few hundred schoolmates. I can't quite imagine how tough that must be on social media today. Bullying and mobbing are just so much more efficient.

I suppose that one could argue that's it's just stronger selective pressure for toughness. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." But now, words can hurt. Can destroy your life. Or so it seems. And what about the ones who survive? What sort of society will they create? I have no clue.

Maybe we should manage social media like psychoactive drugs.

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spend about 10 minutes a day on instagram and come away thinking how amazing the world is. You have to curate your feed. Curate curate curate.

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.

100% agree with this, as do several of my friends. Curated correctly (pretty easy to do), Instagram becomes a place of respite and solace. And for some, a pleasant peaceful channel before going to sleep for the night. Kind of ironically :)

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huh. I have never heard anyone brag about the size of their linkedin network.

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

#214
post #69

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.

Unfortunately it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

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

#215

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…

My parents went through the same thing with me. Turns out I just really, really like computers and I get really, really anxious around new people. That time of your life when everything is awkward and you're full of hormones certainly doesn't help.

He's 17 which is the "I think I'm an adult" area. Every 2 years he'll be looking back and thinking, "wow, I was really young".

Tread cautiously, treat him like an adult and just talk to him. The more comfortable he feels around you, the better. Many of us got sick of our parents at that age (I moved out the week after I turned 18 - nobody expected it), but I figured out later when I lived with another adult who treated me almost like I'd imagine a really good boss would, ala, "everyone keeps the house clean, if I ask you to do something it's because I've already done something today and I know you've seen it and not done anything about it. I get it, nobody wants to do this stuff - but I work 8 hours a day, 7 days a week and I hate it too, but it's easier on both of us if we work together".

Get him to participate in more around the house stuff, cooking is good, help with your taxes if he's interested (then hopefully exploit that for the next 30 years). Repairing stuff. Don't tell, ask - reward.

On the social side, go to meetups or clubs in things you've found interesting together, ask him for help finding them. I get people say kids should be around people their own age, and generally speaking I think they should, but I look back and at that time I just wanted to do stuff that interested me. Unfortunately none of my friends from school had similar interests - so I found that escape through work and online.

I'm glad I forced myself to hang with my friends then since we still keep in touch, but there's opportunities all through his 20s (and especially university, send him to student living spaces) to build relationships with people his own age. I do regret however, forcing myself into relationships just because it was "what was expected of me".

Plenty of people live lives that are considered "the norm", parents hope their children follow similar paths they did. But sometime we don't. And that's OK, so long as we're happy. So concentrate on that.

Good luck!

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

#216

Morons - "It can't be the economy because unemployment is low and the economy is booming." Except of course that rents are far outpacing wages and most people are getting by with make work. Almost all the US jobs created since 2005 are temporary https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created... I mean good lord, if I were 17 right now and knew it were only going to get worse as I got older I would be do…

Why do you think Cal State psychology professors are “rich”? Twenge has a salary of about $100,000/year. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2016/california-s... Plus whatever she brings in by writing non-fiction books, delivering paid speeches, doing market research consulting, and maybe some summer job. That’s probably quite a bit lower than the average reader of this forum.

According to this she's at least in the 8th percentile (http://graphics.wsj.com/what-percent/). Meaning she doesn't have to worry about keeping a roof over her head or how to feed herself (that's 1 in 6 btw https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-hunger-us). So yeah, she's safely rich enough to be insulated from being wrong about poverty. And people will listen to her because she has a title (ie rich enough to pay for one) and so therefore they assume she is right.

A complete dumpster fire the whole way down.

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

#217

I find it interesting the article doesn't talk about physical health. Many of the mental health drugs cause extreme weight gain which can lead to depression.

Well the one I'm on definitely doesn't. /anecdata

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. I also believe that YouTube can have similar results. Kids watch videos of "professional" YouTubers having nice cars, traveling all the time, living in nice homes, etc... We have had to significantly limit the amount of time our kids are exposed to YouTube (and Instagram) simply because of the "I want it now" and "I want that one" mentality it has caused on some occasions.

YouTube, like TV and the newsstand, has good content and bad content.

Very true. Unfortunately, for kids/teens they tend to gravitate towards the "bad" content. I don't mean the content is necessarily by definition (i.e. r-rated or poor production quality), simply that it provides no value other than "look at me" and "see how I live" value to viewers.

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

#219
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to curate your feed. Curate curate curate. So the counter-argument is that Instagram is not so depressing provided that one uses as little Instagram as possible ("curate, curate, curate")? That kind of proves the parent's point (which wasn't that one can't possible ever find anything non-depressing/jealousy inducing on Instagram).

> one uses as little Instagram as possible No, you didn't understand. The point is that you should follow things that make you feel good and cut off access to things that make you feel bad. Choose your experience. Curate your feed. That's supposed to be the whole point. It's like the difference between enjoying a glass of fine wine and alcoholic abuse that causes cirrhosis.

Isn't that like only following people whose political views you agree with?

On one hand, we've got to burst this bubble we're in and get out of the echo chamber.

But if you burst the bubble and get out, then you'll just be depressed looking at everything you hate.

Hmm.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thankyou that was the one, my production engineering classes where a longtime ago
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