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Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
31–40 of 118 posts
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world had much bigger and more imminent problems in the past. People didn't dwell on them collectively in the same way.
I don't mean to be glib, but you are in denial. Nuclear war is more likely now than since the early cold war, China is ready to invade Taiwan, climate change is poised to weaken or complete disrupt the Gulf Stream, America is months away from electing an insurrectionist as president, buying a house is a pipe dream for most Americans... How could you see that as a young person and not feel at least a little hopeless?
We are talking about data that spans over a decade, not a year.
Look at figure 1: https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2022/05/31/...
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#33The coupling of social media and smartphones has made parental negligence, laziness, emotional distress, and plain stupidity a hundred times more harmful. That's the gist of it.
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#34Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#35Absolutely coupled with excessive cell phone use, seed oils, and mineral / vitamin deficient vegetables.
The pandemic did nothing to help this.
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#36Don't know about teenagers, but quite a few people close to me, 50 to 60 yrs old have have gone more than a little mad due to social media. Paranoia, conspiracy, and chronic anxiety. They were all quite sane 10 years ago.
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#37The problem with social media is it is a paralysis engine. It drives the most seemingly credible, brain-wormy and engagement-driving discourse to the top, promoting the most violent, exclusionary and aggressively undertoned rallying cries of trending angst-fueled ideologies. As a consequence, whatever your opinion, identity, or circumstances, you will surely encounter the echo chambers of people who want you dead or removed from society: calculated, memetically selected hatred that sows fear, uncertainty, and doubt in anything more that complete surrender and inaction.
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#38[flagged]
since when is gender dysphoria a made-up mental disorder?
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#39Yes.
Re: Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
#40I 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 stereoty…
Conversely, were over-diagnosing and now everyone is ill.
Which necessarily follows because the closer you look the fewer people are "normal". In fact I'd go so far as to posit that everyone is aberrant, to nobody's surprise.
And of course this is all derivated from a basis of largely qualitative soft-science which had ought be treated as an art than it is a science, however there are pressures which force both practitioners and researchers to justify it as a science.
I'm sure there's some "law of self-awareness" as well. The closest analogy I have is the January Effect which describes an even in the market, a pattern of sell-off in the later year to mark a loss, and subsequent repurchase in January. Upon this pattern being disclosed, the market adapted strategies to exploit it which ultimately resulted in a complete silencing of the effect. In a sense more applicable to this, being diagnosed with some mental illness can also be leveraged to gain favor, I mean I can get a prescription for pharmaceutical grade amphetamines for fidgeting for instance; or excuse my bad behavior with some other diagnosis.
My position is that it's all very unclear. I'm lazy and don't care to dig it up but there was a study from the UK that observed the measurable effects from school based, non-individual interventions and it found their effects to be significantly detrimental for some students - to the extent that they negated the aggregate benefits - which I think supports this position because treatment can exacerbate things. And that's without mentioning pharmacological interventions which are... Interesting.