The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023) • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by poulpy123 » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 9:49 AM UTC

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]

if it was true we should see a downward trend in west european countries

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

#302

Post by sirsinsalot » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 9:50 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #276

mbgerring wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media is like that because it was deliberately designed to be addictive and we have a decade of documentation to back that up.

That is something I've been think about, what if social media wasn't designed to be addictive? There shouldn't be anything inherently wrong in keeping in contact with your high school buddies on Facebook, so what if all the doom scrolling, likes, and corporate profiles where removed from Facebook? Would it be safer? I think there's are huge risk that we are about to realize that either social media cannot be made saf…

There's nothing inherently "wrong" with communication, which at its simplest form is what "social media" is. It is just communication, with media. We have had this for a long while.

The difference came when the businesses started optimising for engagement rather than happiness or connectedness to friends.

Using engagement, which drives ad revenue, as the metric for success means you design a system that is addictive.

The issue is optimising for engagement because humans are hardwired to find certain things moreish. Our dopamine system is easily abused and hijacked.

Digital communication is good. Engagement optimisation is bad. This means businesses need another model of revenue outside ad revenue, which sadly is the most profitable.

At a lower level, capitalism thrives on over-consumption. Fast fashion, doom scrolling, high-waste food produce supply chains; it's all over-consumption that takes advantage of human psychology to fuel energy gradients from which profits can be found as cash transits across the gradient as people expend energy maintaining it.

This might sound reductive, but until we realise that sustainability in ALL things is very important, and we built that into consumer mindset, we will keep being hijacked on every front.

The question is, how do we design things that are SUSTAINABLE from revenue to user psychology? Given that we can't collectively manage to do that to save our own planet, I don't hold much hope in us even looking for an answer. The system is broken. Sustainability isn't profitable. Humans are myopic.

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

#303

Post by romwell » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 9:53 AM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #112

romwell wrote: post #71

There's that, there's also a better understanding of mental illness, so less if it goes unrecognized, undiagnosed, and unrated. Growing up, I was an intelligent kid (if a bit shy) who just needed to be more organized . Today, I'm an AuDHD[1] adult who just needs to have others to have different expectations in some cases, and just benefits from having access to Adderall for some of the others. In college, I was just…

By most of every possible measure, the world was far more messed up in the past. You speak of things like nuclear war causing anxiety, yet 70 years ago kids would regularly have nuclear attack drills (akin to our fire drills) while watching videos about how to respond to nuclear attacks, and people building nuclear shelters may have been eccentric, but nothing beyond that. Go further back and we get WW2, WW1, Great D…

>70 years ago kids would regularly have nuclear attack drills (akin to our fire drills)

Yes, but the economy was doing better.

>Go further back and we get WW2

Before the war, most people were not expecting an apocalypse-level event that it was, and there were no nukes.

>These are all events that make any of our big-event concerns today look trivial.

You either underestimate today's threats and concerns, aren't affected by them, or both.

>Basically, I don't think you can attribute the skyrocketing rate of various forms of mental illness to better diagnoses.

That's what I said too. But it is a factor that must be accounted for, especially when comparing to the past when the statistics on mental health were not collected the way they are now.

Suicide statistics in particular.

>And if big-event stressors (as opposed to things like internet) were the main cause, we should be having far better outcomes than in the past.

This doesn't seem to follow from anything you said.

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

#304

Post by bufio » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 9:57 AM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #101

grecy wrote: post #35

Do teens have much to look forward to? Climate change is already causing severe weather events, which are very likely to ramp quickly. Careers are a thing of the past, and it seems like no matter how hard you work you'll never "get ahead" and will be lucky not to spend your life living paycheck to paycheck. Life expectancy has gone down, markedly. Debt is up. New wars.

I’m amazed that I had to read so many comments complaining about social media before I hit this one. How have so few failed to consider the idea that young people might be correctly anxious and worried about the future which looks, in many ways, pretty grim.

I think people would feel more capable of facing the grim future if they weren't so isolated these days.

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

#305

Post by benreesman » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 10:07 AM UTC

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…

There’s very little doubt that social media is hard to use in a positive way these days, and very little doubt that a race to the bottom on all our worst impulses is a big part of that. But the causal arrow is trickier.

The exact time period over which social media has become front and center in daily life is the same period of time in which we’ve watched financial crisis (massive net wealth transfer to the richest) move into loony ZIRP stuff / asset bubbles and attendant massive net wealth transfer to the richest, explode into a cultural war that seems pretty clearly about wealth inequality and social mobility underneath the tribalism paint job (the tribalism stuff is real but people living great don’t go in for populism in insane numbers) slide into a disastrously mishandled pandemic (during which we blew through all previous notional and discounted measures for what rich means), and now everyone is being told that inflation and unemployment are good (they’ve been cooking the CPI forever, that was going on in the 90s that I’ve seen, this made up stuff about abundant good jobs is new).

So whether it’s teens or Gen Z or whatever the case: they have parents and older siblings and can guess about their prospects. Your parents going crazy from economic stress or your adult sibling moving back home has got to be at least up there with unhealthy kinds or amounts of screen time as a stressor.

Now AI is looking like nothing but the biggest lever for hockeystick inequality in history and is overwhelmingly controlled by a few people who give many the creeps.

Is an unhealthy retreat into screen time (and fentanyl) the cause of social collapse? Or are people embracing escapism, tribalism, and substances while eschewing social activities and even sex because the donor class is going for the jugular and they’re looking to pull it off?

So yeah, I think you’re on to something looking a little further back, but it at a minimum very correlated with mortgage meltdown to the present.

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

#306

Post by fasterik » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 10:12 AM UTC

grecy wrote: post #35

Do teens have much to look forward to? Climate change is already causing severe weather events, which are very likely to ramp quickly. Careers are a thing of the past, and it seems like no matter how hard you work you'll never "get ahead" and will be lucky not to spend your life living paycheck to paycheck. Life expectancy has gone down, markedly. Debt is up. New wars.

These are definitely problems, but here are some positive points to balance the negative:

The price of renewable energy has fallen 99.8% since 1975 [1] and power generation from renewables has increased 800% since 1965 and doubled since 2010 [2]

GDP per capita is 5-20 times higher than in 1820 [3]

Life expectancy has more than doubled since 1770 [4]

Armed conflict causes just 0.2% of global deaths [5] and relations between nations have become more peaceful since 1945 [6]

5 billion people own smartphones [7], which are orders of magnitude more powerful than a supercomputer of 50 years ago, and which they can use to access the entirety of human knowledge in the form of books, articles, and free lectures from top universities, plus instant communication and collaboration with people across the globe. These are all things that the richest people in the world didn't have access to for most of human history.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/modern-renewable-energy-c...

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison?t...

[4] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy

[5] https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace?insight=armed-confl...

[6] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/peaceful-and-hostile-rela...

[7] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/02/05/smartphone-own...

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

#307

Post by bluescrn » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 10:13 AM UTC

thefz wrote: post #246

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…

In other words, capitalism is bad for the earth and for the humans. Who would have thought!

But still better than the alternatives that have been attempted so far.

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

#308

Post by johnchristopher » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 10:14 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #276

mbgerring wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media is like that because it was deliberately designed to be addictive and we have a decade of documentation to back that up.

That is something I've been think about, what if social media wasn't designed to be addictive? There shouldn't be anything inherently wrong in keeping in contact with your high school buddies on Facebook, so what if all the doom scrolling, likes, and corporate profiles where removed from Facebook? Would it be safer? I think there's are huge risk that we are about to realize that either social media cannot be made saf…

> I think there's are huge risk that we are about to realize that either social media cannot be made safe, at all, or that it has been made dangerous in order to make a profit.

People have been screaming that at the top of their lungs for years.

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

#309

Post by boppo1 » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 10:14 AM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #305

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…

There’s very little doubt that social media is hard to use in a positive way these days, and very little doubt that a race to the bottom on all our worst impulses is a big part of that. But the causal arrow is trickier. The exact time period over which social media has become front and center in daily life is the same period of time in which we’ve watched financial crisis (massive net wealth transfer to the richest)…

>very little doubt that social media is hard to use in a positive way these days

Horseshit. I use Facebook and Instagram and love both. When I see something I don't like, I click the 'Don't show me stuff like this' option. I have an endless feed of old european castles, guitars and a couple other obscure hobbies & interests. I have learned things about my hobbies I never would have otherwise and practice them at a higher level.

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

#310

Post by grupthink » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 10:14 AM UTC

mbgerring wrote: post #100

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…

Social media is like that because it was deliberately designed to be addictive and we have a decade of documentation to back that up.

Agreed. It's like dining out versus having a healthy home cooked meal. Restaurants will sell you delicious food loaded with sodium, sugar, and fat because they want you to crave their food. Likewise, when you outsource your family values, entertainment, news to social media, you meet a similar problem.

Relatedly, beware of the hidden ads in social media. It takes much less money to astroturf a community like reddit than to advertise through conventional means (e.g. commercials, product placements, banner ads). You may be aware of ads on youtube, but you may not be aware of the ads in the comment section. I've seen youtube comments as follows:

    Ed: Christ! My stock portfolio has gone down so much since the pandemic... it hurts.
    Bob: Mine did too, however in the past year I've been able to recover financially.
    Ed: Really? Please help me, how did you recover your losses?
    Bob: I'd hate to share my secret, but Jonathon Harris provided me with amazing investment tips.
    Sal: Mr. Jonathon Harris helped 10X our portfolio! You can reach him at jonharris@gmail.com

That was my re-enactment of their discussion. Sure, that was an example of an obvious ad. But think of all the times you read a conversation about a product or service and became convinced to try something just based on a conversation between two supposed strangers online? I've never bought anything from a conventional ad, but I've purchased plenty of things after reading what the socials say about a product, and that makes me ashamed of myself. Word of mouth is effective for a reason, but it's insidious online. And that's where they get you. Steel your mind, when online.