101–110 of 664 posts
Recasting this as "Social media is bad for mental health" would be more truthful. But it would not villainize just one new social media platform at a time when legacy platforms struggle with growth.
My preferred outcome would be if the companies involved performed mutual annihilation by making social media as a whole look as bad as possible.
However, there is another huge offender in the psychiatry misinformation space: Reddit.
The amount of incorrect, oversimplified, and downright weird psychiatry and psychology information they pick up from Reddit is astounding. The most common self-diagnosis is ADHD. Do some of them actually have ADHD? Sure, statistically speaking some of them will actually have ADHD. However, there’s something about Reddit’s hive mind that has convinced these people that the bar for ADHD is very low, such that they see everything as ADHD. It’s so bad that entire cohorts will come through and convince each other that they all have self-diagnosed ADHD, despite most of them functioning just fine in their personal, academic, and work lives.
They say things like “My brain doesn’t produce dopamine” (ADHD has dopaminergic involvement but it is not a disorder of decreased dopamine production, thats Parkinson’s) and other such statements that would be easily disproven with even cursory research on the topic. This is one of the most confusing aspects to me, as these are the same people who will spend hours researching the intricate details about front-end frameworks or other topics. There’s something about Reddit psychiatry that short-circuits past their normal logic and leads to blind acceptance.
I suspect the root problem is that they’re not actually going to Reddit for psychiatry advice or self-diagnosing with the goal of learning how to work with a mental health condition. It seems to be more about identity and adopting an explanation that makes them different and unique. ADHD has become especially attractive as a self-diagnosis because it’s trendy right now and it gives people a sense that their accomplishments are that much greater due to starting from a disadvantaged point.
Meanwhile, I have worked privately with several mentees who admit struggles with doctor-diagnosed ADHD and they behave completely differently. They usually don’t want to public announce their condition and go to lengths to avoid letting it be obvious to their peers or employers. The trivialization of genuine ADHD is massively frustrating to these people.
For all of human history across every culture, parents would do what they could to keep their kids away from “bad influences”. You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers. With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to unt…
As an aside, a TikTok employee told me TikTok is known to trigger old maladies like anorexia etc. I was told this after mentioning that trying TikTok gave me my first nicotine cravings in several years.
For all of human history across every culture, parents would do what they could to keep their kids away from “bad influences”. You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers. With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to unt…
> You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers. This is also a good recipe to plant prejudice. I'm glad parents no longer have such a strong influence.
TikTok knows this and they thrive in knowingly damaging the mental health of their users of this addiction.
The best way I can describe my use of TikTok is, it makes me happy. There are fun people doing fun things, and it makes me happy to watch. Even if I'm older than most of them.
Whenever I go on the platforms I mention in my first paragraph I instead get insulted, provoced, accused, questioned, and depressed.
I'm sure there's some bad stuff happening on TikTok, but on the whole it's a happy, friendly place. That simply cannot be said about the others.
As usual, the real "problem" with TikTok is that it's not owned and controlled by a western tech giant. That's why it gets attacked in western media.
Perhaps not so rare then?
These contagious social phenomena seem to arise most in young adults, especially women, who are heavy users of social media.
Tangentially related. I think capitalism increases self-reported rates of mental illness because individuals who are not achieving the highest goals they set for themselves are looking for an easy excuse as to why they can't achieve them. I think levels of anxiety are also on the rise, which causes many symptoms which are similar to more severe mental illnesses. Which also reinforces my first point.
Other than becoming a social media influencer, what goals are young people actually striving towards? I'm not sure what you're seeing, but I'm not seeing hordes of young people crying because they're trying to become a medical researcher or engineer or achieve some other tangible goal and can't make it for some reason.