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Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

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Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#541

Post by [deleted] »

timst4 wrote: post #123
warner25 wrote: post #2

I'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…

Middle School educator here. I can assure you that your daughters will not be alone when it comes to a moratorium on social media. However, the girls they may very well want to be friends with may be very much into social media and group chats. My advice is to be firm but also take steps to create social opportunities for your daughters. I have a 12yo and I host board game nights with amazing snack trays. I help her…

[deleted]

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#542

Post by kelipso »

tempestn wrote: post #372
bcrl wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a GenXer, my friends and I have regular contact outside of social media because we already had those habits ingrained in us before the current crop of social media platforms ever existed. I can't imagine being a teenager today having to deal with everyone in high school being on the same social media platforms and dealing with the pressure to fit in. We had cliques for good reason.

Yeah, you've got to look at percentages here. Some boomers get sucked into the pit of social media, but far more teenagers do. More life experience (and brain development in the case of young people) won't always help, but it often will.

> you've got to look at percentages here

Exactly. Just because you have a bunch of kids smoking doesn't mean the anti smoking advice and practices don't work on most of them.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#543

Post by josephg »

trieste92 wrote: post #536
josephg wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just think the gender norms for men are different. Traditionally, women are valued more for their beauty and (later) their capacity to raise children. Men are traditionally valued for their capacity to be bread winners. “Women are valued for what they are. Men are valued for what they do.” I think both ideas can be pretty toxic to their respective genders. The problems just show up differently. Social media, online…

> The problems just show up differently. Social media, online bullying and body shaming hurt girls more than boys. And video game addiction, desperation due to purposelessness and suicide seem to hurt men more than women. Idk. I feel like this is just culture trying to make up stories for each gender to define what deviance is supposed to look like It reminds me of how some people gravitate towards mbti types or enne…

> Idk. I feel like this is just culture trying to make up stories for each gender to define what deviance is supposed to look like

Regardless of how much the differences are cultural or innate, gender specific outcomes certainly show up in the data. Eg, this chart from the linked article:

https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8...

> the first step to overcoming them is disregarding the stupid stories that sound true

Yeah; it would help immensely if we could teach everybody that they're essentially healthy and worthy of love. Good, consistent parenting acts as an inoculation against these problems. When we're talking about the kids with the worst mental health outcomes, they're probably disproportionally poor, and more often than not come from single parent households. I suspect more support for struggling families would make more of a difference to the mental health outcomes of kids than somehow overcoming gender norms. It seems like a much more tractable solution, too.

Convincing regular people to not buy into the expectations of their own gender sounds like a borderline impossible task.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#544

Post by TheAlchemist »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #219
warner25 wrote: post #2

I'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…

I had my 12 year old daughter read the article and after she argued a while I said: Ok, write up your rejoinder and I will post it and see what others think. For context we severely restrict access to social media in our house, but of course they find ways around this as expected (I don't pi-hole because I want them to learn to be hackers) ----------------------------------- *Why I think it’s reasonable for me to hav…

Nicely written !

Now, did she use chatGPT ? ;)

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#546

Post by josephg »

monetus wrote: post #514
josephg wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure - and as an Australian I find America’s tolerance for school shootings utterly baffling. Here in Australia we play all the same video games as American kids do, and we don’t have school shootings. The problem isn’t the video games.

> tolerance for school shootings utterly baffling. I hang out with fewer gun owners than many but I am from Tennessee. It is kind of like getting people to recognize the need to do something about climate change. Most everyone recognizes it as a problem now, but solutions are someone else's business. "The ability to affect the problem is upstream, what am I going to do about it? What am I supposed to do about schools…

I've lived in the USA and I believe you. I just find it unbelievably depressing that the "best country on earth" can't find a way to stop their own children getting shot by other children in government run schools. As far as I know, the USA is the only country in the world with this problem.

Climate change might be exactly the right metaphor. Despite widespread public support for action, the australian federal government is still doing very little about the problem. Its not a good look.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#547

Post by RheingoldRiver »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #219
warner25 wrote: post #2

I'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…

I had my 12 year old daughter read the article and after she argued a while I said: Ok, write up your rejoinder and I will post it and see what others think. For context we severely restrict access to social media in our house, but of course they find ways around this as expected (I don't pi-hole because I want them to learn to be hackers) ----------------------------------- *Why I think it’s reasonable for me to hav…

My opinion is: Give her anonymous social media (& general internet safety tips), i.e. reddit or maybe some special-interest discords. Sounds like interacting with strangers on the internet is a lot better than your friends. Help her decide what to subscribe to based on her interests. I was about that age when I started posting on anonymous boards, and I wrote terrible group fanfictions, talked about how great the Lord of the Rings soundtracks were, predicted what would happen in my favorite webcomics were, etc. Communities like this still exist, they're just in different places now.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#548

Post by ryloric »

colonCapitalDee wrote: post #217
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #9

I 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…

I tried Tinder (and Hinge) as an average looking guy and found it to be dehumanizing. I rarely got matches, the matches I got usually didn't respond to my messages, and even when they did I could tell they weren't invested in the interaction. I've got a great job, a decent face, I work out, I've got friends, family, hobbies, and passions. I genuinely like myself; I'm satisfied with my life and my personal development…

You're very very young, you're not gonna die before you find a partner.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#549

Post by Manuel_D »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #307
ravenstine wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reflecting on that question means saying things that many people would find offensive. It's a lost cause to suggest that corporations implicitly understand something innate about female psychology and are taking advantage of it, and that's exactly why social media wins; the current politics you mentioned are a protective layer against taking meaningful action against the machine. If society was as concerned about the…

> ...that many people would find offensive. It's a lost cause to suggest that corporations implicitly understand something innate about female psychology... You are wrong. Feminism as a broad social movement, and as an academic discipline, explicitly sought to question and attack the social structures and behaviors that were often insisted to be "innate" about female psychology and well being. Basically no one would…

The reflexive rejection of any inmate gender differences can do just as much harm as good. For instance, if girls are innately predisposed to fall into harmful social media habits and feminism rejects and denounces any acknowledgement of it does that help girls? Or does it hurt them?

For instance, a greater tendency among girls to express aggression through social violence rather than physical violence is universal across all cultures. Few would say this is not an inmate difference, and it has obvious roots in sexual dimorphism. This is significant with respect to social media because you can't punch someone through a screen, but it amplifies the ability to carry out social violence. Group chats, and threads denouncing rivals are a very effective tool of social violence.

Failure to recognize this innate difference in how boys and girls express aggression could lead to platforms failing to recognize the importance of curtailing this behavior, leading to greater harm.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#550

Post by nazgul17 »

chmod775 wrote: post #224

> Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller. Bullshit. These numbers are self reported and show exactly the opposite of reality. Boys aged 15-24 are about four times [0] more likely than girls to die by their own hands, so clearly relying on self reported cases of mental illness is not very helpful and is likely to shift focus away…

If I remember correctly, the same author recently wrote another post that included that argument, in fact using it exactly to point out that self reported data only goes so far but the increase in suicides doesn't lie.
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