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Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

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Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#301

Post by saiya-jin »

maeln wrote: post #258
moonchrome wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think teenagers are thinking about pensions... If they are they are probably already having mental issues because that's not something someone pre 20s should be concerned about. People in this thread need to stop projecting their problems and worldviews as universal social issues.

Idk but in France, when I was still a teenager, it was not that uncommon to talk/joke about the fact that we will never be able to retire. In high school, most of my classmate already started to have a political conscience and where thinking about this kind of stuff. Same with the environment. We already had social media at the time (mostly facebook) and yes, I won't deny that there was already something anxious abou…

I can subscribe to the last sentence more than the rest.

French are generally very interested in politics from youngish age, for better or worse (the amount of outright communism supporters there among young anywhere I spoke to is disheartening, especially for somebody like me who went through proper communism and saw first hand how it always fucks up individuals and nations for generations, and consistently fails to deliver on every single promise that looks nice on paper). I attribute this to their naivety, seeing wrong in the world and instinctively going for some direct quick solution, despite proofs that it never worked that way and side effects were nasty.

French and some other southern states have really rich social support, even in decades it will be above-average for western world. So french complaining about it going south need to travel the world a bit and get a reality check.

There is too much information readily available, and humans for some reason tend to focus much more on negative part, as do media. So if already pre-teens are watching gruesome combat footage, hardcore porn, reading about depressing future prospects re climate and environment, demographic curves, terrorism and so on and on... its hard even on grown ups, and not even kids that should be carelessly running outside without a worry in their head. It can be just few in the group/class, but they will easily 'spoil the rest of the basket'.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#302

Post by BlargMcLarg »

ben_w wrote: post #281
nivenkos wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Situation wrt to teen mental health is similar in Europe, but there's a much smaller graduation debt. But Europe has far lower professional salaries than the US. Also economic conditions definitely have a big impact, I could finally buy a small flat after years of renting and it's such a great change to be able to make changes in your own home and buy your own things. My father did that at 23, not 30.

Both for you and the person you are replying to, I would caution that “Europe” isn’t one country like the USA, even just the EU is 27 smaller countries in a trenchcoat — the average may be lower, but bits are higher. University tuition is wildly variable and not directly proportional to income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_payments (Housing costs are also wildly variable, but I don’t know where to get enough…

Almost every Western country shows similar issues, especially given professionals working jobs most prevalent in cities and expected to go to office. It'd be more apt to name the exceptions that confirm the rule.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#303

Post by meerita »

tgv wrote: post #167
paxys wrote: post #68

Social media definitely amplifies it, but consider the economic and social environment that teenagers have lived through their entire lives. Multiple major recessions, a global pandemic, rising inflation, housing and education getting more expensive by the day, prospect of a mountain of debt right after graduation, climate that will be unlivable in a few decades, political extremism becoming the norm, and massive gov…

> Multiple major recessions One. They lived through one major recession, and here it wasn't really major, and is not something they lived through recently. They were younger than 6 when it started. I've lived through two. The 80s weren't a happy time, and there are no signs that that had such an impact on teen mental health. If it did, it would be proof that the impact of a major recession is temporary. > prospect of…

+1 kids from previous generations lived under much worse conditions. Not only economical ones, but also social (wars, technology, etc.)

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#304

Post by ekianjo »

paxys wrote: post #68

Social media definitely amplifies it, but consider the economic and social environment that teenagers have lived through their entire lives. Multiple major recessions, a global pandemic, rising inflation, housing and education getting more expensive by the day, prospect of a mountain of debt right after graduation, climate that will be unlivable in a few decades, political extremism becoming the norm, and massive gov…

reading this comment kids who lived thru ww2 would have committed suicide by droves. they didnt.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#305

Post by rendall »

htlion wrote: post #280
rendall wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teens are aware that they are going to inherit a pretty terrible world With respect, I truly mean no insult when I say this is a naive and ignorant position. By every measure, the world is generally better than it has ever been. Far better than any decade in the past you could care to name. Despite media doom-and-glooming, there is every reason to expect that teens will inherit an overall materially better world th…

I agree that the quality of life is currently better than it has even been. Though the future is looming because of climate change. Last year, a heat dome destroyed a tow in Canada, yet we are just at the beginning of the consequences. This year, we are seeing intense droughts in India as well as on the west coast. Scientists predicted that it would happen and it does, but this is just the start. We should be all on-…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31270584

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#306

Post by sacrosancty »

i_cannot_hack wrote: post #279
tapanjk wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teens are aware that they are going to inherit a pretty terrible world, and are powerless to do anything about it. I don't mean to come across as snarky, but there is a lot to unpack in this statement. First, you inherit something that your parents or guardians own, and the world is definitely not owned by them. Second, why feel powerless if they are actually going to inherit something? They can always fix it after…

> They can always fix it after they take control. The oil cannot be unburnt. The glaciers cannot be refrozen. The species cannot be made unextinct. At least not in any human lifespan.

That stuff has no effect on the future lives of these teens. It's not as if they were ever going to see those obscure Amazon insects anyway. We don't have dodo's anymore but we're happy.

I'd say they falsely fear that it will cause them great harm. I know a teen who was genuinely afraid of climate change as if she would drown in the rising sea or something like that. I think there's a lot of exaggerated apocalyptic fearmongering harming them.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#307

Post by xiphias2 »

nicoco wrote: post #221
jay_kyburz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand such strict screen time limits. As adults everything will be on a screen. Might as well start getting good at it. My kids are I will even let them back on the computer in the evening after dinner if they want to do programming or level editing in Roblox, or make music in garage band, or something else creative.

I agree with you on something: too many discussions mention 'screen time' as if anything done on a screen was perfectly equivalent. I really feel that playing a videogame/coding/doomscrolling/watching ads/reading/... are all very different activities with different consequences.

There’s a huge difference between video games as well. I wanted to show my nieces what I was playing as a kid, so I bought them aladdin and lion king pack on a Nintendo Switch that I bought for them, but they just want to play Mario Kart, which I think is boring, as it contains so many random elements, that they don’t really have to put in the effort to go through the levels.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#308

Post by burntoutfire »

somenameforme wrote: post #214
paxys wrote: post #68

Social media definitely amplifies it, but consider the economic and social environment that teenagers have lived through their entire lives. Multiple major recessions, a global pandemic, rising inflation, housing and education getting more expensive by the day, prospect of a mountain of debt right after graduation, climate that will be unlivable in a few decades, political extremism becoming the norm, and massive gov…

Consider the early 20th century. Some ostensibly irrelevant political figure was assassinated which rapidly spiraled into the "war to end all wars" in which about 20 million people were killed, in a world population of 1.7 billion - so more than 1% of people. In relatively short order this led to the Great Depression in which over 10 years the global economy collapsed leading to mass suicide, starvation, and disorder…

> The point of this is not just to emphasize that the past was unimaginably and exponentially worse than the present in every imaginable way, but rather that there was no widespread mental health collapse.

I think there might have been, it just took different forms. For one thing, alcoholism and wife abuse (beating) was absolutely rampant in those times. These are not signs of mentally healthy individuals...

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#309

Post by xiphias2 »

erddfre3423 wrote: post #219

Social media is bad. What is even worse is that smartphones allow people to use it anywhere, whenever they feel bored. The impact isn't massive just on mental health, but also on general productivity and people's social lives. It's just way too addicting. I work in tech and constantly feel like moving into a forest without internet connection for these reasons.

Good luck for getting all documentation that you need offline. I was trying to work from hotels with crappy internet, but at this point it’s just impossible. No software creator cares about offline experience anymore.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#310

Post by Mordisquitos »

odessacubbage wrote: post #255
tristor wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This number is skewed heavily towards women too All of the data I've seen on the mental health crisis in the West seems to indicate that it hits women harder than men. I have yet to see an explanation for why, though. Does anyone know of any articles that thoroughly cover this gender split in mental health and why this particular issue is more predominantly affecting women?

could it be that women are more likely to seek treatment for mental illness? also to the degree that mental illnesses are gender variant, some are more pro social and less subject to stigma than others.

I have some recent anecdata on the topic. When browsing Google Maps reviews to compare psychotherapists in my area, the overwhelming majority of the reviews are from women.
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