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The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

afterbabel.com

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Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By most of every possible measure, the world was far more messed up in the past. You speak of things like nuclear war causing anxiety, yet 70 years ago kids would regularly have nuclear attack drills (akin to our fire drills) while watching videos about how to respond to nuclear attacks, and people building nuclear shelters may have been eccentric, but nothing beyond that. Go further back and we get WW2, WW1, Great D…

>70 years ago kids would regularly have nuclear attack drills (akin to our fire drills) Yes, but the economy was doing better. >Go further back and we get WW2 Before the war, most people were not expecting an apocalypse-level event that it was, and there were no nukes. >These are all events that make any of our big-event concerns today look trivial. You either underestimate today's threats and concerns, aren't affect…

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Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#552

The DSM-5 was published in 2013, redefining the 'mental health' diagnosis landscape substantially. You will see in some pf the graphs arpid onset of the climb in 2023. Could changes in diagnosis and treatment be a factor in this?

I’d be surprised if this wasn’t at least a part of the effect. I wasn’t diagnosed with anxiety until three years ago. I don’t think I suddenly developed it in my 30s - it just wasn’t caught by any medical professionals back in the day.

This was a good development for me - a minimum dose medication helped improve my quality of life a ton

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#553
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I first blame firstly parenting. People give their child an iPad and walk away. were parents any better 50 years ago? There were no ipads but fathers were much less involved in child rearing. Also - beating up kids was routine. > I second blame introductions to education as a toddler. When you are a toddler and inspired to learn you grow and don't stop. Again , what changed since 2008? Why is this worse now?

Better in the sense that you didn’t learn to just passively consume from a screen and learned to be independent. I’m not convinced that parents becoming involved to the extent they are is actually a net positive. Kids don’t learn to be on their own, to think without a computer or their parents, and have every minute of their day mapped out.

> Kids don’t learn to be on their own, to think without a computer or their parents, and have every minute of their day mapped out.

I get what point you're trying to make, but while (especially) the lack of a father seems logically good for independence, overall the increase of absent fathers has had disastrous effects.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#554
post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the inflection point was about here: https://imgur.com/ALMObBv Not that I am blaming porn. I am not. But once the screens and bandwidth became large enough, UI's easy enough to navigate etc AND the devices themselves became quite commonplace, the always online mentality became one used much less for essential communication and business and transitioned more to a cultural way of life (porn is just an easy…

Infinite scrolling was also present in desktop. I blame the pivot from the chronological feeds to algorithmically generated feeds based on engagement (or whatever other metric).

agreed, chronological feeds have a visible signal to users telling them how far they've scrolled. If you're seeing posts from Feb of the past year, you've been scrolling too long.

Ad-based social apps (all of them) replaced that with algorithmic, so you have no real signifier of how long you've spent scrolling.

Tiktok takes this one step further by stripping the date from the videos.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids used to be more adult before technology was around. I think it’s the opposite parents are coddling their kids plus you have this new lib stuff like safe spaces and the whole concept of “feeling unsafe”. We have an entire generation of babies who can’t handle conflict including internal conflict. So what can they do? Kill themselves or other people as we see them do

Why put "feeling unsafe" in scare quotes? There's a lot to feel unsafe about right now.

We live in the safest time in human history by a margin so wide it's remarkable.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#556
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the same type voltage gated calcium ion channel is also affected by electromagnetic fields? This is the kind of broad brush statement that makes people face-palm. A "voltage gated" anything is necessarily affected by electromagnetic fields, because that's what those words mean… …but the character of that effect depends almost entirely on the specifics. Specifically, your brain cells do things at about 100-1000…

> This is the kind of broad brush statement that makes people face-palm. A "voltage gated" anything is necessarily affected by electromagnetic fields, because that's what those words mean… It’s not a broadbrush statement, it’s a very specific statement. It’s a statement that this is how EMFs can affect our neurology and our biology. I don’t understand you’re complained about this at all. > Specifically, your brain ce…

> It’s not a broadbrush statement, it’s a very specific statement. It’s a statement that this is how EMFs can affect our neurology and our biology. I don’t understand you’re complained about this at all.

That fact you think your statement isn't broadbrush suggests you don't understand the rest of my previous comment.

All interactions in your daily life are either the electromagnetic field, or gravity. Even though some of the radiation you're constantly experiencing is coming from the weak nuclear force, the radiation that does your chemistry any harm is the bit that interacts via electromagnetic fields.

It's EM fields that make lighting bolts work. It's EM fields that travel along your nerves. It's EM fields that stop you from falling through the floor, that keep the floor intact, and stop the Earth from collapsing into a black hole. It's EM fields that give you sunburn and vitamin D.

Saying "EM fields affects us" is as true as saying "chemicals affect us": Yes, light is an EM field, water is a chemical. You don't get to remove these things from our environment, they are our environment.

That is why it's such a ridiculously broad brush. Without specifying power level, duration, and frequency, one can get literally any result from no impact to you exploding (which would happen not only from too much, but also if one were to suppress every EM field in your body).

> Why are you assuming there has to be some residence between the EMFs and the speed of the fire neurons for the voltage gated ion channels to be triggered or disrupted? This makes no sense.

Because basically all electrical interactions depend on frequency. If I have a circuit with a capacitor in it, that acts as a high-pass filter; if I have one with an inductor in it, that acts as a low-pass filter. Almost everything acts a bit like both a capacitor and an inductor, including our bodies.

And the fact you think that makes no sense, suggests you don't know the absolute basics of electronics, because I managed to pick that up from 101 courses.

Likewise, basically all chemicals in your body have different responses depending on which wavelengths of EM field they're exposed to. Your brain is wired to respond strongly to extremely low frequencies.

> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6513191/

You should have led with that.

But…

…that quote was on the section about genotoxic effects, which have almost nothing in common with anything from the section of calcium channels, judging by the citations used.

A different quote from the same link:

> Thus, the vague fear for the many unknown effects of RF-EMF exposure is expressed as ungrounded negative effects not only to the scientific community but also to the general public. In addition to this, scientific data published by various researchers have been contradictory in their outcome.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#557
post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past we could stay online for long hours doing some few activities (chatting, playing games, browsing few sites). These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference.

>These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference. reading all of these 'royal we' anecdotes makes me feel grateful that I can survive without a mobile quite fine. HN is as close to social media as I get -- so I guess i'm stuck wondering : are all these 'conditions' of the modern world inexorably linked and self-perp…

I don't use social media, but I have Whatsapp groups for organizing, and its useful if I want to read something I don't have immediately on hand on the go, or if I want to take a picture, or take a call, or check the map if I want to go somewhere or if I get lost. I can look up recipes or set timers while cooking, use it as an alarm clock, stopwatch. Plus the one, billion, quadrillion apps; though, they were a lot cooler back when smartphones first came out, and, as I said, I usually don't use any apps besides email and the browser and maybe also a music streaming app.

I think those are the main things I use my phone for, and getting rid of it would be very inconvenient at this point, especially since I have an iPhone anyway so I can shut off all push notifications and all tracking software and what have you. It's not 100% secure, but what can you do. Though, to be honest, I think this will be my last smartphone, I won't get another one after it breaks. I was in my local library the other day, just checking it out, and there happened to be a travel guide for a city I'm visiting soon. My god, that thing was way better than any info I've found online, and it was quite pleasant to sit down and read a book for a few hours, instead of frantically browsing through one million websites to find out what was cool, interesting, and legit, and what was a tourist trap. Its a shithole, the internet, its just a means for large-scale fraud, theft, and surveillance. But there are still a few good things left, and that redeems it somewhat.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#558
post #91

Not just social media, but always online mentality. Spending all your time online gives you a skewed perception of the world and I believe being online always is a major negative. Spending time outside is good for you. Socializing with real people in front of you is good also. Not sure if we can ever go back to that without some major catastrophe.

So quick to blame social media, even the article just waves it's hand and makes the assumption. Why not declining social mobility? Why not climate change anxiety? Why not late stage capitalism? Nah, it's always easy to blame Tik Tok as if the chosen release isn't indicative of something much greater going on.

> Why not late stage capitalism?

What is social media if not an aspect of late stage capitalism? Unlike a normal customer business relationship social media companies don't give the slightest shit about your well-being or satisfaction. Indeed, you're not the customer at all.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#559
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly think a drinking age below the driving age is appropriate. Either by increasing driving, or lowering the drinking age.

When I grew up in Germany you were allowed to drink beer and wine at 16. It's hard to drink yourself into the hospital with those and you are still living with your parents. It provided a safe environment to experiment and learn how to deal with alcohol. At 18 you were able to get a driver's license and start drinking stronger drinks. However, you weren't as excited about the novelty of liquor. It's the only policy a…

Hard to drink yourself into the hospital with wine? I know Europeans drink a ton but remarks like this really drive home the point. One bottle of wine is easy to drink and enough to get me vomiting. Two wouldn't be hard and is definitely in alcohol poisoning territory for people who aren't experienced alcoholics.

Anyway, I don't think America should emulate European drinking laws until it can be shown that Europeans drink less than Americans. The average German drinks 13.4 liters of pure alcohol a year, vs 9.8 liters for Americans (still too high): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_c...

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Continued growth is alarming on its own.

Hard disagree. Economic growth is what raises people's standard of living. We're not going to eliminate poverty without continued growth. That doesn't mean it doesn't also cause problems, but those problems are solvable.

But we know that in the medium term, growth is limited to cubic; and in the long term to quadratic. Building a society that depends on a few centuries or millenia of exponential growth is designing for failure when that asymptote is reached, and all the assumptions about future growth are violated.
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