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Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
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Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#12I always wonder when an "epidemic" gets reported if things really have changed or if we just recognize it better. When I grew up, we had a lot of kids (including myself) with problems like depression or not fitting in in other ways. Back then they were just labeled as "slow", "stupid" or "difficult". Nobody thought about mental illness or ways for addressing these issues.
Actually glad you said that. One of my recent shower thoughts that I was sure no one would understand. I distinctly remember growing up, people being "slow" or "different" or "". Gender identity and mental health issues have been around forever, they're just now actually getting brought to the forefront.
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#13I always wonder when an "epidemic" gets reported if things really have changed or if we just recognize it better. When I grew up, we had a lot of kids (including myself) with problems like depression or not fitting in in other ways. Back then they were just labeled as "slow", "stupid" or "difficult". Nobody thought about mental illness or ways for addressing these issues.
Also it used to be the case that beating your own kids was normal. Of course now we got studies about how that screws kids up, but it was ubiquitous in my generation. And now that we can identify that children can be harmed from physical violence, we actually have ways to diagnose that sort of thing in teenagers. I wonder what our baseline trauma is supposed to be!
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#14All this article says is that Haidt's analysis is just correlation, and then cites a single metastudy from 2019, and doesn't go on to explain what Haidt did wrong. This is despite extensive writing from Haidt that deconstructs that specific metastudy.
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#15Here is a simple experiment. Spend the same amount of time on social media as your average teen for a month, and report your mental health before and after assuming you use it less. 'correlation does not imply causation' has become the most overused lazy argument to dismiss so many problems.
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#16Seems more plausible to me that young people are just realizing they will be inheriting the consequences of decades of selfish leadership and they are reasonably worried about the future.
The narrative that social media is the cause and not the obvious looming climate change, war and wealth inequality is frustrating.
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#17I think capitalism is. Social media companies are driven by profit and not by well-being of their users.
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#18Seems more plausible to me that young people are just realizing they will be inheriting the consequences of decades of selfish leadership and they are reasonably worried about the future. The narrative that social media is the cause and not the obvious looming climate change, war and wealth inequality is frustrating.
The world had much bigger and more imminent problems in the past. People didn't dwell on them collectively in the same way.
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#19I always wonder when an "epidemic" gets reported if things really have changed or if we just recognize it better. When I grew up, we had a lot of kids (including myself) with problems like depression or not fitting in in other ways. Back then they were just labeled as "slow", "stupid" or "difficult". Nobody thought about mental illness or ways for addressing these issues.
And it's such a good thing that we're finally paying attention to this stuff and treating it (insert graph of left-handedness over time). But then everyone is out here trying to figure out what must be wrong with the world today when Boomers and Gen X are traumatized as hell and full of undiagnosed mental illness. But they grew up in a culture where unless it was life-debilitating or presented in exactly the stereotypical manner it was ignored and pushed down.
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#20[deleted]