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

• xtat 4y ago
  Social media is also a savior for many kids while perverse high school social dynamics implant a dystopian foundation of the world, affecting perceptions into adulthood and often for the rest of their lives. This all sounds a bit like a near-sighted appeal to antiquity to me.
• Evan_Hellmuth 4y ago
  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
• juanani 4y ago
• legitster 4y ago
  Man. Those charts are dire. I'm not entirely sure how much social media is to blame, but it certainly can't be helping. It's certainly pretty telling that most people when asked seem to innately know that social media is bad for them. However, I find the proposal here kinda lame: - Mandate academic access and fund research - Ban young children from social media or create a "suitable environment for them" We all basically know it's bad, but we are going to spend a ton of time figuring out specifically why. Which makes the "suitable environment" kinda self-defeating - we don't know what a suitable environment is! And banning teens from doing something popular... I'm not even sure how seriously to take this suggestion. So we know something is bad (probably for all ages), but no one really wants to stop doing it. (Someone will probably comment about business interests, but come on, HN doesn't make money and we are all still here). So I'm really not sure what the end game is. What does fixing/ending social media actually look like?
  • nickff 4y ago
    Haidt and Lukianoff offer a much clearer and stronger case for how social media and other influences are harming youth in their book "The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure".
    • majormajor 4y ago
      The link discusses it being international, not just American. I'm also curious how "coddling" would describe social media.
      • jamesssssss833 4y ago
        In my mind they intellectually coddle users by providing an echo chamber where they can spout their ideas to a group chosen specifically of people who will agree with them.
        • bigDinosaur 4y ago
          Is that different compared to teenage social groups of the past?
          • jamesssssss833 4y ago
            In the past most, especially school aged children and college age adults, needed to carefully craft your acquaintance group and police them through concerted effort, sometimes over years, to get a self-selected group who would challenge you so little. Now all the work is done for you using data you’ve been submitting for review literally the entire time you use the internet. The real tragedy for me is how many kids and adults go online out of curiosity on a subject and end up on twitter, or facebook, or YouTube. The curiosity gets replaced with seeking those dopamine hits from endlessly scrolling. Edit: dont forget youtube. Imagine you have a history of buying into hysterics (or “enjoys controversial science”) and are curious about astronomy, or politics. Log on to youtube or facebook to find communities where people are discussing these topics and you’re directed to flat earth, and qanon, pol pot fans, among others. These established groups are full of people who will tell you whatever you were on about is dead on, any time someone comes in and shares evidence to the contrary can be banned so you don't need to think about it anymore, dogpiled on so that their responses become less and less informative, accused of brigading. All this gives you a good out if you'd like to avoid being challenged and just straight pulling in those dopamine hits. Again you can do this in real life but it takes work to keep and maintain an echo chamber in the real world. On social media you’re effectively automating away the problem. Edit: don't forget about the tankies
• ginger2016 4y ago
  Haidt wants to censor the speech he doesn’t like; he is pining for the old order. His main talking point is Diversity and Equity is bad. He even suggests diversity is bad. Watch this video from mid point. https://youtu.be/RKRuvKtFvqo https://youtu.be/RKRuvKtFvqo
  • ginger2016 4y ago
    My theory is that he is affected by America’s racial reckoning, and is blaming social media for it. So he has come up with these convoluted explanations to justify his insecurities.
    • LAC-Tech 4y ago
      Racial reckoning? Sounds ominous.
      • ginger2016 4y ago
        Not ominous, in mid 2020 the whole of America realized the country wasn’t treating millions of its citizens fairly and started adopting policies to improve equity and diversity, and that upset Professor Haidt. Here he was among the protestors when a school district tried to enroll more minority students in a program. https://nypost.com/2018/12/04/angry-parents-lash-out-at-doe-official-over-desegregation-plan/ https://nypost.com/2018/12/04/angry-parents-lash-out-at-doe-...
    • scythe 4y ago
      The quote you complain about obviously can't be about racial diversity. He introduces a problem with diversity, and then links it to problems which, he says, and emphasizes in TFA, have increased very sharply since 2010-14. But racial diversity has been rising steadily for decades with no inflection point near 2014. Furthermore, he goes on to explain how social media leads to a fracturing of cliques and a tendency to maintain parallel lives. It's clear from this context that the "diversity" he's talking about must be a sort of diversity of perspectives and not of heredity or anything else like that.
  • 4y ago
• usrn 4y ago
  Is it social media? Or is it also the knowledge that they effectively have no future. Rent is going up and mortgage rates are going up faster. A shrinking portion of young adults can now afford housing. The economy is becoming so disfunctional there's almost no reason to bother participating. When children end up in that position their family will turn on them and they have nothing materially or socially.
  • jimbob45 4y ago
    Yes, rent is expensive, but it’s more than possible to make your way in today’s world provided you don’t fall behind due to drugs or avoidable diseases. The people for which success is out of reach do not browse HN.
    • usrn 4y ago
      Right, but this is about teenagers, not people who browse HN. Not everyone can be a software developer or startup founder. Someone has to build and maintain all these buildings, roads, and farms.
      • dangerlibrary 4y ago
        I love that you think there aren't teenagers on HN.
    • onion2k 4y ago
      The people for which success is out of reach do not browse HN. It depends how you define "success" of course, but by my criteria of "living with financial independence, real happiness, and the ability to choose what impact you have on the world" very few HN readers will ever be successful. We trade our happiness and satisfaction that comes from making a real impact on the world for a pile of cash to make tech people don't care about.
    • archhn 4y ago
      The majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. This is a precarious condition that leads to a lifetime of stress. Most people are living in extreme stress conditions. I wouldn't call living paycheck to paycheck "making it." Most people aren't making it--by the numbers. I know the type of person that posts these kinds of incredibly out of touch comments on here. You work at a corporation, or your skills are currently in high demmand. You are surrounded by people making good money. This insulates you, leading you to extrapolate the conditions you are living under over the WHOLE WORLD--today's world! Let them eat cake? In today's world it's: let them withdraw from their 401k if they fall on hard times. It's ridiculous and frankly insulting and dismissive of the plight of many struggling people. It's the old aristocratic mentality: anyone that doesn't succeed is a fuck up. It's a method of projecting the failings of the system onto those it fails, used over and over throughout history. I suspect with the political instability of this nation, we won't be having these types of arguments much longer. As the system fails, debates will become viciously partisan. There will be no more "if you try hard, you can succeed." Everything will be reduced to, "Submit to the will of the party, and you're good. Don't and you're a traitor deserving of elimination." This is what happens when people retreat behind slogans and refuse to address reality. Things break down, then things get out of control because we have failed to adapt. Then comes the age of horror where the system has to destructively seek a new equilibrium.
• treespace8 4y ago
  Parent of a teen, one anecdote to add. You see what all your friends are doing all the time. Every gathering or event that you where not a part of you see, sometimes in real time. People hate being excluded, and this greatly amplifies this feeling. I'm certain I missed out on a ton of cool stuff as a kid, but at least I didn't have to see it.
  • abdel_nasser 4y ago
    exactly. the equation has changed. people who dont fit in are now even more fucked. everyone is obligated to play this high stakes game that nobody asked for and that wasnt filtered through any kind of intelligent societal deliberation. nobody seems to be worried that kids make the rules in public schools, they bully each other viciously and kids who graduate from the system cant point to the country of portugal on a map. its full blown insanity.
    • DrSiemer 4y ago
      But most of them become very skilled in navigating the social media landscape, which is what actually matters to them. And the people that don't fit in will usually put more energy in other ways to express themselves and have a much higher chance of becoming Truly Interesting People, if they make it through that pressure cooker. It's tough and I'm glad I'm not a part of it, but it's not the end of all cohesion in society that some make it out to be.
      • abdel_nasser 4y ago
        they will be skilled at something although im not sure it will be anything to do with socializing. and saying that outcasts will just be more likely to blossom because of it is just speculation. at a certain point in history man began to eat plants and adopt a sedentary agricultural lifestyle. there were many people who were made sick by eating plants and very little meat or fat. very, very sick. there are still echos of it in the population today. was it a positive thing for all the skills of the past to be thrown away and a large chunk of people to be sacrificed because they werent compatible with the new way? sometimes a societal shift eliminates an entire class of people. youre wrong because you try to paint it like its zero sum for all classes of people. in reality, if it is zero sum its only because what we lose in sacrifice we gain in progress. can you believe this has been going on for ten thousand years and still it doesnt really have a name?
• MonaroVXR 4y ago
  My family is kinda addicted, so addicted, we ended up not talking anymore because someone wanted a perfect shot off the eifel tower and it wasn't goid enough, even worse when there has to be made pictures of food and whatever.
  • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    > pictures of food and whatever I never understood the food photos. Do I just not love food enough? Do people really enjoy seeing photos of their friends’ meals?
    • tsol 4y ago
      I sometimes think it's more for the pleasure of the person posting it than anyone else
    • ImaCake 4y ago
      I take photos of good looking meals but never to post them elsewhere. They are just going into the memory bank of photos for later reminiscing.
    • stickfigure 4y ago
      I'm a foodie, I cook a lot. I enjoy food porn. Sometimes it inspires me to prepare something new or adopt a new technique. If the dish was prepared by a friend, their creation makes me happy just as if they had posted some sort of art or electronics project.
    • MonaroVXR 4y ago
      It depends on the subject: - For food, if you're eating somewhere else, it's showing that you're doing something in a restaurant. - For food, showing that you're ready for a man. (That's what I've heard) - Photos without obvious intentions (But they are "obvious") let me explain... If I shoot a video in Tesla without showing the Taxi driver. Than I'm in Tesla and you (the viewer) aren't. You will need to feel jealous about me. (It's about status)
• germinalphrase 4y ago
  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 of them struggle to articulate any kind of positive vision for themselves/their lives unless they have lucked into a passion or have family that pushes. They’re still teens. Funny and moody and confused, but their heads really are in their smartphones all the time.
  • javajosh 4y ago
    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?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • shadowofneptune 4y ago
      It's been four years since I graduated high school, but my experience was that even if you were not on a given social media platform, at least one of your friends definitely was. It is very hard to ignore or stop caring about.
    • WalterSear 4y ago
      They all found each other online :(
      • fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
        Finding the weird people like me online was really good for me!
        • WalterSear 4y ago
• temp8964 4y ago
  I am wondering how much this effect vary by family culture. Are Asians kids less impacted because parent intervenes? Just guessing.
  • ImaCake 4y ago
    There is a chart in the link that shows the problem is equal no matter your ancestry or cultural background.
• derevaunseraun 4y ago
  This topic is something that's been generating a lot of hot takes recently. Personally I think the way to solve it is teaching people to be more mindful of their own emotions. e.g. if seeing someone's artificial presentation of their life on social media makes someone feel bad, they should be aware of the causal link. The upcoming generation should know how to regulate their own social media diet. There's so much nastiness on the internet, so many lies. I think that if the upcoming generation isn't aware of this then we're playing with fire as a society
  • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    Telling people "be more mindful of your emotions" is less than useless. Facebook etc. have many thousands of some incredibly intelligent people whose sole job is essentially to "hack" your emotions to keep you scrolling and scrolling. It's like telling society at large "diet and exercise" to lose weight, but when so many places are incredibly un-walkable, and food scientists produce foods engineered to make you want more. Yes, "diet and exercise" does make sense individually, but obviously that strategy has failed miserably for society at large given we are fatter than ever.
  • SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    It would be very difficult to teach a teenager to be mindful of their own emotions to the degree necessary that social media would have no effect on them upon exposure. Teenagers brains aren’t fully developed yet and cannot think critically, have limited empathy, and do not yet have solid senses of self.
• vmception 4y ago
  I think a lot of us in other generations are part of the same trends I used to laugh at fidget spinners and everything gen z, then I tried formal education again, taking a class for a semester and oh my god the first couple sessions were really difficult! It immediately clicked with me that we - at least I - am not exempt from deteriorated concentration. I’m acclimated to the creative and less-structured demands of getting things done on time, and being rewarded for that. But pretending to pay attention for hours and not do anything because its noticeable and rude and punishable? That was very different. A couple weeks into the class I was fine and patient. But the first few sessions were fidget inducing. I don't think a lot of us know. We aren't in the same environment.
  • tsol 4y ago
    I think everyone's concentration is deteriorating, but kids don't have the benefit of having experienced life without social media. From the very beginning they've been immersed in this, making their problems that much worse
    • vmception 4y ago
      That is a difference, I think a large portion of the adult population hasn't considered introspection on themselves and are subject to the same trends. I was able to recognize it because I had read about modern children's behavior in classroom, and I was able to recalibrate because I was familiar with what my level of concentration should be and had been. But that's not a consolation if everyone, perhaps including the teacher I responded to, would find themselves "infected" the same way if they were told to be the student in the classroom. I bet a more holistic solution would be found if people recognized they are distracted too, instead of only looking at the easier target: kids forced to be in that setting.
  • Clubber 4y ago
    >I - am not exempt from deteriorated concentration It's a muscle. Anyone who hasn't done school for a while will have to rebuild that muscle. It was like that before social media, just gotta relearn how to learn. Programming is similar. If you do nothing but CRUD for a while (for whatever reason), when you gotta do the hard stuff where you have to keep a bunch of structure in your head at the same time, you're probably gonna struggle with it. After a few weeks, you'll be in better shape. Same with reading complex documents, writing, math, etc.
• hk1337 4y ago
  Everyone’s mental health is plummeting and social media is why.
• recursivedoubts 4y ago
  Our descendants will look back on us allowing children access to unadulterated social media the way we look back on smoking.
  • toolz 4y ago
    Strongly disagree, when has society ever decided less access to information is ideal? Our descendants will create better platforms that can allow users to better filter for their emotional needs and they'll likely have better tools to understand their own emotions.
    • stirfish 4y ago
      I don't think of social media - especially casual image sharing sites - as being particularly information-rich.
    • LAC-Tech 4y ago
      Strongly disagree, when has society ever decided less access to information is ideal? All the time, every day, forever? Not sure what society you're living in but here in the western world the push for censorship is constant.
    • remarkEon 4y ago
      >Strongly disagree, when has society ever decided less access to information is ideal? The trick social media companies use is convincing people that all they're doing is giving people access to "information". They are not; they're just creating addiction machines. It should be self evident that wikipedia or a minimalist blog with a comment box is in an entirely different solar system from facebook's algorithm that keeps track of how long you scroll and then shows you something you're likely to interact with right before you're supposed to close the app, manipulating your emotions to keep you "engaged" longer. >Our descendants will create better platforms that can allow users to better filter for their emotional needs and they'll likely have better tools to understand their own emotions. We already have them. My kids won't be able to access the internet until they figure out how to navigate the command line. In the beginning ...
• stonogo 4y ago
  This person wrote a whole paper whining about college students standing up for themselves, then testified that social media is a leading cause of this mental health crisis based on nothing but children self-reporting it to be the case, and concludes that we should fix it by passing stronger data collection protection for teenagers. This is incoherent.
• abledon 4y ago
  And TikTok usage is heavily limited in China (its origin) but allowed to be consumed unlimited in other countries
  • denimnerd42 4y ago
    I'm not sure if you know but Tiktok and Douyin (Chinese Tiktok) are actually separate.
    • remarkEon 4y ago
      I think the point remains. The Chinese seem to grok that social media and everything that comes with it can be severe net negatives, and so they've gone the (predictably) authoritarian route of heavily restricting its use.
• blondin 4y ago
  i want to share one of the saddest things i have read online recently. not long ago, one would think that bullying would not follow kids to their houses. once they got home, they would be safe with their family. that's no longer the case with the advent of social media. the story is that of a teenage girl who committed suicide due to constant bullying. it never stopped, even when she got home. and her family had no idea. she was, based on the photos and her brother's post, a very pretty and high achieving young person. that alone, he wrote, was the reason they targeted his sister. after her suicide, a memorial page was set up by her family. anyone who knew her could add a message. huge mistake! the bullies flooded the page with cruel and insensitive messages. like "good riddance" and how "the world was better without her". remember, the bullies were her schoolmates, not strangers... the story saddened and upset me. i couldn't imagine what the poor family were going through. and i know that these bullies didn't realize the gravity of what they were doing. i don't have a solution to offer either. i just wanna share that young person's story. i am sure when the leaders of our social media platforms get in their meeting rooms, nobody is going to mention her. i wanna share her story so people know it happened. and that it's still happening.
• abdel_nasser 4y ago
  it must be said, even if its not what everyone wants to hear, that the fear-mongering corporate news media, who carpet the world in content that is deliberately designed to elicit a primordial brain-stem stress response, have probably contributed to this problem. whether they turn on the tv or they are sitting in the classroom, kids of all ages have it drilled into them that their country is evil and racist, that they are guilty almost implicitly for having white skin, doomed to a life of hardship if they have black skin, and also that the world is coming to rapid apocalypse which is completely the kids and the kids familys fault. i am not making a statement about whether any of that is true; what is undeniably true is that kids are being injected with this stuff 24/7 and its not good for them. when i was a kid, we stood for the flag and sang the pledge of allegiance. there was a notion in the air of unity, order and strength. when i look back i recognize that this was very good for my mental health. you can have your opinion about the pledge but there is no denying that our children need an environment that is good for their mental health.
• motohagiography 4y ago
  Even though I am in favour of Musk's purchase of Twitter, the implied idea that the slot machines in our pockets need broader engagement to improve discourse and society, and that engaging in more direct conflict in less-moderated forums will improve the mental health of young people - both seem like very big bets. I'd still be willing to take those bets because there is a good chance the reason they're going nuts is the platforms manage and toy with their attention and instincts like animals, so they're probably acting a lot like they are beings in captivity. Something that breaks the spell might mitigate the effects. Maybe they're not that crazy, they're just indexed on something others can't see?
• twayt 4y ago
  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 commenters asserting the validity of those beliefs. Confirmation bias at scale. You can scarcely have a nuanced conversation online without some idiot misinterpreting what you said and rousing a mob to hound you for your narrative violation. Combined with the viral nature of negativity, this is an iron cage that is difficult for an inexperienced, impressionable teen mind to escape. Parents need to be more proactive and should keep up with the firehose of negative beliefs teens are being fed through these distribution channels and attempt to have a conversation with them. At the very least, this should teach teens the valuable skill of challenging ideas and being critical of what others are putting out there. The ones who view the medium as the devil are misguided at best. Their temporary efforts to stop it is a bandaid over the real problem of who teens are being influenced by.
  • WaxedChewbacca 4y ago
    I can buy this, but it might practically be a distinction without a difference. If social media is an amplifier, we have to be careful what we're amplifying. Most people have no regular practice for the cultivation of wholesome solace. The result seems unsurprising.
    • twayt 4y ago
      The way to control what is being amplified is to control what people are producing. You can try to do this by modulating what is allowed to be produced or you can modulate this on the demand side. The latter is more robust but harder to legislate. It can be done via greater public awareness though. We have multiple case studies for this sort of thing.
  • FFRefresh 4y ago
    I have a somewhat similar question. Don't get me wrong, I don't think moving more of teen social life onto the internet and less in the physical world is going to lead to happiness, so I agree on principle. But this obsession with social media in particular as the cause of all ills seems overblown. I am a huge fan of Jonathan Haidt, and think he's done a great job in explaining some of the cultural shifts going on, and the changing of morality/psychology in our society. But I feel like he is overselling social media's impact. He even mentions in his testimony, that the correlation between social media use and mental illness may be around r=0.10 . That is a fairly weak correlation. I also have not seen a study (note that this doesn't mean one doesn't exist) that has done a good job of controlling for the selection effects involved with the data, to attempt to understand if there is any causality involved and what direction it would go. My hypothesis is that those with mental illness would be more likely to use social media more in the first place. Social media feels like a bit of a bogeyman in our society. There are 100% issues with it, and I don't necessarily think it's net-positive for humanity, but it's only one part of the ever-changing environment we as humans are now finding ourselves in. Blaming social media won't solve our issues, I feel like they run much deeper. Some of the deeper issues are around meaning, identity, belonging, status, decreasing tolerance for discomfort/inconvenience, increasing detachment from physical reality, etc. Our amorphous culture is guiding us down this path and it's really hard for us to grasp...
• paxys 4y ago
  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 government gridlock that has made fixing any of this impossible. Can't really shield kids from this reality anymore when all of it is one click away. Teens are aware that they are going to inherit a pretty terrible world, and are powerless to do anything about it.
  • AbrahamParangi 4y ago
    Consider the possibility that this perspective might be less a reflection of reality and more a reflection of the media environment.
    • thorncorona 4y ago
      Does that make it any less true though? It causes people to change how they act. Political activism among youth seems to be quite high. Perhaps for the better.
      • s1artibartfast 4y ago
        >Does that make it any less true though? No, but it is an important distinction if you want to look for solutions, either socially or as a parent.
      • dr_dshiv 4y ago
        > Political activism among youth seems to be quite high. Perhaps for the better. Or sometimes for the worse. I can see how engagement in politics or disengagement from politics could both negatively impact mental health. Personally, I found it very difficult to “be on Facebook” and watch friends and family politicize. I can see how political engagement can be a coping mechanism but I can also see how it can be a source of psychological toxicity.
• carlivar 4y ago
  Working for Facebook/Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. is today's equivalent of working for a tobacco company.
  • tjpnz 4y ago
    I would also add Twitter.
  • btheshoe 4y ago
    Snapchat is a messaging service. Quite different from the rest imo.
    • carlivar 4y ago
      https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-05-10/lawsuit-snap-teen-suicide-yolo-lmk https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-05-10/lawsuit-sn... https://www.businessinsider.com/mother-sues-meta-instagram-snap-alleging-role-in-daughters-suicide-2022-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/mother-sues-meta-instagram-s... https://nypost.com/2019/09/30/teen-commits-suicide-after-hes-outed-as-bisexual-on-snapchat-family-says/ https://nypost.com/2019/09/30/teen-commits-suicide-after-hes...
  • nsenifty 4y ago
    Why not add cellphone manufacturers? If social media is equivalent of tobacco, the cellphone is the pipe/cigarette/<insert delivery mechanism here>.
    • sweetbitter 4y ago
      You don't need to run social media software for leisure. My phone is an expensive paperweight that remains off/home most of the time...
    • Mordisquitos 4y ago
      I would say that the mobile phone manufacturers are, if anything, analogous to tobacconists. They do provide access to the noxious stuff, and one may argue it is their main source of income, but they also provide other non-harmful and even necessary products (depending on culture, in Spain for instance tobacconists would traditionally also sell postal stamps, bus tickets, etc.).
• throw93232 4y ago
  My friend kids were doing sports and dancing at very serious level. Before pandemic, then lockdown started and they were forced to stop. Now they do not want to invest time in something like that again! It is easy to blaim "social media", but it is adults who create this toxic culture. Kids need stability and current "doom" culture does not help.
• twayt 4y ago
  Figure 2 that shows the rates of major depression among boys and girls is shocking. 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 10 boys have been diagnosed with major depression. I wonder what the distribution is of others who haven't been diagnosed or deal with depression to a lower degree. Something that may be surprising to some people is that this trend isn't limited to boys and girls. From data collected in 2019/2020, 30% of people aged 18-25 years in the USA have diagnosed mental health issues. This number is skewed heavily towards women too. Source: Table 8.1B https://www.samhsa.gov/data/report/2020-nsduh-detailed-tables https://www.samhsa.gov/data/report/2020-nsduh-detailed-table...
  • tristor 4y ago
    > This number is skewed heavily towards women too All of the data I've seen on the mental health crisis in the West seems to indicate that it hits women harder than men. I have yet to see an explanation for why, though. Does anyone know of any articles that thoroughly cover this gender split in mental health and why this particular issue is more predominantly affecting women?
    • odessacubbage 4y ago
      could it be that women are more likely to seek treatment for mental illness? also to the degree that mental illnesses are gender variant, some are more pro social and less subject to stigma than others.
      • Mordisquitos 4y ago
        I have some recent anecdata on the topic. When browsing Google Maps reviews to compare psychotherapists in my area, the overwhelming majority of the reviews are from women.
        • ThalesX 4y ago
          I'm not sure if this translates to other countries, but in my back of the woods, the whole field is basically women.
• dpweb 4y ago
  What bothers me most and even on HN, where you usaully get intelligent discourse, the alarmist pessimism. Everything is falling apart! Just another form of self-indulgence. There must be something compelling about pretending the apocolypse is tomorrow. Yes, there are problems in our social, political, ecomonic systems. They need to be recognized and addressed. Democracy makes that process slow and difficult. But the pessimism to me is one of the biggest dangers.
  • Clubber 4y ago
    Yes, you're talking about despair. We get constantly feed a steady stream of doom and gloom from old media and have been for decades. I assume social media is just more of the same. I try to catch myself and try to be optimistic, but if I consume a lot of it, it's overwhelming. I definitely have been limiting my intake of news over the past several years. Election cycles are the worst for doom and gloom, but they all sell it, all the time.
  • paulpauper 4y ago
    optimistic posts can do well here too. it depends on what catches peoples attention and gets voted to the front page.
  • remarkEon 4y ago
    Well, the doom-scrolling is a feature not a bug of social media. If you think the world is ending tomorrow, don't you want to be there to watch it all end?
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    Almost every thread on HN is filled with such weird pessimism. Or such obviously false observations. The famous dropbox criticism is only scratching the surface. Its so predictable you know what the top complaints will be before you even open the page. There could be a post about some crazy new performance optimization coming to firefox and the top comment will be a link to a 15 year old bug where the right click menu padding for the flags page isn't consistent when viewed on BSD. Concluding the browser is abandonware due to this.
  • teaearlgrey_hot 4y ago
• mywaifuismeta 4y ago
  Not surprising to me at all. I just have to look around me and it's super obvious that social media has ruined people's lives, especially teens who don't yet have the mental maturity to understand how their brains are being hijacked. As an adult you at least have the mental facilities to logically understand what's happening, and you are less exposed to peer pressure and not in need of acceptance from your tribe(s). But for teens there is literally not way out. I'd happily take all the NFT scams if in turn we could shut down TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, etc. They are the worst thing that has happened to humanity in the last decade.
• tempfs 4y ago
  Everything in this country, in this life, is a competition. One big zero-sum game. It starts in high school. Social status, academics, athletics, and now social media followers and likes. I am very glad that when I was in high school, social media wasn't really a thing yet. I could leave it all at school. Just go home and read, play video games or go outside. Most of my mistakes were limited to the memories of those people who witnessed them first hand. Kids today are under near constant competition with each other and it takes a toll. At some point, I hope, without some massive existential crisis serving as the impetuous we can collectively come to the understanding that our technology has vastly outpaced our morality. I hope that the prevailing social norm becomes cooperation over competition and the desire to lift others up instead of stepping on them for your own personal gain.
  • wolverine876 4y ago
    > One big zero-sum game. Not relationships, marriage, work, or community. Even business is rarely zero sum, or the economy wouldn't grow. Generally speaking, business is win-win deals.
    • WalterSear 4y ago
      > Not relationships, marriage, work, or community I don't understand how you could think any of this. Relationships? They are absolutely a competition for the young: both platonic and romantic, but especially romantic. Nothing more competitive. Work? Work is absolutely a competition, for young and old alike. Community? What else do you think teens are seeking out online?
      • noisy_boy 4y ago
        Relationships are a huge competition in an atomic family type situation - children competing with spouses for time, spouse/kids competing with grandparents, family competing with friends... and god forbid if you have a family member with medical needs. When time was collective because of extended families, this stress got spread out and not as much noticeable but with the shrinked family unit, this is only going to get worse.
• misc213 4y ago
  We could start by trying to take the magic out of how social media sites decide what to display. Content delivery algorithms can be very effective at imparting a lasting impact on users that carries away from the platform. If content delivery algorithms were open sourced it could add a healthy check to the ecosystem.
  • multiplegeorges 4y ago
    How? Implicit in this request is the expectation that the platforms would accept changes and merge them into production. I don't see why they would.
• jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago
  Play some video games, research something interesting, stay in school but don't take it too seriously, and learn a marketable skill slowly. Do this, dgaf about everyone else, you'll be ok.
  • wolverine876 4y ago
    > dgaf about everyone else, you'll be ok It sounds cool but it could be taken as serious advice. If that's how you truly feel and act, you are not ok and you are missing out on what is most rewarding in life.
    • bowsamic 4y ago
      It's not at all worth the risk. I'd rather be not okay and not attached to conditions of reality than be "okay" and attached to conditions
      • wolverine876 4y ago
        I'm sorry you feel that way. It doesn't need to be that bad at all. Nihilism is trendy now, but don't confuse a trend with life and reality; don't make life decisions on a fashion of the moment. Loving relationships have been a fashion for all of human history, and they aren't going away because of trolling.
        • bowsamic 4y ago
          I’m not a nihilist, I’m a Buddhist
• gok 4y ago
  The government's abject failure to invest in fixing climate change, or education, or health care for young people, or general human rights? No, surely what's got teens down is congress not regulating social media hard enough. Thank you, senators.
  • tgv 4y ago
    As I wrote elsewhere: that's not new, at all. That was there in the 80s/early 90s as well, with the added continuous stress of the Cold War. What motivates you to reply like this, without any evidence? OTOH, you completely ignore section 2 of the paper.
    • yunwal 4y ago
      I feel like the major difference is that back in the 80s/90s, the people in power were trying to solve the existential issues.
• manholio 4y ago
  I have an idea: let's body-shame them into believing they were born in the wrong body for their actual gender, and suggest that removing their reproductive organs and a devastating, life-long hormonal treatment will make it all alright.
• agumonkey 4y ago
  I don't know how much is true but it seems the web makes too many things too heavy available too early and often. You see kids discussing existential concepts, business, .. at 13yo. I'm not sure previous generation were focused on these instead of just coasting along for fun. It's nice to make people more mature but too early and too much seems a failure.
• tracer1 4y ago
  I wonder what the impact is on general mental health, I'm not sure the impact of social media is restricted to harming kids and teens...
• TheGigaChad 4y ago
• rejectfinite 4y ago
  Imagine you were born in 1900. When you're 14, World War I begins and ends when you're 18 with 22 million dead. Soon after a global pandemic, the Spanish Flu, appears, killing 50 million people. And you're alive and 20 years old. When you're 29 you survive the global economic crisis that started with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, causing inflation, unemployment and famine. When you're 33 years old the nazis come to power. When you're 39, World War II begins and ends when you're 45 years old with a 60 million dead. In the Holocaust 6 million Jews die. When you're 52, the Korean War begins. When you're 64, the Vietnam War begins and ends when you're 75. A child born in 1985 thinks his grandparents have no idea how difficult life is, but they have survived several wars and catastrophes. --Quoted from somewhere
  • chrisco255 4y ago
    My grandfather was born in the year 1900 (he had my mom in 1960). I was born in the 80s. I knew about all the wars and the Great Depression by the time I was 8. It was frequently talked about, particularly the Depression, among the elders in my family. And my brother and I were always fascinated with the big wars from a young age. At any rate, my great grandmother would save EVERYTHING. Nothing ever went to waste. No food, no item, was thrown away willy nilly. She had the same appliances for decades (they actually lasted). She would save up bottles and cans and actually turn them in for money. She raised 3 kids as a widow in the Depression. I never, ever got the impression that my grandparents or great-grandparents had it worse than me. I knew by the way they carried themselves. They grew up in a time of scarcity and the influence of that carried with them until death.
  • refurb 4y ago
    Pretty much. I remember my wife's great-grandfather talking about leaving the farm at 16 during the Great Depression, jumping on the roof of a train and looking for random work at every stop. Today, plenty of parents won't let their kids walk home alone at night at 16. Of course the social media experts would say he "unfairly" benefited from the post-WW2 economy, plenty of jobs, a nice house but hell, I wouldn't trade places with him.
• erddfre3423 4y ago
  Social media is bad. What is even worse is that smartphones allow people to use it anywhere, whenever they feel bored. The impact isn't massive just on mental health, but also on general productivity and people's social lives. It's just way too addicting. I work in tech and constantly feel like moving into a forest without internet connection for these reasons.
  • spullara 4y ago
    This is a good test to see if they have what it takes to survive in the metaverse. /s
  • LewisVerstappen 4y ago
    > The impact isn't massive just on mental health, but also on general productivity and people's social lives. It's just way too addicting. My main app of choice is YouTube and it's just astonishing how much amazing educational content there is on the app. MIT OpenCourseware, 3Blue1Brown, PBS Eons, SmarterEveryDay, ... and I could go on and on.... DESPITE THIS, their recommendations and the YouTube search has gotten so unbelievably terrible over the past few years that it's just becoming unusable. Their recommendations have nothing to do with the channels I'm subscribed to, instead it's so much goddamn crap with click-bait titles/thumbnails (because one of the biggest factors for the YouTube Rec. Algorithm is thumbnail click-through-rate). For YouTube search, if you search for "schlieffen plan", then sure the first 3-4 recommendations will be based on what you searched. BUT after that, the fucking recommendations have nothing to do with your search query... instead it'll just be completely random stuff that the YouTube algorithm thinks you might click on. It's gotten completely unusable with YouTube shorts now because they're trying to shove that shit down the throat of their users (99% of the YouTube shorts are complete fucking garbage). It's really a shame because there's so much amazing content that's been uploaded to the YouTube platform, but the idiots in charge of the company are completely ruining the app... especially over the past few years.
    • wackro 4y ago
      I remember reading part of a study a few years ago that noted that youtube was the only social media (in the study) that didn't negatively affect mental health. In fact it had a slight positive impact. If I find it I will link it, but here's an article in a similar vein: https://www.psychalive.org/worst-mental-health-instagram-facebook-youtube/ https://www.psychalive.org/worst-mental-health-instagram-fac... So yes, the search is obviously geared towards engagement. But not at the cost of mental health.
• nimos 4y ago
  History has proven that making people feel bad about themselves is a very effective marketing tactic. Algorithms shove skinny, tan and pretty in our faces while advertising things to make us skinny, tan and pretty. Unconstrained by morals would you rather try to sell to someone of good or poor mental health? And, what constraints have we placed?
• mewmew 4y ago
  Surprised to see noone has mentioned the use of tinyurl in a .gov document. Those links may be stale, tinyurl.com may be sold, etc, etc.
• betwixthewires 4y ago
  Social media cannot be blamed. Parents are the only ones to blame. I grew up while MTV had music videos playing. There were mascara wearing men talking about slitting their wrists and there were tough looking black men talking about killing people in the street. Some people imitated that. Some parents turned it off. If you give your kid access to anything and everything the world has to offer, including every manner of degenerate and pedophile, you allow your daughters in their most vulnerable years to be taught all manner of unhealthy social proving mechanisms, you get unhealthy people. It really is that simple. There are brothels in the world too, you don't blame the brothel when a kid grows up in there. Raise your kids and quit listening to people that tell you it's unethical to decide how to do that, and quit making excuses and blaming the world for jot doing it.
  • DSingularity 4y ago
    Oh. Turn the tv off? Please, do tell — how shall we turn off social media?
    • ptsneves 4y ago
      You install parental control. Does this seem unfeasible?
      • vaylian 4y ago
        Not unfeasible. But non-sensical. You simply cannot offload raising of kids to technology. Besides, parental control tends to have a lot of false positives.
    • burntoutfire 4y ago
      You can not install social media apps on kids phone, and restrict them in the browser (facebook has that feature). Dunno how to do the same on the PC though.
  • sedeki 4y ago
    I grew up similarly, and I've come to the same conclusion!
• Thorentis 4y ago
  Do the same study on pornography, I dare you.
• Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  Social media is merely the channel, fatuous narcissists looking to shill nonsense lifestyles are the vector.
• Ekaros 4y ago
  Also it seems social media has huge effects on bullying too. As it doesn't anymore stop at home door, but continues through day and night. Previously at least outside school and getting there from there you could escape it. But now it is ever present and probably somehow worse if shared to multiple people on Internet. And nothing is done to punish the bullies or remove them from the system. They are not locked up or shipped in some facility where they could not anymore cause harm and damage to others. So sad that adults allow them continue it without any proper repercussions.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• rob_c 4y ago
  And once again the law makers are about 20 years behind whats on the ground...
• findthewords 4y ago
  My 2 cents: "it's the economy, stupid"
• rvz 4y ago
  This just in: Digital drugs products like Facebook™, Instagram™, Twitter™, Snapchat™ and TikTok™ are destroying the minds of its users (especially teens) mental health. More at 10 from Obvious News Network.
• RappingBoomer 4y ago
  social media is replacing the traditional ways of communicating ideas (which have been tv, radio, newspapers, and school curriculum & textbooks)...but now the elites cannot really control social media, as much as they want to control social media and as much as they try to control social media...they cannot..... and control of what goes into young minds is THE most important commodity for elites...shaping young minds is how the elites control the future ("Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it," Proverbs 22 6) and the elites don't like losing that control...they want to set the future path for youth; they want to create the adults that youth will become....and so the elites are trying to restrict channels of communication into young minds that the elites cannot control...they are doing that by demonizing social media...
  • gverrilla 4y ago
    "The dominant ideology is the ideology of the dominant class" Karl Marx The "elite" is very much descentralized and unconscious/semi-conscious. There's absolutely zero risk for the power structures on current social media: ideology is 100% ok: banks are fine, scam and fraud is rampant, people are surely working (some of them have their main goal in life to progress in a carreer in a big company), people are surely studying (academia is the brain of the elite), people are still bragging against elites with near-zero effect and then when they get older finally bowing their heads and accepting "reality", religion is fine, harry potter is awesome etc etc.. Not to mention social media itself is owned by the elite and has some important functions - which are working perfectly fine.
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  This fits too neatly into the "new thing is going to kill/corrupt your children" meme that is very popular through history. Having said that, advertising based platforms are basically all about making you feel worse about yourself to spur purchases. Who spends more money on advertised products the Zen master at one with themselves or the anxious person looking for the quick fix to make them beautiful, popular, trendy, etc. Basically human insecurities and addictions are a market externality the same as carbon in the atmosphere. If they aren't internalised to the market then you're basically creating a highly efficient machine to seek them out and abuse them for profit. We need to build different incentives in from the start than "do anything to get money and I'll take a cut" which obviously leads to bad places once the capitalist machine gets a hold of it. Like a gun, it's a powerful tool, and you have to be careful where you point it.
• SunlightEdge 4y ago
  Interesting report. I think we should ban teenagers/children from having smart phones. Calling and texting aside, teenagers don't need phones. As an education tool, laptops/desktops are invaluable for teenagers. I'm uncertain of the best way to manage these devices with teenagers. Perhaps limiting the internet connection to their devices might work - e.g. only for an hour when a parent is around. Perhaps parents do not provide enough protection. Broadly encouraging positive behaviours and exercise, and giving teenagers good defenses against difficult issues (bullying, negative thoughts, loneliness) could all help.
• RGamma 4y ago
  2014 is a curious date, because it's when I first understood that my utterly optimistic outlook on what the internet would do to at least western culture/society was misdirected. It's when I first noticed how loud, oblivious and frenetic online interaction became at large and how - by self-selection - sociopaths took the lead on the stage that big central platforms provided them. But what I found/find even sadder were/are the engagement numbers around shallow multimedial diarrhea and influencers. It's also the year I sharply cut back on my internet usage by about 90% and quit all communities (perhaps prematurely, but I was sort of shellshocked). HN is almost all that's left (except one venerable gaming community) and it itself I consider one of the shallower communities (this is structural because of the lack of longitudinal communication since discussions are keyed on links, not longer-lived standalone threads. The crowd makes up for it though). And now... I'm glad I made the connections and experiences I did before then, some of which carried over to today. I also learned how the psychopathological spectrum does not just exist in textbooks and how to bail when confronted with it. Maybe when I have less things on my plate I'll stretch out my feelers once more and visit a couple online villages like I enjoyed so much back then.
  • bonoboTP 4y ago
    HN is also extremely tiring to read. Constant sour venting about office politics and how it's all futile, and everyone is out there to get you, the darned sleazy manager abusing the developers, the dark government surveilling the people etc etc. I mean even this very discussion is quite dark. I'm not saying these aren't realistic issues, but it's probably better to quit HN too. Almost all front page stories are some form of grumbling about the unfixable dark state of the world.
    • RGamma 4y ago
      Hehe, it's gotten better I believe. I'm browsing it somewhat less than I used to so my sample may be off. Eventually you numb slightly to it, and with a couple interesting pieces sprinkled in, the overall utility is still positive to me. And more generally: Controversy is never going away, I just have to get better at detecting silent consensus that fits my ethics (i.e. where the gap between world models is not so large to make conversation impossible). These days this mostly entails belief in some form of shared reality and basic human rights; how the standards have fallen! And on some occasions we simply like to scream into the ether. Personally, I don't hold it against anybody, even though it may be against community hygiene when overdone or inappropriate. But at that point there's moderation. The IT crowd will manage. It's what's happening "outside" that worries me...
• tinus_hn 4y ago
  Of course two years of lockdowns, uncertainty and polarized screaming matches have nothing to do with it.
• pcj-github 4y ago
  It is so obvious to any parent with a child in this age group the harm that phones and social media have done. My daughter, now 15, is on anxiety meds and scars up and down her arm from cutting. I'm an MD that crossed over to tech, but my earlier profession (vascular surgery) largely involved taking care of the wreckage that the tobacco industry wrought upon society. The parallels here are obvious and striking. The spell under which society was either ignorant or in denial (via advertising) about the harms of smoking in 1950 is very similar to what we have today. 1. More research needs to be done to solidify the data on what is pretty obviously happening, but we can't wait on the data to take action (it will be important for the lawsuits though). 2. We need regulation that forces these apps to only be able to execute for something like 2 hours in a 24-hour period before being sandboxed and shut off. They aren't mission-critical, nobody "needs" instagram more than this other than Meta. These kids need a break, and to breathe. 3. We need a large educational investment, quickly, to get people to understand the harmful combination of social media, device usage, and puberty. The comments in this thread make this readily apparent... The number of "but, but, but" and "whatabout" comments is pretty astounding here. 4. Social media companies must be litigated for knowingly and willingly doing this. Class-action lawsuits, in the many billions of dollars. The behavior of these companies will not change otherwise.
• smittywerben 4y ago
  Great! Let's raise all consents and COPPA to age 30.
• csomar 4y ago
  Conspiracy theory time: Social media is being blamed for a mental disorder epidemic in order to justify cracking down on the free flow of information. On a more serious note: > The patterns are nearly identical in the UK and Canada, and the trends are similar though not identical in Australia and New Zealand. We do not yet see signs of similar epidemics in continental Europe or in East Asia, although I have not yet found good data from those regions. East Asia population are aggressive consumers of social media. If they are not getting depressed from it, then the Anglosaxon (which seems to be suffering from this crisis) should look elsewhere. > The “eyewitness testimony” confirms the academic findings: social media is a culprit Cool science.
  • foerbert 4y ago
    > East Asia population are aggressive consumers of social media. If they are not getting depressed from it, then the Anglosaxon (which seems to be suffering from this crisis) should look elsewhere. Only if you discount the rest of the sentence you quoted... > ... although I have not yet found good data from those regions.
• plaguepilled 4y ago
  I have mixed feelings on social media for young people. When I was growing up it actually helped me immensely as it let me connect with like minded people and escape the local echo chamber (I don't mean to disparage my childhood community, but I definitely didn't fit in). I feel that I was able to develop emotional intelligence in a way that my schooling environment could not provide, so there are some upsides. However, there was definitely a period of time where I would have benefited from using social media less and giving it less importance in my day. In some senses, it felt like a responsibility, whereas now I treat it like an elective leisure activity. I believe that social media access should be introduced in late teens, when the ability to discern and self regulate what an 'elective leisure activity' is. As an aside, I also think that critical thinking skills should be in the curriculum for at least 2 years before a kid gets a smart phone, but that's unfortunately up to the discretion of parents, regardless of competence.
• lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  Some ideas: - Social media apps (whatsapp to tiktok) must rate-limit posting for under-18s. You can post (text/tweet/whatever) only once every ... 5 minutes. It's possible to have a conversation but the levels of abuse and cesspool like behaviour just become so much harder bonus points - same for adults.
• wirrbel 4y ago
  A bit of a scape goat. I remember how teen magazines managed to totally disrupt the body self-image of my sister in the 90ies, which she still suffers from today. We cannot distinguish effects of media meaningfully from our societies on a general scale. Certainly some “propaganda” effects may be observable via intervention. But the general mental health effects are hardly traceable
• mathieubordere 4y ago
  I believe that a simple human being has not evolved to be constantly bombarded with every global problem imaginable. In the past you only worried about your direct environment that caused enough problems on its own. Now the thing is, the whole world has more or less become our direct environment and I'm not surprised mental problems our spiraling out of control as a result of it.
• newsclues 4y ago
  Environmental, hormones (food/medicine) and social (pandemic lockdown). Lots of causes.
• Existenceblinks 4y ago
  It's like a "known issue, won't fix" issue sitting in issue list for a decade now.
• grammers 4y ago
  IMO the cause is negative news sell best combined with social media and their algorithms. Maybe we need to change the news culture altogether? Why focus always on the bad stuff?
• mfashby 4y ago
  Related book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. He argues that the incentives of social media companies are misaligned. Their profits come from advertisers, and that maximising their profit means maximising 'engagement' and screen time, which is detrimental to the users. Regulation as proposed in OP is acknowledging the problem, but maybe fixing the underlying cause will involve changing the business model. book link https://stolenfocusbook.com/ https://stolenfocusbook.com/ non-profit aiming to raise awareness of the problem and influence lawmakers https://www.humanetech.com/ https://www.humanetech.com/
• isolli 4y ago
  All the charts stop in 2018, 2019, or at best 2020 for one of them (major depression). I'm deeply worried about what we will find when we extend the charts to include the two years of pandemic.
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  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.
• chimen 4y ago
  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.
  • Shadonototra 4y ago
    > I had to fight with my daughter for TikTok and whatnot, she is only allowed with YouTube due to school/tutorials/classes etc this is very bad, the problem is not tiktok, she finds an escape thanks to tiktok, don't remove that from her talk to her, talk to her teacher if she doesn't have problems at school with other kids > 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. that's an education problem, it is your fault, not theirs or some apps
    • Loughla 4y ago
      >that's an education problem, it is your fault, not theirs or some apps Honestly, do you think parents are able to effectively counter literal billion-dollar companies that pour resources into making sure their apps are engaging (read: addictive)? How? We've taken a hard-line stance with our kids and have explained/educated them on every aspect of social media, attention, and addictive programs. And we're still losing the fight. I genuinely think people massively underestimate how addictive many apps are, especially to developing minds that are constantly seeking novelty.
      • Shadonototra 4y ago
• killjoywashere 4y ago
  In medicine we have a saying: on a scale of 10, death is an 8. It’s not clear to me that suicide is the worst case scenario. For example we have a really good family friend whose daughter has attempted suicide multiple times and has been in an inpatient psychiatric facility for over a year. She’s 13. Her first attempt was at age 11. The state of California is out of beds for this sort of thing so she’s several hundred miles away in another state. Do you think the SWEs, PMs, or executives at FaceBook, Instagram, Snap, or TikTok do volunteer work at these facilities? Do you even think they know where such facilities are?
• indymike 4y ago
  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.
  • hef19898 4y ago
    I have to agree with most of your points, even if they seem to be US problems to a large extent. What social media does, so, IMHO is enabling and aggrevating those problems.
  • jliptzin 4y ago
    Seems very plausible to me, I don’t think this is an unpopular opinion
  • dash2 4y ago
    The article makes a strong claim, based on evidence, that social media and not anything else is the real culprit. Why is it wrong? What evidence supports your alternative proposed causes?
• ofisboy 4y ago
  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.
  • rufius 4y ago
    I have no thought to add here. Just wanted to say I’m sorry to hear that about your sister.
  • tsol 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing that, I think there's a lot to think about there
• Cloudef 4y ago
  More and more people are living as a lower class, relationships are fragile, internet and social media is more integrated into our lives causing shallow over socialization, short attention span and addiction for attention / likes / whatever, broken families / families with mental issues, unstable economy, owning being replaced with renting, loneliness, and increasing race against other people for financial and social survival, honestly it all looks pretty bleak, even more so for the people younger than me. Also for some people the country waging war and spreading propaganda of surrounding countries nearby isn't helping things either.
• SunlightEdge 4y ago
  Should health professionals run a campaign to advise parents not to let their teenage children have mobile phones? Severely resticrt internet access to them?
• amachefe 4y ago
  Yeah, Lets blame it on the social thing aka the present thing. As if it teams mental health has always been great. I guess Social Media started the class cliques too in schools, the competition, the social pressure. Social media started the 24hrs news cycle that is bombing everyone and making it look like the world is ending the next hour.
• dghughes 4y ago
  IRC has been around for decades as have bulletin boards. IRC is real-time versus slower bulletin boards but are graphical. What is it with social media that is so different? I've used per-Internet BBS, IRC, bulletin boards and I feel the difference in social media. The closest I can come is chat rooms in games where there is a mix of anonymity, comradeship, contempt, bullying but all by people there to game. Social media mixes people who normally would not associate all in the same space. Whether it's young and old or left vs right, religious or not.
  • lalopalota 4y ago
    The difference between social media and IRC / IM / fourms is the pervasiveness into all aspects of our lives. The older style communities were focused around specific topics / activites and what was done there didn't spread outside that specific community. Now anything we do is broadcast (& recorded) to anyone and everyone who might take an interest, now or in the future.
    • dghughes 4y ago
      Yes that's true I was overlooking mobile phones with cameras and networking. At least before you could leave your desktop at home and go outside.
• cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Note that most of the graphs show drastically worse mental health situations for girls vs boys. Which accords with my experience as a parent. It's just awful out there for young teen girls, and a horrible experience parenting one. That said, I'd submit that what social media on the phone is for girls... video games are for boys. All encompassing, immersive, 24/7 focus stealer. And Zuckerberg wants to make this markedly worse on both fronts. We need a 'Butlerian Jihad' against this crap. And I say this as a person who came of Internet-age spending all my waking hours on MUDs & MOOs in the 90s. We need to resist the "metaverse" (the commercial weaponization of the "virtual") with all our strength.
• nameless912 4y ago
  While this is absolutely true, there's also another elephant in the room: a global pandemic that's destroyed every kid's routine, robbed 2+ years of their childhood from them, and for many put them severely behind in school and extracurricular achievement. Given all the pressure we put on kids these days to excel at everything in order to ensure their futures, it's not surprising that many are feeling more hopeless and jaded than even the generation that came before them. Frankly, I think all of this jadedness and depression is at least partly a product of the inconceivably high stress of everyday life experienced by millennials and then Gen Z. Most millennials saw all of this before finishing high school: - Gulf war - 9/11 - Wars in Iraq/Afghanistan/etc. - Hurricane Katrina - 2007 housing bubble/fuel shortage - 2008 financial crisis In short, America's "squeaky clean best country in the world" image falling apart; Most Gen Z will have seen all of this before finishing high school: - Sandy Hook shooting, among dozens of others - The election of Donald Trump (who, love him or hate him, is _extremely_ unpopular and seen as an existential threat by most American teenagers) - Rapidly increasing ecological destruction (West coast fires, Australian fires, Hurricane Maria, etc. etc.) - The COVID-19 Pandemic - The murder of George Floyd and many others besides - The unbelievable greed of major corporations financializing nearly every aspect of modern life - (as of a few days ago) the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Casey vs. Planned Parenthood In short, the basic fabric of society starting to unravel. This analysis is obviously extremely slanted by my leftist bias and leaves out plenty of other tragedies and trials I could mention, and I'm not going to deny that. But the fact is that the teenagers I know have zero hope left that the future holds anything better for them. They're inheriting a broken world and they know it; their mental health reflects this. People love to wax philosophical about how "kids these days have no trust in authority or institutions" and...well shit, you wonder why.
  • mythrwy 4y ago
    Gee I wonder what teenagers saw during the black plague or conquest of the Mongols? The problem kids face today isn't problems, those have always existed. The problem today is non problems or problems that don't relate to the person in any way or hypothetical problems that are pumped to cause hysteria for political or economic gains get way too much attention. Which describes most of what you list. People have survived and overcome massive problems in our historic past, but these bullshit "problems" have themselves become a problem and media, social and otherwise is a good part of the cause.
• deleted 4y ago
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• SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  I think the rise of social media and poor mental health has a much simpler explanation and I think due to occams razor it works out: 1) social media incentivizes negative reactions and therefore promotes negativity 2) there is something bad happening all the time that you cannot do anything about For example as an adult does it benefit my mood in any way to hear teenagers aren’t doing ok? Nope. I can’t even do anything about it because I don’t have influence over any teens. But it’s still heavily upvoted on the social media I visit. I imagine the same thing happens on tiktok and Instagram and the like, except teenagers have underdeveloped brains so it’s not like they can even critically think about their consumption.
• charlieyu1 4y ago
  Decades ago people would live happily for a whole life because they don’t have a chance to see how bad the world really was.
• kingkawn 4y ago
  The cause isn’t social media, social media simply prevents the terrible shit going on from being filtered out of their awareness by major news orgs. The cause is rampant disregard for looming environmental devastation, a society that is feudal at best, and the sense that everyone running the world hasn’t got a clue and so has siloed themselves into their small set of responsibilities and disregards every other axis of thought and concern. The kids see what’s wrong. The large scale effort to throw pills and other off the shelf mental health suppressive treatments at them is only masking their legitimate anxiety and reasonable loss of all sense of order and a future within the context presented them by the hapless adults. Kids are spot on to be freaking out, and honestly they would be justified in trying to grind the entire society to a halt until these issues are taken seriously.
• namelessoracle 4y ago
  I think everyone's mental health is going down because of social media. Kids may be getting it worse because parents mental health going down can be doubly impacting on the kids. And teen is where they start using social media themselves.
• psychlops 4y ago
  Aside from the terrible picture this paints and appreciation that this information is coming to light, it is frustrating that the authors chose to paint this as a gendered issue (#1.5) with girls being more impacted than boys. If they had bothered to look up CDC information they would see that teen boys suicide rates doubled during the same time period. Girls and boys choose different ways to deal with depression and the authors focused on reportable depression and signs of self-harm which are biased gendered measurements of depression.
• djoldman 4y ago
  There seems to be a lot of room for controversy when the subject is something that is infeasible to measure due to required sample size, difficulty of recruiting human subjects, and multicollinearity of features. Because of the above, the language of suggestion ("associated with" or "correlated with") dominates these studies. The underlying problem is one of separation: the studies do not say that social media use causes "plummeting teen mental health," nor do they say that social media use alone affects teen mental health. There are some interesting conclusions by the cited studies however: > The 12-month prevalence of major depressive episodes (MDEs) increased from 8.7% in 2005 to 11.3% in 2014 in adolescents and from 8.8% to 9.6% in young adults (both P < .001). The increase was larger and statistically significant only in the age range of 12 to 20 years. [0] > Rates of major depressive episode in the last year increased 52% 2005–2017 (from 8.7% to 13.2%) among adolescents aged 12 to 17 and 63% 2009–2017 (from 8.1% to 13.2%) among young adults 18–25. Serious psychological distress in the last month and suicide-related outcomes (suicidal ideation, plans, attempts, and deaths by suicide) in the last year also increased among young adults 18–25 from 2008–2017 (with a 71% increase in serious psychological distress), with less consistent and weaker increases among adults ages 26 and over. [1] [0] https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/138/6/e20161878/52639/National-Trends-in-the-Prevalence-and-Treatment-of https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/138... [1] https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/abn-abn0000410.pdf https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/abn-abn0000410.pd...
• m1nz1 4y ago
  I presume all the people defending the lords of society's attention are either on payroll or domineered themselves?
• diogenescynic 4y ago
  Instagram and Facebook are probably the biggest culprits, but YouTube is part of the problem as well. It disgusts me how many ads are in kids content on YouTube--and they usually aren't even relevant to kids. Why are you showing car insurance ads on a video for kids? Also, kids have a bigger hurdle to get over than any other generation--housing and college costs keep rising and there's never been more competition in every other aspect of life. Our society has created a toxic winner takes all environment that leads many to despair and depression.
• randomsearch 4y ago
  My succinct explanation for this: “social media extends the school social environment into the home.” Whilst I believe social media is bad for everyone’s health (the unethical manipulation of users by the social media companies), the reason it is so so terrible for teenagers is it removes any possibility of escape for the horrendous “Lord of the flies” that is high school. If I hadn’t been able to escape that environment each evening, I very much doubt I would still be here. And I wasn’t suffering anywhere near as much as many people I knew. High school is a terrible idea, and social media extends and amplifies the horrible behaviours it engenders.
• DrFell 4y ago
  Have you noticed how much content in social media has become either hating those who deserve it, or hyper sentimentality? It’s like manic lizard brain theater.
• antiverse 4y ago
  I'll take the onus and point out there that there's a non-insignificant number of people on this board actively participating and making this even worse, and in some cases gloating about it. When these threads come up, they are either quiet about it, or they would find a way to shift the blame as a means of self-defense (either conscious or not). Keep this in mind next time you read a thread about salaries and how so-and-so company is paying $600k+ TC for new grads and you're "leaving money on the table."
• cdkmoose 4y ago
  I don't think we have anything going on right now that we haven't had in the past. global health issues, national and global financial issues, war, threats of terrorism,... have all existed the past. What we have now is a world of social media that amplifies the issues, often negatively, to the point of overwhelming psychological impact. Social media is what is pushing us over the edge.
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  How much and how well were we measuring mental health - teens or otherwise - prior to the last decade or so? We are what we consume - food or content. That said, imagine being young and looking back 20+ yrs. Tech bubble burst, 9/11, housing bubble burst, an unproductive gov, an unsupportive social infrastructure, etc. Imagine thinking that past is your future. But sure, let the (do nothing) status quo powers blame social media. How convenient.
  • ThalesX 4y ago
    > We are what we consume - food or content. That said, imagine being young and looking back 20+ yrs. Tech bubble burst, 9/11, housing bubble burst, an unproductive gov, an unsupportive social infrastructure, etc. When I was young and without social media, with NATO bombing a neighboring country, I heard a couple of times from some concerned adults about the entire situation. Now, I'd be flooded with images of the destruction, probably blamed for it somehow, told I'm not doing enough to stop it. They feel like vastly different worlds.
    • chiefalchemist 4y ago
      Agreed. But the problem isn't social media. The root problem is war, as well as a media that knows "hyperbole sells".
• alfor 4y ago
  Kids used to play together outside, unsupervised, undirected play, all the time. 2022, I discovers after two year livin there that some of my neighbors had kids. I saw them 5sec from the house to the car.
• carlgreene 4y ago
  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.
  • standardUser 4y ago
    Boomers wrecked the world and young people know they need to fix it. Sorry it can't just all be sunshine and roses like you prefer, but women in this country are about to lose a fundamental human right, so maybe "looking on the bright side" is not the appropriate disposition for these times.
    • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
      Well maybe only 50% of women
      • standardUser 4y ago
        At least until the next case hits SCOTUS. With a far-right majority like that, anything is possible.
    • carlgreene 4y ago
      Sure it is. It mostly always is. Of course we have more work to do for women, POCs, whatever the other oppressed groups are out there, but ignoring and brushing off the progress made in the last century is sad. We've made great strides and will continue to.
• spywaregorilla 4y ago
  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
• nottorp 4y ago
  The conclusions sound somewhat legit, however the proposed solution is just basic surveillance state. Require ID to access a web site.
• incomingpain 4y ago
  >There is an emerging consensus that the correlation is in the ballpark of r = .10 to r = .15. A ballpark figure for the correlation just for girls is roughly r = .15 to r = .22 Time to go back to the drawing board. If your correlation is so small then social media isn't the problem. Social media is a nice scapegoat but you literally disprove yourself if your correlation is so low. >The “eyewitness testimony” confirms the academic findings: social media is a culprit. Social sciences are notoriously bad for this. When you fail at your study with really bad correlations that should get you laughed at in any other legitimate science. You then go to the very scientific 'eyewitness testimony' this isn't laughable anymore, this is political. You are writing a study with a false conclusion with political motivation behind it. This is offensive, quite unlike Haidt. >. Researchers and spokespeople for the major platforms who tell you that the evidence is “inconclusive” or that the effect sizes are “too small” should be asked directly: “OK, then what do YOU think caused this?” Oh this is a simple one. The correlation between measurements of these kids and political polarization matches up quite a bit more than social media. This all derives from identity politics. Obama as 'first black president' was inevitably going to have a identity politics factor. There will always be consequences with this. The measurements detected in children at the same as adults. Page 3 indicates a sharp rise since 2009. Instagram doesn't even launch until 2010 and obviously it didn't just go straight to being ultra popular. It wasn't until years later did really the big social media boom happen. Hence why social media correlation is so poor. Not to mention early social media wasn't quite the toxic pit that it is today. Identity politics is toxic. No doubt all these children were sitting in classes hearing all about Obama and his identity politics. Doesnt even matter which way it rolls, perhaps they are in texas learning about how terrible obama is... doesn't matter. Though I would bet most teachers were pro-obama. But once you pop that cork... you also have all the other politics coming through. Climate change no doubt being taught in schools. LGBT, Antiracism... all those poor white kids are oppressing their black friends... But all of these are politically charged subjects that are not getting the nuance that the pundits give them. Their kindergarten teacher in everywhere except florida get to discuss gender and race issues these far too complicated subjects with kids. What do you expect to happen? That's the danger of identity politics. It's insidious. It spreads like wild fire and leaves destruction in its path. It begets more identity politics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtWAmhOOEDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtWAmhOOEDI Obama is a very smart dude who saw the consequences and this 'white male' problem but that's how the identity politics end. Working together again. You need to extend that hand to those 'white supremacists'. But what hand has been offered to date? https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53844037 https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53844037 Years later... Obama isn't offering his hand. He's 'blasting' trump. Without someone bringing both parties back to the table and getting to talk to each other again. This inevitably will result in far more violence. Yes the USA has had 2+ years of civil unrest and violence already. It's a matter of time it goes well beyond.
• spicy_tendies 4y ago
  b
• deleted 4y ago
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• spicy_tendies 4y ago
  I really think the real cause in anxiety and depression are more related to climate change, corporate greed, work culture, inflation, the pandemic, and war. Social media just informs teens the reality of these issues and it's depressing as fuck.
• mirrorlake 4y ago
  Frequent phone notifications, social media aside, must have some negative impact on quality of life. In the worst cases, I've worked with people who had notifications go off every 2-3 minutes. I can't help but assume this destroys their ability to focus and turns every mental task into a herculean effort as they must backtrack so frequently. Every context switch makes them forget what we spoke about, or what we were working on. Notifications turn their phones into literal torture devices. Disable as many notifications as humanly possible, and make it the highest priority to reduce how many times per day your phone interrupts you.
  • ThalesX 4y ago
    I've never been as afraid in a car as when my "crypto-bro" cousin picked me up to drive 3 hours and he basically had a scrolling wall of notifications and tried to 'absorb' as much as possible; news, crypto, memes, stocks, business, you name it... horrible 5 hours.
• jeffpalmdev 4y ago
  Is social media the inevitable manifestation of computing technology evolving at an exponentially faster rate than our biology? I feel like we are we going to remember these days as the 'Wild Wild West' of unregulated social media, and the impact it's having on kids is tragic.
• sigspec 4y ago
  I have an 11 and 9 year old. They don't have phones. They do have devices, mostly for Minecraft. They are restricted with parental controls and time limits. They do not have unrestrained internet access and YouTube is completely blocked. As a parent I find myself frustrated at the filtering options and conflicted by my close-fistedness. They moan every day that they are the only one in their class that doesn't have a phone, can't be on TikTok, can't watch Squid Games, etc. Parents are just throwing the entirety of the internet at their children and I'm left trying to explain to two kids why I don't think it's a good idea. Am I wrong? Am I just creating an environment of anxiety? God, being a kid in 2020 is different than it was in the 80s/90s
  • brimble 4y ago
    > Am I wrong? Am I just creating an environment of anxiety? No. Parenting and schools have gone completely to hell. You're not wrong, everyone else is. I still can't believe schools started letting kids carry their cell phones with them to class all day. As early as elementary school. WTF. For my part, I figure my kids can have an unrestricted cell phone (and so, unrestricted Internet) as soon as they can pay for the device and plan on their own. If they can hold down a job to cover the bill, they can probably handle it. Fuck giving 8-year-olds personal smartphones. Or even 12-year-olds. That's insane.
  • jimmyjazz14 4y ago
    I completely agree but it seems like the rest of the world including my kids school makes this work hard. You are smart to keep the Youtube pandoras box from opening.
• qiskit 4y ago
  That's because politics became injected into social media/internet. The problem isn't social media per se, it's politics, news, media, etc that has overrun social media in the past 15 years. Before Obama, the internet and social media was place for young people to goof off. Then obama used youtube/etc to reach young people and then the lgbt/news/media/leftists went crazy on social media paving the way for Trump - which strangely became a problem. Before Trump arrived, politicians/lgbt/news/media/leftists destroying teens mental health was celebrated on social media/internet. Of course nobody in the senate or government cares one lick about teens' mental health. They are only interested in better controlling social media to destroy teens' mental health for their own agenda. I've advocated for social media to ban all politics and news. Lets see how that affects people's mental health. Or better yet, remove all politics and news from their recommendations or frontpage. Instead, social media/tech run "get out the vote" campaigns, lift "authoritative" voices and inject politics/news into everyone's lives.
  • solenoidalslide 4y ago
    The fact that people exist who actually blame Obama should be proof enough that our society was mentally ill far before social media.
    • qiskit 4y ago
      > The fact that people exist who actually blame Obama I don't blame Obama. I supported him. My point isn't that Obama is the problem, my point is that politics is the problem. > should be proof enough that our society was mentally ill far before social media. That's the point. Politics was toxic and has always been. Politics, the source of toxicity, got injected into social media starting with Obama. Then the lgbt/news/leftists ran with it and injected more toxicity. Which led to an opportunist like Trump taking advantage and injecting even more toxicity. Once again, politics is the toxic agent that is hurting people on social media. Not social media itself.
• timst4 4y ago
  Lots of politically charged comments here, but I actually work with students on a daily basis. It’s not about politics, people. Social media does play a role, but not in the way most would argue. All those saying it is an addiction are correct, but I would expand it to include most of the teen internet as well. The thing is they don’t use technology like you do. They are CONSUMED by digital media if they don’t receive boundaries from home. Their lives are dominated by the virtual - memes, tiktok, news, Netflix, YouTube and they have been since an early age. They know this is not a healthy lifestyle and yet they cannot tear themselves away. Many are hopelessly addicted to the point of sacrificing sleep, food, and relationships to technology addiction. Meanwhile, most teenagers are well aware of the problems they will inherit (climate, political divide, cost of living, etc) from the previous generations. I had to talk 7th graders off of a ledge this week after one student started a discussion about the latest IPCC report. However this alone isn’t the problem. It is the vast DISJUNCTION between these two worlds that causes them stress. They have been raised by predatory technology into a world full of greed and a collapsing ecosystem. They are caught between virtual consumerist addiction and despair about reality on a daily basis. Super heavy stuff for anyone to deal with.
  • antiverse 4y ago
    >but I actually work with students on a daily basis. I hate to be the one but what's your sample count? What does, "I actually work with students on a daily basis" mean? Are you a teacher in a high school? University? Do they intern/co-op at your company? I attend a few schools for part-time things here and there, and I'm exposed to students aged 14-70 regularly. Politics are involved as a means of an identity, even if they realize that they are powerless to do anything. The lack of critical thinking for any given saucy subject (most recently see Roe vs Wade) means that the opinions people hold are generally prepackaged from whatever sources they obtained them from and are internally congruent† - they know things here and there about a given subject, but externally nonsensical given the situation that the person is in and what they ought to focus their attention/time towards - they are, for lack of a better term, wasting their precious time away getting baited by professional media con people with attention grabbing headlines and memes. † Best seen in person as a dialogue between two or more people where you're aware that their source material was written by one person in an essay (or a tweet roll) form, but has been changed to be a kind of a ping-ponged conversation where each person takes a turn to continue the over all narrative. (Better put: one big agreeable circle-jerk.)
• _qvsf 4y ago
  I will start this off by saying I am a teen (14) and have suffered a unstable upbringing in the events of my childhood (mother was abusive). I have had unmonitored internet access from the age of I think 5, and for what it is, I at least didn't end up as bad as some others did. I was born in the last generation that parents bought their kids toys and let them watch TV, so you could imagine I was pissed off as much as the rest of you are about young kids being in a tablet 24/7. I grew up with older games and computers and the likes and therefore have developed a fondness for older games, music, website design, culture and whatever else (early 2000s to early 2010s), and I say that to give you context as to why I don't mindlessly browse social media like the rest of my generation does the way I've seen them. I browse forums, websites like this, chat with people on discord about likeminded stuff (trust me, I would love to use Matrix if all my friends did too) and I never fell for the social media bullshit despite how much pressure I get to fall into it because of every other kid I've known being literally dependent on it (Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok as of recently and I fucking hate them all with a burning passion for ruining my generation), Twitter is for the part of my generation that thinks they're "different" but essentially they're just the same exact shit with the added pronouns and pride flag profile pictures. I have read a lot and talked to people my age personally to understand what exactly it is that promotes derogatory mental health, and it's the fact usually that nobody cares anymore. People harass over opinions about them harassing others, "diversity" being pushed to ruin mental health even more and make people believe things about them that aren't true at all and make it their entire personality, the music my generation listens to promotes violence, unrest, "making money" which is just putting profits over values, and "getting p*ssy" which is literally just objectifying women more than ever (I'm not even gonna talk about how much female rappers influence this), use of drugs like nicotine and marijuana is being pushed more than ever and I know people as young as 16 who literally depend on them, social media like TikTok is just prime ways to serve them propaganda and useless bullshit nobody cares about, On top of all that, they barely have any interests of their own due to the fact their free thinking has been impaired because they're all so used to being spoonfed content by a centralized media platform on a phone and I am so glad I didn't fall for any of that shit. I love computers and stuff like Linux, I love old games (half life, doom, sonic, sims 2&3, team fortress, guitar hero), I listen to metal (Killswitch Engage is my favorite band of all time) and my free time is usually occupied by that or talking to my friends, and I guarantee you if you got someone else my age to try and write about this, they'd say back "bruh I ain't even tryna do all that right now this shit all cap". School system, home life for my generation, etc are problems, but if anyone wants to hear my perspective on those issues please ask me in the replies. Please excuse any dumb phrases, swear words or crappy grammar btw.
• tmaly 4y ago
  This is not unlike dungeons and dragons in the 70s Or Atari / Nintendo in the 80s
• trapatsas 4y ago
  What I see here is a bunch of adults pretending to understand what is best for their kids. Really unpopular opinion: you all don’t know shit.
• leach 4y ago
  I'm in my mid twenties, I grew up with social media evolving around me and quit it during the pandemic in 2020. I still use reddit every now and then but stopped commenting and reading comments besides on technical subreddits or gaming ones. I detest social media, I think even though it may not be the root cause as others have pointed out it's definitely amplifying the underlying issues. I think I can sum up my detest for it in one simple statement, it's all fake. I know people who will delete a post on instagram if it doesn't get enough "likes". I put likes in quotes because what do likes even mean? Likes are just people scrolling through their timeline and liking something from whoever their friends with. They are essentially meaningless, they add no value to your life and just feed an arbitrary algorithm that runs on a positive feedback loop. So why do people obsess over them to the point of deleting content if they do not receive the "correct" amount of likes. Meanwhile the actual currency of social media is really just attention. Every single service is fighting for your attention. More eyes on the timeline means more eyes on ads. So they create the whole experience of the network around keeping you on it. Suddenly you don't see content you may be interested in, rather you start seeing content that will keep you hooked. Just one more post, one more tweet, one more tik tok. Suddenly you've spent an hour of your life doing nothing besides consuming mediocre content. This comment is getting too long and ranty, and doesn't even touch on the way the companies will prime your emotional state to be more receptive to whatever ad they want to show you. Adults have problems with social media and addiction to it, there is absolutely no reason a child should be consuming these addictive apps. They are a net negative on society, any perceived "connection" they supposedly give is vapid and fleeting and quickly overwhelmed by the negatives they push down the timeline.
• ellopoppit 4y ago
  Wonder how this compares to mental health across all age groups? Seems like its deteriorating across the board for similar reasons
• notacoward 4y ago
  The top comment purports to represent an unpopular opinion, but I'll offer one that's even less likely to appeal. Maybe kids would be less likely to over-engage with computers and what's behind them if they didn't see their parents doing exactly that. There are plenty of adults who can barely take their eyes off their phones even while driving. There are even more who work long hours with computers, but to anyone not looking directly at the screen a debugging session can be indistinguishable from a YouTube video binge. Sometimes there really isn't that much difference. All of the parents talking about how hard it is to enforce screen-time rules or limits should think very hard about what the time they spent typing those comments might look like to others. Addendum: even when kids don't directly witness parents' social-media use, they often become aware of it in other ways. If every dinner-table or in-the-car conversation starts with "I saw this great post on Facebook" or "somebody on Hacker News said" they can figure out what's going on. When parents' beliefs or mood are obviously affected by online events, they see that too and it becomes normalized. Again, people should think carefully about the example - as well as the rules - that they set.
• unrealp 4y ago
  1. life has gone better based on data - this means there is more opportunity to being successful. if you are still not successful then it becomes your problem. it is more like lost opportunity has more cost in today's world. 2. human mind scales input to output - emotional output range is fixed. if input is low, we become more sensitive, thereby retaining same emotional output range. in today's better society, people are becoming more sensitive due to this reason, so with higher sensitivity you react to more things (and random things like what you see on social media). 3. we disorderize more - once we label as (depressed/anxious....) it becomes a self-fulfulling profecy. 4. social media - having lot of random stuff - doesnt help to create stream of consciousness story. its rathere mix of random unconnected happenings.
• PickledHotdog 4y ago
  Hrm, US government seems to be saying "Hey! Look over there!" Surely it's not rising inequality, inaction on climate, stagnating wages, less security in work, out of control cost of living, the constant warmongering, the dogged commitment to the imperial system, lack of universal healthcare or any of that. It's social media! (Or maybe it's that kids in the US can see the universal healthcare in other countries and that's what's making them depressed?)
• isitmadeofglass 4y ago
  I wish these studies would stop working with the base assumption of “we know social media is bad, we just have to prove it”. I’m not saying this conclusion is wrong, but when you start with that biased view, you end up doing bad science. It’s not enough to prove correlation, you need to prove causation. Kids who are depressed have more time on their hands, fewer friends, fewer activities, it’s almost a given that their social media consumption must be higher even if there is no effect. But the studies never seem to spend much time considering this because they aren’t trying to figure out if social media is bad for mental health, they already decided this is the case and they are just gathering ammonitikn for their predefined conclusion.