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The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

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

#181

Post by brazzy »

hanniabu wrote: post #110
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.

> Spending all your time online gives you a skewed perception of the world I'd say it gives you an accurate depiction, exposing the shit in the world around us. Whereas people not online so much are happy because ignorance is bliss.

No, exposing the shit and concentrating on it is not accurate. Building your world view on the part of the world you can personally observe, which has some good and mostly boring normal aspects, is not ignorance. I'd argue that for most people it's in fact more accurate.

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

#183

Post by bamboozled »

samr71 wrote: post #25
ChatGTP wrote: post #19

Since my youth climate change has been A wildly depressing concept to grapple with. Environment destruction period. I mean being depressed is one thing, living in a world that's literally cooking at the same time just takes it up a whole other level. I guess in the past, no matter how bad things got for you on a personal level, you could kind of count on the world being there if you got through it, now it's sort of 5…

So true. There's also the imminent return of Jesus Christ and the subsequent rapture to worry about. Kids have so much on their plate these days...

Obviously you're trolling...but anyway I'll bite.

3 degrees of warming will be something like the rapture for modern civilization.

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

#184

Post by CraigJPerry »

Quekid5 wrote: post #177
CraigJPerry wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Before smartphones, people regularly experienced true downtime Was there not a similar argument made as newspapers became commonplace? Before that the same argument had been made for books but newspapers were on another level - they were effectively limitless drugs, affordable and every single day a new one was available. Instead of talking, laughing and joking with the other workers waiting at the bus stop or in…

The newspaper at least... stops once you've read it -- so that's what an hour (or whatever) gone of your day. That's a major difference, at least.

Today you consider a phone to be infinitely distracting because you haven’t experienced yet the next engrossing medium, we put our phones in our pockets occasionally today but perhaps tomorrow we just won’t take our iQuest3 thingys off our faces between sunrise and bedtime.

Someone will be well placed to make your argument - well at least you put your phone away at some point!

The socially challenging bit is the difference not the magnitude I think.

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

#185

Post by JohnMakin »

brazzy wrote: post #178
JohnMakin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody except a very small minority of techno-nerds (and most of those not teenagers) was alawys online until about 15 years ago, the advent of the smartphone. It took easily another 5 years before a significant amount of teenagers had them, especially outside the richest countries. But of course it's not the technical capability that's the problem, it's the always-online culture , the network effects, the constant d…

Then why does this trend disproportionately affect girls? There is nothing particular special about “onlineness” that should affect them particularly worse than boys, but plenty of very real evidence that shows social media sites like IG are very harmful to girls (and meta knows it).

There are plenty of millennials that have been terminally online since at least their early teens and weren’t showing this same trend. I’m saying there’s nothing inherent about “online-ness” that should warrant mass levels of depression like this.

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

#186

Post by brohoolio »

woooooo wrote: post #77
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…

The medium is the message.

For folks who don’t know, this is a great read and explores how we are connected and communicate is more important than what is communicated. Highly highly recommend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage

The slightly alternative title is a play on words that was originally an error.

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

#187

Post by granshaw »

ta8645 wrote: post #50
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…

[flagged]

This mode of thinking is very prevalent on the left but it’s actually the opposite on the right, which is instead anti government. So it really isn’t a universal shift.

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

#188

Post by ascorbic »

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…

That didn't change in 2010 though, did it? None of that seems particularly different from 25 years ago, and their figures show this was clearly a sudden change around 2010-2012. The smartphone does feel like the only convincing explanation to me, because it's the only thing that happened globally around then which was a persistent change in the lives of teens.

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

#189

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

pmontra wrote: post #131
303uru wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> Here are 13 Other Explanations for the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis.

She finally gets to the deciding modern condition - the one where kids are systemically denied critical growth time (daily blocks of adult-free time & safe places to roam [safe=no threat of police or other compulsive adults]).

And even tho she has this on her list of false suppositions she admits probably isn't as false as she infers.

But she then immediately minimizes this historic erasure of development by saying it's just 'independence' kids have lost. Gaslighting done, she bizarrely accuses devices & social media of causing it, even tho it was obvious by the 1980s that options for free-roaming and adult-free time were well on the way to being eradicated.

Perhaps being so invested in pregurgitated conclusions, she's unable to notice super-obvious competing factors.

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

#190

Post by Gasp0de »

granshaw wrote: post #180
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…

All this talk about “community” - what “community”? It simply doesn’t exist anymore even if you wanted it - short of arranging to stay near your extended family and in laws, what else is there in the modern western world? Churches, I guess is the only other true community left…

Small communities exist everywhere, at least in Europe. Scouts, sports clubs, volunteer fire departments, political activism groups. In all of these groups we build a community around a non-competitive purpose (with the exception of some sports clubs) and in all of them we also help each other with stuff that is not related to the primary purpose of the club.
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