Live data from Hacker News

The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

afterbabel.com

481–490 of 937 posts

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

#481
post #89
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Can you elaborate on this? From what I can tell, the outcome that you’re speaking of has occurred for the opposite reason. Looking at the data for the US, there seems to be an even more exponential curve between 2015-2020, which would imply that these trends could have been further exacerbated by the reduction of government regulation. The same is likely true for the concentration of wealth, the loss in small busines…

Yes, the reality is we've been in a starve the beast situation for decades in the US. It's a spiral as the bad actors get to say "See, we have X but X doesn't work" leaving out the conditions they've forced on X to cause these deficiencies. Repeat until the X thing is dead or completely toothless.

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

#482

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…

Please explain to me how The War In Vietnam is causing a mental health crisis today

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

#483

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…

People made the same arguments about violent video games (a major panic in the 1990s), about youth literature, about Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. All about depraving children and getting them hooked on smut for profit.

Social media is "adversarial" in the sense that yeah, most platforms want to maximize engagement, and maximized engagement might not be best for you. But that's also the relationship you have with companies selling you sugary food or expensive shoes. They're not your friends and they want you to spend money in ways that might not benefit you. We manage.

Ultimately, you have agency to shape your experience. You're not "addicted" to it any more than one gets "addicted" to chocolate or Louis Vuitton. Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design.

At some point, adults in the developed world decided at some point that it's not OK for children to play unsupervised outdoors, walk to school on their own, and so on. It's probably a function of increasing standard of living and plummeting birth rates. Just 50-100 years ago, you had multiple children with the expectation that not all of them will make it to adulthood. Nowadays, most families will have one kid - their single most important "investment" - and they have the means to tightly monitor and control their physical environment. The internet is sort of the only place where you can meet with friends and have fun unsupervised. It's an escape hatch.

I don't see how banning or regulating TikTok or Facebook really solves this.

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

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure, it's worth investigating, I support that. But I do not support making a claim like "I do think it plays one of the largest roles in the increase of neurological disorders since the 2000s. Including autism." when there's little evidence and no obvious mechanism.

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

#485
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

Wow, I think the exact opposite. The wonder of capitalism is that it harnesses the problems that we would have regardless and at least points them in the general direction of social benefit. At least I can't think of any other system of economic organization that has been tried in the history of the world that I would prefer.

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

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mon…

I don't deny radio frequency electromagnetic radiation could be harmful. But clearly the change is behavioral and it is not the radiation that makes teenagers doomscroll 16 hours/day.

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

#487
post #419

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…

This is like trying to dismiss cigarette/cancer links by pointing out that we have also built more power plants and have more cars and our lifestyles have changed and that must be why we have more lung cancer. No, it's cigarettes. I refer to social media companies as "tobacco companies of the mind."

[deleted]

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

#488

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.

Define "traditional" - do you mean USA in the 50s? What is traditional and what isn't changes with each generation - particularly in the western world and the USA, which are both on the forefronts of technological, intellectual, cultural and philosophical changes in the past 200-300 years.

The USA in particular, changes pretty radically with every generation as a different group of immigrants comes and changes the culture

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

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He's responsible for a ton of AIDS deaths, so we'll let him be with one pandemic.

Now Reagan caused the worldwide epidemic of a mysterious disease of unknown origin?

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

#490

Not just social media, but always online mentality. Spending all your time online gives you a skewed perception of the world and I believe being online always is a major negative. Spending time outside is good for you. Socializing with real people in front of you is good also. Not sure if we can ever go back to that without some major catastrophe.

> Not sure if we can ever go back to that without some major catastrophe.

We easily can. With the network effect, we can just encourage everyone we know that socializing with real people in real life is important and set up some coffees, lunches, dinners, walks, board games, etc, and then encourage those people to do the same with the people they know.

Won't take very many hops to reach everyone this way and get back on track.

Post reply on HN