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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)

#131

Post by pmontra »

303uru wrote: post #91
latentcall wrote: post #57

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.

So quick to blame social media, even the article just waves it's hand and makes the assumption. Why not declining social mobility? Why not climate change anxiety? Why not late stage capitalism? Nah, it's always easy to blame Tik Tok as if the chosen release isn't indicative of something much greater going on.

The archive of that site has many posts answering your question. Some have been on HN in the past months.

Archive https://www.afterbabel.com/archive

Here are 13 Other Explanations for the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None of Them Work. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/13-explanations-mental-health-c...

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

#132

Post by drukenemo »

JohnMakin wrote: post #81
latentcall wrote: post #57

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.

In the past we could stay online for long hours doing some few activities (chatting, playing games, browsing few sites).

These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference.

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

#133

Post by robotresearcher »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #127
robotresearcher wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Scandinavia poor and miserable?

[flagged]

That's not really true, and what does that have to do with the parent's assertions?

Take Canada as an example then. It has a strong welfare state, is neither miserable and poor, nor ethnically homogenous.

To be clear, neither Canada nor Scandinavia is perfect nor perfectly happy.

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

#134

Post by CalRobert »

echelon wrote: post #9
kbos87 wrote: post #2

I’m not a parent nor am I a teen so take my comments with a grain of salt. The one thing that has consistently jumped out to me on this topic is how quickly people seem to jump to convenient answers. Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? That gets no atten…

Kids need more time away from other kids. They're spending too much time in the insane asylum with the other inmates. This leads to bullying, gossiping, comparing themselves against one another. Social media made it worse. Kids at home on the farm, reading books, exploring nature - that was healthy. Now they're addicted to algorithmic peer pressure before their brains can even adjust to filtering it out.

We just moved from three painfully lonely acres in the countryside to a small city and my kids seem much happier.

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

#135

Post by EGreg »

usr1106 wrote: post #8

Few deny that a drinking age is necessary. We also need a smart phone age. It's quite obvious that many teens are addicted to their phones and the mostly useless content they consume there.

I interviewed a lawmaker from Utah on a panel last year, and I specifically asked about their new law and how they plan to enforce it without requiring ID from everyone: https://socialmedia.utah.gov/

Because in the UK, doing this even just for porn sites creates a slippery slope: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/dec/05/pornography-...

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

#136

Post by atoav »

elzbardico wrote: post #39

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…

While I agree with the point that the causes of the current trend might be intergenerational, I think that this very important to mind fact is irrelevant for the topic.

Social media is a problem to in societies and economies that are wildly different to the US, unless you mean us forming modern societies with groups bigger than 100 people is the problem or you mean those factors lead to the shape of social media as we have it today.

I would imagine that social media would fuck with teenagers in ancient Rome in a similar way than it would with todays teens. There is something universal there.

The problem is that social media in the way they are structured have zero incentives to build good structures for young adults to thrive in and 100% incentives to keep them in a state where they can be influenced. And that is an astable state of insecurity. Which is why many want to be influencer, because then at least you are the one doing the influencing.

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

#138

Post by anon373839 »

AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #95

I think all the social media stuff is missing the mark. It's 100% bad but it's just trash filling the hole society is making. Looking top down at the problem, humans need self actualization or propose to be happy. Originally we evolved to live in medium sized social groups that worked together to ensure their survival, we took care of each other and that was what drove our purpose, or rather why that need evolved, it…

> I think all the social media stuff is missing the mark.

I think phones may well be responsible. Before smartphones, people regularly experienced true downtime - unstructured moments with nothing to do except be in your surroundings, feel your own boredom, experience your thoughts. Now, the moment our attention isn’t occupied by something external, we reach for our phones to have something to fill the silence.

I believe this has negatively affected everyone’s mental health, but it stands to reason that children would be worse off because they’ve never known anything different: they’ve never had the opportunity to develop the ability to just be.

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

#139

Post by drukenemo »

Gigachad wrote: post #11
llIIllIIllIIl wrote: post #5

It’s not just social media. Free roaming and spending time outside on their own or with peers went down dramatically for the last 30 years.

Most urban spaces these days are incredibly depressing. No points of interest within walking distance. Lots of large and difficult to cross roads. Combined with the very real danger of cycling in many places. As well as the loss of small businesses that used to be interspersed in residential areas.

Those urban characteristics are not found in Europe typically, and yet the problem seems to be global.

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

#140

Post by vkou »

zdragnar wrote: post #96
vkou wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People have long complained about television, both in terms of bad behavior of fictional characters and tone of news shows. At this point, though, young people are far more likely to doom scroll, fantasize about influence or whatever online than they are to be watching television. It's also worth noting that this is a "teen mental health crisis"- television has been around long enough for several generations to go th…

Sure, we complain, and complain, but have we done anything about it?

If anything, we've relaxed our attitudes towards having a 24/7 propaganda box shouting in our living room.

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