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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]

#641

Post by zeroonetwothree »

dash2 wrote: post #592
treis wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even really correlated. The timing is off. Teen Social Media usage exploded in the early to mid 2000s and all the bad trends started 2010 or later. Plus, it was a seismic event. We went from little social media in 2000 to ubiquity by 2010. We should have seen one big rise to a new steady state not a continually increasing problem.

The graph here shows social media exploding from 2008, not before. https://www.worldline.technology/post/over-2-5-billion-peopl...

This is showing all users worldwide. Surely US teens were ahead of the curve.

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

#642

Post by Evan_Hellmuth »

Smartphones are to blame. The ubiquity of easy distraction causes these problems, not any one distraction in particular.

If kids (and adults) only had phone/tablet access for an hour a day this problem would cease to exist. But for some reason that has become unthinkable

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

#643

Post by ClumsyPilot »

antisinguIarity wrote: post #606
adrianN wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying a smartphone every year or two absolutely pales in comparison with having to rent a poorly insulated flat that is heated with oil in a city that forces you to own a car to get to work in a country that mostly burns coal and gas for electricity. Individual choices can only save a small part of your emissions. Blaming individuals for problems that need state policy is an effective tool of fossil fuel interest gr…

Ah so I'm a shill for the fossil fuel industry, because I believe in the power of individual choices? Fantastic. FWIW I had made no mention of emissions - I was talking purely about destruction of the ecosystem (which was the phrase used in the parent comment). I believe that (in some cases, deliberately) ignoring those impacts of our consumer habits makes us in the West the greatest force for planetary destruction.…

"because I believe in the power of individual choices? " "The embodied energy of a person's collection of tech absolutely does sit in the same ballpark as heating and transportation energy costs."

You believe in silly ideas like this because you never bothered tp grab a calculator. If you did, you would know that embodied energy of all you electronics in a couple 1000 megajoules. Thats the same as two tanks of petrol, and all you life choices add up to nothing.

We've been at this 'individual responsebility' crap for 50 years. They've got you right where they want tou.

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

#644

Post by spamizbad »

indymike wrote: post #481

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 th…

The sort of environment you're describing only applies to a certain socio-economic strata of the United States; specifically upper and upper-middle class suburban America. Most children do not have that experience.

I'm sure depression is more acute in that population but even poor teens are growing up with social media.

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

#645

Post by zeroonetwothree »

treis wrote: post #536
WithinReason wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article points out correlation, which would be also explained by GP's comment

It's not even really correlated. The timing is off. Teen Social Media usage exploded in the early to mid 2000s and all the bad trends started 2010 or later. Plus, it was a seismic event. We went from little social media in 2000 to ubiquity by 2010. We should have seen one big rise to a new steady state not a continually increasing problem.

Exactly. By 2018 around 95% of teens used social media. We would thus expect the trends to have spiked more before then rather than after. Instead we see a linear trend.

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

#646

Post by theclansman »

mnsc wrote: post #561
seydor wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes that s a good example. "being proud to be black" is diverse, being proud to be white is not. There is definitely a level of doublespeak here, although i'm not sure if teens are really annoyed by it

When someone expresses black pride my interpretation is that they are reclaiming, trying to manifest and celebrate that they no longer live in times where being born black meant that you were a second hand citizen and that you should/could feel no pride. When someone express white pride I can't interpret it the same way because there hasn't been a time where the structures were so that being born white made you infer…

How does that apply to 13 years old kids?

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

#647

Post by Karawebnetwork »

indymike wrote: post #481

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 th…

> Unpopular opinion: Social media is a great scapegoat, but it is not the source of the problem.

It's the War On Drugs all over again.

We understand addiction enough to be able to say that a person's mental, emotional, and psychosocial states are the greatest causes of addiction and not the drug itself.

Social media leads to an increase in a cortisol and dopamine. It also increased oxytocin by a large margin. Behaviors linked to its use are similar to that of other substances that increase those hormones directly.

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

#648

Post by ryan93 »

mattacular wrote: post #635
gilbetron wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example from my son, a 13 year old white kid, gave me is that if you have one of the "diversity cards" (minority, LGBQT+, female sometimes, or some other thing) than you get to joke and talk in a way than those that don't have such a card. So his friends that are gay or black or indian or disabled are able to tease each other about it and have more liberty to use terms that my son is not allowed to. The gay kid…

Your white son is at the bottom of the pack because he can't openly tell bigoted jokes about his peers?

He is saying that the gay kid can make bigoted jokes about arabs to an extent.

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

#649

Post by carlgreene »

Teens are being told the world is terrible by pessimists when there truly hasn’t been a better time to be alive. How do you expect them to feel? This is amplified on social media and shown with "proof" from all corners of the world.

We've evolved from a place where hearing about bad news from the tribe was an advantage. It allowed us to adjust our life to take into account risks _seen_ by other folks in the tribe. On a world scale that is broken, but our brains haven't adjust yet. If you're in the US is little value in knowing there was a shark attack in New Zealand, or a mass shooting in London.

The world is amazing and beautiful. Of course there are atrocities, there always are, but the developed world is living a pretty amazing life. Even the poor relatively speaking.

If someone is living a sad, scared life and projects that on to the youth then that person is the problem (again, social media makes this incredibly easy). Kids are unbelievably impressionable and impressing them with your knowledge about random atrocities in the world does no good for their psyche.

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

#650

Post by spywaregorilla »

I was pretty depressed in high school, but simultaneously was aware it was likely to be a transient thing. I was athletic, smart, and reasonably popular. But I had virtually no autonomy and therefore no real social life outside of school. Which, again, was honestly pretty great.

I don't know how common my situation was but I imagine it was fairly typical. And most kids probably felt the burden of greater competition

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