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Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

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Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#741

Post by verisimi »

fireflash38 wrote: post #599
verisimi wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are broken. Perhaps they always were. Perhaps this latest, is the cost of prioritising work over family - it is now common to have both parents working, with child care outsourced to professionals, that may do everything right, but will not love the child. Love is underrated, intangible. I suspect there are very few whole individuals out there at all. Once the child grows, why would it look to family to help?…

Why do you think that childcare is incompatible with familial love and care?

Well, do you think a teacher can love a class of 20 or 30 kids, like a parent can? I think they might do a professional job, but it would be impossible to give individual attention. And, around here (UK), teachers have a lot of non class time obligations with the result being that they are away and a lot of care is passed to teaching assistants.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#742

Post by 10xDev »

tokai wrote: post #423
Buttons840 wrote: post #149

The charts in this article are deceptive and cause me to not trust the author. Look at long term teen suicide rates and you will see that suicide rates were quite high around 1990, and then rates dropped until about 2005, and are now on the rise again but have not yet reached 1990 levels (I think). So, the author of this piece wants to make it look like suicides and self harm are on the rise because of social media ,…

This. If you go even further back like 1890-1920s today numbers are also looking very good. This whole mental health pandemic is over blown. People had it even worse just recently - and they didn't get much help outside of drinking.

So our bar of what is considered acceptable is now anything above the levels it was during a period that include the first world war and the 19th century?

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#743

Post by ransom1538 »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #491
skilled wrote: post #337

I'm no saint when it comes to addiction and being on my phone for more than I should be, but I have a sister who is in her mid 20s right now, and for the last couple of years she has slowly isolated herself from life and her family, she spends most of her time in her room on the phone and does weird things like get cosmetic surgeries, ordering cosmetics, etc. It's bizarre. She does this and all the while never leaves…

My brother is essentially the male version of this, just swap the cosmetics for video game DLCs. He's early 20's, no job, no interest in work, no interest in getting out of the house, no interest on anything... talking to him is the most frustrating experience ever, nothing comes out of him, no emotion... I talked so many times, tried to get an idea of what might drive him: travelling, learning, walking around in the…

Can you be a human being and cut him off? Who is this sick person enabling this? Who is passing out the money? This is no different than buying heroin for someone. Say hey, "No money, get job, bye". Let them begin the human experience. The video games will go away fast. Show humanity, cut them off.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#744

Post by boomlinde »

imgabe wrote: post #118
miki123211 wrote: post #95

This author is seriously suggesting that governments ban children's use of social media, and that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity. Any policy that actually achieved this, without being trivial to circumvent, would basically need to replicate the great firewall of China. Doing this in a half-assed way is even worse than not doing anything at all. If you just require ID checks for…

There are two avenues to deal with a hazard. You can try to manipulate the environment to eliminate the hazard, or you can try to strengthen people to make them immune to the hazard. I think we should prefer the latter over the former whenever possible. For one thing, it's more robust. The environment is messy and control is often illusory at best. Control limits freedoms and introduces centralized points of failure…

If the hazard is just me skulking about and punching you in the back of your head every time you let your guard down, you could strengthen yourself and make yourself immune by never going outside and always keeping your door locked and barring up your windows.

How is that inherently preferable to the addressing the harm itself? By what principle do you conclude that we should prefer one over the other whenever possible?

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#745

Post by genrilz »

giarc wrote: post #725
genrilz wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I at least skimmed all of the meta-analyses that both of them cited. It seems like social media has both positive and negative effects on people, and these average out to fairly near zero. From this, I can make a hypothesis about why you are seeing what you are seeing: Assuming you are in a society which values hard work, (like the US) then the people around you probably think of social media based screen-time as bei…

"social media has both positive and negative effects on people, and these average out to fairly near zero" Is that the right way to think about it though? Opiates have many positives (medical pain management) and many negatives (drug misuse and overdoses). Do we simply say "the effects average out so there's not a problem"?

I do think it is worth considering how social media effects people at a more granular level. For instance, I think the focus on "engagement" probably makes the negative effects worse, and we would see less negative effects if social media companies weren't optimizing for that.

However, my understanding is that Haidt wants to completely kick kids off of social media. This is a bit different from how we engage with opioids, which are still used for pain management. Opioids only really have positive effects for pain management, and so I think that it is reasonable to keep them regulated. (although I've heard grumbling from doctors about how them trying to be careful about who they give opioids too leaves a lot of people in severe pain) On the other hand, social media's positive effects are things like staying in touch with old friends, building community with people like you when people around you hate you, and learning new skills. I don't think that restricting or eliminating social media use will help here. Instead I hope that people take the design of social media more seriously. (for instance, HN or Mastadon)

EDIT: additionally I'd say that the negatives of unregulated opioids do far outweigh the positives, which is not the case for social media.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#746

Post by pksebben »

I'm all about most of this. I disconnected from facestagramitter a while ago, and it was the best thing I've ever done for myself bar none. Got a change of career out of it and a vast improvement in my personal life.

But...

> Did life in America suddenly get that much worse during President Obama’s second term, as the economy was steadily improving?

Yes. Yes it did. The bank bailout was one of the worst things to come out of the oval office in my lifetime - a significant portion of the middle class just dried up and financial security for everyone but the wealthiest was all of a sudden a pipe dream. "The economy was steadily improving" is an incredibly ignorant and narrow take. The numbers for GDP looked good, but that doesn't account for distribution.

Social media in the form it has now is toxic. But it's not outlandish to think that a whole generation watching their parents lose homes and having what meager inheritance they might have relied on evaporate would be a little depressed about it.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#747

Post by bcrosby95 »

BadHumans wrote: post #623
runamuck wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a good rule. I NEVER reply to someone who comments on my comment w/ hostile intent. For example: I made an innocent comment on a YouTube video, and someone completely misread the comment and posted a hostile reply. I wanted to explain to him that he misread my comment but I just let it go. You never need to defend yourself. If you want to post a comment, post it. If someone misunderstands or mocks you, let the…

> If someone misunderstands or mocks you, let them. Very easy to say when you aren't going viral and 100,000+ people aren't trying to get you fired or hurling insults at you ranging from calling you an idiot to telling you to die. I'm not saying you're wrong but it's much easier said than done.

This is why I run multiple online identities. I learned back in the '90s when I got death threats because of my MUD character (a text based multiplayer rpg). I knew people who had their power pulled in real life by rival guilds so they could kill them when they disconnected.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#748

Post by canadianfella »

gwervc wrote: post #703
amplex1337 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You certainly can just throw things out there, but if you are obsessed with making every single person satisfied with your thoughts, you are going to have a bad time. The world is full of people who disagree with you, but you need to learn more than ever to recognize and filter out what you don't care about. I don't even view replies to posts any longer, 98% of the time because I am not seeking validation sharing my…

> You certainly can just throw things out there On 4chan sure, on Reddit absolutely hecking no. On the main subs in French wrongthink comments get deleted super fast, and on one English-speaking about a hobby it's an immediate ban.

[dead]

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#749

Post by oblio »

logicchains wrote: post #159
oblio wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The brain has some flaws that are very hard to overcome. Addictions are some of them. There's a reason almost every country in the world regulates and restricts gambling.

>The brain has some flaws that are very hard to overcome. Addictions are some of them. The majority of people don't feel victim to addiction, it's a minority of people who are prone to it. Everyone shouldn't have their freedoms restricted just to cater to the more weak-minded.

You don't really seem to understand how the legal system works, don't you?

Laws are there to protect powerful people (in many cases), to protect the majority (hopefully most cases) and to protect the vulnerable, sometimes from themselves (in a decent number of cases).

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#750

Post by klondike_klive »

quest88 wrote: post #625
VA0 wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media is designed to make money, whether that be from selling data or conglomerating it and advertising to you. They want the user to be purely a consumer. They are designed to make people reactive and have a short attention span, they are easier to sell to.the users mental reward system is essentially brainwashed to be an easier target to sell to.

I think that's part of it but not all of it. Even here on HN, with no ads, you can find hostility in the comments.

Up yours!

(Sorry)

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