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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)

#471

Post by maxwell »

api wrote: post #430
2devnull wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/social media/books/g

Social media is nothing like books. It's also nothing like eBooks, Wikipedia, regular discussion forums, telephones, etc. Modern social media has some completely novel characteristics that are responsible for its damaging effects on mental health. - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction. - It d…

Sounds like the rack of newspapers and magazines that have now disappeared from the newsstands, which now sell consumer packaged goods.

Fair point comparing infinite scroll to slot machines. Books end, newspapers and magazines get thrown away. Always more to scroll.

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

#472

Post by Podgajski »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #443
Podgajski wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we evolve with the polarized pulsed microwave radiation from man-made devices? Or Did we evolve with the non-polarized radiation from the sun? You cannot compare that. The proof of this is that the FCC has safety regulations against how close you are to the sources. But these were devised with two and 3G technologies. Also, most of the studies are not real world studies, and so they lack many of the key character…

FCC having safety regulations isn't actually proof of a problem, it's proof that there's concern there might be a problem.

If there might be a problem, then we should investigate it, correct? But instead, we’re just rolling it out more and more and faster faster. Whatever happened to the precautionary principal and health?

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

#473

Post by diob »

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…

Yeah, I'd be more willing to say it's the collapse of community oriented society in a lot of places along with a general feeling of economic despair (you'll own nothing and be happy).

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

#474

Post by ativzzz »

cf1241290841 wrote: post #137

The increase in depression numbers might be a rational reaction to the current environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Never_to_Have_Been

This is why for pretty much the majority of human history, we had some form of religion to trick ourselves into ignoring this. Now that religion is on a decline...

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

#475

Post by manuelabeledo »

WalterBright wrote: post #467
jdksmdbtbdnmsm wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It also created other famines.

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

#476

Post by onion2k »

ben_w wrote: post #379
Jensson wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My childhood memories of advertising was: • Slushy machine! • Buy our cereal, it has a buff friendly tiger with a dashing neckerchief! • Buy our chocolate, the sexy cartoon rabbit lady/ambassadorial guests say it's wonderful! • Here's a small man made of butter playing a trombone!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGHLriHhvtg • This anthropomorphic telephone wants you to get a loan! • Weird adverts that turned out to…

None of this seemed to be aiming at getting anyone depressed.

Every single one of those adverts gave the message "If you don't buy this product you'll be unhappy/unattractive/hungry/missing out/uncool." Every single one. None of them aim to make people depressed, but they all do exactly that if you don't buy the product.

It's worth noting that all the adverts you remember are for products that were wildly successful at the time. People are very willing to pay to avoid being unhappy, even if when the message is coming from a cartoon rabbit.

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

#477

Post by mike_hearn »

naasking wrote: post #372
mike_hearn wrote: post #242

This is a super interesting thread, but (un)fortunately Haidt's claims about a teen mental health epidemic have been pretty convincingly debunked. https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide... Aaron Brown checked a sample of the papers Haidt relies on to build his case and found that they couldn't support his claims. They're of the sort of quality we've come to expect from the field, dominated by ti…

> Haidt's claims about a teen mental health epidemic have been pretty convincingly debunked [...] It's quite probable that there is no teen mental health crisis. I don't see how you can reach this conclusion when it's very clear in the data that hospitalizations for teens due to self-harm has gone up significantly. Are you suggesting that hospitals are not now or were not previously correctly reporting this data?

The question is what counts as a crisis.

Haidt presents datasets that are very short. The graphs begin in 2004. Teens have been depressed for a lot longer than 20 years. It's hard to know what the natural variance of this statistic is given just his articles.

If you look at longer term US suicide stats (stratified by gender but not age) there's quite a bit of variation over time.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-s...

The 1970s were really rough for women, but not men. 1990 was rough for men but not women. These graphs show that variance can be pretty high when taking the long view. Current overall suicide levels aren't anything special, even though they've been going up for decades (watch out for the non-linear X axis).

If we look at the 10-14 girls dataset that Haidt picks where the change seems most dramatic, it goes from 1 per 100,000 to 2 per 100,000. Very few people commit suicide at that age, fortunately. We're talking on the order of 100-200 girls in that age range per year in the entire USA. At these low initial levels, even very small changes will look big on a graph. Every death is tragic, but if "crisis" now means something that affects such an truly tiny percentage of the population then almost anything can be a crisis.

The other unrelated issue is that if you look at his graphs, self harm and suicides started going up in 2007, not 2012 as he claims. I don't see how you'd pick 2012 as the inflection point if not trying to force the smartphone narrative.

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

#478

Post by rqtwteye »

Personally it's more that there is more awareness today and it's more ok to come forward saying you have a problem. When I grew up in the 70s there were a lot of people with problems but they were just labelled as "stupid" or "difficult". I personally had serious depression and social anxiety but there was nobody to talk to and I wouldn't have known the vocabulary to describe the situation. I know several people who I am pretty sure were gay. One guy was most likely trans. And a ton of people with depression and/or anxiety. My dad and a lot of men his age had PTSD from WW2. None of these went into any statistic.

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

#479

Post by slantaclaus »

WalterBright wrote: post #421
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…

> reagonomics Now Reagan caused teen mental illness, too? What's next, Reagan caused Covid?

Don’t forget The War In Vietnam

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

#480

Post by ativzzz »

ajmurmann wrote: post #444
hutzlibu wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"At 18 you were able to get a driver's license and start drinking stronger drinks" You must have lived in a different german reality then. For us it was always easy to get someone else to buy your booze, if it was not already given to you somehow by the older guys. Or if you looked slightly older(I was NEVER asked for ID while buying drinks). Many people in my age group developed a drinking habit - and big surprise,…

Lol, I wasn't suggesting that drinking alcohol is good. I was merely saying that allowing a gradual on-ramp when kids still are living with their parents is less bad. Compare the German situation to the opposite extreme of the US where you aren't allowed to drink anything till you are 21 and living with other people your age. You could hardly design a worse approach of you tried.

In the US, most states have family exception rules where you can drink with parents

Plus, it's not like kids follow the drinking laws if they don't want to

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