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The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

afterbabel.com

351–360 of 937 posts

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

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that doesn’t happen at a global level. The medium is the message!

Advertisements is a global phenomena. Advertisements are often made to make you depressed about your situation, so the more effective they are the more depressed people get.

Yeah that's the whole thing about advertising is it effectiveness scales with the feelings of inadequacy that it generates.

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

#354

I’d argue that the author glosses over 2008 recession as the underlying issue by saying that the recovery was well underway by 2012. The reality of the recovery wasn’t shared equally and those who got the short end of the stick for the last decade likely shared those worries with their children (directly or indirectly) Does anyone know how the child’s parental income impacts the growth of depression / anxiety over th…

The effect is there in countries that didn’t have the 2008 recession (Australia for one).

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

#355

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…

> People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that.

This is the kind of worldview that comes from years of navel-gazing in a therapist's office. "Why do I beat my kids? ...Because my father beat me! Now that I understand why I do it, I can stop beating my kids..." Or, you could just stop beating your kids.

It doesn't matter why it happens, it just matters that it happens. But instead of preventing or discouraging kids (or people in general) from using social media, you can blame the ghost of Ronald Reagan--the gift that keeps on giving.

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

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also retrospective studies of areas that adopted smartphones well after the financial crisis showed delayed effects that make it implausible to tie them to the crisis.

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

#357
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in no small part "thanks" to social media, no? like yeah in the us and anglosphere it's no small part car centricity, but like the blog post points out, this is a trend that's visible even places that don't have school shootings and car centricity, so it kind of has to be social media. (actually proving it is hard but, like, at this point, i don't see how it can even be disputed by any reasonable person, only pedants…

There are so many alternative explanations to go through before it "has" to be social media. Already mentioned was time spent outside. For instance, video games are (also) a huge drain on time spent outside.

Gen X and Millenials also had video games (including online ones that didn't require you to be playing physically together) and it didn't have the same effect - the mental health decline became prominent and accelerated during the rise of social media, not video games.

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

#358
post #349

Opinion: We’re treating kids like adults too early in their lives. Of course breaking laws isn’t ok but who here hasn’t done something crazy? Neighborhoods aren’t being neighbors any longer and people simply want to have law enforcement be the negotiator for everything.

Kids used to be more adult before technology was around. I think it’s the opposite parents are coddling their kids plus you have this new lib stuff like safe spaces and the whole concept of “feeling unsafe”. We have an entire generation of babies who can’t handle conflict including internal conflict. So what can they do? Kill themselves or other people as we see them do

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

#359
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.…

> There is nothing particular special about “onlineness” that should affect them particularly worse than boys

Females are on average far more social than males. If there's a dose-response effect social media time and mental health, then we should plausibly expect girls to be affected more.

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

#360
post #339
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are those values precisely?

I'd say marriage and family just to begin with.

lol, ok, never mind all the countless people those "values" drove their childhoods, adolescence and lives into the ground or worse
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