Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

afterbabel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 937 posts

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

#771

Post by hutzlibu »

Aeolun wrote: post #407
hutzlibu wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"At 18 you were able to get a driver's license and start drinking stronger drinks" You must have lived in a different german reality then. For us it was always easy to get someone else to buy your booze, if it was not already given to you somehow by the older guys. Or if you looked slightly older(I was NEVER asked for ID while buying drinks). Many people in my age group developed a drinking habit - and big surprise,…

I dunno, I never feel the need to pull out my phone when drunk? If it weren’t so problematic for other reasons being drunk all the time might stop smartphone addiction.

Oh well, Heroin might even "work" better in that regard..

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

#772

Post by [deleted] »

labrador wrote: post #671

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.

[deleted]

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

#773

Post by Klonoar »

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.

Not everyone was there by 2012, and yes, there were internet-enabled phones but the experience was substantially worse.

You are attempting to put a square into a circle here.

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

#774

Post by Fricken »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #409
Fricken wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

11 years ago I visited Lombok, and island adjacent to Bali in Indonesia, where people generally lived very traditional village lifestyles and most adults over 30 were illiterate. They had recently been provided 4g cellular coverage, and all the teenagers and young adults were lounging around doomscrolling Facebook lite on their $50 android phones. There was no multigenerational transition for them.

> most adults over 30 were illiterate Literacy was over 95% in 2010 in Indonesia. It takes 5 seconds to Google for it. Since most of Indonesia are Moslems, they learn to read the Koran at an early age. Yes, I know that small parts of Lombok are Hindus.

I was going off what the family I stayed with in Kuta told me. The mother of the family could not read. Indonesia is quite diverse. There are many isolated ethnic groups. On Lombok material quality of life can vary quite a bit from one village to the next, as can their commitment to Islam.

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

#775

Post by hutzlibu »

shkkmo wrote: post #614
hutzlibu wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"At 18 you were able to get a driver's license and start drinking stronger drinks" You must have lived in a different german reality then. For us it was always easy to get someone else to buy your booze, if it was not already given to you somehow by the older guys. Or if you looked slightly older(I was NEVER asked for ID while buying drinks). Many people in my age group developed a drinking habit - and big surprise,…

I learned to drink in Germany as a 16 year old exchange student and then came back to US and experienced drinking culture here. You are absolutely correct that German teens have much easier access to hard liquor the American terns. I presume this is some combination of the culture and enforcement realities in Germany compared to the US. However, I would also (anecdotally) say that the teen culture in Germany around d…

"However, I would also (anecdotally) say that the teen culture in Germany around drinking is healthier and less prone to binging than in America."

There are huge local differences. In my youth and hometown, it was definitely binge drinking - and we just followed tradition. But what I learned of other areas, was actually quite similar. Healthy alcohol consumption was rather the exception, but there is a trend towards it.

And I have not been to the US to directly compare, but I cannot really say that I experienced "intergenerational knowledge transfer about responsible alcohol usage" in germany. That is, my father does not drink, because my grandfather drank too much. Does this count? Otherwise I just know too many families with at least one alcoholic and some on the way. And teenage drinking is just something teens are expected to do and the parents just try to limit the extremes. But many would be actually worried if their children never drank, because it might mean, they are isolated oddballs.

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

#776

Post by B56b »

throwup238 wrote: post #668
CognitiveLens wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems inevitable for online discussions of a topic this large to be completely unproductive. It's broad enough that everyone's favorite societal ill can be blamed, yet virtually no one reads Haidt's research explaining why other explanations are insufficient.

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

#777

Post by cynicalsecurity »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #710
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So far, nothing else exists.

Communism/socialism failed like Chernobyl reactor number 4.

Adopting a new socio-economic system some young cocky pal imagines in his head? Nope, thank you. I'm too old and experienced for that. Not in a million of years.

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

#778

Post by hutzlibu »

paulmd wrote: post #593
hutzlibu wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but it feels like they're expected to fight harder and harder for less and less." And they also should feel ashamed for what they get and consume, as it has a CO2 impact and their future is doomed if they use too much. But in my experience, climate change is a minor factor, compared to the always comparing yourself not to your local group anymore, but the whole world.

> And they also should feel ashamed for what they get and consume, as it has a CO2 impact and their future is doomed if they use too much. I loathe how this has turned into an easy way to dismiss any product you don't like, a thought-terminating cliche, because hey, you're not going to argue that your iphone is more important than the planet , right? What a jerk! I have seriously had probably a dozen discussions wher…

"Being charitable I'm sure tons of people just have an extremely bad intuitive yardstick for what actually matters"

People on average just have very bad physic knowledge. No understanding of basic science at all. I actually think that we cannot solve climate change without fixing those knowledge holes - otherwise we just get more pointless activism (like the ones you mention) and ignorance.

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

#779

Post by _gabe_ »

bratbag wrote: post #235
bparsons wrote: post #30

People underestimate the change that took place between 2008 and 2012 with ubiquitous phone usage. All of a sudden we all started staring at these devices for several hours a day. We never leave this thing. The resulting impact on our mental state cannot be overstated.

Yep. Boredom drives in person socialising and creativity. Human contact and the act of creation engender life satisfaction, a long term persistent sense of well-being that is far better for you than short term spikes of happiness, and the antithesis of depression. We are never bored with a phone in our pocket.

This isn’t true. I’m reminded of this interview with some women who lived through Victorian era England (before any phones existed)[0]. Towards the middle of the interview she talks about the mud in the streets and how they spent hours brushing mud off their dresses. She even makes a quip and says, “of course now those hours are spent looking at the television”. If the interview happened today, I’m sure she would have said cell phone instead of television.

I think many of us romanticize the past.

[0]: https://www.upworthy.com/amp/unearthed-bbc-interview-feature...

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

#780

Post by carl_sandland »

arkey wrote: post #340
carl_sandland wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

partly ;) I do seriously wonder if our brains are just overloaded, the rest was various conspiracies I come across (what gave it away, the communists?)

I do believe our brains are overloaded. After removing "woke" and "communist" as specific agents, would you still really mean all that as just a joke? You don't think there's at least a bit of it that's pretty close to the truth?

I don't think the problems are intentional, rather they are the unforeseen outcomes of rapid technological and societal evolution, of man leaving faith behind and discovering themselves insufficient. This only seems to be accelerating.
Post reply on HN