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There was something very off before the pandemic. Girls were already diverging sharply from the historical norm and from boys over the last few years: https://

• mprovost 5y ago
  Instagram was founded in 2010.
  • retrac 5y ago
    I fear that it may be as simple as that. Because if that's the cause, I'm not sure we can fix it.
    • prepend 5y ago
      Pi-hole blocking Instagram works pretty well for me, although not perfectly. We can also treat this like smoking and opioids and lawsuit/tax excessively instagram and use it to pay for public mental health services. It seems like there will be a clear evidence trail that Instagram knowingly marketed and permitted use of their app by children under 13. So that’s some future administration/state AG payday, I think.
      • retrac 5y ago
        You are right. I should not be defeatist. If social media is truly ruining our mental health (it's not really an "if" anymore, is it?) then it is both reasonable and necessary to start doing something along those lines.
    • spoonjim 5y ago
      The Clean Air Act provided a legal framework to fix air pollution. We need a similar approach to fix mind pollution. I don’t think this is impossible because Zuckerberg has managed to piss off apparently everyone across the political spectrum. If it was someone like Steve Jobs I would say the problem would be much harder.
      • isthisreality 5y ago
        I see regulation as a last resort. Bigger government is rarely the answer. Social media is certainly exacerbating the mental health crisis, but I believe the smarter play is to better prepare our children for social dynamics, healthy communication, and emotional intelligence. I prefer to improve the people than to restrict their freedoms.
        • spoonjim 5y ago
          I think somewhat “bigger government” is a perfectly appropriate response to vastly bigger corporations. Three years ago there were no companies worth $1 trillion and now there are three companies worth $2 trillion.
    • machinehermiter 5y ago
      This is like people reading research in the 50s that smoking causes lung cancer. Even if true what are we going to do? Everybody smokes so lets just keep smoking instead of trying to quit.
  • ianai 5y ago
    That definitely looks like an impactful year from the graphs there. I think if I had kids I wouldn’t let them on such sites until 16/17 or never. Granted, I have a strong opinion against social media before this data.
    • balfirevic 5y ago
      > or never How does that work?
      • ohazi 5y ago
        Poorly
        • balfirevic 5y ago
          Thank goodness!
    • Dumblydorr 5y ago
      How would you handle it if they begged, pleaded, and explained how all their friends use it and it'd be social ostracism to not use it? I'm not a parent yet but I dread this situation. I'm good at denying urges personally, so I'd tell them desire is a constant part of life, we can't always get what we crave. Further, I'd state actual facts about girls mental health, they will see and be exposed to unhealthy mindsets on this app. Some good that'll do. When I have kids, it'll be "dad, why can't we join the VR orgy party? It's not real sex!"
      • iamstupidsimple 5y ago
        > How would you handle it if they begged, pleaded, and explained how all their friends use it and it'd be social ostracism to not use it? Having been on both sides of this, as a teenager and having saw my siblings go through it, I don't envy you either. But I can talk about my personal experiences. I was very introverted as a kid, and tools like Facebook gave me a bit of social autonomy and confidence, and it absolutely strengthened my in-person relationships. I know others that feel the same. Not being contactable via the internet definitely can cause social ostracism, but a reasonable middle ground for me is something like Discord or WhatsApp, which is semi private and avoids the toxicity of The Feed.
  • voisin 5y ago
    I am not disagreeing but I am interested to know which specific factors make it so different from things in the past. I remember growing up and the boogeyman was sexualized videos on MTV and violent video games. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t quite believe it now. Not to say I don’t believe social media has negative impacts but this is a pretty sharp rise. It also coincided with the post-2009 financial crisis. Could be more financially unstable households. Could be a feeling if being left behind as pressure to excel academically and socially increased due to a desire to get into better schools for some financial security. I don’t know. Just throwing out other hypotheses.
    • MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
      If you really want to see "who" is most affected by this, divide it up by state and income. If we see that most states align with this, we could attribute it to your statement. However, if it's solely based on income, then higher income states will outweigh lower income ones and we'd be able to pinpoint it to affluence and the pressures of innadequacy.
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I am sure there are myriad reasons, and surely the underlying fact of income/wealth/security gap widening plays a role in all of the change we are seeing. But I would posit that it is possible that constant exposure to people in your network's achievements (or appearances thereof) can elicit emotions that have negative consequences over long periods of time. I think tribal species probably have an innate function of trying to sort and rank members for various purposes, and maybe that program can get overloaded.
      • craig131 5y ago
        I think a lot of this might be projection from the HN community. How is this even relevant to schools opening? It seems obvious that forcing kids to wake up at 7:30 to go to a conveniently free and "safe" underfunded facility so both parents can work yet still not make ends meet is the actual culprit. The gender difference is notable, but kids and young girls are very cruel to each other, especially when packed together in close proximity.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • renewiltord 5y ago
    My girlfriend and I broke up that year too. Sharon, if you see this, you need to get back with me. Little girls are dying because of what you did.
    • moneywoes 5y ago
      Haha
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Synaesthesia 5y ago
    Yeah but it was quite diferent back then, a lot more niche and photographer-y. Its a totally different network today.
  • maininformer 5y ago
    Jonathan Haidt is if the same opinion
  • _Understated_ 5y ago
    > Instagram was founded in 2010. You may not be far from the truth: last year I watched a talk given by Jonathan Haidt (sp?) and he specifically showed the suicide numbers increasing when the "Like" button appeared... the increase was not an anomaly, it was obvious. I can't find the video unfortunately :(
    • pepperonipizza 5y ago
      https://youtu.be/CI6rX96oYnY https://youtu.be/CI6rX96oYnY He talked about it here on the Joe Rogan Podcast
    • xook 5y ago
      While this may not be the exact video, would this[0] be a worthy substitute? I'm not in a position to view it in its entirety at this moment, but I would be interested later when there is time. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhwTZi3Ld3Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhwTZi3Ld3Y
  • Krisjohn 5y ago
    Then the problem is not Instagram. When IG first arrived it was basically Flickr for mobiles. It didn't have a horrible algorithm or any real novelty other than being a slick mobile interface for sharing the same stuff that was being shared on the web. Also, as a working adult, I didn't get my first iPhone until my boss handed it to me in 2010. I doubt a critical mass of 10-14 year old girls were bullying each other on IG from 2010.
  • novia 5y ago
    That was also the year that mobile phones became common for children to have in classrooms.
• base698 5y ago
  Instagram kills, from Coddling: > U.S. hospitals going back to 2001 and were able to estimate self-harm rates for the entire country. They found that the rate for boys held steady at roughly 200 per hundred thousand boys in the age range of fifteen to nineteen. The rate for girls in that age range was much higher, but had also been relatively steady from 2001 to 2009, at around 420 per hundred thousand girls. Beginning in 2010, however, the girls’ rate began to rise steadily, reaching 630 per hundred thousand in 2015. The rate for younger girls (ages ten to fourteen) rose even more quickly, nearly tripling from roughly 110 per hundred thousand in 2009 to 318 per hundred thousand in 2015. (The corresponding rate for boys in that age range was around 40 throughout the period studied.) The years since 2010 have been very hard on girls.
  • lupire 5y ago
    Has anyone checked Instagram use among those girls and others?
    • retrac 5y ago
      Yes. Social media use is correlated with anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts, particularly in girls, in a growing number of studies. And in the studies that compare different social networks, Instagram usually ranks the most negatively. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/04/depression-in-girls-linked-to-higher-use-of-social-media https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/04/depression-i... https://journals.lww.com/co-psychiatry/fulltext/2019/11000/social_media,_internet_use_and_suicide_attempts_in.12.aspx https://journals.lww.com/co-psychiatry/fulltext/2019/11000/s... But of course, an isolated, depressed, anxious child is likely to withdraw and spend a great deal of time online. Whether it's a symptom or a cause, or both and to which degree, seems unclear. That said, just anecdotally, as a man in my 30s, I cannot look at the typical popular Instagram profile targeted at my demographic. It evokes horrible feelings. Jealousy, image insecurity, sexual insecurity, sexual frustration, FOMO, social status insecurity... all bundled up in a nasty ball. And quite reliably induced after ten seconds and three photos of inhumanely sexy men in implausibly photogenic homes that cost 10x as much as I'll ever make. No thanks. I believe that walling that whole thing off mentally, has been good for me.
• zeteo 5y ago
  As a parent of girls this is deeply worrying to me. With the spread of Trumpism the war on women has reached a complete new high across the country but especially in the south. I'd be interested to know how much of this growth is related to developments in red and purple states.
• tomjen3 5y ago
  Those graphs only go back to 2000. Do we have older data?
  • retrac 5y ago
    Not specifically on self-poisoning hospitalizations in those age groups. But this is longer term data for completed suicides, for US teenagers: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/figures/m6630qsf.gif https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/figures/m6630qsf.gif And since someone may well ask, the enormous difference by sex in those two charts is because the first chart I linked is hospitalizations related to self-poisoning. The above CDC chart is completed suicides. Girls tend to choose techniques that are generally less fatal, like poisoning. Boys tend to hang or shoot themselves, while the latter of those is very rare with girls. It's rather fascinating, and disturbing, how intensely localized these things can be, and how they're driven by social factors and what's culturally familiar.
    • gpt5 5y ago
      Cry for help vs giving up.
• aidenn0 5y ago
  In my abnormal psychology class, we learned that men had a much higher success rate in suicide, except in places where women had ready access to highly lethal poison.
  • mmiliauskas 5y ago
    Of course we do, our toxic masculinity demands us to excel at everything...
    • phist_mcgee 5y ago
      I understand that your comment is facetious, but I think there may be something to this line of thinking. Men are more likely to follow through with their actions, due to immense social pressure for success. Even if that success is killing yourself, I think a lot of men would rather a successful attempt than an unsuccessful, just to avoid the shame of failing at something so serious.
      • 363722636 5y ago
        It's because men are more likely to use a gun to commit suicide while, for whatever reason, women are more likely to down a bottle of whatever there is in the medicine cabinet that they think will do the job. This ladder approach backfires if you dont know whether a specific medicine is designed to induce vomitting in large doses or how to negate that concern (and with suicide being tied heavily to moments of impulsiveness, by the time you finish the research your resolve may have left you)
        • aidenn0 5y ago
          In places where guns are not available, men are more likely to hang themselves; this is also a fairly deadly method.