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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)

#361

Post by hattmall »

boppo1 wrote: post #309
benreesman wrote: post #305

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)…

>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 hi…

Even what you describe is an incredibly poor method of consuming information. There's no reasonable way to say you wouldn't have otherwise learned about something just because you learned about it in the way you did.

I learned far more quality information about my hobbies when there were vast Internet forums of users dedicated to discussing them.

Facebook groups and other social media has supplanted most of those forums but presents the information in a much more inferior fashion. However it creates far more engagement by exploiting the same principles as gambling addiction or animal training. Variable expectation of results and the level of work required, scrambling the feed, burying information, creating an inconsistent expectation of experience. That in and of itself wreaks havoc on brain chemistry and brings forth depression just like gambling addiction.

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

#362

Post by arkey »

bedobi wrote: post #360
arkey wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

lol, ok, never mind all the countless people the absence of these "values" are driving their childhoods, adolescence and lives into the ground or worse

edit: Right, sorry, that was quite a reactive response on my side. I'll try to be constructive and foster conversation instead of just resorting to sarcasm: what's your point? are you seriously implying marriage and family are overall negative values?

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

#363

Post by naasking »

watwut wrote: post #266
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

The article is about mental health crisis being international. Meanwhile, German, French, Swiss, Japan or Scandinavian kids walk around towns free without adults. They walk to school at age of 6 or even sooner. If it was just about independence, countries like Germany or France would not had the issue.

Exactly. Everybody just immediately jumps to their pet theory without actually digesting the full set of data that needs to be explained. The article very clearly lays out why those other explanations are less plausible than social media, and the cross-cultural nature of it is a big point.

All that said, the authors who publish on that site are also very pro-unsupervised free play and think its decline has caused mental health issues of its own (see Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind).

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

#364

Post by truculent »

brvsft wrote: post #355
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…

> 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 pre…

> 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.

Which of these approaches is more likely to result in someone changing their behaviour? Is there any evidence that advice to “just stop X” is as or more effective than causally aligned methods?

What an unusual attitude for an engineer to have. I suppose you fix bugs by “just not writing bugs in the first place”, too.

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

#365

Post by giraffe_lady »

brvsft wrote: post #355
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…

> 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 pre…

This is funny because most therapists these days practice CBT or one of its variants, which is explicitly focused on behaviors and outcomes and gives minimal weight to investigating "root causes" like that. The kind of worldview that comes from never doing therapy I guess.

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

#366

Post by naasking »

fulladder wrote: post #155

If you want to posit an explanation for this phenomenon, you have to be able to explain two things: what changed abruptly in the early/mid 2010s?, and why did it uniquely affect teen girls? Many of the reactions I've seen over the years to these authors' work focuses on some particular frustrations or complaints about American society, the economy, our culture, and so on. The problem with these theories is that none…

> If you want to posit an explanation for this phenomenon, you have to be able to explain two things: what changed abruptly in the early/mid 2010s?, and why did it uniquely affect teen girls?

And that it's cross-cultural, so three things.

> and yet it's much less clear now that there is any gender difference in technology uptake.

There are definitely well known differences in how the tech is used by the different sexes. Females are typically far more social than males.

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

#367

Post by JohnMakin »

Klonoar wrote: post #257
JohnMakin wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before cell phones there were beepers. and people could always reach you on a landline. or leave a message on the machine. payphones. people weren’t really that much farther than they are now, it just required a little more coordination. and cell phones have been around a lot longer than 10 years when this really picked up steam. even if you filter this statement to exclude everything but smart phones - smart, intern…

I would be surprised if the parent you’re responding to is even remotely discussing phone calls or answering machine messages, but rather the depth of what smartphones enable distraction-wise nowadays. Cell phones existed before but you weren’t browsing the entire web on them. ;P A beeper isn’t even in the same league and it’s really not a point here.

You were definitely browsing the entire web well before 2012 on smart phones. And even before then there were internet enabled phones.

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

#369

Post by Podgajski »

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…

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