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

Unpopular opinion: Social media is a great scapegoat, but it is not the source of the problem. It is where they go to communicate and cope. My sole qualification to post this: I have four kids that are either teens or in their early 20s, and one who will be a teen next year. Here is what I see out there:

1. Kids have little or no slack in their schedule. This means very little freedom, and very little time to work things out mentally. School, practice, volunteer, homework, bed, do it all again. This builds up to a very difficult to unwind ball of stress, anger, fear and despair.

2. Everything is conflicted and unclear. Schools teach cultural tolerance while enforcing zero-tolerance policies. Diversity is good, but being ____ is bad. So many areas where what we teach and preach are the opposite of what policies and actions actually do.

3. The stakes are too high. View the wrong website on your chromebook and get referred to law enforcement. Have a kid send you the wrong selfie and get charged with a sex crime. Get a bad grade and you are off the volleyball team, and you won't make the team next year - so done forever. Misbehave and you'll be arrested by the resource officer and face time at juvi, and potentially a conviction that will be held against you for a very long time (in some states juvi convictions count against three strikes laws).

3. Kids are targeted. Sexual predators, gangs, fringe and mainstream ideologues looking to recruit followers, sports agents and talent scouts all have one thing in common: they want to exploit kids or sell them something.

It's really hard to be a kid right now, and that needs to change. We need to lower the stakes, the stress and have something that resembles consistency.

My sister, now 27, was diagnosed with psychosis about 10 years ago. Her real social life was plummeting and i couldn’t notice it since i was living away. But apprently she was obsessed with social media, particularly twitter back then. At one point, she came to our parents saying thay “people put cameras at home and they are watching her”. So, she totally lost it. Immediately diagnosed and started using heavy medication. She totally lost touch with real life and human interaction. She still wouldn’t talk for hours if you sit in the same room. Still obsessed with social media. She has 20k followers on instagram (not sure how much of it is real though). And if you look at her instagram profile, it ‘S totaly a different person. Fancy dresses, fancy restaurants, bars etc. but in real life, she’s a total loser with no single friend. Doctor says it’s only medication that can help. I don’t believe it. I believe she has to also get therapy sessions. But my family doesn’t believe it. They are old , too tired to deal with this. Probably they also need therapy. And i do as well. But living abroad, with my wife and little daughter, i can’t really influence these decisions. So all i do is being sad. A teenager’s life was totally ruined because of this. Maybe it’s not entirely social media’s fault but i’m sure it plays a big role. Just a little advice, if you see your kid or sibling being isolated, untidy and spend more and more time on social media, please try to stop it before it gets out of control. Just my 2 cents.

Should health professionals run a campaign to advise parents not to let their teenage children have mobile phones? Severely resticrt internet access to them?

>Jobseeker’s Allowance is one forth of the average rent in London

Tricky issue. I do know that where I live (Wales), there are huge numbers of people living relatively comfortably on a benefit-funded lifestyle.

There's also a whole lot more to the UK safety net than Jobseeker's Allowance.

>If you lose your private insurance you’d have to rely on the NHS

If you don't mind me asking, are you a UK native? That's a fantastic turnaround of the typical sentiment about the NHS, which is that it's a shining example of what the wonders of socialised care can do, and how we can do without the evils of privatised healthcare. FWIW I agree with you - it's actually a stinking dump of a money pit, and an embarrassment to anyone who has experienced any other 1st world health care.

I don't deny any of that either. These matters are complex and I cannot reasonably argue them here without discussing other factors in detail such as changes in life expectancy over the past century, the more fatalistic approach to life pre-war (big families meant survival insurance, pre-penicillin times meant many more [expected] deaths in childhood, harder times financially, etc. etc. The whole social milieu was different.

Let me say just this: when I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s what I said above wasn't quite 'dead' yet as my childhood was pretty much similar to that—and it was often damn hard times back then (moreover, from where I came from it was so for many of the kids my age, I was no exception). Several weeks ago I gave an account of my own childhood on the HN story Old Enough: the Japanese TV show that abandons toddlers on public transport and there's no doubt that by age six I was an independent agent— that is, walking miles to school across busy roads by myself at that age and so on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30951723#30953588. We had to be more resilient just to survive—and we were.

The fact is I'm old enough to have witnessed these changes firsthand. Leaving aside the reasons (which, no doubt, will be argued about for years to come), there is no doubt that mental health issues among the young have increased substantially in recent decades.

Edit: Incidentally, during my teenage years I cannot ever recall any mention of childhood or teenage suicide. No doubt it happened, but even the concept thereof would have been anathema to us kids back then.