Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf] • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by honkdaddy » Thu, May 05, 2022, 11:18 AM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #63

germinalphrase wrote: post #22

My entirely anecdotal impression as a high school teacher is that media (in general, often but not always “social” media) is doing an exceptional job of sucking up teenagers’ every waking moment that is not actively demanded to be focused on something else. It’s pleasure without joy. Ennui without boredom. Their social skills (and social interest) appear markedly reduced even compared to even five years ago. So many…

I'm curious: how do the "weird ones" do? The outsiders, contrarians, the ones who don't quite fit in and who might even take pleasure in not caring about social media?

Social media isn't just popular kids posting photos on Instagram anymore; it encompasses the entire spectrum of young people now. In my experience with my younger sisters' friends (17-22), the ones that don't fit in with the normal, popular crowd, just bury themselves in a different type of social media.

Twitter and TikTok are still pretty big for the "weird girls". Witch culture, far-left politics, nerdy fandoms, and outsider music all have pretty big communities online, a lot of which are made up of teenage girls or queer-adjacent kids.

The "weird boys" mostly end up on reddit and Discord, as expected. I remember spending time with their group at one point and asking one of the kids what he was doing on his phone all night, he said he was arguing with another reddit mod on Discord about rules for their new sub. This was at a campfire.

The comic book store or DIY concert hall don't exist as watering holes for nerdy Gen-Z. I think there's something profoundly sad about that.

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

#462

Post by Jcowell » Thu, May 05, 2022, 11:20 AM UTC

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #344

jackblemming wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, please don’t trivialize how the pandemic impacted youth because your family was fine. Especially because many of their parents (if they’re fortunate enough to have both) probably lost their jobs.

Not op, but I don't think op is trivializing how pandemic impacted youth, I think he's saying that youngster are more resilient than we think they are and we project ours fears on them. And than we trivialize how dangerous it is for their well being being bombarded by stories of personal success over nothing (being a popular tik toker is 99.99% luck) and let them do it anyway, because having to actually talk to them,…

> Not op, but I don't think op is trivializing how pandemic impacted youth, I think he's saying that youngster are more resilient than we think they are and we project ours fears on them.

I would argue that Youngsters are also more vulnerable, raw and new to the cruelties and realities of the world as they slowly get older. The only difference I see is that they become a mental bomb of mental health issues on a wide range of a spectrum.

I do not believe a kid who sees their family lose everything during a recession comes out 100% okay. Especially when you factor in how the recession affects the metal health of parents and in turn children if the parents do no deal with it in a Healthy way.

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

#463

Post by thenerdhead » Thu, May 05, 2022, 11:21 AM UTC

I don’t think this is new. I’ve been reading “Four arguments for the elimination of television(1978)” by Jerry Mander and this same phenomenon was also realized with teenagers who watched excess television.

Similar big companies then invested millions in research saying their product or programming does not have an effect on teens, and then the government sees the dire truth to then sponsor an actual study to try and show the general public it’s not “that bad”. But the reality is that we all know it’s that bad and yet we allow it freely into our homes.

An extremely important read if this study alarms you.

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

#464

Post by hnfong » Thu, May 05, 2022, 11:22 AM UTC

moonchrome wrote: post #196

Semaphor wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Situation wrt to teen mental health is similar in Europe, but there's a much smaller graduation debt. We have other issues here, though (speaking for the situation in Germany). I’m quite some time out of my teens at 36, but for many years now I’ve been told that all that tax (technically not a tax) I pay for my pension will not result in me getting any meaningful pension. For people who are currently teenagers it p…

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.

Aside from what other people already mentioned that some teens actually do care, I think you're making a mistake conflating "worrying about the future" (which teens absolutely _should_ do to a reasonable extent), and having mental issues.

It's a rather big jump from being concerned about one's future (and the society's future) to having mental issues just from that. It's also not very constructive to perpetuate the idea that being careless about the future right way to live one's teenage years.

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

#465

Post by chimen » Thu, May 05, 2022, 11:22 AM UTC

Ofc it is plummeting. We are letting them install apps that have people behind them with the sole job of making them more addictive. We are handing them drugs, multiple variants if I may say so. I had to fight with my daughter for TikTok and whatnot, she is only allowed with YouTube due to school/tutorials/classes etc and I still find myself pretty often having to snap her out of shorts and other bs with an algorithm behind it designed to keep you on and ...consuming.

These are modern drugs my friends and we are not doing anything about it. Our kids are being milked of their time, attention, imagination, focus and money. The majority of them can't even cross the streets properly any more. They don't even look if the drivers saw them, they all have a phone in hand.

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

#466

Post by mmarq » Thu, May 05, 2022, 11:22 AM UTC

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #380

mmarq wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about kids who didn’t have a yard where they could play? Those whose parents lost their jobs? Those that have been evicted because their parents could not pay ever increasing rents? Besides, living in an economy that moves from recession to recession has an impact on the mental health of their parents, especially in economies with little or non-existent safety nets (see UK and US), and I’d be very surprised if t…

> What about kids who didn’t have a yard where they could play? > Those whose parents lost their jobs? If you acknowledge that, you should also acknowledge that heir only window to the outside World was a screen where some a*hole from Dubai whose only purpose was selling themselves and the things they were dressing to their "followers" for money, was saying all day that "we're gonna be fine" and then we didn't, "we a…

> What saved him?

> He could only look at himself and his own life, if it somewhat improved he could notice, if it somewhat got worse, he could hope things could change for the better, as they did so many times before.

Yes, but not only that. He also saw that he was better off than his parents and that throughout the years his life improved significantly, while a 30-year-old today is worse off than their parents and, rightly or not, feels that life is getting worse every year.

My salary quadrupled in the last 6 years, I managed to buy a flat and I can afford to pay for my child’s education, but to achieve all of this I have to be way better than my average colleague, way luckier and to work in one of the highest paying industries. All of this to achieve what a brute working in a post office in the 80s would have taken for granted (buy a house, send your kid to school and nursery, save some money, buy a car). This leaves me in a constant state of mild anxiety (what if I stop being good at my job? What if I become sick and I can’t provide for my family? What will be of my child in such a toxic environment?) and the only social network I use is Twitter, where I only follow reputable newspapers (practically I use it as an RSS feed). I understand that my views may be influenced by living in the UK, which is a more anxiogenic society than the rest of Europe.

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

#467

Post by derangedHorse » Thu, May 05, 2022, 11:23 AM UTC

conradev wrote: post #351

bambax wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mmm, what? The things you are listing don't concern "teenagers" in their young teens, at all. They start being a problem for young adults, maybe. The study in question debates young teens, ages 11-13 and 13-15, well before college. In my experience as a parent of young teens, while they're sensitive to climate issues and of course "suffered" [1] during the pandemic, they aren't politicized, don't care about house pri…

I was 12 when I started using Twitter (shh, don’t tell them https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/29/twitter-is-locking-out-th... ) I was 14 when I had to loan my parents some money, and was acutely aware that I would not be able to afford college. I read the news every day and was smart enough to realize that things were not going so great (according to the news). To say that kids are blissfully unaware of the world they…

I think it would be safe to say the majority of kids (at least in America) don’t share that same experience. Also, I’m not saying that to try and discredit your experience, I’m just acknowledging the counterpoint may not generalize well to the majority of teenagers in America.

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

#468

Post by honkdaddy » Thu, May 05, 2022, 11:25 AM UTC

fercircularbuf wrote: post #282

crate_barre wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you differentiate what you are saying versus what people have always said about reading comic books all day, or playing video games all day, watching tv, listening to certain music, spending all your time on the internet, etc? Life is boring as fuck. It really is. It takes a lot to keep a human captivated.

Life is what you make of it. Personally, since I've become an adult, I couldn't tell you the last time I remember experiencing boredom. And I have deliberately disconnected myself as much as I can. My phone is always on silent mode, and I've turned off notifications for every app except text messaging and calling. I deleted my last social media account a few years ago, and I try to the best of my ability to use my co…

>Even if you spent the entire day sitting in front of a blank wall, there are literally endless things you could think about and explore. You could think about the things in your immediate environment, how they work, how they came to be, how you could improve on them. You could run any number of thought experiments like if we made contact with an alien civilization how would we come to understand each other?

I spent 9 days in the hospital a few years ago, mostly unable to move. The boredom was absolutely crippling. I consider myself a fairly scintillating person who enjoys time by himself, but I couldn't go more than a couple hours staring out my window without needing the warm sedation of daytime TV. There are only so many alien civilization thought experiments one can run without needing some external stimuli!

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

#469

Post by Jcowell » Thu, May 05, 2022, 11:26 AM UTC

twayt wrote: post #60

Is it really social media itself that's the major contributing factor? Or is it really that people are using social media as a distribution channel to propagate negative, defeatist beliefs en mass in response to the natural challenges teens face when growing up? I think it is the latter. One has but to open TikTok to quickly come across a video instilling negative beliefs about the opposite sex with tons of commenter…

> I think it is the latter. One has but to open TikTok to quickly come across a video instilling negative beliefs about the opposite sex with tons of commenters asserting the validity of those beliefs. Confirmation bias at scale.

I don’t have a study for this but I don’t believe this. More likely than now you have to be consuming such content to get such content. If you go to TikTok for positive vibes and actively search it out , that’s what you will get.

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

#470

Post by 7952 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 11:26 AM UTC

hilbert42 wrote: post #414

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…

I'm not denying that those issues all contribute to the problem. However, teenagers had a terrible, rotten time during WWII - bombs on cites, constant threat of military service, parents and elder brothers killed in war, one's country being invaded, etc. yet on the whole most never suffered these mental health issues. The difference is striking Somehow, they had stamina and resilience that today's teenagers don't hav…

I think WWII could actually be quite a fun time to be alive for young people on the home front in the UK (and maybe N America). They had much more social freedom, often worked in groups with other young people, and had a sense of purpose, unity and camaraderie. The future was uncertain, but their own role was much clearer. And rationing even meant that people were getting fed properly.

The modern world is brilliant at creating a constant sense of insecurity. That is often artificial but feels real. Your place is society and in the group is always insecure and shifting. Maybe kids are mollycoddled, but you have to wonder why people are driven to do that. Why do the richest most stable countries feels so insecure?