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The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

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Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#91

Post by RangerScience »

xeromal wrote: post #89
nluken wrote: post #79

While I don't doubt that social media can drive some of these mental health issues, I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular).…

> I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. I have absolutely no data to back this up but a difficult college admission process isn't novel to 2012+. This is also ignores the plenty of kids/young adults that never went to college and still suffer from whatever this epidemic is. We'd need to review data for people who didn't go to undergrad/g…

* people who didn’t try to go

If stress from college prep is an issue, it’s only people that weren’t going through that who you’d want in the other bucket.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#92

Post by [deleted] »

nluken wrote: post #79

While I don't doubt that social media can drive some of these mental health issues, I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular).…

[deleted]

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#93

Post by paperwasp42 »

oneoff786 wrote: post #35
d_sem wrote: post #11

Having exited my teen years just before the smartphones became ubiquitous in the US, I got the opportunity to watch externally how social media and other similar systems effected the day-to-day of my younger siblings through their teen years. It was not positive. Maybe someone younger can attest to my observations: - more localized isolation as kids spent a higher % of their attention in internet communities - less c…

> less cultural cohesion due to hyper diversity in memes resulting in fewer shared experiences People being different is bad?

OP hit on a really interesting point, and if he's referring to the same thing I've seen, the issue isn't "difference." I think the issue is the degree of difference.

The place I volunteer at has quite a few teen volunteers, and I've noticed I can immediately spot the chronically-online teens (and there's a lot of them), because it's like they're from a different planet. They use language I don't understand, their humor revolves around memes I don't understand, they constantly reference people/events from their favored internet niche, and then completely lose interest in talking with people who don't understand their niche.

I think this ends up decreasing the amount of difference and diversity teens are exposed to, because when there are a million [insert niche here] fans online who "totally get you", there is far less incentive to make friends in the real world. And if you do make real-world friends, they likely are going to be part of that same niche, and have the exact same language/interests/etc that has been crafted by the online community. (It's honestly a bit eerie how good these niches are at creating cookie-cutter teens. I've had bizarrely similar conversations with kids who have never met each other, but are into the same niche. And it's not just their interests that are similar, it's their attitudes/outlooks/political views/etc.)

I find this really concerning, because it's important for teens to be exposed to a wide variety of people/experiences and be encouraged to respect them all. And that's hard to do when you're in a bubble of people who are identical to you, and have very little incentive to branch outside of that bubble.

I think back to my teen friend group, and it was a hodge-podge of computer geeks, theatre kids, journalism nerds, etc. I got so much benefit from having such a diverse friend group, and it's concerning to see those types of friend groups becoming rarer.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#94

Post by Melatonic »

I am so damn happy I was born at that perfect time where cellphones just started to become popular in highschool and yet I never had to deal with Facebook. I got to start with mixtapes and end youth with my telephone as my vinyl player and the worst thing that could happen to me was that I might go to my friends Myspace page and accidently blast "CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES" from my family computer.

We definitely owe it to the future kids to figure out how to replicate something similar to that in the modern era. But I have no idea how.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#95

Post by [deleted] »

kderbyma wrote: post #81

2012 was a major shift in culture. Major hacks, social media, phone culture, the beginning of the 'scandals', globalisation was on full tilt, people had never really moved along from occupy movement, and this was when corporations decided to just feign support to avoid getting targetted. I think this was the wokening across the culture which came hand in hand with mental health crisis.

[deleted]

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#96

Post by kneebonian »

kderbyma wrote: post #81

2012 was a major shift in culture. Major hacks, social media, phone culture, the beginning of the 'scandals', globalisation was on full tilt, people had never really moved along from occupy movement, and this was when corporations decided to just feign support to avoid getting targetted. I think this was the wokening across the culture which came hand in hand with mental health crisis.

Interestingly enough there was another major shift that happened in 2012, some say in reaction to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

https://tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net/production/ca8d4b10f55ed...

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#97

Post by sophacles »

6_6_6 wrote: post #76

good times (pax americana) create weak people (fat, depressed, entilted, egomaniacs, etc) we need a 'war' to prune the tree of life yet again human is not above the nature winter is comming

Are you seriously suggesting it's a good idea to kill off a bunch of folks? Let me guess, you are in the group that gets to survive, and you just want to provide a "solution" to all the people that you dislike.

I have a better idea: lead by example. Why don't you demonstrate the effectiveness of removing a bad branch on yourself first?

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#98

Post by HEmanZ »

nluken wrote: post #79

While I don't doubt that social media can drive some of these mental health issues, I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular).…

I understand your point, because I was the same. But I’m not sure our experience is a super common one among teens.

Reason I think this now, is that I have volunteered at large local high schools for college admission help. There just aren’t that many students who get pushed or push themselves like this. The majority in the US don’t go to college, and the vast majority don’t put in a stressful amount of effort into college/career prep and extra-curricular activities.

I don’t know what theory to replace it with, but I don’t think the majority of the students in the US are overworked like this.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#99

Post by verteu »

nimbius wrote: post #27

Perhaps related: the Affordable Care Act was passed by US President Obama in 2010. the US prior to 2010 had also experienced nearly seventy school shootings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th... Since Mr. Haidt reports from the US statistics of the CDC: 1. could it be reasonable then to suggest the prevalence of mental illness in teens is evidence of more cogent detection systems coming onl…

Not likely. The pattern holds for suicide rates, which are not very affected by ACA "more cogent detection systems."

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#100

Post by thatfrenchguy »

carabiner wrote: post #90
nluken wrote: post #79

While I don't doubt that social media can drive some of these mental health issues, I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular).…

40% of high school students don't go to college (of any type). Of those, only a tiny portion are focused on elite universities. Many are just going to Long Beach State, University of Redlands and other 4 year schools that you've never heard of. They have lax admissions. Among adult Americans, only a third have bachelors degrees. Certainly the high pressure scholastic environment of certain high schools is not common.

You’re going to get a bias in here because a lot of folks are STEM focused / high achieving high anxiety types :)
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