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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)

#461

Post by heresie-dabord »

mathgradthrow wrote: post #56
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 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…

Well said! Here is a phrase from TFA:

> "the phone-based childhood"

We can take this even further: it's a Phone-Based Education and Social Discourse

What has happened in the "Anglosphere" is that we have opened a for-profit Pandora's Box of resentful and manipulative discourse that makes no damned sense to people who are looking to their society for sense and guidance.

As you say, the system is full of manipulative actors. Not all of them are foreign.

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

#462

Post by incomingpain »

Jon Haidt's best correlation for social media was roughly 15%. Practically saying it's not social media, but he challenges those to figure out a better answer.

>not just the rise in depression and anxiety, but also the overprotection of children, the rise of “safetyism,” and the shouting down of speakers on university campuses when students deemed the speaker to be “harmful.”

Social media is helping the situation, not making it worse. Though also depends on which social media, there's a bit of a censorship problem with some of them.

I look at the previous generation, how did they socialize? Considering my local city.

Arcades basically don't exist anymore.

Bars are in steep decline because of >100% alcohol taxes and drunk driving laws. $9 beers are the cheap brands and the police park themselves outside bars and pull over you because you might be drunk driving.

Church is non-existent. government shut down many churches in violation of freedom of religion. Church attendance is at record lows. Someone is burning down churches, government doesn't care to investigate.

Clubs were mostly shutdown by the government because vice laws, sexism, etc. Illegal to operate a gentlemans club these day. Strip clubs basically dont exist anymore because of the government. Cannabis clubs are illegal.

Libraries and community centres aren't welcoming to people like me. I cant even go with my 4 year old daughter? I literally do IT work for these libraries but I'm accused of being a child predator and must identify myself and let them record my ID or I must leave? So I leave?

Malls literally have anti-socializing laws. How dare you 'loiter' aka socialize.

Parks now have a huge list of government laws restricting their use. Pretty rare to see other people at parks.

Hell I look at how I socialized, I had a road hockey game going practically all the time. Random boys would be walking by, we'd ask them if they wanted to join. They'd run home and get a stick and come back.

That's illegal now, it's unsafe for kids to play road hockey... I literally haven't seen kids playing road hockey in ages.

Skatepark? They literally built them and then fenced them off because of the hooligan kids... then stopped building them.

So you want to go for a bike ride? But you legally must have a bell/horn, helmets, and kids even legally are required to have knee and elbow pads. Oh and you're limited to 10km/h. Virtually everyone ignores these laws. I did 800km this summer. My daughter got to play at so many empty parks all summer.

Want to walk your dog, you have to keep them on a leash, pick up their poo, dog must be muzzled, only certain breeds are allowed to be outside, you're not allowed to play fetch, or chase or anything like that, on certain hot days you must legally carry water and a dish for your dog, and your dog can't bark too much or that's excessive noise law. So what do you do instead? You stay at home.

Government has basically outlawed in person social interaction. But humans require in person social interaction. Social media is where they are going to get some social interaction, not that it's fulfilling.

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

#463

Post by WalterBright »

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)…

> massive net wealth transfer to the richest

Those rich people created the wealth. Wealth was not "transferred" to Bill Gates, for example.

Gates created products. He then sold these products to people, who believed those products were worth the money they paid for them - i.e. it was an equal value trade. That is how Gates made money. It wasn't a transfer.

Theft, taxes, donations, subsidies and welfare are examples of a transfer of wealth.

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

#464

Post by hackinthebochs »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #373
hackinthebochs wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media created a perpetual church gossip culture where every action and statement is endlessly evaluated by the peanut gallery, while also creating a land rush for finding new moral angles to exploit for social status. Naturally, this catty culture will affect females more and teen girls in particular. Why specifically social media? It's a function of communication efficiency. It's why church is associated with…

> Naturally, this catty culture will affect females more and teen girls in particular. Why naturally? Can you describe this without leaning on a vague and misogynist adjective. There might be something here but as stated it's no more nuanced and has no more explanatory power than "women are like that."

Women are more social, i.e. more agreeable[1], more people-oriented[2], and so on. As such, they will be more susceptible to status anxiety derived from their place in the social hierarchy. Men's social status is more about who you are, what you do, or what you have, and so social hierarchy is less relevant. Social media has massively scaled up the complexity and the stakes of managing one's place in the social hierarchy. Women feel this more acutely than men. Teens even moreso because they are actively negotiating their place in the hierarchy and are less likely to have a rigid social network to fall back on and feel secure in.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/

[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018...

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

#465

Post by hackinthebochs »

JeremyNT wrote: post #374
hackinthebochs wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media created a perpetual church gossip culture where every action and statement is endlessly evaluated by the peanut gallery, while also creating a land rush for finding new moral angles to exploit for social status. Naturally, this catty culture will affect females more and teen girls in particular. Why specifically social media? It's a function of communication efficiency. It's why church is associated with…

> Naturally, this catty culture will affect females more and teen girls in particular. How does it follow that this "naturally" affects teen girls more than other demographics? This strikes me as at best hand-wavey. If you suspect some underlying cause of this, please state it explicitly rather than implying a tautological "teen girls are just like this."

See my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38940277

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

#466

Post by PawgerZ »

alienicecream wrote: post #102
303uru wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So quick to blame social media, even the article just waves it's hand and makes the assumption. Why not declining social mobility? Why not climate change anxiety? Why not late stage capitalism? Nah, it's always easy to blame Tik Tok as if the chosen release isn't indicative of something much greater going on.

Yeah that's what the kids are thinking about, late-stage capitalism and declining social mobility.

In comparison to other generations? Yeah, they are.

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

#467

Post by WalterBright »

jdksmdbtbdnmsm wrote: post #457
LocalH wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media didn't cause the problem, but it very much accelerated it. I think the media aspect of it is related to the uptick in 24-hour news that began with Ted Turner and CNN, and got its own acceleration with 9/11. Social media sort of piggybacked onto that and blew it wide open.

"The problem with capitalism is not that it creates problems for humans but that it exploits the problems that we would have regardless, drastically exacerbating the consequences." –Chris Cutrone

Capitalism solved many problems, like regular famines.

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

#468

Post by KittenInABox »

kredd wrote: post #429
drukenemo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past we could stay online for long hours doing some few activities (chatting, playing games, browsing few sites). These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference.

15 years ago, we would somewhat choose whom to be “always online with”. It was more of a selected in-group of people, having similar interests and ideas. Right now, it just feels like “everyone screaming into the void” as “every app is for everyone”. It feels much different for some reason. Or maybe I’m just getting older and not a teen anymore.

I agree this might be the distinction. Communities are too permeable. The constant conflict we're seeing now reminds me a lot of e.g. harry potter fandom ship raids, except at a broad scale and for everything. We're not hissing about how people who want Harry and Hermione to fuck are dirty traitors to Ron and Hermione, we're trying to get someone's source of healthcare (employment) to kick them off for whatever they said about Ukraine/Russia.

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

#469

Post by Podgajski »

meiraleal wrote: post #459
Podgajski wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, there’s not, annd unfortunately a lot of it is really bad. I would just keep up with the studies that are being published and the sources of their funding. The website the environmental health trust has a lot of material that I would categorize as mostly reliable. https://ehtrust.org/

I think it is very unfair that your reply was flagged while the same level theory of OP comment is top ranked.

I’m not, I’ve been at this for a while. It’s very strong bias of those in the tech industry that there’s no problem with radio frequency electromagnetic radiation. I was the same way. I was a network engineer for Cisco Systems from 1996 to 2000. I would’ve said the same thing before I realized it affected me in the late 201Os. There’s been such strong propaganda from the telecommunications industry because of the money involved. Just the fact that people keep saying “radiation comes from the sun as well” is proof of this fact sis, it ignores the fundamental science of how radio frequency telecommunications work. Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to comment about my post being flagged.

I’m not gonna post on hacker news anymore, there’s just too much noise.

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

#470

Post by serf »

drukenemo wrote: post #132
JohnMakin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being always online wasn’t quite so shitty til the last 10-15 years. Many people did it and were just fine for a long time. To me this feels like blaming food poisoning on the fact you have to eat food. Maybe the food is just bad. the current state of online is the food. it just really sucks.

In the past we could stay online for long hours doing some few activities (chatting, playing games, browsing few sites). These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference.

>These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference.

reading all of these 'royal we' anecdotes makes me feel grateful that I can survive without a mobile quite fine. HN is as close to social media as I get -- so I guess i'm stuck wondering : are all these 'conditions' of the modern world inexorably linked and self-perpetuating?

Like, if I wanted to develop a mobile-phone habit would it be best for me to get interested in social media, and vice versa?

Maybe my ducking of these trends just stems from my aversion to social media all together, and that saved me from mobile-phone overuse?

I don't know. But it is interesting, and wildly segmenting, that everyone around me refers to these problems that 'we' have -- but I don't. I can't be alone in this feeling.

p.s. to be clear, i'm not gloating -- if anything it's kind of loneliness inducing that I can't relate to the struggle.. but it's kind of a bittersweet feeling like being one of the few who doesn't catch a plague and has to watch others suffer.

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