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To contrast: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-illness-part-one https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-il... Salien
by 23B1 4y ago
To contrast:
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-illness-part-one https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-il...
Salient points:
In sum, all five Anglosphere countries [US, UK, CA, AUS, NZ] exhibit the same basic pattern:
A) A substantial increase in adolescent anxiety and depression rates begins in the early 2010s.
B) A substantial increase in adolescent self-harm rates or psychiatric hospitalizations begins in the early 2010s.
C) The increases are larger for girls than for boys (in absolute terms).
D) The increases are larger for Gen Z than for older generations (in absolute terms).
Why did this happen in the same way at the same time in five different countries? What could have affected girls around the English-speaking world so strongly and in such a synchronized way?
[...]
At this point, there is only one theory we know of that can explain why the same thing happened to girls in so many countries at the same time: the rapid global movement from flip phones (where you can’t do social media) to smartphones and the phone-based childhood. The first smartphone with a front-facing camera (the iPhone 4) came out in 2010, just as teens were trading in their flip phones for smartphones in large numbers. (Few teens owned an iPhone in its first few years). Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, which gave the platform a huge boost in publicity and users. So 2012 was the first year that very large numbers of girls in the developed world were spending hours each day posting photos of themselves and scrolling through hundreds of carefully edited photos of other girls.
- superkuh 4y agoOh, you mean so after the global economy tanked things got worse? And you're deciding to blame this on smart phones? And only smart phones. Because their screens are somehow more magically bad than say, a desktop computer.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Geezus-42 4y agoHow many times has the economy tanked in the past? How many of those times did we see the same effect?
- baxtr 4y agoHow many times have we measured? Don’t have an opinion, just curious.
- tokai 4y agoAs it often is with social studies the evidence is not bullet proof, but it seems that there is a general consensus that economic crisis is bad for mental health outcomes in a population. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-016-2720-y https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s... https://journals.lww.com/co-psychiatry/Abstract/2010/03000/Economic_crisis_and_mental_health.9.aspx https://journals.lww.com/co-psychiatry/Abstract/2010/03000/E... https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-psychiatric-sciences/article/impact-of-economic-crises-on-mental-health-care-a-systematic-review/0476353ACDD16BF4B4DBC990E5B34620 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-psy... https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-016-2720-y https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
- cwmoore 4y agoThe global economy has tanked many times. Smartphones are just the once. Your argument is that having something new you're nearly always conscious of has no impact?
- superkuh 4y agoExactly my point. Since 2008 it's been all downhill. You may have been insulated from the impacts of the series of crises is but I can assure you it's been pretty stressful for most people.
- PKop 4y agoDo you think the growth of rates of depression and anxiety do not cut across socioeconomic groups? Doesn't it seem the rate of growth of these mental conditions outpaces any increase in poverty or economic strain? Presumably even those who "have been insulated from the impacts of the series of crises" are amongst the increase in teen mental illness. Everything isn't just economic phenomena.
- adamisom 4y agoafter all, 15 year old girls’ top concern is how the 2008 crisis hit them
- smeej 4y agoWow. This just made me realize today's 15yo girls were born in 2008.
- Apocryphon 4y agoI mean isn’t the seemingly unaffordability of U.S. housing, skyrocketing student debt, race to the bottom, etc. rooted in the inequality that has festered since 2008, which is why you see articles about how young people are burning out early or even starting to avoid college?
- superkuh 4y agoYou forget that those 15 year old girl's lives are dependent on their 40 year old parent's lives which have been drastically impacted in terms of ability to provide a "good" life for their children.
- pydry 4y agoWhy would the state of the global economy affect adolescents in particular and girls in particular? Also why didn't it get better when the economy improved?
- api 4y agoThe only wrinkle here is that if you go back to the 1970s and 1980s the teen suicide rate goes way up. In reality it seems like the second half of the 1990s until roughly 2010 were the anomaly. We had what seems like a golden age for teens where suicide and mental illness were lower in those years and may just be returning to the mean. I am not arguing that social media on phones is good or that it couldn’t be part of the problem, just that the more data I see going further back the more it looks like there are other things involved too. I was a teen during precisely that golden age. I was isolated and kind of depressed as a teen but I also remember a ton of interesting culture that really made me feel like there was something to live for. The three standouts in my memory were the great music, the teen and youth subcultures (which back then really were kind of underground), and the incredible frontier feeling of BBSes and then the early Internet. If I were a teen today I have no idea what would feel like that. There just seems to be nothing. The music is awful. The movies are all remakes and comic book crap. The experience of the Internet is just scrolling social media. All subcultures have been publicized and commoditized. Maybe someone actually living it can contradict me. I hope I’m just old but it really does look bleak.
- bruce343434 4y ago> If I were a teen today I have no idea what would feel like that AI doing my homework (and my future career)
- sxyuan 4y agoA wrinkle to your wrinkle: a cursory glance at this source [1] suggests that the rise of adolescent suicide in the 1970s and 1980s was greater among young men, which is the opposite of what we're seeing today. [1] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.pu.08.050187.002221 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.pu.08....
- smeej 4y agoWow, if those were golden years, my heart breaks for today's teens. Of the 50 people I finished 8th grade with in the epitome of upper middle class suburbia, 3 of them had died by suicide by the time the rest of us were finishing high school, and they weren't the last. It seemed like an age where problems existed, but were deeply shameful, deeply hidden, and deeply isolating.
- Bukhmanizer 4y agoJonathan Haidt’s analyses are absolute garbage. I see this constantly in his work, he writes as though his argument is driven by data, but if you look closely, the two are often barely related. > At this point, there is only one theory we know of that can explain why the same thing happened to girls in so many countries at the same time Ok this is what I mean. The idea that “there is only one theory” is something that’s 100% his opinion (and also, very obviously the opinion he came into the analysis to start with) yet he presents it as something that the royal “We” have agreed upon. There are hundreds or thousands of theories one could posit about this trend. One of which is the very obvious fact that attitudes towards mental health are changing. I went to school in the mid-2000s. I knew so many people who attempted suicide none of whom were ever hospitalized for it.
- 23B1 4y agoI think you're probably right in that there's no one answer, but when we expand our thinking to encompass the impacts the Information Age has had on a number of other aspects of society – politics, learning, business, language, the economy – it's reasonable to suspect some correlation.
- starkd 4y agoBut stating an opinion as fact is not evidence he thinks there is truly only one theory. It is just how many people talk. Everyone knows he means there is only one theory that he can think of to explain it.
- Bukhmanizer 4y agoIt’s not how scientists talk. And stating your opinion as fact when you’re a hugely influential social psychologist is really bad.
- ridgeguy 4y agoA fair cautionary statement. But the substack post (and presumably its analysis) is by Zach Rausch. As Haidt writes in the intro: >The rest of this post is Part 1 of Zach’s report, in his voice. Haidt hired Rausch as a research assistant, so caveats, but it's not actually Haidt's analysis.
- jiggywiggy 4y agoData is tricky. Many things happened the last decades to account for such things. It's hard to solely blame it on phones with cameras and Instagram. Although it's clear the huge impact it has. We already had social media like msn and pre fb like sites before 2010 that could have had similar effects. Of course fb funded research shows a net positive. And most teenagers already switched to more messy platforms like Snapchat a long time ago. Anxiety is also higher in boys which have less visual pressure. Things like older parent and excessive nurturing and overbearing parents also seem to play a big part. As well as the rise of victim culture, which also might have to do with social media.
- starkd 4y agoAlso, boys are not less affected by this than girls. They are just affected in different ways. They are more likely to act out in anti-social ways.
- jiggywiggy 4y agoThey are less affected by Instagram perfect images and social pressure like girls are. That's why I think it's more then just that.
- lostmsu 4y ago> They are more likely to act out in anti-social ways. Sounds like a healthy reaction to a society, that puts its media presence ahead of actual wellbeing.
- mike_hearn 4y agoYou have to be careful with that analysis. There are at least three issues: 1. The time period over which he looks is extremely short. Although the change in data looks compelling, I'd really want to see more than just a few years of "normal" levels to be convinced there's really a major deviation from the norm. 2. The argument starts by asserting a correlation (rollout of smart phones, change in the data) but then moves smoothly to a different correlation (social media usage, change in the data). 3. The biggest problem: this is all social science. Someone took a close look at the studies Haidt is using to try and prove a link to social media specifically (vs other causes) and discovered they're of the sort of quality we've come to expect from the field, dominated by tiny unrepresentative samples, bad methodologies, bad statistics and so on. https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evidence-that-social-media-is-causing-the-teen-mental-health-crisis/ https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide... To his credit I found this rebuttal on Haidt's Twitter feed and he promises a response. Unfortunately, judging from his tweets so far, that response might not be convincing: Haidt: "Brown requires a standard of proof not appropriate for a public health crisis" Reply from someone on Twitter: "Oh no, that's a bad argument I think! We shouldn't be calling for lower standards of evidence during a public health crisis, but the inverse" Haidt: "Aaron has set his skepticism meter so high that he says none of the 300 studies in the google doc are valid. That is too high. No studies pass muster?" I don't think Brown actually does assert all 300 are invalid, just that he checked quite a few and none of the ones he spot checked were valid. But this is a way of thinking that crops up all the time in academic work. Back when I was reviewing COVID papers I was constantly hitting this kind type of assumption in the public health space, that quantity is some proxy/substitute for quality, or that you don't need to verify the quality of studies you're citing because they can't all be wrong, or (worst of all) that because a problem seems important the standard of evidence should be low. It's totally possible that there is an abnormal increase in teen mental health issues lately but it's too early to consider it proven. More raw data is needed stretching back a lot further in time. Additionally the claim that it's driven by social media needs a smaller number of higher quality studies before it's taken seriously. Right now not only do the studies not convince, but it's not even clear what they're measuring. For example the growth in smartphones would also make it much easier to consume news around the clock, and social media often rebroadcasts news, so it could be hard to decorrelate these things to decide to what extent it's selfies vs headlines that drives the depression.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fsociety 4y agoReally though, the phones? To blame it all on phones and social media, is the classic “duh isn’t it obvious just look at what they are doing” moment. This perpetuates the narrative of the “coddled mind” AKA dysfunctional generation who are glued to their phones and unable to cope with the “real world” requiring “safe spaces”. How we are all victims to radicalization from social media even though research has not been able to link the two. It also completely ignores the fact that women are much more likely to be abused, men under-report depression/anxiety, our diets consist of shitty process foods, we don’t exercise as much, the economy has favored the rich again and again, the several research studies which suggest reverse causation, parental abuse etc. Some readings. https://www.yesmagazine.org/health-happiness/2023/03/02/social-media-teens-depressed https://www.yesmagazine.org/health-happiness/2023/03/02/soci... > The CDC’s 2022 report found 3 to 4 times more teens reporting parental abuses (55%) than its 2023 report found for school (15%) or cyber (16%) bullying, even though the agency’s definition of parental abuse is narrower than for peer bullying. LGBTQ+ youth again suffer the most. They are 4 times more likely to be violently abused by household adults and 3 to 5 times more likely to have attempted suicide than non-LGBTQ+ youth. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/we-know-less-about-social-media-than-we-think https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/we-know-... > Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. “Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews.” Gabor Mate has more weight in my mind on explaining the rise of mental illness in western society. His book “Myth of Normal” is great and does not contain new information so much as it ties things we know together.
- yucky 4y ago> It also completely ignores the fact that women are much more likely to be abused, men under-report depression/anxiety, our diets consist of shitty process foods, we don’t exercise as much, the economy has favored the rich again and again, the several research studies which suggest reverse causation, parental abuse etc. None of which started in the early 2010's, unlike wide access to social media and always on connectivity via smartphones.
- seba_dos1 4y ago> The first smartphone with a front-facing camera (the iPhone 4) came out in 2010 Uhm, my N900 from 2009 has a front-facing camera and I'm quite sure it wasn't the first.
- Yoric 4y agoFWIW, the phone I had in 2005 had a rotating camera. Not a smartphone, insofar as it didn't have touch screen, but it supported some (limited) web browsing and had a marketplace.