Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
jonathanhaidt.substack.com
Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
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Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#2I'm still reading it, but this is great so far. As a father to four little girls, though, it makes me feel really defeated. I can already see that social media has eroded my wife's mental health. I just don't know what to do in the next few years when our girls approach the age when everyone else will get an iPhone and have an Instagram account. I want to say no, but that leads to many other issues, including what the author describes perfectly in this passage:
"Suppose that... a 12-year-old girl decided to quit all social media platforms. Would her mental health improve? Not necessarily. If all of her friends continued to spend 5 hours a day on the various platforms then she’d find it difficult to stay in touch with them. She’d be out of the loop and socially isolated."
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#3I wasn’t aware that there is a media campaign to discredit this finding. Teen suicides exploded in growth YoY the moment smartphones became cheap enough around 2009.
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#4I wasn’t aware that there is a media campaign to discredit this finding. Teen suicides exploded in growth YoY the moment smartphones became cheap enough around 2009.
Remember the pro-cigarette media campaigning of the 90s and 00s?
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#5I'm still reading it, but this is great so far. As a father to four little girls, though, it makes me feel really defeated. I can already see that social media has eroded my wife's mental health. I just don't know what to do in the next few years when our girls approach the age when everyone else will get an iPhone and have an Instagram account. I want to say no, but that leads to many other issues, including what th…
It’s ok for a 12yo to be out of the loop for a few hours. They see their friends every day at school.
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#6I'm still reading it, but this is great so far. As a father to four little girls, though, it makes me feel really defeated. I can already see that social media has eroded my wife's mental health. I just don't know what to do in the next few years when our girls approach the age when everyone else will get an iPhone and have an Instagram account. I want to say no, but that leads to many other issues, including what th…
Same. It have no idea what I'm going to do about it.
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#7Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#8The article promises evidence, but it starts by repeating the premise half a dozen times, then offering correlations and loose theories. If there was evidence in there, I missed it. Maybe there was. But even if there was this was a badly formatted article.
Why can't people succinctly describe their thesis and then have a nice outline for the fine details on the proof? Is this not something we learn at uni, or even high school?
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#9I wonder if online dating tends to lead to similar impacts to mental health for some groups of people as social media does to teen girls. Just like in Haidt's examples, it's impersonal, phone-based, leading to constant social comparison, feelings of rejection, ostracism and ghosting. I wouldn't be shocked if a few years from now research came out showing that it has similar effects to adults, but they're just better at withstanding it than teens.
This is purely anecdotal with my group of friends, but we all can safely say that we feel mentally so much better when we're not on those apps, and yet the pull is always there when you want to expand your dating reach beyond your immediate circle and you hope that maybe this time around you'll get lucky and find the right partner. As a regular CBT practitioner I can detect many unhealthy conclusions that my mind makes any time I'm on these apps.
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember the pro-cigarette media campaigning of the 90s and 00s?
No. Can you point to some history on this?