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I don't have any answers to the problem but teen mental health issues have grown quite a lot since social media. My wife works in PICU and she has never seen s

I don't have any answers to the problem but teen mental health issues have grown quite a lot since social media. My wife works in PICU and she has never seen so many suicide attempts in all her career (going back to 2006) as she has in past few years. She talks to other doctors who come from other areas and their concerns/experiences are the same. I feel like every week she is talking to me about some new kid's attempt.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> My wife works in PICU and she has never seen so many suicide attempts in all her career (going back to 2006) as she has in past few years. Social media has been around a lot longer than the last few years. (In fact, while they weren’t even the first wave of widely-used-by-young-people social media, both Twitter and Facebook opened to the public in 2006.) There have been a few major events that have occurred in the last few years, though, that aren’t social media that might relate to the effect under consideration.
- whats_a_quasar 4y ago
  I will continue posting links to Jonathan Haidt's review docs all over this thread. Social media and smartphones became widespread in the early 2010s, and that's exactly when teen suicides started rising. [1] COVID does not appear to have significantly affected teen mental health [2] If you have evidence that something else is driving the rise in teen suicide rates, I'd love to see it. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill... [2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Social media and smartphones became widespread in the early 2010s Among adults (or in “household” surveys where adults were surveyed? Sure, but the majority of teen internet users were using “social networking sites” in 2006.) [0] If your contention is that adult social media use is driving teen suicide rates…well, that’s actually more plausible than teen use, but none of the policy responses address that. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/05/21/part-1-teens-and-social-media-use/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/05/21/part-1-teens...
    - Scalestein 4y ago
      It isn't just social media, it is the combination of social media and smartphones. This makes social media far more pervasive in a teen's life. See section 6[0] where they discuss how mental health declines correlating with Facebook coming to college campuses and with high speed internet arriving in cities for some evidence. [0] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
    - lolinder 4y ago
      > the majority of teen internet users This stat can't be meaningfully compared to teen suicide rates because the latter is across all teens, regardless of online/offline status. If the number of "online" teens grew dramatically between 2006 and 2013 (as I suspect it did), then the relative change in percentage of "online" teens on social media would be a fraction of the much larger change in teens in general. My personal experience growing up around then is that a majority of my peers weren't deep in social media and smartphone use until well into the 2010s. I didn't have a smartphone when I graduated high school in the early 2010s, and I certainly wasn't an outlier at the time.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    I think they were referring to lockdowns, not covid. Kids weren't really affected by covid, but lockdowns and school closures were massive. To see if there was an effect on this from that you'd have to account for duration and severeness of lockdowns in various places, not look at overall rates.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > I think they were referring to lockdowns, not covid. Both were among (but not, even together, the totality of) the things I was referring to. > Kids weren't really affected by covid A massive wave of death, incapacitation, and serious illness that very likely struck sonewhete in their families? Kids may not have had particularly severe acute health cobsequences from COVID, but that doesn't mean they weren't affected by it.
    - whats_a_quasar 4y ago
      The link I posted is data for the change in teen mental health between 2019 and 2021. The data incorporates all of the effects of COVID, Lockdowns and school closures, and does not show a significant change from pre-pandemic trends. I was using "COVID" as a shorthand for all of the changes during the pandemic.
      - Izkata 4y ago
        > The link I posted is data for the change in teen mental health between 2019 and 2021. The data incorporates all of the effects of COVID, Lockdowns and school closures Yes, my point is that is exactly the problem with your data. It needs to be broken down by location to account for differences in lockdowns and school closures, to claim there was any or no effect.
  - WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
    > If you have evidence that something else is driving the rise in teen suicide rates, I'd love to see it. Will reality do? Over recent generations, kids have systematically been robbed of critical developmental environments - primarily they are denied regular hours of unsupervised alone/peer time and expansive areas to free range. The environments that kids absolutely need to develop social and problem solving skills have been replaced with ceaseless supervision, ceaseless containment and a soundtrack of false messaging about risk from stranger kidnapping (spoiler: FBI stats are clear that kids aren't and haven't been at meaningful risk of stranger kidnappings). At the edges of all that are justice systems/LEO/authority that stand ever-ready to transform routine stupid transgressions into forever penalties that systemically ruin future life/job/housing opportunities. We adults have erased their life prep and endlessly notched up pressure on every front. What else do we expect to follow that except poor mental health? As for social media's part, one has to take a lot of nuance out of teen mental health studies to single out SM as the primary driver of bad mental health. ref: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/21/blaming-social-media-for-suicide-is-taking-the-easy-and-likely-wrong-way-out/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/21/blaming-social-media-for...
- philwelch 4y ago
  > Social media has been around a lot longer than the last few years. Setting aside the (valid and important) point about the lockdowns, it also took time for social media to evolve into its current form. Snapchat and Vine came out in the early 10’s and TikTok in 2017. Twitter has never been especially widely used; it has outsized influence because corporate media types use it, but it’s not what the masses are scrolling. Social media might not be new, but the short-form video style of social media has taken off a ton in the past decade. At the risk of speculation, I’d also surmise that this is a major part of the problem. Humans have a primal desire to interact face to face. Full motion video of people talking to the camera is sort of a junk food version of human interaction. It’s the same reason watching people play video games on Twitch is more engaging when you can see their face in the corner of the screen, and why so many YouTube thumbnails include some recognizable face either looking into the camera or expressing an emotion. Photos and text don’t scratch the same itch, so they’re less addictive. (Some people can be addicted to text-based social media. I am one of these people. But we were the ones who got addicted to webforums and Usenet; probably not the typical user.)

dragonwriter 4y ago

> My wife works in PICU and she has never seen so many suicide attempts in all her career (going back to 2006) as she has in past few years. Social media has been around a lot longer than the last few years. (In fact, while they weren’t even the first wave of widely-used-by-young-people social media, both Twitter and Facebook opened to the public in 2006.) There have been a few major events that have occurred in the last few years, though, that aren’t social media that might relate to the effect under consideration.

whats_a_quasar 4y ago
I will continue posting links to Jonathan Haidt's review docs all over this thread. Social media and smartphones became widespread in the early 2010s, and that's exactly when teen suicides started rising. [1] COVID does not appear to have significantly affected teen mental health [2] If you have evidence that something else is driving the rise in teen suicide rates, I'd love to see it. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill... [2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Social media and smartphones became widespread in the early 2010s Among adults (or in “household” surveys where adults were surveyed? Sure, but the majority of teen internet users were using “social networking sites” in 2006.) [0] If your contention is that adult social media use is driving teen suicide rates…well, that’s actually more plausible than teen use, but none of the policy responses address that. [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/05/21/part-1-teens-and-social-media-use/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/05/21/part-1-teens...
  - Scalestein 4y ago
    It isn't just social media, it is the combination of social media and smartphones. This makes social media far more pervasive in a teen's life. See section 6[0] where they discuss how mental health declines correlating with Facebook coming to college campuses and with high speed internet arriving in cities for some evidence. [0] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
  - lolinder 4y ago
    > the majority of teen internet users This stat can't be meaningfully compared to teen suicide rates because the latter is across all teens, regardless of online/offline status. If the number of "online" teens grew dramatically between 2006 and 2013 (as I suspect it did), then the relative change in percentage of "online" teens on social media would be a fraction of the much larger change in teens in general. My personal experience growing up around then is that a majority of my peers weren't deep in social media and smartphone use until well into the 2010s. I didn't have a smartphone when I graduated high school in the early 2010s, and I certainly wasn't an outlier at the time.
- Izkata 4y ago
  I think they were referring to lockdowns, not covid. Kids weren't really affected by covid, but lockdowns and school closures were massive. To see if there was an effect on this from that you'd have to account for duration and severeness of lockdowns in various places, not look at overall rates.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > I think they were referring to lockdowns, not covid. Both were among (but not, even together, the totality of) the things I was referring to. > Kids weren't really affected by covid A massive wave of death, incapacitation, and serious illness that very likely struck sonewhete in their families? Kids may not have had particularly severe acute health cobsequences from COVID, but that doesn't mean they weren't affected by it.
  - whats_a_quasar 4y ago
    The link I posted is data for the change in teen mental health between 2019 and 2021. The data incorporates all of the effects of COVID, Lockdowns and school closures, and does not show a significant change from pre-pandemic trends. I was using "COVID" as a shorthand for all of the changes during the pandemic.
    - Izkata 4y ago
      > The link I posted is data for the change in teen mental health between 2019 and 2021. The data incorporates all of the effects of COVID, Lockdowns and school closures Yes, my point is that is exactly the problem with your data. It needs to be broken down by location to account for differences in lockdowns and school closures, to claim there was any or no effect.
- WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
  > If you have evidence that something else is driving the rise in teen suicide rates, I'd love to see it. Will reality do? Over recent generations, kids have systematically been robbed of critical developmental environments - primarily they are denied regular hours of unsupervised alone/peer time and expansive areas to free range. The environments that kids absolutely need to develop social and problem solving skills have been replaced with ceaseless supervision, ceaseless containment and a soundtrack of false messaging about risk from stranger kidnapping (spoiler: FBI stats are clear that kids aren't and haven't been at meaningful risk of stranger kidnappings). At the edges of all that are justice systems/LEO/authority that stand ever-ready to transform routine stupid transgressions into forever penalties that systemically ruin future life/job/housing opportunities. We adults have erased their life prep and endlessly notched up pressure on every front. What else do we expect to follow that except poor mental health? As for social media's part, one has to take a lot of nuance out of teen mental health studies to single out SM as the primary driver of bad mental health. ref: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/21/blaming-social-media-for-suicide-is-taking-the-easy-and-likely-wrong-way-out/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/21/blaming-social-media-for...
philwelch 4y ago
> Social media has been around a lot longer than the last few years. Setting aside the (valid and important) point about the lockdowns, it also took time for social media to evolve into its current form. Snapchat and Vine came out in the early 10’s and TikTok in 2017. Twitter has never been especially widely used; it has outsized influence because corporate media types use it, but it’s not what the masses are scrolling. Social media might not be new, but the short-form video style of social media has taken off a ton in the past decade. At the risk of speculation, I’d also surmise that this is a major part of the problem. Humans have a primal desire to interact face to face. Full motion video of people talking to the camera is sort of a junk food version of human interaction. It’s the same reason watching people play video games on Twitch is more engaging when you can see their face in the corner of the screen, and why so many YouTube thumbnails include some recognizable face either looking into the camera or expressing an emotion. Photos and text don’t scratch the same itch, so they’re less addictive. (Some people can be addicted to text-based social media. I am one of these people. But we were the ones who got addicted to webforums and Usenet; probably not the typical user.)