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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)

#501

Post by circlefavshape »

FarhadG wrote: post #149
geodel wrote: post #59

My theory is it is effect of ever faster economic growth across the world. Now it has given great many benefits to great many people. Negative effects so far discussed are only in term of destruction of ecology, depletion of natural resources, pollution etc. To me this growth has created a sense of anxiety in all teens and older. Now the societal structures, jobs, careers, education, medicine etc do not change over m…

This resonates with what I've observed: I've asked several close family members and friends (between 16-22) what's troubling them and the most common answer is that they feel they're behind in life. They feel that they must already be driving an exotic car, surrounded by tons of potential partners, and at the top of their game—I assume these expectations are set by the content they consume and interact with on a dail…

> They feel that they must already be driving an exotic car, surrounded by tons of potential partners

Really? I'm way older than that, but have a fair bit of contact with people that age via my kids and music/theatre stuff I'm involved in, and I don't know anyone who feels like this

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

#502

Post by WalterBright »

jampekka wrote: post #491
WalterBright wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really believe that government regulation has been reduced?

Regulation and government involvement in economy very much so. This was/is the core of the neoliberal turn.

Consider all the labor regulations since. All the complexity of the taxes. The design of cars today is completely driven by regulations - for example, the tendency for cars to all look alike comes from regulation of every aspect of them.

Regulation has driven a lot of industry out of America, as it made it too expensive to operate here.

In what area has government been reduced?

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

#503

Post by jstarfish »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #290
JohnMakin wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Why do you assert that onlineness doesn't affect women disproportionately? Women face all sorts of abuse and minimization online. I've heard of many women using male sounding names online in order to be taken seriously or avoid harassment. The general advice on subreddits dominated by women is to turn off personaal messaging to avoid the inevitable rape threats. Take a look on Instagram and take a look at some musici…

While all of that is true, nobody hates women like other women. Men are just way more conspicuous and aggressive about it. Women conceal their abuse through rhetoric and political games.

Everyone is a girl, online.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37469575

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

#504

Post by dbbk »

samr71 wrote: post #12
usr1106 wrote: post #8

Few deny that a drinking age is necessary. We also need a smart phone age. It's quite obvious that many teens are addicted to their phones and the mostly useless content they consume there.

I deny a drinking age is necessary. From what it sounds like, the kids should be out there drinking more!

The drinking age is also entirely irrelevant to teens because it just means they drink at house parties rather than bars.

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

#505

Post by WalterBright »

jampekka wrote: post #500
WalterBright wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government has gotten enormously bigger and more pervasive since then.

Ok, if you say so.

Don't take my word for it. Just take a look at any chart of state/local/federal spending.

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

#506

Post by lancesells »

pardoned_turkey wrote: post #483
mathgradthrow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

The algorithmic feed and what is shown is absolutely by design. I don't use social media so I don't know how good / bad it is but there's clearly intent.

Comparing social media or Youtube to literature or D&D doesn't really work for me. This is more akin to a billion channel cable service where your remote only works some of the time. You use it to socialize with your friends, but you're also forcefed content that you didn't ask for, that may or may not be good for your mental health.

And yes, adults have agency but this article is about teens who have agency but are still growing and don't have the experience to make good decisions.

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

#507

Post by mrweasel »

groby_b wrote: post #460
mrweasel wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what do we do with that information? Un-invent social media, ban it? How would such a ban work and what should it cover? At this point I feel like we should pick a time in history, say the late 1930s or 1940s, somewhere around there, and use that as a frame of reference. Any new technology would be assessed based on the value added to average persons life, vs. the overall cost to society and the planet. Only if i…

That's a very romantic approach ("good old times"), but it's fundamental broken even if we could implement it. The late 1930s and 1940s weren't exactly the greatest time to be around, and using that as a yardstick sets us up for a large downhill climb. And then there's the problem that often, changes interact with each other, and their full value (or cost) is only clear when it's together with other inventions. You c…

> That's a very romantic approach ("good old times"),

My grandfather used to say: So when was the good old times, because I don't remember them? He was born in 1921.

The point of picking a somewhere in the past would be to avoid debating which things we'd want to get rid of, and instead focus on which technologies would we have adopted, if we had the current knowledge of it's ramifications. E.g. we'd skip the mass adoption of internal combustion engines and go for EVs if we had the full future vision and technology in 1940, so we should get rid of gas and diesel cars.

To it was just to have a reference point where living standards where fairly high and where most of us wouldn't be completely lost, and use that as a starting point for judging the value of various technologies.

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

#508

Post by crmd »

slantaclaus wrote: post #482
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…

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

Undermining trust in institutions.

Prior to the truth of the Vietnam war coming out, ordinary Americans tended to gave the benefit of the doubt to the government. They lost the baby boomer’s trust with Vietnam.

Bush 43’s Iraq war did the same to Gen X.

For Millenial Americans it was the government’s ruinous response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Then the COVID debacle happened.

Fast forward to the present moment where the vast majority of Americans have never seen functional institutions in their or their parent’s or grandparent’s lifetime.

A shockingly high percentage of gen z colleagues I speak with see government institutions, the American government itself, healthcare, tech, banking, capitalism, etc to be a giant scam. They believe they’re on their own and cannot count on society in any way for support.

They feel like they’re alone in the woods. I think it contributes to their anxiety.

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

#509

Post by croutonwagon »

JohnMakin wrote: post #81
latentcall wrote: post #57

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.

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.

I feel like the inflection point was about here:

https://imgur.com/ALMObBv

Not that I am blaming porn. I am not. But once the screens and bandwidth became large enough, UI's easy enough to navigate etc AND the devices themselves became quite commonplace, the always online mentality became one used much less for essential communication and business and transitioned more to a cultural way of life (porn is just an easy and funny way to drive that point home).

Doom scrolling wasnt really as much of a thing until Android and iOS matured enough and gained enough acceptance that it was no longer a status symbol. Heck i cant even tell you most of the social media apps these days, much less dating, but having some conversations with my younger cousins over break, there really arent many ways to meet folks outside of some of these apps (at least to them), which is sad. Apparently something as simple as "why not just join some type of IRL hobby and meet people that way" was scoffed at.

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

#510

Post by karaterobot »

wait_a_minute wrote: post #490
latentcall wrote: post #57

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…

Okay, I traveled back in time 30 years and convinced people to recognize the danger of being online all the time. I even made sure there would be innumerable studies suggesting it, and that pretty much everyone was at least aware of the danger. So, now that I'm back in 2024, everybody should already know that being online all the time is not healthy. I haven't checked yet, did it stop them from being addicted? I'm sure it did, right?!
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