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The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

afterbabel.com

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

#701
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.

If any of those were the explanation, you would find correlations between people with worsening mental health and those factors. Is it worse in countries at most risk from climate change? No. Is it worse where financial security is worse? Possibly those with expectations of stable careers do better, but not at the national level from the numbers in the article. Life expectancy is not usually teens main concern, nor i…

> Is it worse in countries at most risk from climate change?

It doesn't have to be that. I would try and spot correlations between mental health and bombardment of this in the news.

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

#702

I remember peer pressure being a big factor in teen years, mostly in the negative. Couldn't the rise of always-connected social media have super charged this negativity and made most teens feel like outcasts, with a few "teenfluencers" determining who is in and who is out? That would be a kind of hell for me to live in who was a teen before all this.

See the movie Eighth Grade for an anxiety inducing exploration of this theme. My personal take is that not having community is devastating, and the issue with social media is that it makes you think you have community in your brain, but your body/heart knows that you are actually just alone in your room. Even worse, it makes you crave a kind of unattainable community, so even people with loving family and friends might feel alone because they are longing for something nonexistent.

To your pet cat, the difference between you scrolling on your phone and you staring at the wall is nothing.

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

#703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So long as we're making sweeping claims without any attempt at supporting them, you're wrong, this is all downstream from the Protestant Reformation.

Capitalism (an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit) was invented prior to written history so the reformation only exists in the context of private property being a core assumption of society. That assumption is NEW in the history of humanity, the concept of "property" has only existed for about 50,000 years The protestant reformation then was an att…

anti-capitalism ideas, so great they're mandatory and a wall built around you so you can't flee to somewhere else - everywhere it's been tried

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

#704
post #583

Maybe it's because with corporate Capitalism, we've given up all our freedoms for comfort and safety. Comfort and safety are nice and all, but when we are no longer free to exist in reality, with other people, we get depressed. Our technological overlords (Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Epic Games) have engineered digital life for young people to be as "engaging" as possible for their own benefit. We spread out to the suburb…

> I think Capitalism is a good system, but corporate Capitalism kills freedom. How do you picture capitalism operating such that corporations don't emerge? In my mind I can't separate the accumulation of capital from corporate capitalism, at least given sufficient time.

I mean corporations in the multi-billion to trillion dollar definition rather than a small mom-and-pop "corporation". For one I think antitrust legislation should be more thoroughly prosecuted - most notably I think network effects beyond a certain threshold should not be legal. For example, Hacker News has some kind of network effect - network effects are invariably going to happen in society.

But the network effect that Instagram/Facebook/Discord/Twitter/etc. has reaches so far that any teen or young person that wants to be part of digital life must use these corporate ran companies. Having a stronger world wide web and a weaker app based internet would water down some of these network effects.

Automobile companies have network effects because of their historical lobbying that made teen life in the suburbs nearly impossible without a car. I'd like to remove money from politics to remove a lot of these incentives big corporations have to protect their bottom line.

Now... what about a regular company like Nike or Proctor and Gamble or UPS? I think the way you don't create mega corps like those is to prevent globalization with these companies. Keeping supply chains within their own countries would help, for example. Keeping companies like Meta operating within the US or even within California only would create much more competition, and make many smaller companies much wealthier. An Instagram like app operating in only New York would make it much easier for social media competition within New York because there would be limits to how large that app can get. Trying to compete as a new social media company with Instagram is nearly impossible when you're up against a multi billion dollar company with a billion users.

These are all just random theories from some guy (me) on the internet, who knows if any of these would actually work. But I guess the point is I believe in more smaller markets rather than fewer, larger markets.

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

#705

causes are a mix: smartphones, social media, doomscrolling habits, carbon climate crisis (and its dire implications). and the rise of the so-called Woke/DEI propaganda cult in academia. all add up

There could be a much easier explanation. Life in the past wasn't much easier, in fact, it was much harder and crazier. But no one really cared measuring the problem and it appeared it did not exist.

Life may have been harder and crazier, but the challenges people faced were far more local and solvable. One's community truly needed the upcoming generation of children to step up and help out with their sweat, blood, and tears to keep everything together. That infused purpose and meaning into the struggles.

Now a young person is hyper-aware of how large the world is, how small they are in relation to it, and how all of the big problems that command so much attention are completely beyond the scope of their influence (and are likely to be that way for their entire lives, outside of some astronomically unlikely events).

There's also a somewhat related argument to be made that with the homogenization and erosion of culture in the modern world. We've almost completely lost coming-of-age rituals where adults and elders in local communities induct children into the world of adulthood. Whether by design or by accident, this leaves more and more young adults feeling disconnected, purposeless, and adrift in the world. Which tends to leave many holes to be filled by consumerism and other potentially harmful tenets of modern society, which now includes social media addiction.

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

#706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#3: Isn't this what has happened anyway? Anecdotally, everyone I knew that was young, hip, and lived downtown moved to the surburbs once they reached a certain age.

Suburbs are a relatively recent invention, powered by cars and racism [1].So, I don't think you can say "this is how it's always been." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States

Well, it seems like when you give people an option to not live in small boxes on top of one another many will take choose that option.

I don’t understand why urbanites have to scream and yell about someone else’s choice to live in the suburbs.

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

#707
post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's addressed in the post. There is some of that, but there are similar increases in hospitalisation for self-harm, which wouldn't be affected by an increase in awareness of mental illness.

That assumes people aren’t induced towards self harm due to an increased awareness? If you believe suicide or self harm are common (and valid/acceptable) solutions to your issue, would you not be more likely to do so?

[deleted]

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

#708

I believe the big 2016 bump is due to Trump. Does that have international impact? Since I'm German and still had daily news about his behavior I say yes. As far I can remember we never had so many news about any other US president. I mean Trump was very active on social media and was very attention seeking, much more than other presidents. Why would Trump cause depression? First of all he basically said all the thing…

I agree with most of this but my opinion is that Trump was the symptom, not the cause.

I see it both ways. If you are the type of person Trump targeted with his insults and attacks, which is a lot of people in the US, and you're young and don't really 'get' the political situation, that could cause some significant psychological distress. Imagine you're 17 and the president says "Mersenne and people like them are destroying our country".

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

#709

What started as a critical blogpost about wokism turned into an worldwide youth mental illness crisis. This raises a few red flag on me.

Jonathan Haidt is a very thoughtful researcher and has been looking at this and related issues for a very long time. I think your dismissal is perhaps a bit too casual.

Both “the coddling of” and “the righteous” mind were pretty poor scholarship. The kind where the researcher starts with the conclusion and then looks for evidence that confirms the theory. Good science should either neutrally look at the evidence or, when starting with a theory, search for disconfirming evidence. Haidt does neither.

Furthermore, Haidt struggles to accurately represent his ideological adversaries. Another red flag. Disagreement is natural but public intellectuals should be able to effortlessly make a strong case for the positions they have themselves rejected.

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

#710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We will probably won't find a culprit It's capitalism. That's the answer you're looking for

Comrade, have you ever studied the history of the USSR? Give it a try, it's fun. It tells a story how 1/6 of the planet's land surface for 80 years was turned into garbage. They did it with one simple trick.

This is such a predictable response

I’ll say it for the millionth time:

The Trotskiest-Leninist State-Command Economy (aka USSR) is not the opposite or even that much different than State Capitalism.

I won’t fight this strawman

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