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The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
151–160 of 937 posts
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#152Few 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.
Except with drinking, there's at least many adults that can effectively consider the risks of drinking. With smartphone usage, I'd argue that adults are just as bad, if not worse, in judging their own usage. I fail to see how this is anything but blaming the youth (or, modern speech "ageism").
Parent isn't blaming the youth, but rather, just pointing at the cause.
Absolutely, adults do pretty badly on this. They also consume alcohol, and do other stupid shit.
Yet, the kids should be protected from this. This is the parent post's point!
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#153I 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…
People have been citing Marx's theory of alienation for a century and a half. Conveniently, they are only started to manifest during the rise of social media.
> Fast forward and we're now trying to derive purpose out of pure competition. What percentile is your IQ, your GPA, your income, your stack rank
I hear this a lot, and this attitude does seem more pervasive on the internet, but in the real world, I find that people don't care about any of this any more than they have to, especially after college. The only people who I know who work "unhealthy hours" genuinely seem to enjoy work or are treating work as an escape. When you look at working hours in the US it's been mostly flat since 2010 and it's actually significantly lower than it was in the 1950s [1]. The real reason nobody is spending time with their community because they are too busy consuming media. The average teen spends over 7 hours a day consuming media [2].
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this applies to kids just as well as adults: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect But what scares me more is how this trend has the potential to normalize surveillance in general. It's not uncommon to for people to treat their employer or the government as a surrogate parent. So why wouldn't kids raised in a digital surveillance family accept a digital surveillance state?
elf on the shelf is a frighteningly common indoctrination to a life of surveillance
I lifted an Elf on the Shelf box in a store, and it felt heavy for a stuffed toy. What's in there? Are those things WiFi enabled now?
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#155If you want to posit an explanation for this phenomenon, you have to be able to explain two things: what changed abruptly in the early/mid 2010s?, and why did it uniquely affect teen girls?
Many of the reactions I've seen over the years to these authors' work focuses on some particular frustrations or complaints about American society, the economy, our culture, and so on. The problem with these theories is that none of that stuff abruptly changed in the 2010s, and even then there's no particular reason that a 13-year old girl would be so much more negatively impacted by changes that did occur than anyone else.
Haidt's theory focuses a lot on technological change like smartphones and social media (though it has some other components). Ten years ago this seemed believable because it appeared at that time that teen girls were more interested in these technologies than boys. However, the under-30 mental health problem is ongoing (and may even be accelerating), and yet it's much less clear now that there is any gender difference in technology uptake.
I haven't seen a satisfying explanation from Haidt about the more recent data, and have come to believe that there is no adequate explanation right now.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#156I would also argue that overprotectionism is also one key factor in the teen mental illness, nowadays parents don't want their children to do risky stuff outside and wanted their children to stay indoor. It will surely lock-in their freedom to do many stuff and they have nothing to do but to surf on the social media.
This means although the children are less exposed to the external threats, they also have less experience to the outside world, which caused an asymmetric information flowing around in social media when they are surprised by some crazy act of their peers -- including flexing off with money, doing impossible stunts, and even pregnancy.
Keep in mind what you see on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tiktok are shared globally, that means a 12 years old lad from Texas could be seeing another 12 years old do some crazy stuff on SF, but what I want to say is about kids should be interacting with their local peers more than the global ones. This way you won't taint the kids POV to be among the globals, or be the best of the best. Focus on the local community and parents should not be that paranoid to overprotect their children. If they need to get hurt, just let them get hurt in a controlled way. Just, let, them, be.
Overprotectionism implies controlling freedom, and the lack of freedom means lack of innovation and reflections, and will easily create a death spiral, that one of them descend into mental illness, and eventually many other horrible things.
Also, I think the core reason for any mental illness, at least from my own POV, is always about getting asymmetric information, which caused mental imbalances from within. But how do we get rid of asymmetric information or mental imbalances? No, I don't think you can...but if you could accept this fact, and you would be free from the mental illness hell.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#157Seems pretty simple. The bottom of Maslow’s pyramid is under attack with unnecessary layoffs and offshoring leading to extremely dismal prospects of stable, long-term employment. What kid is going to feel good if their parents are constantly stressed by employment woes? Even worse when the government tells you everything is fine and there’s nothing to fix.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#158Not 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.
People don't tolerate information well. When we are young we need our small safety bubbles where we are sufficiently isolated from information so that we can fantasise that we matter. That we amount to something. Social truth that (nearly?) all of us don't is apparently too hard to bear.
And I don't think we can come back from this. That we can go back to ignorance. We need to adapt, the way species always adapted. By letting weaker ones die. And that's exactly what will happen unless by sheer accident some technological miracle pops up to save us from this problem. We won't step back from profitable technologies. We never did.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#159People 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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Well, if the Big Government was not so hellbent on helping making billionaires trillionaires at the expense of the working class, maybe the poor could learn to be more self-reliant.
Pretty hard for a lot of people that doesn't make multiple hundreds of thousands dollars an year to not depend on the government, when lax fiscal policies completely devalue their money while inflating the assets and the pockets of the oligarchic class.
Get real, the oligarchs don't want less government, they want less of the big goverment money going for other people than the oligarchs. Not a single one of them want free markets, not one of them wants fiscal discipline, not a single one of them want real free trade.
They nurture crises for years so they can extract more when we cannot ignore the crisis anymore, and emergency measures are required. They have postponed the energy transition, their foundations and their grants helped to demonize nuclear when we desperately needed for it to evolve and expand. Now we are faced with an emergency, and we are pretending that nobody is going to make loads of money out of renewables, and that probably it is going to be the same people who made lots of money from oil. The bills will explode for the common folk, like they are doing in Europe, and in the end, if we escape deindustrialization, they will use the government to extract money from the people again to finally nuclearize our power generation.
So, if we want to talk about big government, let's talk about big government, but let's be honest and admit that big government, big corporate and big finance are basically siamese twins.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#160I 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…
Being the best in your community is a dead end. This is a global optimization problem, maybe galactic, maybe the universe.