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The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

afterbabel.com

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Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#81

Not just social media, but always online mentality. Spending all your time online gives you a skewed perception of the world and I believe being online always is a major negative. Spending time outside is good for you. Socializing with real people in front of you is good also. Not sure if we can ever go back to that without some major catastrophe.

Being always online wasn’t quite so shitty til the last 10-15 years. Many people did it and were just fine for a long time. To me this feels like blaming food poisoning on the fact you have to eat food. Maybe the food is just bad.

the current state of online is the food. it just really sucks.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#83

People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy f…

People are quick to blame social media because there are exceedingly plausible mechanisms by which social media could cause such a phenomenon, and there is tremendous profit in doing so and not just of the money variety. State level actors run secret influence campaigns on facebook, and more recently, just create and control whole social media platforms without oversight. The time for skepticism about the scale of th…

What about the public influence campaigns that are ran openly on television? How well have we managed to quantify the effect that has on the public?

They also take place without any oversight.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#84
post #50

People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy f…

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Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#85
post #67
post #59

My theory is it is effect of ever faster economic growth across the world. Now it has given great many benefits to great many people. Negative effects so far discussed are only in term of destruction of ecology, depletion of natural resources, pollution etc. To me this growth has created a sense of anxiety in all teens and older. Now the societal structures, jobs, careers, education, medicine etc do not change over m…

That theory can't be correct. The rate of world GDP growth hasn't increased significantly. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/gdp-growth-r...

~2% or above growth rate is huge when compounded over decades.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#86
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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This reads like it was generated by Heritage Foundation GPT.

“The era of big government is over.”

— Bill Clinton, 1990 something

We’re still living in Reagan’s World and they still don’t get it.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#88

People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy f…

No, what you are saying is factually wrong. Now if you are lying or just wrong would depend on how much of your income depends on it.

The culprit is manipulated mass media, the current version of it is social media so before mark Zuckerberg the culprit was television owners, not whatever excuse you are trying to find to not blame media.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#89
post #50

People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy f…

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Can you elaborate on this? From what I can tell, the outcome that you’re speaking of has occurred for the opposite reason.

Looking at the data for the US, there seems to be an even more exponential curve between 2015-2020, which would imply that these trends could have been further exacerbated by the reduction of government regulation. The same is likely true for the concentration of wealth, the loss in small businesses, disenfranchisement, etc.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#90

Hyper-individualism in all spheres of life, magnified by anti-social technology. They are depressed because current life-form is depressing. Capitalism is pathologically tautological.

I think it's the opposite of individualism. Individualism accepts some responsibility for risk, but we seem to be in a system where no risk is tolerable, and the government has to fix everything. It gives rise to learned helplessness.

I don't see social media as a technology for individualists either, because it's all about approval and homogenization. Individualism is actually antisocial at it's core, because it's about being yourself regardless of what anybody else thinks. It only seems like we have an individualist system because everything is on blast 24/7, but that's really just the shuffle of collectivists patting each other on the back in the public eye so that others can align their virtues with the current zeitgeist.

We don't have public places anymore where people can just be people away from the gaze of social media. Individualism requires learning who you really are, which means making mistakes, and that's difficult when a video on social media could make you a pariah outside of the confines of your local community.

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