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

#311

Post by panarky » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 5:18 AM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #228

Before I even started reading, I knew it was going to be an attack at the phone. A few centuries ago, they'd attack books. Look back at videos from the 1950s and people didn't talk to each other on the train back then either, their noses were in books, magazines and newspapers. By the 80s, the nerdy kids had headphones and cassette players. By the 90s, people had discmans. The trouble with articles like this is they…

Is it the phone or is it Facebook?

If you have 500 friends, your feed is dominated by the 5 friends with spectacular stories about their stupendous lives.

Continuously comparing your ordinary life against your feed naturally makes you feel bad about yourself.

And being on public display 24x7, with the pressure to perform for your audience, in a never-ending struggle to keep up, must do incredible damage to the psyche.

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

#312

Post by indubitable » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 5:23 AM UTC

bitcurious wrote: post #258

djsumdog wrote: post #228

Before I even started reading, I knew it was going to be an attack at the phone. A few centuries ago, they'd attack books. Look back at videos from the 1950s and people didn't talk to each other on the train back then either, their noses were in books, magazines and newspapers. By the 80s, the nerdy kids had headphones and cassette players. By the 90s, people had discmans. The trouble with articles like this is they…

>In just the five years between 2010 and 2015, the number of U.S. teens who felt useless and joyless – classic symptoms of depression – surged 33 percent in large national surveys. Teen suicide attempts increased 23 percent. Even more troubling, the number of 13- to 18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31 percent. Perhaps to a nihilist maybe that's not a bad thing, but to most that's neither good nor nihilism. T…

To me the problem seems somewhat self evident.

Children like to think they're special. Parents of children like to think their child is special. And we're doing more than ever to try to convince children that they're special. But reality is not so kind. The vast majority of people, by definition, are not special and never will be. The internet emphasizes this truism. Whether your personal desire is intelligence, strength, beauty, music, or some other skill - the internet will emphasize that, even for your age, you suck.

That explains the useless part at least. As for joyless, I think the huge number of apps designed to give you that constant burst of something, ostensibly dopamine, that gives that feeling of joy (and more importantly from their perspective, addiction) is something that I think will have, almost with complete certainty, unforeseen consequences. Look at casinos and you see people that who are 'happily' inserting their pennies and pulling the rod - yet they look, and mostly are, completely miserable. Their addiction we consider negative because money is directly involved, yet is the addition to notifications, numbers, and all the sort of bells and whistles modern social sites use to trigger addiction truly that different? If anything, the insidious nature of it all makes it seem even worse.

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

#313

Post by indubitable » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 5:24 AM UTC

shams93 wrote: post #275

djsumdog wrote: post #228

Before I even started reading, I knew it was going to be an attack at the phone. A few centuries ago, they'd attack books. Look back at videos from the 1950s and people didn't talk to each other on the train back then either, their noses were in books, magazines and newspapers. By the 80s, the nerdy kids had headphones and cassette players. By the 90s, people had discmans. The trouble with articles like this is they…

Rasing tuition from $50 a year for baby boomers in the 70s to 25k a year any generation facing a life of indentured servitude when their parents got to be human beings is going to be nihilistic.

The vast majority of kids don't realize what money means. I mean they do in the abstract sense, but they tend to be naively unrealistic about the future. What's $70k of debt per year (paired with compound interest) matter when they'll be a millionaire in a decade or two anyhow?

--Edit--

Interesting, people didn't seem to realize this was true. Here [1] is a study from Gallup on peoples' views on wealth. There is a strong inverse correlation between the number of people that expect to become "rich" and age. For ages 18-29 it's 51%. That decreases down to 8% by the time people are 65, which is still unrealistic.

That study is from 2003, yet its results have been replicated with minimal change in other more recent studies as well (though not from Gallup). It's part of the reason that education loans are simultaneously so overtly predatory, but also phenomenally successful (from the point of view of lenders). Young people are completely unrealistic about their chances for success and so the implications of taking on mountains of debt with often poor interest rates, when you're young, is something they cannot accurately assess.

[1] - http://news.gallup.com/poll/7981/Half-Young-People-Expect-St...

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

#314

Post by flukus » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 5:26 AM UTC

bkohlmann wrote: post #23

CryoLogic wrote: post #7

Housing market is pretty bad factor. Most generations previous could afford a starter house on two minimum wage or a bit above minimum wage incomes. In many areas today you need two engineering incomes to pay off a 30 yr mortgage.

I'm not sure how many 13-17 year old teenagers were or are concerned with their ability to purchase a home.

I agree, but maybe we're projecting? We didn't have to think about it, it was a given that we'd move out and rent somewhere and eventually buy a home, only for the poorest in society would this be unattainable and much of the rest would be covered by social housing projects.

Many people in their 30's and 40's are now finding out that this isn't the case and it's talked about a lot, so teenagers are more likely aware. There's also a better chance that they're coming from a family that has never owned a home.

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

#315

Post by nate_meurer » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 5:27 AM UTC

simplify wrote: post #139

I just read a good article that relates to this. The cause isn't pretty, though (and not related to a screen). https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5a6a144de4b0ddb658c46a21

Thank you for this

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

#316

Post by brokensegue » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 5:57 AM UTC

ianai wrote: post #304

King-Aaron wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We’re still having children bringing guns to school to shoot their bullies. Americans seem to bring guns to church to shoot church goers. They bring guns to cinemas to shoot patrons. They leave guns in their car's back seat so their infant can accidentally shoot them through the back of their own head. I think the example of gun violence has a solution found outside the topic of teen depression. Gun ownership and t…

I addressed depression in the later paragraph. Kids are facing a pinch. If they do the socially expected thing and be “dumb” they face dismal employment opportunities. If they buck the trend they face harassment and still bad employment opportunities. Faced with no way out people feel depressed. And I’m just singling out a couple stress points there.

kids in my experience don't think about dismal employment opportunities. maybe late high schoolers but even though.

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

#317

Post by weeksie » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:35 AM 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…

This is pretty much my exact experience with social media. I grew up in a remote, working class area. Many of the people I grew up around are lower SES than I ended up being. Of course, I'm the lucky one that got out of that so my relative well being is pretty high. Who knows what it would be like if I grew up in a wealthy suburb of a major city.

That said, I do find myself drained after spending too much non creative screen time. News sites, twitter feeds, fb, insta, etc. . . . Anecdotes and all, but the screen time hypothesis jives well with my personal experience.

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

#318

Post by jraby3 » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:48 AM 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'm not on social media aside from Reddit. But what I notice with my wife and others is a simple reason why I dislike it. If you have 400 friends, and they each only take one vacation a year, that means 8x per week, you're looking at other people taking a vacation. Even if you travel 4x per year, you'll still feel like you never do anything and everyone else is always celebrating their life.

I realize this is a simple example, but it's valid and wears you down over time. Also, even having a handful of very wealthy friends can eventually lead to feelings of envy.

In past times, most people grew up surrounded by people similar to them in terms of wealth and status - but in today's world that's no longer the case.

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

#319

Post by seem_2211 » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:56 AM UTC

cwar wrote: post #120

eat_veggies wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

There are a lot of memes that go around people my age/younger than me (I'm 24), that make reference to depression / the fact that people don't really think that they have a chance at making a decent life. It's a humorous take on it, but it's manifesting a deeper anxiety, and it seems to have become a big thing in the past two years or so.

I moved to America about 18 months ago from New Zealand, and noticed that while Americans have more "stuff" they carry a lot more anxiety too. There's a lot less room for error. I think that's the same thing that's happened over generations. We've squeezed the big things - wages, housing prices, middle-class jobs and pumped up our general consumption. So we have more, but less security.

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

#320

Post by mathgenius » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 6:57 AM UTC

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 agree with this. It's not about "jealousy" towards your friends on fb. It's about feeding the attention-monkey. And the more you feed that monkey the more it wants.

Healthy brains spend time (much time) prior to attention, just being. I like to go on long walks and practice breathing. Dissolving mind and attention leads to great clarity, when the thoughts are needed.

Society as a whole does not seem to recognize the attention-burden, for example, more and more advertising and television images are showing up everywhere. It is not possible to just relax and be, while commuting or getting around town. People seem to assume that this is the way to live. It is not.