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

Saying teens are "hyper-aware of social status" is not going far enough: the teenage years are a period of social awakening in which we reach new levels of understanding, empathy, and theory of mind.

From a physical perspective a lot of teenage behaviour can be attributed to various brain structures developing at different rates (specifically, structures associated with emotions developing quicker than the structures associated with rational inhibitions).

Mentally speaking, a lot of teenage development is about the brain growing and "recalibrating" to deal with the new sensations this growth brings.

It is not a great leap from there to expect that social media, with their hyper-optimised feedback-loops, are capable of greatly disturbing this process.

I never argued that. So you are building a straw man. Of course everything has an "effect". But it didn't bring society down. That's the point. It isn't the cause of all of societies ills. If the media, people like you and others were right, then society would have collapsed a long time ago. It hasn't.

> You, yourself mentioned ads in your comment. What is an ad but a type of media? And yet, ads are so effective that they are basically the backbone of many of the largest tech companies in the world.

Sure. But ads are media specifically engineered to influence you in a particular manner. Gangsta rap, violent video games, porn, etc are meant to entertain. But I agree, all media influences.

> If this wasn't possible, advertising wouldn't be one of the largest industries in the world.

Once again, I'm not denying that media has influence. Advertising, news media, entertainment, movies, etc all influence to some degree. My point was about the scaremongering and scapegoating of certain things and how overblown it is and how people do it for money and influence.

> The third largest party in Germany wants to leave the euro

I presume they feel they have to leave the euro before there is an option of leaving the EU.

It's true that other parties refuse to be in coalition with the AfD. This is a bad move on their part. It doesn't make them not a main party though. Especially because the other parties have also been refusing to be in coalitions with each other too.

Right now German politics is the most disastrous in Europe - all the political leaders hate each other, all have publicly trashed each other, all have been refusing to work together and yet Merkel and her buddies continue to rule as if nothing had happened. It's taking months to form a government because they're trying to figure out which party-destroying, soul-sucking coalition is least unacceptable to them and the voters.

We will have to disagree on the EU's approach to compromise. Yes, it compromised with Thatcher back in the 1980's but that was a different time. The EU was much smaller and its institutions felt much less powerful, so compromise and teamwork was much more important back then. As the EU has grown so have its ambitions and the character of the project has changed. The modern EU is not the same organisation that Thatcher dealt with.

That can be seen in recent events. Cameron was given nothing at all and told to pretend it was some massive sacrifice by other leaders. The British public easily saw through that instantly which is why virtually nobody in the remain campaign referred to his "deal" ever again. A compromise would have been the UK suspending unlimited immigration from the EU. It was made clear that such a thing was never going to be on offer and they thought it was insane to even ask.

As for the opt-outs ... good luck keeping them in the event of a remain vote! The EU sees "opt outs" as some horrible nasty legacy thing that they regret ever happened, not as a basic part of negotiation. Even their phrasing shows what they truly think: Germany and Germans like to refer to them as "special privileges"! I have German friends and debated Brexit with one of them once, that's how she called them and I'm not surprised, they call it "extrawürst" in their language - extra sausage. Deep down Germans know that the EU is an undesirable future, but feel they have to suffer through it anyway for the greater good (elimination of Germany as a country and transference of German pride to Europe, a new country free of the horrible history of their own).

I think that taking it away from me would have made things worse instead of me suddenly becoming very good socially. Next year, I went to college, met new people and stopped caring about League.