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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)

#511

Post by s1artibartfast »

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…

I think this is an issue of "can" in the "technically possible" vs "realistically possible".

There are lots of people who have done exactly what you said, and others that never became terminally online, yet real-world re-adoption has been slow.

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

#512

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #463
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)…

> 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 o…

[deleted]

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

#513

Post by dimgl »

kbos87 wrote: post #2

I’m not a parent nor am I a teen so take my comments with a grain of salt. The one thing that has consistently jumped out to me on this topic is how quickly people seem to jump to convenient answers. Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? That gets no atten…

This is a great point. So my parents were well-intentioned but were immensely restrictive in all areas of my life. I can't imagine just how much worse it'd be with the monitoring and restriction tools that are available nowadays. I actually stop myself from posting things on Instagram given that I have them on there. So I think there's some truth to this.

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

#514

Post by tmp_eSGPhx »

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.

[dead]

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

#515

Post by throwaway092323 »

asylteltine wrote: post #358
1-6 wrote: post #349

Opinion: We’re treating kids like adults too early in their lives. Of course breaking laws isn’t ok but who here hasn’t done something crazy? Neighborhoods aren’t being neighbors any longer and people simply want to have law enforcement be the negotiator for everything.

Kids used to be more adult before technology was around. I think it’s the opposite parents are coddling their kids plus you have this new lib stuff like safe spaces and the whole concept of “feeling unsafe”. We have an entire generation of babies who can’t handle conflict including internal conflict. So what can they do? Kill themselves or other people as we see them do

Why put "feeling unsafe" in scare quotes? There's a lot to feel unsafe about right now.

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

#516

Post by faeriechangling »

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…

The issue I’ve been seeing in wealthy industrialized countries, is that people are becoming poorer as they grow older, the prices of energy are rising, the prices of land are rising, so simply getting people together is less viable than even 20 odd years ago.

The internet gives you an instant connection to people who have interests specific to you better than even an expensive international convention can do for essentially free. If you decide this is worth it anyways, well you’re going to end up financially behind somebody using the internet in a cheap apartment on undesirable land, and that is going to undermine you bit by bit.

Those who thrive in this era of humanity I think are just going to be well adapted to an online world, or just be wealthy enough that they can afford the luxury of meeting in person. The only way in which I see this trend moving in the opposite direction is that the average amount of people living in each home is likely to rise due to land cost.

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

#517

Post by nkohari »

303uru wrote: post #91
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.

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.

Constant doomscrolling on social media is what causes anxiety about those topics.

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

#518

Post by coffeebeqn »

throwup238 wrote: post #7
kbos87 wrote: post #2

I’m not a parent nor am I a teen so take my comments with a grain of salt. The one thing that has consistently jumped out to me on this topic is how quickly people seem to jump to convenient answers. Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? That gets no atten…

I think that arc largely peaked in the 1980s and 1990s with stranger danger and the satanic panic nonsense. Helicopter parents and people calling social services on unattended kids was already a meme by the 90s.

It metastasized. It didn’t decrease. Now kids are barely allowed to go outside on their own

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

#519

Post by jdietrich »

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?

Self harm is a behaviour, not a disorder. There isn't a predictable relationship between the rate of self harm and the rate of underlying psychiatric pathology. We have reasonable evidence to suggest that self harm tends to be socially contagious, occurring in socially-connected clusters rather than consistently across the population; young people whose friends engage in self-harm are dramatically more likely to engage in self-harm.

It might seem contradictory, but it is entirely plausible to argue that the internet is causing a self-harm epidemic rather than a mental illness epidemic. Obviously that would still be a serious problem, but it would lead us to very different conclusions and interventions.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6914...

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

#520

Post by itishappy »

JohnMakin wrote: post #367
Klonoar wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What percentage of the population do you think had them? What percentage of school children?

Nerds doing nerd stuff aren't going to affect the zeitgeist much, it's the network effect of having essentially 100% of your peers spending much of their time on social media.

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