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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)

#661

Post by ender341341 »

paulmist wrote: post #621

What about the awareness of what self-harm/depression is in the first place? It's easier to say you're depressed if you understand what depression is, and it's easy enough to Google that. Same with self-harm, I wouldn't ask my classmate but I could easily Google it. Similarly, mental health campaigns could contribute, accelerating how fast kids learn about bad mental health. We could've had the same percentage of dep…

I think that better diagnosis does account for some of the diagnosis count (like many mental health issues the solution used to just be "if you can't figure out how to act normal on your own you're going to a home/asylum, we may smack you around a bit first to see if we can get the message through to you").

But talking with any educators for that age group it's not just that the number of people diagnosed as depressed/anxiety but the level of depression/anxiety in the individuals diagnosed escalating that alarms them the most.

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

#662

Post by lonelyasacloud »

nitwit005 wrote: post #549
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.

> Few deny that a drinking age is necessary. Because of drunk driving. If that was not an issue, we certainly wouldn't have a drinking age of 21 in the US. Several states still allow your family to serve their children alcohol, which is closer to the example of letting your kid use the internet.

In the UK the restriction is around the sale and was set to 18 in 1923 and had nothing to do with drunk driving.

The restriction was because of concerns around minors being too young and naïve to fully understand the full implications of their actions. Which is why consumption is/was allowed at home on the basis that responsible adults will help children to learn to handle alcohol sensibly while stopping them doing anything too stupid ... at least that's the theory anyway.

Similar rules apply to driving, voting, smoking etc in most places. And as it is possible to live a perfectly meaningful life without being bombarded by TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube etc, it's really hard to understand why similar should not apply to Social Media.

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

#663

Post by gedy »

grecy wrote: post #35

Do teens have much to look forward to? Climate change is already causing severe weather events, which are very likely to ramp quickly. Careers are a thing of the past, and it seems like no matter how hard you work you'll never "get ahead" and will be lucky not to spend your life living paycheck to paycheck. Life expectancy has gone down, markedly. Debt is up. New wars.

> Do teens have much to look forward to?

Life has always been kinda shitty in every generation, but I think the difference is a lot of negative/apocalyptic messaging from all types of media surrounds people, and the positive/optimistic messages we used to get are lacking or treated as "cringe", eye rolls, etc. Pop music has a lot less positive love songs, all existing power structures are suspect, etc, etc.

Whether true or realistic or not, it's not helpful to kids to hear all this crap. The downer types are offering no realistic and/or hopeful alternative.

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

#664

Post by imiric »

ajmurmann wrote: post #97
woleium wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

elf on the shelf is a frighteningly common indoctrination to a life of surveillance

I have the related theory that the whole Santa Clause and Easter Bunny lie thing makes children more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. If all adults, including the weatherman conspire to lie to me for no actual gain, why wouldn't politicians and media personalities conspire to lie to me about the earth being flat or climate change if there is profit or power to be had?

Oh c'mon, that's absurd.

Most children learn to distinguish reality from fantasy between the ages of 7 and 10. Conspiracy theories are based on the idea that some sinister entity is hiding some truth about the world, and that only a select few are aware of it. People are not born with this level of cynicism, and if they eventually acquire it, it will be during adolescence or adulthood, once they're already able to distinguish fantasy from reality. This is an entirely separate thought process than the one involved in child fantasies.

While pretend play may not be as crucial to development as previously thought[1], it's still a healthy and fun part of growing up. It increases the familial bond, and gradually prepares children to a less magical world. Let them enjoy it while it lasts.

[1]: https://news.virginia.edu/content/pretend-play-may-not-be-cr...

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

#665

Post by starik36 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #625
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…

> 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? Add on top the permacrises/polycrisis time we're in. My generation, we entered the workforce right during the 2008ff financial crisis. The Europeans got further fucked by the Euro crisis 2010, which crippled our care…

All the political crises, you listed starting with 2008, could have easily be relisted from a decade or two earlier. There have always been crises.

I am not sure that is any different than it has been for any generation.

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

#666

Post by faeriechangling »

bluescrn wrote: post #311
drfuchs wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Folks in the 60’s thru 80’s expected global nuclear annihilation with some probability.

There was also concern over population explosion back then ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb ). But talking about population has become quite the taboo. Utterly unacceptable to restrict reproduction, but it's cool to take people's transport/heating/protein away to save the planet?

It’s not unacceptable at all to restrict population, it’s just a controversial notion. I’d go as far as to say that population restriction being good is an elite consensus.

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

#668

Post by throwup238 »

CognitiveLens wrote: post #16
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…

The causal link to social media is presented very simply in the article, but I suspect that's mainly because the article is not about diagnosis, but about the prevalence of the pattern. There is a lot of data to support the social media effect specifically (some referenced in the linked articles from Twenge), and I suspect the next few posts from Rausch will dive in more deeply, so it's not right to claim that they'r…

Not only is there a lot more content on the blog about the topic but Haidt and Rausch have several public Google docs where they keep an ongoing list of evidence for and against their hypotheses.

Every time one of their articles gets discussed on HN (which happens at least once a month at this point) the discussion goes in circles about evidence and causality without engaging the meat of the content.

HN just doesn’t have any mechanism to promote long term discussions about this topic.

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

#669

Post by mindslight »

serf wrote: post #470
drukenemo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. reading all of these 'royal we' anecdotes makes me feel grateful that I can survive without a mobile quite fine. HN is as close to social media as I get -- so I guess i'm stuck wondering : are all these 'conditions' of the modern world inexorably linked and self-perp…

I don't think it's a plague, but more like a bunch of attractors now that ~everyone has expectation that everyone else is "always online". I'd say I'm in a similar position as you with regards to not opting into most of it, yet I still feel the social pressure of being drawn into crap like group texts. People, who a decade or two ago wouldn't call you back for days, now pile on within the hour with walls of emote-laden content-free well-wishes. If I were 10 years younger I'd probably have declared bankruptcy already and written an LLM autoresponse bot.

The other half of the mobile 1-2 punch is that the UX is terrible, due to both the limited form factor and the hostile software. People are social animals so most just suffer through it for the connection, and not knowing that the experience can be so much better on a real computer. Using software that functions across devices, I do feel the same attractors on a fully fledged desktop. But it's much less concentrated as I can read the entire context without scrolling, type out a response at a comfortable speed, and then switch away from that window until I poll it again. Whereas even with a phone running mostly libre software it feels like being sucked into a tap-tap-tap morass that I'm only using because I have to.

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

#670

Post by asylteltine »

throwaway092323 wrote: post #515
asylteltine wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because it’s a ridiculous notion. National crime is at an all time low and gets lower every year. You haven’t been safer more than you are today. Mental safety is feel good progressive nonsense. If you can’t handle reality, you are eventually going to snap.
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