The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

So I'm not arguing that that's not a bad thing. It is a bad thing, in my opinion. Anything that's done to deceive the audience in any way is unethical.

I'm saying it's not new, and certainly didn't suddenly take off in 2010. It's been a mainstay in mass media for almost as long mass media has existed.

Further, what Facebook has done is treat all ads the same as regular content. That's not something advertisers chose to do; it's something Facebook chose to do. Blaming advertisers for a decision they had no part in is missing the mark.

To be clear, I think many advertisers are probably pretty happy with what Facebook did there. But that's not the same as the advertisers being responsible for that decision. Facebook did it because it led to more clicks and therefore more revenue for Facebook. Same thing with how Google has progressively made search ads nearly indistinguishable from regular search results. Advertisers didn't do that. Google did. Advertisers didn't decide to make the first 75% of results on Amazon be sponsored or promoted products. Amazon did that themselves.

> Google, Amazon, And Facebook are 3 of the 6 largest companies in the US and are effectively advertising companies.

They're media companies, not advertisers. They sell advertising, as virtually all media companies do (with exception for publicly funded or high-subscription-fee companies). Advertisers buy advertising space.

So if your argument is that Google, Amazon, and Facebook are making advertising worse, I agree. If your argument is that advertisers (the people buying the ads) are making things worse, and that this correlates to the drop in mental health, I don't completely discount the theory; but I'd need to see a lot more evidence to support that contention.

These teen mental problems are a result in a shift in attitudes in America - the attitude that everyone is a victim, achievement is bad, one should get everything for free rather than the old idea that kids should work for their goodies, the mounds of presents kids get for Christmas, participation awards, everyone gets an A, parental supervision of kids play even into mid teens, testing is bad for kids' self-esteem, kids are too fragile for testing, and so on.

I.e. the old virtues of industriousness, thrift, personal responsibility, etc., have all but disappeared.

For example, in my day (when people walked uphill to school both ways) kids routinely got jobs as soon as they turned 16. Today, many peoples' first jobs are not until they graduate from college. That's a massive change.

Kids need to learn how to deal with adversity as they grow up. Parents these days are able to remove all adversity from kids' lives, up until the mid-teens. Then, parents cannot do that anymore, and the kids have not developed coping skills for adversity. No coping skills, parents can no longer fix it for them, leads to mental health crisis.

Of course trying to drink away your depression doesn’t work, but alcohol can be a tool in a mentally healthy lifestyle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance