Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
jonathanhaidt.substack.com
Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
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Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#2Then why has the rate of suicides fallen instead of rising in the same period mental healths apparently should have gotten worse?
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#3Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids mentally unwell".
Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#4Then why has the rate of suicides fallen instead of rising in the same period mental healths apparently should have gotten worse?
Which period are you referring to? According to https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-... this is not the case.
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#5Just to levy a single criticism among several: I find Haidt’s rebuttal of the climate change hypothesis unconvincing: fears around climate change are not “energizing” in the way that prior crises are, in a significant part because public sentiment around climate change is that we’re already doomed in a way that isn’t really possible with social crises. Similarly: I don’t think most teenage girls were voraciously reading Al Gore in the 1990s; extensive public awareness of climate change doesn’t imply a disproportionate impact on youth, especially when we consider that more extreme weather events (and their reporting) began in the mid-late 2000s.
I think Haidt could probably make his argument stronger if he discussed social media as an accelerant, rather than a cause in and of itself. I can’t think of any real reason why he doesn’t (it makes his argument strictly stronger, and results in the same conclusions) other than ideological ones: he’s too baked into his incestuous “heterodox” world to weaken his claims.
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#6[flagged]
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#7Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids mentally unwell". Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?
Nobody can really endure clockwork orange style viewing of anything for very long. That's not moly coddling. Banning cigarettes and amphetamines is not coddling either.
Younger people in particular are susceptible here due to peer pressure at a critical stage of socialization, meaning if all your classmates are using it is much harder to opt out for a middle schooler than a working age adult. This isn't simply a test of ones own character in isolation.
In fact that is why they are targeted in the first place. Get them hooked young. It is the ones who get hooked who might spiral into problems as a result. That seems like a plausible theory.
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#8What about the increase in mental health awareness (including: better education and reducing the stigma) - is being able to detect more cases contributing in a meaningful way to the overall increase?
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#9Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids mentally unwell". Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?
This is an excellent point; it’s hard to square Haidt’s precious claims with coddling unless we’re to accept some kind of convoluted “whiplash” argument: children who are first coddled are then “shocked” with social media. But this requires a generational or chronological explanation that isn’t evidenced: we’d expect to see suicide rates level off with more recent cohorts of teenagers (i.e., the ones who’ve been on the Internet their entire lives), but the evidence presented by Haidt doesn’t show this.
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#10Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids mentally unwell". Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?
The "coddling" one has always been a bad faith argument; a post hoc rationalization for political goals.