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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)

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Scandinavia poor and miserable?

[flagged]

Alban Uzoma Nwapa (born 26 August 1957), better known by his stage name Dr. Alban, is a Nigerian-born Swedish musician and producer with his own record label, Dr. Records.

    His music can best be described as Eurodance/hip-hop reggae in a dancehall style.

    He has sold an estimated 16 million records worldwide and is most famous for his worldwide 1992 hit "It's My Life", from the album One Love.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Alban

Welcome to Sweden (1990): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uPDfuC3Jck

You'll find similar examples in all the scandinavian countries, it features in many of the scandi-noir hand knitted sweater hurdy-gurdy-murder tv series.

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

#282
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally. From my experience, phone is an extremely common factor. If you randomly take a peek at any person in the 1st and 2nd world during their "downtime", I bet that you will 99% of the time see them on their phone. Phone have absolutely consumed everything we used to do. I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly, they almost always…

A person sitting on a chair alone staring blankly would be considered a sociopath these days.

I often worry about what others will think of me if I put away my phone and rest in silence.

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

#283

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…

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

#284

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…

We went rather quickly from a situation where it was quite easy to explain to kids what is expected of them - you hunt, survive or maintain a farm to survive - to a situation where the value of an action depends on a million things. And, just to add yet another layer of complexity, there are few certain things about the future regarding what you need to know or do to thrive in it. Most jobs today might be obsolete by…

THIS. But add the things you're not supposed to say:

1) a LOT/most people don't care about their own kids. This has not changed from history, of course. A lot of people have kids for a hundred different reasons, not to have kids. You're supposed to, to keep a marriage together, to get attention, to feel superior to others, ...

2) hence, they neither explain to kids what is expected of them, don't help. Kids grow up in a directionless vacuum.

3) People's (average) abilities have not gone up in 20-30 years. So this is a much worse problem than simply not wanting to help. A worse problem than simply adults needing to put aside 30 minutes every day for the kids. Adults don't have the knowledge expected in high school. Nor do they have practical knowledge (it's not that most adults don't know math, or don't know how to be a plumber or open a shop, it's that they know nothing)

Which means most adults CAN'T provide direction for kids. Not even if they wanted to. Not before putting in a lot of effort themselves first.

4) The traditional escapes have been closed off: factory work, marriage (as a means to escape jobs), clergy (as a means to escape normal jobs). All this has diminished or even disappeared.

The marriage thing is a double whammy since marriage helps both partners on a lot of different fronts. Not just jobs, but housing, stress, cooking, housework, calling the doctor when something's wrong (or generally administrative stuff), and of course an outlet, someone to talk to and even sex.

5) most easy jobs that have replaced this, have global competition. "Influencer" for example. So, they're not at all as easy as they look.

6) and the solutions for this are "psychology". In case anyone failed to notice, this fundamentally means blaming the kid (therapists are only supposed to fix the symptoms), while making it as hard as possible to see that you're blaming the kid.

Psychologists/therapists are not capable people that will teach kids that, say, a career as programmer, consultant or engineer is open to them, and then learn them math, economics or ... Again: they're totally incompetent. They won't do that, as it's not expected of them, but they also can't.

7) and like any other neural network, if you don't a human mind enough feedback, it'll start by having wild swings in output, and eventually the signal to noise ratio in the output breaks down, which for humans probably means the person "in" the human mind effectively (eventually) disappears, replaced by wild, big, excessive, even violent impulses.

8) what therapy/psychologists do is ENTIRELY the wrong thing: they "focus on the negative", the symptoms. In other words, they take a human mind, and complain about the noise. Think of it like this: If you had to guess a number between 1 and 2 million, and numbers divisible by 314 (for example) are valid answers. If I only tell you "no", and discuss how bad your decision process to arrive at an answer is ... it'll take a while. If I help you and tell you how to arrive at the right answer, you'll have it in 2 or 3 guesses.

It is almost impossible to overstate the difference you'll see in "performance" between a kid that is left directionless for their first 15 years and someone who is "led up the ladder". Constantly explaining what they're supposed to do, and where their reasoning is flawed. Now you can can overdo this, but frankly, if you overdo it, the kid will become angry ... and still be extremely capable. Perhaps not ideal, but hardly a situation where the kid's life will crash and burn.

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

#285

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…

[deleted]

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

#286
post #254

I don't know much about kids from the "Anglosphere" but I do know that preventing kids from making their own experiments and adventures is the craziest approach ever (parents being interrogated by the police for letting their kids walk back from school when they're 10...!!!) In France my kids walked to school by themselves at age 7, including taking a bus and the metro, and coming back at night in the winter. I'm cur…

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

#287
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.

Previous generations had the same problem with television. We also have this problem with video games, gambling, junk food, pornography, etc. Behavioral addictions are usually a coping mechanism for underlying problems. I don't think we should have the state banning all of these things. It's the responsibility of individuals to engage in self-reflection, moderate their own behavior, and if they're under a certain age, for the parents to set boundaries and teach them healthy habits.

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

#288
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The vast majority of people I know (38m,Germany) don't regularly consume broadcast TV. Even my parents and their peers don't (but to a lesser extent).

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

#290
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Why do you assert that onlineness doesn't affect women disproportionately?

Women face all sorts of abuse and minimization online. I've heard of many women using male sounding names online in order to be taken seriously or avoid harassment. The general advice on subreddits dominated by women is to turn off personaal messaging to avoid the inevitable rape threats.

Take a look on Instagram and take a look at some musicians that are men and some that are women. The level of hatred directed towards women and the extra barriers they face will be very clear.

You also have subreddits that glorify misogyny like WomenAreThings or MisogynyKink. You have others where guys steal pictures from girls' social medias and redistribute them with captions about rape fantasy or where they use AI to force their victims into sexual media.

You look on YouTube and the algorithm wants to push misogynistic content aimed at disillusioned young boys and more and more of them are tuning in and blaming women for all their problems, asserting that feminism was a mistake.

If you're on Instagram compare how many women have their profiles set to private than men. This is to avoid the constant harassment they'd otherwise face.

I'm seeing more research every year that suggests women are actively self-censoring, silencing themselves or pretending to be men when online.

Here's a few interesting bits of further reading. I've been told off in the past for sharing these things here because women's rights are politics and therefore against the guidelines of the site but I hope it's relevant enough to the discussion here:

1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/089443931986551... 2. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/online-violen... 3. https://www.womankind.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/brea...

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