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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)

#321

Post by nickd2001 »

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…

Music groups such as amateur orchestras, brass bands etc are still a bit of community. Admittedly quite niche, you need to know about them, find a way and have the ability to learn an instrument. There are informal ad-hoc communities e:g at my local leisure centre the regular swimmers chat to each other quite a lot. Kept a lot of people going mentally through lockdown I think. (swimming was allowed subject to restricted numbers and booking ahead)

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

#322

Post by mglz »

DeathArrow wrote: post #194

Most of the West lost its traditional values. If there are no values to build upon, if you have no reference, if everything and everyone is the same, if right and wrong, good and evil are confused, if you have no compass, then it's very easy to get lost and become mentally ill.

What are those values precisely?

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

#324

Post by mglz »

> As discussed in previous posts and as Twenge et al. (2022) showed, it can’t be the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The timing of that event is exactly the opposite of what you’d expect, namely: the epidemic should have started in 2009 and then gotten progressively better after 2012 as the economy improved in the USA and other countries.

The economies might have gotten better, but middle and lower classes have less and less opportunities to benefit from that. Lack of money while growing up will make children unhappy if this leads to social exclusion and deprivation.

Also kids are aware of the climate crisis since around then. Smartphones and social media might act as an amplifier, but such major shifts are usually multicausal.

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

#325

Post by muragekibicho »

drewjaja wrote: post #317

Our society is teaching us to seek money, power, intelligence, beauty, bodily satisfaction, all of which will never satisfy us. “If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die…

True. I'm not religious but when people stop worshipping the invisible sky daddy they turn to worshipping OnlyFans models, Amouranth-style twitch streamers and toxic masculinity gurus like Andrew Tate.

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

#326

Post by arkey »

weatherlite wrote: post #300
Sparkyte wrote: post #299

I first blame firstly parenting. People give their child an iPad and walk away. I second blame introductions to education as a toddler. When you are a toddler and inspired to learn you grow and don't stop. I third blame the use of social and personal ideals over community and connectivity. I fourth blame the lack of independence given to a child to make mistakes and learn. I fifth blame the lack of analogue input in…

> I first blame firstly parenting. People give their child an iPad and walk away. were parents any better 50 years ago? There were no ipads but fathers were much less involved in child rearing. Also - beating up kids was routine. > I second blame introductions to education as a toddler. When you are a toddler and inspired to learn you grow and don't stop. Again , what changed since 2008? Why is this worse now?

> Again , what changed since 2008? Why is this worse now?

Because of 16 more years of a downwards trend.

> were parents any better 50 years ago?

Probably not, but they didn't have iPads to give. They were probably as bad as now, but maybe pointing to better or higher standards. Since we're using generalisations here, I'd risk saying that generally speaking (in my view of South-Western Europe), a few decades ago it was less possible/socially accepted to become a 30-year-old useless bum. Nowadays I'm no longer surprised about having a conversation with a 20-something-year-old and finding out he doesn't quite understand the idea of the need to work in order to survive, let alone provide.

Of course, these are generalisations, but I'm afraid they are increasingly becoming indicatives of how things are.

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

#327

Post by williamcotton »

vkou wrote: post #83
mathgradthrow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are quick to blame social media because there are exceedingly plausible mechanisms by which social media could cause such a phenomenon, and there is tremendous profit in doing so and not just of the money variety. State level actors run secret influence campaigns on facebook, and more recently, just create and control whole social media platforms without oversight. The time for skepticism about the scale of th…

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.

But that doesn’t happen at a global level.

The medium is the message!

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

#328

Post by tokai »

People pretend like this is a new startling development. But we are not even close to the youth suicides numbers of the 1880s. Luckily now we are talking about how we feel and try to get better, compared to the rest of human history. To me there is obviously no new epidemic, but just finally an acknowledgement of issues that has always been present.

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

#329

Post by mrweasel »

johnchristopher wrote: post #308
mrweasel wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But what do we do with that information? Un-invent social media, ban it? How would such a ban work and what should it cover?

At this point I feel like we should pick a time in history, say the late 1930s or 1940s, somewhere around there, and use that as a frame of reference. Any new technology would be assessed based on the value added to average persons life, vs. the overall cost to society and the planet. Only if it hit a certain threshold is it to be implemented. Social media is out right away, negative impact on individual and society and provide little value that postcards and "letters from the readers" didn't already cover.

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

#330

Post by williamcotton »

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)…

China, India, Poland, Australia and Brazil weathered the 2008 financial crisis relatively well. Poland and Australia avoided a recession entirely.

Yet the rise in teen mental health is still in parallel in all of the above nations with those heavily affected by the crisis.

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