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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)

#521

Post by dcsommer »

bedobi wrote: post #357
dcsommer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many alternative explanations to go through before it "has" to be social media. Already mentioned was time spent outside. For instance, video games are (also) a huge drain on time spent outside.

Gen X and Millenials also had video games (including online ones that didn't require you to be playing physically together) and it didn't have the same effect - the mental health decline became prominent and accelerated during the rise of social media, not video games.

Video games are very different today. There are far more social and gambling features built-in to addict users than in the old mostly-single-player days. I'm not convinced you've disproved video games as being part of the problem.

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

#522

Post by paulryanrogers »

roenxi wrote: post #106
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.

Even if it were one of those things; nothing has changed since 2010 to make them worse. The current negative economic trends set in around 1970, "social mobility" isn't a thing most people ever have access to. I've never been able to figure out what the problem is with climate change was so I dunno; maybe that is fair. But nothing new seems to have happened in the last decade that wasn't also happening in the 2000s.

Microplastics have accumulated as well as other forever chemicals, and awareness of them.

It's likely several factors at play and at different severities in different places.

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

#523

Post by Podgajski »

meiraleal wrote: post #486
Podgajski wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My point is that RFEMF may affect behavior and mood. This only adds to the biological stress of doom scrolling all day.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014765132...

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

#524

Post by naasking »

mike_hearn wrote: post #477
naasking wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/1…

> 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 article

I'm not talking about depression, but self-harm. Yes the graph starts in 2004, and then we see a 188% increase in self-harm among girls, after being basically stable for at least 6 years. That's pretty dramatic.

> 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).

Even supposing I accept that suicide rate hasn't changed much, a stable suicide rate with increasing self-harm rate still qualifies as a mental health crisis. You keep focusing on suicide when the self-harm rate among girls was 20 times higher than their suicide rate when it was stable 2004-2010, but is now 72 times higher. That's clearly a problem.

> 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.

That is not correct. The graph clearly shows that 2007 was at or slightly below 2004 levels. You can also see a slight increase from 2006 to 2007, and then a ~25% decline in 2008, then another ~10% decline in 2009, then a return to the 2007 levels in 2010. After 2010, you can see increases past historic levels, and 2012 you see a very sharp increase. (edit: I'm talking about Figure 2 at the link, just so we're on the same page)

That might be a coincidence, but it's not completely arbitrary as you're implying.

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

#525

Post by jancsika »

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…

> - 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.

Wikipedia on its own with zero-cost internal hyperlinks was also addictive. There were people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes well before they were getting themselves into Youtube rage bubbles.

That's to say-- I think it matters what one is getting addicted to.

Society can bounce back from people who got addicted to studying too much of various bona fide topics like constitutional law and industrial hygiene.

On the other hand, society would have a harder time recovering if a critical mass of citizens are quantized to mostly low-effort rabbit holes, like believing the earth is flat, or fiat declarations that maritime and common law are the only legally binding forms of constitutional power.

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

#526

Post by everdrive »

WalterBright wrote: post #426
zdragnar wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have long complained about television, both in terms of bad behavior of fictional characters and tone of news shows. At this point, though, young people are far more likely to doom scroll, fantasize about influence or whatever online than they are to be watching television. It's also worth noting that this is a "teen mental health crisis"- television has been around long enough for several generations to go th…

In the 1930's movies were blamed for the decay in society. In the 1960's comic books were blamed for teen problems. In the 70's it was rock music.

The connection here does seem to be a lot more firm. Teen suicide rates are way up, and they do seem to strongly coincide with widespread smartphone and social media adoption. Do you believe those correlations are just circumstantial?

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

#527

Post by philip1209 »

I think this is going to hit in waves:

1. First teens, because they don't know better

2. Next new retirees, because they lose social connection from work and don't appreciate that social media + TV are unsuitable replacements.

3. Next, remote workers who moved from a city to a suburb, and become progressively more physically isolated unless they make a conscious effort to connect IRL outside the home with peers.

#1 is obvious. #2 is starting to hit my parents and their generation. #3 I'm seeing glimmers of and I think it will get more noticeable over time.

I believe the solution is liveable cities, and a return from suburbs to higher-density living in walkable neighborhoods. People need social contact, and I think remote workers + retirees + teens would be more happy living in closer proximity to others where spontaneous social connections are possible.

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

#528

Post by chasd00 »

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 worked really hard as a parent to convince my wife+MIL that it is safe to let our boys roam the neighborhood now that they're old enough to cross intersections safely. However, a 10 year old girl one street over went missing. That has undone 5 years of getting my wife+MIL comfortable. My wife grew up in the neighborhood Amber Hagerman was kidnapped/murdered in so i understand but my kids are completely trapped.

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

#529

Post by AlexandrB »

croutonwagon wrote: post #509
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.

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…

Doom scrolling is an intentional social media "feature". Before infinite scrolling, algorithmic feeds doom scrolling required some effort on the users part. Now you can just keep flicking your thumb up and keep getting more shit.

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

#530

Post by lupusreal »

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.

10-15 years ago roughly aligns with the popularization of smartphones. Before that, almost nobody was going around all day with the internet in their pocket so the experience of "always" online was very different.
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