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The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

• andrewla 3y ago
  The instinct is to treat this as an apocalyptic change of some sort in society. Here's an alternate framing. The DSM-5 was released in 2013.
  • paledot 3y ago
    Does the DSM-5 redefine "suicide attempt"? Self-reported mental health? This is what is being discussed in TFA. And yes, it is concerning.
    • andrewla 3y ago
      It greatly expands the diagnostic criteria associated with "self-harm" and will increase monitoring and diagnosis of these phenomena. Note that the suicide rate does not show this inflection, either in the US or internationally. An omission that makes this article intrinsically suspect.
  • thfuran 3y ago
    And what exactly is the supposed significance of that?
    • andrewla 3y ago
      Refinement and definition of diagnostic criteria change over time. A major change in the diagnostic criteria will result in a change in the profile of the diagnoses made against a population. No malign intent nor conspiracy is required; we changed how we defined certain mental illnesses, and as a result the number and kind of diagnoses for those mental illness (and for mental health) change as professionals adopt the new standards. It's not that there's an increase or a change in the actual mental health, but just that the numbers before and after are simply not comparable.
  • andyjohnson0 3y ago
    The DSM is primarily used in the US, whereas the article is claiming that there is an international epidemic of teen mental health problems.
    • andrewla 3y ago
      The ICD-11 has a not-coincidental release schedule aligned with the DSM-5.
• gumballindie 3y ago
  Likely due to algorithmic trash being pushed on them constantly. No surprise many of them think ai is intelligent or are obsessed with animal porn and anime.
• mglz 3y ago
  > As discussed in previous posts and as Twenge et al. (2022) showed, it can’t be the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The timing of that event is exactly the opposite of what you’d expect, namely: the epidemic should have started in 2009 and then gotten progressively better after 2012 as the economy improved in the USA and other countries. The economies might have gotten better, but middle and lower classes have less and less opportunities to benefit from that. Lack of money while growing up will make children unhappy if this leads to social exclusion and deprivation. Also kids are aware of the climate crisis since around then. Smartphones and social media might act as an amplifier, but such major shifts are usually multicausal.
• tokai 3y ago
  People pretend like this is a new startling development. But we are not even close to the youth suicides numbers of the 1880s. Luckily now we are talking about how we feel and try to get better, compared to the rest of human history. To me there is obviously no new epidemic, but just finally an acknowledgement of issues that has always been present.
  • chasd00 3y ago
    > ..To me there is obviously no new epidemic.. another thing to look at is mental health medicine that has came on market around 2010 or so. If 50 different pills all started getting marketed to everyone for anything remotely not flowers and sunshine then that could be a contributing factor too.
  • haswell 3y ago
    > But we are not even close to the youth suicides numbers of the 1880s … To me there is obviously no new epidemic Do we have any reason to believe that the suicide numbers in the 1880s are at all correlated with systemic factors that still persist? i.e. were people committing suicide for the same reasons people are today? Without this answer, it seems very difficult to support the conclusion that there is “obviously no new epidemic”. It’s also worth noting that: 1. The mental health epidemic people are increasingly concerned about isn’t just about suicide rates 2. Regardless of centuries past, current concerns are based on local trends, indicating that something is indeed changing Yes, we’re talking more about mental health now more than ever. But this is not enough to account for recent trends. I’d be curious to learn more about the time period you’re referencing and how you’re comparing the systemic factors to reach the conclusion that these are the same issues we’ve always faced. At a minimum, it must be acknowledged that the context has completely changed, and even if we’re dealing with the same underlying psychological factors, the world context in which they’re surfacing must affect people in new ways that were not possible in the 1880s.
• cfrog 3y ago
  I would have liked to have seen the increase in terms of percent of total population; I was surprised this wasn't shared automatically to provide context. Showing the base numbers as totals or percentage of totals always provides a clearer picture. 2 to 4 percent is a 100% increase, and of interest across large populations, but it's much less dramatic when phrased as an increase from 2 to 4%. Likewise, if population A has a 150% increase and population B only shows 25%, it can look like A is in crisis compared to B. But if Pop A is going from 5% to 7.5% of total and Pop B is going from 18% to 22.5%....the critical issues look a little different. In addition, I was surprised suicide mortaltity rates were not included alongside the admittance for self harm numbers.
  • d1sxeyes 3y ago
    It’s worth reading some of the other posts on this blog. There a lot of very thoughtful consideration that goes into how the data is looked at for every post, and frank and earnest discussions of how much credence their conclusions merit given the quality of the data.
• 1-6 3y ago
  Opinion: We’re treating kids like adults too early in their lives. Of course breaking laws isn’t ok but who here hasn’t done something crazy? Neighborhoods aren’t being neighbors any longer and people simply want to have law enforcement be the negotiator for everything.
  • asylteltine 3y ago
    Kids used to be more adult before technology was around. I think it’s the opposite parents are coddling their kids plus you have this new lib stuff like safe spaces and the whole concept of “feeling unsafe”. We have an entire generation of babies who can’t handle conflict including internal conflict. So what can they do? Kill themselves or other people as we see them do
    • throwaway092323 3y ago
      Why put "feeling unsafe" in scare quotes? There's a lot to feel unsafe about right now.
      • local_crmdgeon 3y ago
        We live in the safest time in human history by a margin so wide it's remarkable.
      • asylteltine 3y ago
        Because it’s a ridiculous notion. National crime is at an all time low and gets lower every year. You haven’t been safer more than you are today. Mental safety is feel good progressive nonsense. If you can’t handle reality, you are eventually going to snap.
        • throwaway092323 3y ago
          Crime isn't the only thing that impacts people's health. - Difficulty getting insurance to see the doctor impacts peoples' safety and sense of safety. - Fear of gaps in insurance coverage keeps people in toxic jobs where they feel unsafe. - Many people can't get prescription medicines they need, impacting health. - Homelessness is increasing - Polarized political speech, including hate speech, causes legitimate anxiety, contributing to poor psychological health. None of the above things were as big of a problem 20 years ago. Using "crime" as a measure of unsafety only makes sense if you have access to healthcare, a stable job, and don't face discrimination.
• illinx 3y ago
  Does anyone know of any studies that look at rates of cigarette smoking, or activation of indoor smoking bans with respect to the data on mental illness? Most of the west banned indoor smoking around 2006-2008, roughly around when smartphone usage started to explode. AFAIK you can still smoke indoors in China--do they show the same trends? What about Nevada? Did any jurisdictions ban indoor smoking a few years before or after the rest of the west and show a graph shifted on the x axis? This isn't a joke post--cigarette smoking promotes social bonding and nicotine is a mood stabilizer. It's irresponsible to not consider the effects of smoking bans on mental health. Of course there are many health and aesthetic downsides to cigarette smoking but we should look at the data.
  • coffeebeqn 3y ago
    Depression is easier to treat than lung cancer
• AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  They should do the same survey but for non-western countries
• ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  (2023)
• syngrog66 3y ago
  causes are a mix: smartphones, social media, doomscrolling habits, carbon climate crisis (and its dire implications). and the rise of the so-called Woke/DEI propaganda cult in academia. all add up
  • cynicalsecurity 3y ago
    There could be a much easier explanation. Life in the past wasn't much easier, in fact, it was much harder and crazier. But no one really cared measuring the problem and it appeared it did not exist.
    • InSteady 3y ago
      Life may have been harder and crazier, but the challenges people faced were far more local and solvable. One's community truly needed the upcoming generation of children to step up and help out with their sweat, blood, and tears to keep everything together. That infused purpose and meaning into the struggles. Now a young person is hyper-aware of how large the world is, how small they are in relation to it, and how all of the big problems that command so much attention are completely beyond the scope of their influence (and are likely to be that way for their entire lives, outside of some astronomically unlikely events). There's also a somewhat related argument to be made that with the homogenization and erosion of culture in the modern world. We've almost completely lost coming-of-age rituals where adults and elders in local communities induct children into the world of adulthood. Whether by design or by accident, this leaves more and more young adults feeling disconnected, purposeless, and adrift in the world. Which tends to leave many holes to be filled by consumerism and other potentially harmful tenets of modern society, which now includes social media addiction.
    • FabHK 3y ago
      Durkheim, the founder of sociology, famously showed that Protestants, whose life was "easier" as they had fewer restrictions and norms to follow than Catholics, committed more suicides than Catholics. Similarly, suicide rates fell during times of war. Thus, it might not just be a measurement problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(Durkheim_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(Durkheim_book)
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• incomingpain 3y ago
  Jon Haidt's best correlation for social media was roughly 15%. Practically saying it's not social media, but he challenges those to figure out a better answer. >not just the rise in depression and anxiety, but also the overprotection of children, the rise of “safetyism,” and the shouting down of speakers on university campuses when students deemed the speaker to be “harmful.” Social media is helping the situation, not making it worse. Though also depends on which social media, there's a bit of a censorship problem with some of them. I look at the previous generation, how did they socialize? Considering my local city. Arcades basically don't exist anymore. Bars are in steep decline because of >100% alcohol taxes and drunk driving laws. $9 beers are the cheap brands and the police park themselves outside bars and pull over you because you might be drunk driving. Church is non-existent. government shut down many churches in violation of freedom of religion. Church attendance is at record lows. Someone is burning down churches, government doesn't care to investigate. Clubs were mostly shutdown by the government because vice laws, sexism, etc. Illegal to operate a gentlemans club these day. Strip clubs basically dont exist anymore because of the government. Cannabis clubs are illegal. Libraries and community centres aren't welcoming to people like me. I cant even go with my 4 year old daughter? I literally do IT work for these libraries but I'm accused of being a child predator and must identify myself and let them record my ID or I must leave? So I leave? Malls literally have anti-socializing laws. How dare you 'loiter' aka socialize. Parks now have a huge list of government laws restricting their use. Pretty rare to see other people at parks. Hell I look at how I socialized, I had a road hockey game going practically all the time. Random boys would be walking by, we'd ask them if they wanted to join. They'd run home and get a stick and come back. That's illegal now, it's unsafe for kids to play road hockey... I literally haven't seen kids playing road hockey in ages. Skatepark? They literally built them and then fenced them off because of the hooligan kids... then stopped building them. So you want to go for a bike ride? But you legally must have a bell/horn, helmets, and kids even legally are required to have knee and elbow pads. Oh and you're limited to 10km/h. Virtually everyone ignores these laws. I did 800km this summer. My daughter got to play at so many empty parks all summer. Want to walk your dog, you have to keep them on a leash, pick up their poo, dog must be muzzled, only certain breeds are allowed to be outside, you're not allowed to play fetch, or chase or anything like that, on certain hot days you must legally carry water and a dish for your dog, and your dog can't bark too much or that's excessive noise law. So what do you do instead? You stay at home. Government has basically outlawed in person social interaction. But humans require in person social interaction. Social media is where they are going to get some social interaction, not that it's fulfilling.
• rqtwteye 3y ago
  Personally it's more that there is more awareness today and it's more ok to come forward saying you have a problem. When I grew up in the 70s there were a lot of people with problems but they were just labelled as "stupid" or "difficult". I personally had serious depression and social anxiety but there was nobody to talk to and I wouldn't have known the vocabulary to describe the situation. I know several people who I am pretty sure were gay. One guy was most likely trans. And a ton of people with depression and/or anxiety. My dad and a lot of men his age had PTSD from WW2. None of these went into any statistic.
• philip1209 3y ago
  I think this is going to hit in waves: 1. First teens, because they don't know better 2. Next new retirees, because they lose social connection from work and don't appreciate that social media + TV are unsuitable replacements. 3. Next, remote workers who moved from a city to a suburb, and become progressively more physically isolated unless they make a conscious effort to connect IRL outside the home with peers. #1 is obvious. #2 is starting to hit my parents and their generation. #3 I'm seeing glimmers of and I think it will get more noticeable over time. I believe the solution is liveable cities, and a return from suburbs to higher-density living in walkable neighborhoods. People need social contact, and I think remote workers + retirees + teens would be more happy living in closer proximity to others where spontaneous social connections are possible.
  • bequanna 3y ago
    #3: Isn't this what has happened anyway? Anecdotally, everyone I knew that was young, hip, and lived downtown moved to the surburbs once they reached a certain age.
    • philip1209 3y ago
      Suburbs are a relatively recent invention, powered by cars and racism [1].So, I don't think you can say "this is how it's always been." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States
      • bequanna 3y ago
        Well, it seems like when you give people an option to not live in small boxes on top of one another many will take choose that option. I don’t understand why urbanites have to scream and yell about someone else’s choice to live in the suburbs.
  • zelon88 3y ago
    You mention work several times. Work does not make people less depressed unless it is a) gainful or b) meaningful. I think a lot of it is a result of people conflating productivity with worth, and worth with satisfaction. You can be broke and completely satisfied with life, yourself, your situation. Likewise you can have great finances and still be anxious and restless and discontent. I believe comes down to expectations. Managing expectations is critical and not many people do it enough, if at all.
• Anotheroneagain 3y ago
  It's because the conspiracy theorists were wrong, and lead belongs in the proteins. This is a result.
• breakingrules 3y ago
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• 65 3y ago
  Maybe it's because with corporate Capitalism, we've given up all our freedoms for comfort and safety. Comfort and safety are nice and all, but when we are no longer free to exist in reality, with other people, we get depressed. Our technological overlords (Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Epic Games) have engineered digital life for young people to be as "engaging" as possible for their own benefit. We spread out to the suburbs and there's no where to go without the automobile overlords. Privatization of everything means teens have no where to go, except to buy shit at the mall. And who wants to spend life buying shit? The life of distraction and engagement makes companies billions of dollars, forces people to conform to their frameworks (because guess what, everyone else is doing it, and if you don't join in you're even more bored and lonely than everyone else), and kills all freedom. Life in the west is materially very comfortable. But the premise of playing in real life, of hanging out, isn't cool because no teen is doing that. They're trapped by potent digital media wasting all their time. Life is somehow more boring than it used to be. Maybe because seeing crazy videos or playing super fun video games makes everything else seem boring. It makes reality seem boring. We're losing our freedom to giant corporations. I think Capitalism is a good system, but corporate Capitalism kills freedom. Oppression by Corporatocracy is killing people.
  • PicassoCTs 3y ago
    This "your stuck in a cell with only a tv to talk too" used to be a prison sentence.
  • precedentmorsel 3y ago
    As a teen, I see this struggle. Hopefully, what I'm working on can fix this exact, specific issue. I'll launch to HN in about a week. https://jaredmantell.com/blog/1 https://jaredmantell.com/blog/1
  • indigochill 3y ago
    > I think Capitalism is a good system, but corporate Capitalism kills freedom. How do you picture capitalism operating such that corporations don't emerge? In my mind I can't separate the accumulation of capital from corporate capitalism, at least given sufficient time.
• CrackerNews 3y ago
  Someone's suffering a problem? Sounds like they should pull themselves up by their bootstrap. /s
• paulmist 3y ago
  What about the awareness of what self-harm/depression is in the first place? It's easier to say you're depressed if you understand what depression is, and it's easy enough to Google that. Same with self-harm, I wouldn't ask my classmate but I could easily Google it. Similarly, mental health campaigns could contribute, accelerating how fast kids learn about bad mental health. We could've had the same percentage of depressed young people, they just wouldn't know how to express it/act on it.
  • ender341341 3y ago
    I think that better diagnosis does account for some of the diagnosis count (like many mental health issues the solution used to just be "if you can't figure out how to act normal on your own you're going to a home/asylum, we may smack you around a bit first to see if we can get the message through to you"). But talking with any educators for that age group it's not just that the number of people diagnosed as depressed/anxiety but the level of depression/anxiety in the individuals diagnosed escalating that alarms them the most.
• SubiculumCode 3y ago
  1. Time spent alone. Up. 2. Awareness and Acceptance of Mental Health Issues. Up. 3. Cultural Pessimism and disdain for hope. Up. 4
  • red-iron-pine 3y ago
    4 what
• labrador 3y ago
  I remember peer pressure being a big factor in teen years, mostly in the negative. Couldn't the rise of always-connected social media have super charged this negativity and made most teens feel like outcasts, with a few "teenfluencers" determining who is in and who is out? That would be a kind of hell for me to live in who was a teen before all this.
  • timeagain 3y ago
    See the movie Eighth Grade for an anxiety inducing exploration of this theme. My personal take is that not having community is devastating, and the issue with social media is that it makes you think you have community in your brain, but your body/heart knows that you are actually just alone in your room. Even worse, it makes you crave a kind of unattainable community, so even people with loving family and friends might feel alone because they are longing for something nonexistent. To your pet cat, the difference between you scrolling on your phone and you staring at the wall is nothing.
    • asow92 3y ago
      > To your pet cat, the difference between you scrolling on your phone and you staring at the wall is nothing. This stuck with me for a moment, and made me feel like scrolling was effectively doing nothing at all, which is sad and best and sick at worst.
      • timeagain 3y ago
        Sorry to make you feel bad, but that exact realization is the reason I don’t do remote work anymore. (I still scroll on my phone here and there!) A cynic might retort that reading a book is also “doing nothing”, but I think there is a certain physical presence that is missing with the scrolling. Hard to describe, but you know it when you feel it.
        • waterhouse 3y ago
          And how about reading an ebook?
• kipchak 3y ago
  I think social media and technology in general ism while important, to some extent a second order effect response to a breakdown in community This is measured in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone as occurring after 1965-ish[1] through a variety of measures, or for example more recently measuring where couples meet in the US, [2] which were declining well before the 2010s. The Middletown studies of the 1920s for example noticing decreased community activities such as church attendance pointed the finger at new passive and individual leisure activities such as radio. While there's a variety of factors Robert Putnam points towards, I think income inequality and it's effect on well-being is the most under appreciated measure. Putman's measures roughly line up with Peter Turchin's[2] Inequality and Well being measures - the 1965 Great society program coincides with a measured high water mark of well being. You can also point to a lot of the measures on the WTF happened in 1971 website as being roughly equivalent. When people have more money and time for leisure activities, they are more able to engage with their communities and form healthy social bonds. The more time people spend frustrated, screwed over and left behind, the less time and they have for social engagement and other activities like parenting. [1]https://www.tesd.net/cms/lib/pa01001259/centricity/domain/1114/bowlingalone.pdf https://www.tesd.net/cms/lib/pa01001259/centricity/domain/11... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18h7k9g/how_heterosexual_couples_met_oc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18h7k9g/ho... [3]https://peterturchin.com/the-double-helix-of-inequality-and-well-being/ https://peterturchin.com/the-double-helix-of-inequality-and-...
  • graemep 3y ago
    In the UK working hours (especially working hours per household as women work more) have increased. No one has the time for community. Schools have also deteriorated and kids are put under a lot of pressure to achieve academically. I opted mine out.
    • bobthepanda 3y ago
      Housing costs have increased, daycare is shooting through the roof, and everyone seems to be working harder to scrape by, at least in the US. Daycare in particular is quite painful; there are high standards, but government subsidy is so low that simultaneously parents cannot afford it and programs cannot afford to staff adequately.
• standardUser 3y ago
  All other issues aside, it would be shocking if reported rates of teen mental illness did not increase as long-standing stigmas gradually wane and these topic become more acceptable to speak about. If your kid cut themself in 1975, what were you going to do? Ask you husband to spend money to "shrink their head"? More likely you'd hide it, like past generations hid most of their traumas. Now, there are many outlets for both that teen and their parents (and their teachers, and their friends, and their friends' parents) to say or do something in response. There are resources online that virtually anyone can access, phone numbers you can call, authority figures better-trained to recognize these problems. And perhaps most importantly, we got rid of the absurd mentality that what happens in other families is none of our business, no matter how many unexplained bruises or cuts we witness. Only now that we are openly discussing and grappling with these issues do we have ay hope of turning the tide.
  • scarmig 3y ago
    I agree reporting bias could be a thing, but there are statistics like completed suicide which are less susceptible to it (though still present; you can imagine a suicide being declared an accidental death to help a family "avoid embarrassment"). And those statistics have also been steadily creeping up for decades.
    • standardUser 3y ago
      I think reporting bias should be the starting point and the primary area of inquiry when looking at this topic. Unless I'm imagining the recent past where mental illness was literally verboten to speak about and mental health services were widely derided as scams. The change in discourse has been as rapid and dramatic as any social change I can think of, yet the authors seem to think it's enough to simply acknowledge that and focus instead on their many charts, most of which are about self-reporting or diagnoses.
      • tomp 3y ago
        > mental health services were widely derided as scams. Doesn’t this data indicate (or even confirm) that that’s still the case? If mental health services worked, at least some of these issues would be solved, right, not trending upwards?
• FabHK 3y ago
  Minor mistake: > a rise from 5% to 15% is a 300% increase, relative to the anchor point No, it's a 200% increase. (It's 300% of what it used to be, which is a 200% increase on top of the original 100%.)
  • tempodox 3y ago
    Yes, colloquial language has that pernicious habit of mixing up additive and multiplicative growth. One of my pet peeves.
    • as168 3y ago
      the author should have instead used basis points...
• lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  A spiritual void, a loss of social cohesion, isolation, alienation, a loss of a culture that reinforces ways of life that enable flourishing, radical individualism. The decline of traditional religious faith in the West. The sexual revolution and its dreadful distortion of human sexuality. The culture of consumerism and the worship of desire and appetite divorced from reason and one's objective good. So what's a smell that suggests this is the case? According to the triple melting pot theory, in countries like the US, ethnic identity, under the tendency toward some kind of assimilation, gives way to religious identity as not only religious identity, but a substitute for ethnic identity. So what happens with the waning of religious identity? Various dehumanizing ideologies start to look attractive. This explains both the appeal of the sexual, racial, and ecological ideologies that have become popular recently. These ideologies promise identity and social belonging, perhaps even an alleged higher purpose, which is to say they offer false and flimsy identities, ones that have political utility for those who control them. Various subcultures, many created by corporate interest around various products, do the same thing. You have "communities", so-called, that center around owning a particular brand of something. Corporate brand constructed false identities. People don't know who they are. They've alone. They don't know the address of the destination, or even that there is an address. Their horizon goes only as far as satisfying their base appetites, and they pay lip service to ideologies to avoid being shunned from groups without which they cannot satisfy those appetites. And when they do, they discover that their satisfaction isn't all that it is cracked up to be. Here follows the realization that no hope is to be found in what has been sought. From here: suicide, or some higher realization.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    So, to piss off as many religious people as possible.... A couple of goat herder psychologist a couple of millennia ago figured out if you told people they had a purpose things in general worked better. The particular problem is they made up a whole bunch of shit and when the sciences in general came around, people when "wow, religion is a bunch of controlling bullshit". Now, I will say that religion is only mostly a bunch of controlling bullshit, but they did understand people and that is why these religions had staying power that lasted thousands of years in some cases. As we came into the modern age we cast the religion away, but we did forget many of the important lessons on society building it had taught us. In the meantime psychology rapidly expanded, and it was used by both governments and corporations to control individuals with very little of that knowledge being broadly taught to society at large so they could inoculate themselves to it. Add in global internet allowing instant communication anywhere and the consolidation and formation of massive corporate entities able to shape the communication of our modern lives. That communication tells us to continually consume more of their product, and if you can't you've failed. So yea, that will lead to some problems for sure.
• RickJWagner 3y ago
  Recent studies confirm earlier works that show that household political views strongly influence teenage mental health. [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/548381/quality-parent-child-relationships-families.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/548381/quality-parent-child-rel... [2] https://www.carolinajournal.com/report-conservative-parents-more-likely-to-raise-mentally-healthy-teens/ https://www.carolinajournal.com/report-conservative-parents-... [3] https://ifstudies.org/blog/parenting-is-the-key-to-adolescent-mental-health https://ifstudies.org/blog/parenting-is-the-key-to-adolescen...
  • direwolf20 3y ago
    Ignorance is bliss. Conservative parents raise more ignorant teens.
• throwaway-0110 3y ago
  The author attributes the rise in mental illness among teen girls to them "spending hours each day posting photos of themselves and scrolling through hundreds of carefully edited photos of other girls". As someone who was a teen girl suffering depression and extreme anxiety in the 2010s, the idea rings quite shallow. I can assure you I was not suicidal because ... other girls are pretty? what? ... but because of narcissistic controlling hyperreligious parents fucking me up mentally and withdrawing into a smaller and smaller fringe bubble, cutting me off from normal people and normal life. I think the main problem destroying people's mental health is social atomization/isolation/polarization/decay, and social media does have a role to play in that, but is not the problem in and of itself.
  • sufehmi 3y ago
    This is called "anecdotal evidence" I have similar problem too, but then I also people got distressed over social media as well. The existence of our problem does not mean that other people's problems are invalid / does not exist.
    • throwaway-0110 3y ago
      I'm not saying everyone has the same story as me, and I'm also not saying that social media has no role in depression/anxiety. I'm saying the talking point "girls' mental health is in the toilet because they're obsessed with selfies" is speculative and condescending, ignoring more serious issues that teens are struggling with, and it's valid to offer a first-hand perspective as a counterbalance to that.
      • huarahuara 3y ago
        It tends to be middle class young women regardless of ethnicity (though typically white) who suffer the most mentally due to social media giving them anorexia. The idea that selfies harm young women has a lot of basis in reality. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/eating-disorders-anorexia-bulimia-are-severe-ever-rcna80745 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/eating-disorders-...
• atmosfir 3y ago
  Everyone who is skeptical of the proposed plausible cause of social media in causing depression in this thread should explain why their alternative theory holds up to the evidence that no significant increase happened both pre-2010 and is global To my knowledge there is currently no other better theory other than the rise of social media use that explains the phenomenon. Other proposed explanations such as Bad economy, capitalist alienation, terrible politics, parenting habits, global warming, atomic individualism, and lack of purpose all either cannot be generalized globally or did not start in 2010.
  • wiether 3y ago
    > [...] global warming [...] either cannot be generalized globally or did not start in 2010 I guess global warming _can_ be generalized globally? It sure didn't started in 2010 but neither did social networks. Facebook opened public access in 2006 which about the same period when Twitter was launched. _An Inconvenient Truth_ was released in 2006 and it seemed like the start of a global discussion about global warming. And behind _global warming_, there's actually the overall destruction of our environment by mankind. I agree that social media is a cause, but the given arguments cannot exclude _global warming_. Quite the opposite.
    • defrost 3y ago
      The 1972 UNEP First Earth Summit seems a lot more like the start of a global discussion about global warming. It marks the start of concerted white anting of the message and Koch et al funded think tanks to antiprop the fossil fuels are bad message. An Inconvenient Truth was more the start of some limited central north american awareness starring some local politician or something.
      • FrankyHollywood 3y ago
        global warming is actually peanuts compared to worries of previous generations, like the cold war, school kids got instructions on what to do if an atomic bomb would fall on city! stress and worries are from all times
• dennis_jeeves2 3y ago
  I initially misread the word 'international' to mean 'intentional'. Come to think of it, it may all be very intentional indeed.
• Aerbil313 3y ago
  I’m 18, in college. All my friends are basically addicts, I thankfully am not due to my locked down screen time settings[1]. No amount of research or lack thereof can convince me that social media is the major factor behind widespread mental illness. I believe what I see with my own eyes. Adults seem to be more resilient, I don’t know why, maybe because they didn’t grew up in the smartphone era. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850248
• kaiIH 3y ago
  I think that we like to look at social media as a cause for problems rather than an affect that worsens said problem Personally as a young person this is 100% due to the hyper vigilance in the news and the rise of helicopter parents, also due to the fact that we are stunting teenagers development by not letting them be y'know TEENAGERS. The hyper vigilance in the news has lead to children being forced to stay inside, which in turn leads to higher social media use, which can worsen overall mental health if not used properly. Also, I understand the concerns with self diagnosis and "mental illness is quirky" but I don't think it's just that simple, self diagnosis exists because celebrities and mainstream media has put forth mental illnesses and diagnosis as some kind of solution to sadness and minor anxieties, rather than an actual problem with somebody's mental state. Meanwhile people with actual issues have been sidelined, it's not a badge of honour in the sense but a meaningless title to those who don't actually struggle with such issues.
• kbos87 3y ago
  I’m not a parent nor am I a teen so take my comments with a grain of salt. The one thing that has consistently jumped out to me on this topic is how quickly people seem to jump to convenient answers. Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? That gets no attention, possibly because it’s an inconvenient truth for a lot of parents who prefer it that way.
  • dimgl 3y ago
    This is a great point. So my parents were well-intentioned but were immensely restrictive in all areas of my life. I can't imagine just how much worse it'd be with the monitoring and restriction tools that are available nowadays. I actually stop myself from posting things on Instagram given that I have them on there. So I think there's some truth to this.
    • pi-e-sigma 3y ago
      It's also worth noting that 'restrictiveness' is subjective. Your parents could be too restrictive for _you_, but in an alternative universe your hypothetical sibling could complain that his parents didn't care enough, let him do whatever and didn't prevent him from doing some things that he later he regretted, for instance starting drinking too early, getting himself involved in some sketchy people etc.
  • chasd00 3y ago
    i worked really hard as a parent to convince my wife+MIL that it is safe to let our boys roam the neighborhood now that they're old enough to cross intersections safely. However, a 10 year old girl one street over went missing. That has undone 5 years of getting my wife+MIL comfortable. My wife grew up in the neighborhood Amber Hagerman was kidnapped/murdered in so i understand but my kids are completely trapped.
  • mschuster91 3y ago
    > Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? Add on top the permacrises/polycrisis time we're in. My generation, we entered the workforce right during the 2008ff financial crisis. The Europeans got further fucked by the Euro crisis 2010, which crippled our career entries, and lasted for years with its consequences. In parallel, in 2011 the Arab Spring broke out, leading to years of wars and refugees. Then in 2014, the Russians made their first move into Ukraine, and the migration crisis began that then fully escalated in 2015. Right in the midst of that, the US elected the 45th and we all know how that one went. As the migration crisis died down to manageable levels in 2019, we only had a few months of rest, as at the end of 2019 COVID hit the entire world - and before that was over, the Russians went into the rest of Ukraine. That in turn led to cost of living exploding, now also across the world instead of "just" in the urban agglomeration eras. And the entire time, the far-right and authoritarians have been on the rise worldwide, politicians are doing nothing to meaningfully combat climate change or the demographic crisis or ever rising cost-of-living cost and income/wealth disparities. And then people, particularly the Boomer generation, have the audacity of calling us snowflakes, weak, "depression is just a trend" or whatever? They created all this mess, they're all set in cheap homes they paid off decades ago, when wages were still worth something, while we've been fighting for survival? And our younger brothers and sisters have it even worse than we have, they saw us and our parents struggle all these years.
• llIIllIIllIIl 3y ago
  It’s not just social media. Free roaming and spending time outside on their own or with peers went down dramatically for the last 30 years.
  • sixothree 3y ago
    I look at my ability to free roam as a young teen and even late single digits with appreciation and also recognition of the danger. But then I look at the amount of traffic on the streets I crossed on bicycle compared to when I was younger, it makes sense. Even residential streets are less safe from cars. But I know those aren’t the reasons kids don’t play outside anymore.
    • Robotbeat 3y ago
      It’s not just that. It’s that teens are ALSO less likely to drive. When I was 14 and 15, my friends group included someone with a car, and we had a very wide range. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/02/13/gen-z-driving-less-uber/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/02/13/... “Car culture is killing us!” But it’s worse than that; we don’t even have car culture! We have a culture of NO. No pedestrians. No biking without a helmet! No biking on the sidewalk! No driving!
  • Gigachad 3y ago
    Most urban spaces these days are incredibly depressing. No points of interest within walking distance. Lots of large and difficult to cross roads. Combined with the very real danger of cycling in many places. As well as the loss of small businesses that used to be interspersed in residential areas.
    • kibwen 3y ago
      You say urban, but this applies to suburban and rural areas as well. If anything, urban areas are the places that have probably resisted these factors the most effectively. For everyone else: "You get a stroad, and you get a stroad, everybody gets a stroad!"
    • 3y ago
• jhoechtl 3y ago
  As is social media and always on mentality.
• usr1106 3y ago
  Few deny that a drinking age is necessary. We also need a smart phone age. It's quite obvious that many teens are addicted to their phones and the mostly useless content they consume there.
  • nitwit005 3y ago
    > Few deny that a drinking age is necessary. Because of drunk driving. If that was not an issue, we certainly wouldn't have a drinking age of 21 in the US. Several states still allow your family to serve their children alcohol, which is closer to the example of letting your kid use the internet.
    • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      I've honestly never heard those two being linked before. That would seem to imply that Canada, with a drinking age of 18, would you have a a higher drunk driving rate than the US, and I wonder if that's the case.
      • supertimor 3y ago
        In most of Canada the drinking age is 19 (only a few provinces are 18), but it’s also slightly harder to get your drivers license in Canada. You’re required to take a written test and then two driving tests in order to receive a full license.
        • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
          Sure, OK, but that's still at least two extra years. We didn't used to have the two driving tests, and in Alberta we don't anymore - you transition off GDL after a set time without a test, but all the GDLs were instituted relatively recently, so we should be able to look at data 20-30 years ago to see data matching that claim, right?
    • lonelyasacloud 3y ago
      In the UK the restriction is around the sale and was set to 18 in 1923 and had nothing to do with drunk driving. The restriction was because of concerns around minors being too young and naïve to fully understand the full implications of their actions. Which is why consumption is/was allowed at home on the basis that responsible adults will help children to learn to handle alcohol sensibly while stopping them doing anything too stupid ... at least that's the theory anyway. Similar rules apply to driving, voting, smoking etc in most places. And as it is possible to live a perfectly meaningful life without being bombarded by TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube etc, it's really hard to understand why similar should not apply to Social Media.
• ClassyJacket 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • dghlsakjg 3y ago
    I’ll put this politely: citations needed.
  • kibwen 3y ago
    > And sex changes are being used a first line treatment. Rest assured that we all appreciate the apt demonstration of the other sort of mental illness that results from an oversubscription to social media.
• renewiltord 3y ago
  I suppose the interesting question is what parents of non-sick teens are doing differently from parents of sick teens. Is it a property that some teens are inherently more resilient or is it a property that some teens have a different home environment? There's many post-hoc explanations possible but the really interesting question to me is how some aren't sick. Is it just like PTSD where most people who encounter combat trauma just make it back fine and even that one-third of those who encounter extreme combat trauma make it back just fine? Or is it that it's like PTSD where most people never encounter traumatic events of any cause and therefore don't have PTSD. Identifying what's different about those who are sick and those who aren't will probably yield something interesting.
  • chasd00 3y ago
    I think the individual makes a lot of difference. Most people can go to a casino and have fun and be fine, most people can go to a bar and hav fun and be fine. Some people can't do either without destroying their life.
    • renewiltord 3y ago
      I wonder if it is genetic or a memetic spread. If genetic, we should be out of it quickly provided we can boost birth rates.
  • itronitron 3y ago
    I have three teenagers and they are all very different from each other in terms of personality, interests, work habits, and phone use among other things. You could place all of them into three distinct challenging scenarios and a different one of them would excel while the others would flounder. But there isn't that kind of variety in most schools, or if there is students are expected to excel in all three scenarios. From the inside looking out, I think that home environment is the driving factor as I could easily tiger-mom them into deep depression and anxiety. Are they achieving everything of which they are capable? Probably not, but I do see consistent gains in maturity and personal responsibility each year and that really helps put perspective on some of the struggles. As a counter-study it would be interesting to track the adoption of PowerSchool software across the US and see if that correlates with teen anxiety.
• ChatGTP 3y ago
  Since my youth climate change has been A wildly depressing concept to grapple with. Environment destruction period. I mean being depressed is one thing, living in a world that's literally cooking at the same time just takes it up a whole other level. I guess in the past, no matter how bad things got for you on a personal level, you could kind of count on the world being there if you got through it, now it's sort of 50/50.
  • samr71 3y ago
    So true. There's also the imminent return of Jesus Christ and the subsequent rapture to worry about. Kids have so much on their plate these days...
    • bamboozled 3y ago
      Obviously you're trolling...but anyway I'll bite. 3 degrees of warming will be something like the rapture for modern civilization.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • drfuchs 3y ago
    Disagree. Folks in the 60’s thru 80’s expected global nuclear annihilation with some probability.
    • Fricken 3y ago
      I was taught about Nuclear annihilation as well as global warming in the 80s. Fast forward to today and both are still on the table. Climate catastrophes make geopolitical conflict more likely.
      • ChatGTP 3y ago
        I thought the same with all these snide comments, we still have the threat of nuclear war at almost any minute. It never went away, why people think it has? I have no idea.
• Aeolun 3y ago
  I feel like people in general more easily diagnose themselves and others with depression or other mental diseases recently. I find it hard to judge whether it’s due to any external factor or some form of zeitgeist.
  • ascorbic 3y ago
    That's addressed in the post. There is some of that, but there are similar increases in hospitalisation for self-harm, which wouldn't be affected by an increase in awareness of mental illness.
    • Aeolun 3y ago
      That assumes people aren’t induced towards self harm due to an increased awareness? If you believe suicide or self harm are common (and valid/acceptable) solutions to your issue, would you not be more likely to do so?
      • julianeon 3y ago
        This is also complicated by the fact that, if you are about to self-harm or in the population of people verging on self-harm, you are overdue for a mental health diagnosis for depression or a condition like it. It seems a little circular past this point. You may have diagnosed yourself, but if you saw a doctor, they would do the same.
      • nasmorn 3y ago
        I guess also suicide attempts and hospitalizations will be highly affected by how society views it. Actual successful suicides seem the least influenced by external trends.
        • FabHK 3y ago
          Actual suicides can be quite influenced by events (eg other suicides and reporting about them in the media). This is known as the Werther effect (after Goethe's "Die Leiden des jungen Werthers"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide
• bparsons 3y ago
  People underestimate the change that took place between 2008 and 2012 with ubiquitous phone usage. All of a sudden we all started staring at these devices for several hours a day. We never leave this thing. The resulting impact on our mental state cannot be overstated.
  • zgk7iqea 3y ago
    Maybe people also don't really process or understand their emotions when the phone is available. If you always have your phone to entertain you (play music, scroll on instagram etc.), then you don't give yourself time to reflect on your current mental state
  • avgDev 3y ago
    I have fell into this trap and I'm 30. When I'm bored I'm thinkin about projects and business ideas. But when I use my phone for 5 hours in a day my brain is done. I am now working really hard to set boundaries with my phone and limit usage. Because I have a feeling I will look back when my time comes and feel like I wasted great years looking at stupid garbage. There are some great creators on youtube and other platforms but the suggested videos may suck you in.
  • bratbag 3y ago
    Yep. Boredom drives in person socialising and creativity. Human contact and the act of creation engender life satisfaction, a long term persistent sense of well-being that is far better for you than short term spikes of happiness, and the antithesis of depression. We are never bored with a phone in our pocket.
    • worldsayshi 3y ago
      So - boredom is our natural instinct meant to steer us towards socialization. The ever present phone gives us stimuli that makes our intuition think that we are engaging socially. But the reward we are looking for is social bonding but it doesn't happen because our cognitive functions that makes sense of bonding can't execute because there's no full person to bond to. Most often it's an anonymous disembodied text or an influencer or celebrity that do not know you...?
• grecy 3y ago
  Do teens have much to look forward to? Climate change is already causing severe weather events, which are very likely to ramp quickly. Careers are a thing of the past, and it seems like no matter how hard you work you'll never "get ahead" and will be lucky not to spend your life living paycheck to paycheck. Life expectancy has gone down, markedly. Debt is up. New wars.
  • gedy 3y ago
    > Do teens have much to look forward to? Life has always been kinda shitty in every generation, but I think the difference is a lot of negative/apocalyptic messaging from all types of media surrounds people, and the positive/optimistic messages we used to get are lacking or treated as "cringe", eye rolls, etc. Pop music has a lot less positive love songs, all existing power structures are suspect, etc, etc. Whether true or realistic or not, it's not helpful to kids to hear all this crap. The downer types are offering no realistic and/or hopeful alternative.
  • graemep 3y ago
    If any of those were the explanation, you would find correlations between people with worsening mental health and those factors. Is it worse in countries at most risk from climate change? No. Is it worse where financial security is worse? Possibly those with expectations of stable careers do better, but not at the national level from the numbers in the article. Life expectancy is not usually teens main concern, nor is debt. Which new wars correlate with the timing?
    • robertlagrant 3y ago
      > Is it worse in countries at most risk from climate change? It doesn't have to be that. I would try and spot correlations between mental health and bombardment of this in the news.
  • merek 3y ago
    > Life expectancy has gone down, markedly. Do you have a source for this? I'm curious in which country and by how much.
• elzbardico 3y ago
  People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy factors, crime, drugs, values and taboos changing too fast, uncertainty about the future. We will probably won't find a culprit, but if I had to bet, I would say that far reaching event like the Vietnam war, reagonomics, the downsizing mania from the 80's are probably more important factors than the recent creation of social networks. If we have to blame someone, maybe we should be looking at figures like Lee Yacoca, Carl Icahn, and Jack Welch instead of Mark Zukerberg.
  • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    >We will probably won't find a culprit It's capitalism. That's the answer you're looking for
    • commandlinefan 3y ago
      > It's capitalism We had capitalism for a LONG time before we had the international teen mental illness epidemic.
      • spunker540 3y ago
        And this teen epidemic would be the first complaint I’ve heard lodged against capitalism. Can’t be that.
      • jampekka 3y ago
        Not this level of capitalism. The post-war consensus economy of the west had heavy state intervention and economic involvement. Things started to change towards "free market" neoliberalism (AKA voodoo economics) in around the 1970's, and the rate of the change exploded after the fall of Soviet Union.
      • Barrin92 3y ago
• gverrilla 3y ago
  Hyper-individualism in all spheres of life, magnified by anti-social technology. They are depressed because current life-form is depressing. Capitalism is pathologically tautological.
  • robertlagrant 3y ago
    > Capitalism is pathologically tautological. I know you're mud-slinging at capitalism, so I should recalibrate my expectations, but this is even worse than usual. What's "pathologically tautological"? So intrinsically tautological it's like a disease?"
  • coderenegade 3y ago
    I think it's the opposite of individualism. Individualism accepts some responsibility for risk, but we seem to be in a system where no risk is tolerable, and the government has to fix everything. It gives rise to learned helplessness. I don't see social media as a technology for individualists either, because it's all about approval and homogenization. Individualism is actually antisocial at it's core, because it's about being yourself regardless of what anybody else thinks. It only seems like we have an individualist system because everything is on blast 24/7, but that's really just the shuffle of collectivists patting each other on the back in the public eye so that others can align their virtues with the current zeitgeist. We don't have public places anymore where people can just be people away from the gaze of social media. Individualism requires learning who you really are, which means making mistakes, and that's difficult when a video on social media could make you a pariah outside of the confines of your local community.
  • nickd2001 3y ago
    I agree that hyper-individualism is a big part of the problem. People need friendship and connection to be happy. If everyone is "doing their own thing" and looking after their own needs first, its a barrier to that. If you're depressed, going and helping someone else who is in need is often a good way to snap out of that depression (assuming its situational more than clinical depression). Even if the other person isn't obviously grateful, simply seeing that you made their life a bit better can put things in perspective, give yourself a purpose etc. Its often really low effort, e:g just actually bother to talk to someone , give them a cup of tea whatever. But people often fail to see this option that can make 2 people happy, because individualism gets in the way. People are almost embarrassed to offer or receive help and friendship, particularly in the US I feel ...
• throwaway892238 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • fulladder 3y ago
    I don't think Haidt has a political agenda. I've been following his work on this since he published his book on it a decade ago. He has a whole theory about why teen mental health went off a cliff in the last decade, and the theory is basically about technological change and really isn't anything political.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• latentcall 3y ago
  Not just social media, but always online mentality. Spending all your time online gives you a skewed perception of the world and I believe being online always is a major negative. Spending time outside is good for you. Socializing with real people in front of you is good also. Not sure if we can ever go back to that without some major catastrophe.
  • wait_a_minute 3y ago
    > Not sure if we can ever go back to that without some major catastrophe. We easily can. With the network effect, we can just encourage everyone we know that socializing with real people in real life is important and set up some coffees, lunches, dinners, walks, board games, etc, and then encourage those people to do the same with the people they know. Won't take very many hops to reach everyone this way and get back on track.
    • karaterobot 3y ago
      Okay, I traveled back in time 30 years and convinced people to recognize the danger of being online all the time. I even made sure there would be innumerable studies suggesting it, and that pretty much everyone was at least aware of the danger. So, now that I'm back in 2024, everybody should already know that being online all the time is not healthy. I haven't checked yet, did it stop them from being addicted? I'm sure it did, right?!
    • s1artibartfast 3y ago
      I think this is an issue of "can" in the "technically possible" vs "realistically possible". There are lots of people who have done exactly what you said, and others that never became terminally online, yet real-world re-adoption has been slow.
      • pixl97 3y ago
        Technically possible: "We all stop eating too much and obesity drops" Realistically possible: "Obesity levels keep going up"
• geodel 3y ago
  My theory is it is effect of ever faster economic growth across the world. Now it has given great many benefits to great many people. Negative effects so far discussed are only in term of destruction of ecology, depletion of natural resources, pollution etc. To me this growth has created a sense of anxiety in all teens and older. Now the societal structures, jobs, careers, education, medicine etc do not change over multiple generations but multiple times in single generation. This relentlessness has affected me for last 20 years and still does despite all success at surface level.
  • verisimi 3y ago
    My theory is that this is by design. Unhappy people buy things to make them feel happy - this is beneficial to corporations and governments. The answers are within, but the won't be found in this or that product, government, teachers, careers, mental health workers, etc.
  • crowcroft 3y ago
    Coupled with the fact that young people aren't getting any of the upside of the destruction.
  • passion__desire 3y ago
    Was this predicted in Future Shock?
    • geodel 3y ago
      Sorry, I haven't read it. Seems like I should soon.
  • nradov 3y ago
    That theory can't be correct. The rate of world GDP growth hasn't increased significantly. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/gdp-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/gdp-growth-r...
    • geodel 3y ago
• romwell 3y ago
  There's that, there's also a better understanding of mental illness, so less if it goes unrecognized, undiagnosed, and unrated. Growing up, I was an intelligent kid (if a bit shy) who just needed to be more organized. Today, I'm an AuDHD[1] adult who just needs to have others to have different expectations in some cases, and just benefits from having access to Adderall for some of the others. In college, I was just a sad kid who thought fantasizing about near-death scenarios were something everyone does. Today, I am certainly not doing that, in no small part thanks to Sertraline, 100mg, and therapy. The author presents a good case that this time, there's something different than before. An increase in understanding and rates of reporting does not account for increase in suicide rates, for example. But the bucket mental illness epidemic in the title (and things like the "TikTok autism/ADHD" epidemic) are partially attributed to that. Then, there's the COVID pandemic lockdowns which pushed many people to their limits, and resulted in a higher rate of both diagnosis/treatment and consequences of mental illness (or unwellness, if I may). Then, there's the simple fact that kids in the US are growing up in a world with huge economic uncertainty, little chance of making enough money to become homeowners, the potential of nuclear war being discussed in the media, the potential for civil war being nonzero, ballooning healthcare and education costs, climate chnage not being addressed, and... And after accounting for all that, we may come to the conclusion that it's not that there's anything wrong with the kids or the modern way of life (with the Internet, cell phones, and all that), but that our entire society is fucked in very traditional ways. The proper comparison should be to the US circa Great Depression, and even then, the possibility of planetwide environmental collapse or nuclear war was not on the minds of anyone. Now both are a factor (between Greta Thunberg and Elon Musk, we have pretty much the entire world covered), which is giving an extra push to people who aren't well to begin with. As a Ukrainian-American Jew, I can absolutely say that the war in Ukraine and Israel has affected every aspect of my life in a major way (helping MIL evacuate from Kyiv being the most direct one, survivor's guilt being one of the hardest ones to deal with). But I guess that I'm not the only one by far. And I believe we should not be talking about the "Teen Mental Health Epidemic", but rather about how our fucked up world is fucking up the kids. It's on us to fix the world, rather than the kids (as the word "epidemic" may suggest). [1] https://romankogan.net/adhd https://romankogan.net/adhd
  • somenameforme 3y ago
• FactKnower69 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • FactKnower69 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • malcolmgreaves 3y ago
    Yup, noticed this part too and realized the whole post is a joke. It's hard to take someone seriously when they show their ulterior motive in the first paragraphs.
    • ascorbic 3y ago
      It's a complete non sequitur too, because the rest of the post seems to have no relation to it
• HellDunkel 3y ago
  What started as a critical blogpost about wokism turned into an worldwide youth mental illness crisis. This raises a few red flag on me.
  • switchbak 3y ago
    Jonathan Haidt is a very thoughtful researcher and has been looking at this and related issues for a very long time. I think your dismissal is perhaps a bit too casual.
    • gizmo 3y ago
      Both “the coddling of” and “the righteous” mind were pretty poor scholarship. The kind where the researcher starts with the conclusion and then looks for evidence that confirms the theory. Good science should either neutrally look at the evidence or, when starting with a theory, search for disconfirming evidence. Haidt does neither. Furthermore, Haidt struggles to accurately represent his ideological adversaries. Another red flag. Disagreement is natural but public intellectuals should be able to effortlessly make a strong case for the positions they have themselves rejected.
      • emptysongglass 3y ago
        I find the people protecting the woke tribe in these comments to lack any subjectivity or critical distance whatsoever. Are they accurately representing their ideological adversaries with drive-by derision and dismissing out of hand an article that doesn't spend the majority of its time hand-wringing the issue like they do? The more I see of these snide attacks, the less I believe there's any veracity at all in their belief system, which now spans an entire constellation of fringe politics turned mainstream.
        • whatshisface 3y ago
          There's nothing real or good about online wokeism but the male Twitter sphere isn't better. I think the shared thread is the way online interfaces lower the executive function barrier to reading (or watching videos) so much that people become willing to engage with worthless text. Judith Butler drew more attention than pea brains in the hundred page medium but no longer in the hundredths of seconds media.
• deleted 3y ago
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• binary132 3y ago
  [flagged]
• AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
  I think all the social media stuff is missing the mark. It's 100% bad but it's just trash filling the hole society is making. Looking top down at the problem, humans need self actualization or propose to be happy. Originally we evolved to live in medium sized social groups that worked together to ensure their survival, we took care of each other and that was what drove our purpose, or rather why that need evolved, it helped increase the odds a group survived. Fast forward and we're now trying to derive purpose out of pure competition. What percentile is your IQ, your GPA, your income, your stack rank. Society is becoming hyper competitive because that is what makes the most money. Nobody interacts with their local community, they interact with those that provide the best chance of making enough money to survive: coworkers, their "network", prospective employers. This is all great for perpetual exponential economic growth but not so great for humans. Instead of just being the best we can be for our community we're trying to make them compete, keeping people switched on in survival mode 24/7 to extract maximum profits. Instead of community we're trying to create a nice plastic wrapped substitute with social media and phones, they're not the cause, they're the symptom.
  • mcmcmc 3y ago
    Competition and stack ranking are nothing new, Imperial China was doing it in the 6th century with civil service exams. You might as well say humanity is the cause.
    • goodpoint 3y ago
      Calling this a stretch is an understatement.
  • flappyeagle 3y ago
    You got cause and effect reversed. Can’t have global competition without global reach. No instagram, no influencers.
  • corethree 3y ago
    I think you're right. But society has been this way from way Before the mental illness epidemic. Evidence points to the fact that the structure of society is not causative of a new trend we are seeing. That being said I do think you're right. It's just that there's two underlying trends here of "mental illness". The one your addressing has been longer term and more pervasive while the recent trend is, as stated, a new trend and seemingly caused by social media.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• deadbabe 3y ago
  I think it sucks to be a kid today. You learn too much too fast now, there’s no magic or wonder to life, no theorizing about how things work or asking someone, just google it or watch a TikTok. And sometimes what you learn is just plain wrong, but you may never truly know it.
• deleted 3y ago
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• EGreg 3y ago
  1. Both parents working jobs, so childhood is spent with ADHD diagnosis / adderall 2. Dating and gender stuff completely changed, no more "going steady" or waiting until marriage, and not even hooking up anymore, now everything old is cringe, but not sure what is supposed to happen. First generation where females will out-earn males and also no one is really sure what they contribute to society anymore 3. The big one... teens grew up with the Internet, and all the capitalist industries and images promoted on TikTok, Instagram, etc. It's a race to the bottom with exploitation and fake online personas, similarly to how crypto tokens are in a race to the bottom with generating fake volume etc. Now you're competing against the whole world. 4. They see very little to look forward to, because of AI and automation depressing jobs. Their dads are probably on opiates while their moms are on antidepressants. Their parents generation probably has the highest level of divorce of any in thousands of years. 5. AI and automation making jobs pay less, everyone having less to begin with, and AI will probably be funnier, sexier and more interesting than they are, and humans will stop even needing each other for anything anymore. Seems like the best case scenario is living in a zoo with AIs surrounding you and being able to change nothing. Plus with climate change and wars. What's to look forward to?
  • huarahuara 3y ago
    There's really one option. Just leave the United States, if you can afford it. There is a massive pool of men and women outside the developed world, with different ideas of dating, as well as a more unified center of family, and friends, though, many are more socially conservative and traditional compared to Americans. Its up to you I guess, but don't pretend like the developed world is the entire world.
• cf1241290841 3y ago
  The increase in depression numbers might be a rational reaction to the current environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Never_to_Have_Been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Never_to_Have_Been
  • ativzzz 3y ago
    This is why for pretty much the majority of human history, we had some form of religion to trick ourselves into ignoring this. Now that religion is on a decline...
    • stainablesteel 3y ago
      religion gave purpose, it didn't hide a lack thereof people need purpose not to hide from the truth, they need religion and purpose to embrace it
      • cf1241290841 3y ago
        There is no story or belief that can justify unethical behavior.
        • stainablesteel 3y ago
          you think existing is unethical?
          • cf1241290841 3y ago
            Not sure how you got to this conclusion from the initial post. My point was condemning somebody to existence in this world is.
            • stainablesteel 3y ago
              that's even more insane
• snvzz 3y ago
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  • brazzy 3y ago
    "no kid left behind" is not international, so that kinda kills your theory.
    • snvzz 3y ago
      The principles have been widely copied, unfortunately.
      • personomas 3y ago
        Confirmed. In fact, it started mostly in Europe, then came to the other English countries, hitting US last of all.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• fulladder 3y ago
  If you want to posit an explanation for this phenomenon, you have to be able to explain two things: what changed abruptly in the early/mid 2010s?, and why did it uniquely affect teen girls? Many of the reactions I've seen over the years to these authors' work focuses on some particular frustrations or complaints about American society, the economy, our culture, and so on. The problem with these theories is that none of that stuff abruptly changed in the 2010s, and even then there's no particular reason that a 13-year old girl would be so much more negatively impacted by changes that did occur than anyone else. Haidt's theory focuses a lot on technological change like smartphones and social media (though it has some other components). Ten years ago this seemed believable because it appeared at that time that teen girls were more interested in these technologies than boys. However, the under-30 mental health problem is ongoing (and may even be accelerating), and yet it's much less clear now that there is any gender difference in technology uptake. I haven't seen a satisfying explanation from Haidt about the more recent data, and have come to believe that there is no adequate explanation right now.
  • naasking 3y ago
    > If you want to posit an explanation for this phenomenon, you have to be able to explain two things: what changed abruptly in the early/mid 2010s?, and why did it uniquely affect teen girls? And that it's cross-cultural, so three things. > and yet it's much less clear now that there is any gender difference in technology uptake. There are definitely well known differences in how the tech is used by the different sexes. Females are typically far more social than males.
  • hackinthebochs 3y ago
    Social media created a perpetual church gossip culture where every action and statement is endlessly evaluated by the peanut gallery, while also creating a land rush for finding new moral angles to exploit for social status. Naturally, this catty culture will affect females more and teen girls in particular. Why specifically social media? It's a function of communication efficiency. It's why church is associated with this sort of cattiness, everyone knows everyone and is brought together regularly to provide a venue to trade gossip. It also supplies the moral standard by which everyone is evaluated and one's social status is tied to how well one appears to meet this standard. The cattiness is just status games playing out given these constraints. Why 2010? It's when the "always online" culture went from niche nerd to ubiquitous.
• stevefan1999 3y ago
  I would also argue that overprotectionism is also one key factor in the teen mental illness, nowadays parents don't want their children to do risky stuff outside and wanted their children to stay indoor. It will surely lock-in their freedom to do many stuff and they have nothing to do but to surf on the social media. This means although the children are less exposed to the external threats, they also have less experience to the outside world, which caused an asymmetric information flowing around in social media when they are surprised by some crazy act of their peers -- including flexing off with money, doing impossible stunts, and even pregnancy. Keep in mind what you see on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tiktok are shared globally, that means a 12 years old lad from Texas could be seeing another 12 years old do some crazy stuff on SF, but what I want to say is about kids should be interacting with their local peers more than the global ones. This way you won't taint the kids POV to be among the globals, or be the best of the best. Focus on the local community and parents should not be that paranoid to overprotect their children. If they need to get hurt, just let them get hurt in a controlled way. Just, let, them, be. Overprotectionism implies controlling freedom, and the lack of freedom means lack of innovation and reflections, and will easily create a death spiral, that one of them descend into mental illness, and eventually many other horrible things. Also, I think the core reason for any mental illness, at least from my own POV, is always about getting asymmetric information, which caused mental imbalances from within. But how do we get rid of asymmetric information or mental imbalances? No, I don't think you can...but if you could accept this fact, and you would be free from the mental illness hell.
• jimbob45 3y ago
  Seems pretty simple. The bottom of Maslow’s pyramid is under attack with unnecessary layoffs and offshoring leading to extremely dismal prospects of stable, long-term employment. What kid is going to feel good if their parents are constantly stressed by employment woes? Even worse when the government tells you everything is fine and there’s nothing to fix.
• barrenko 3y ago
  I'd recommend reading Byung-Chul Han.
  • nicbou 3y ago
    An explanation would help
• andrewstuart 3y ago
  Kids growing up too early when they should be playing and hanging out outside and having fun together. Real world social connection is essential to human happiness.
  • slothtrop 3y ago
    Adolescence is more prolonged than ever, the problems typically identified (isolation, excess social media, insufficient sunlight) aren't contingent on early adulthood unless we redefine adulthood to mean those things.
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  Most of the West lost its traditional values. If there are no values to build upon, if you have no reference, if everything and everyone is the same, if right and wrong, good and evil are confused, if you have no compass, then it's very easy to get lost and become mentally ill.
  • mglz 3y ago
    What are those values precisely?
    • arkey 3y ago
      I'd say marriage and family just to begin with.
      • bedobi 3y ago
        lol, ok, never mind all the countless people those "values" drove their childhoods, adolescence and lives into the ground or worse
        • arkey 3y ago
          lol, ok, never mind all the countless people the absence of these "values" are driving their childhoods, adolescence and lives into the ground or worse edit: Right, sorry, that was quite a reactive response on my side. I'll try to be constructive and foster conversation instead of just resorting to sarcasm: what's your point? are you seriously implying marriage and family are overall negative values?
          • bedobi 3y ago
            words like "marriage" and "family" when wielded like this are effectively clubs and weasel words meant to induce an image of something akin to 50's propaganda posters of the happy american family living out their american dream, and imply that the people pointing out that's problematic are just being cynical nitpicky amoral misanthropes when really it's the people wielding them in this manner who are very selective about what people they mean to include, and very disingenuous about the many people they deliberately do not mean to include (and just their general agenda)
• Sleaker 3y ago
  Good to see more indepth research on this the last article I had read was asserting the social media access theory was correlation and not causatory because studies that were done in mental resiliency were showing that if you have built the resiliency then you can safely handle the social media... But it seems like that explanation doesn't take into account the developing mind. Love haidt's work and glad to see there's more research being done to find out exactly why.
  • bentcorner 3y ago
    I've seen similar claims (social media is correlation and not causation) and it does seem plausible to me. What I haven't seen so far (and it's possible this data exists, I'll admit to not exactly looking for it) is studies around parental consumption of social media and the impacts it has on their children. IMO social media/advertising can have amplification effects by targeting parents.
    • ryandrake 3y ago
      Yea we try to set a good example as parents. You can’t expect kids to not get addicted to social media when their parents are… constantly scrolling though their phone and social media! I bet even basic ground rules help. We try to adhere to: don’t be seen by our kid doing it. Some parents hold themselves to this rule when it comes to drinking and smoking, so why not apply it to smartphone scrolling too?
• cat123z 3y ago
  So first time poster. Couldn't flicking believe thath Haidt, who I wrote about in my Phil masters is continuing this line of simplicity. The pressure children especially teen girls especially is super cultural. Invention of social media didn't make girls more depressed but allowed new manifestations of all the toxic shite in our society. The solution is to change our fricking societies not to let assholes and racists to expound stupid theories on campuses, or to take girls phones away and keep them more pure. What awful pseudo science nonsense.
• bigbacaloa 3y ago
  [dead]
• madrox 3y ago
  [flagged]
• PeterStuer 3y ago
  The DSM-5 was published in 2013, redefining the 'mental health' diagnosis landscape substantially. You will see in some pf the graphs arpid onset of the climb in 2023. Could changes in diagnosis and treatment be a factor in this?
  • coffeebeqn 3y ago
    I’d be surprised if this wasn’t at least a part of the effect. I wasn’t diagnosed with anxiety until three years ago. I don’t think I suddenly developed it in my 30s - it just wasn’t caught by any medical professionals back in the day. This was a good development for me - a minimum dose medication helped improve my quality of life a ton
  • corethree 3y ago
    This is a huge possibility. One should not even begin to discuss this topic without factoring in what you brought up here.
• carl_sandland 3y ago
  The answer you're looking for is that woke culture arrived. Your God is not dead, you've just abandoned him (again). Social media is obviously a catalyst for patterns of communicated harm that have always been around. The communists have been unraveling the nucleus of family and faith, to be replaced with isolated rage and hate, with government to provide 'proxy support', whereas once was family. We've been divided into us vs them teams on issues that used to bring harmony and coherence. Damn, maybe there is just too many people now? and we're all connected all the time. The brain can only handle so much (much less than I think we admit).
  • bongodongobob 3y ago
    This is satire right?
    • carl_sandland 3y ago
      partly ;) I do seriously wonder if our brains are just overloaded, the rest was various conspiracies I come across (what gave it away, the communists?)
      • arkey 3y ago
        I do believe our brains are overloaded. After removing "woke" and "communist" as specific agents, would you still really mean all that as just a joke? You don't think there's at least a bit of it that's pretty close to the truth?
        • carl_sandland 3y ago
          I don't think the problems are intentional, rather they are the unforeseen outcomes of rapid technological and societal evolution, of man leaving faith behind and discovering themselves insufficient. This only seems to be accelerating.
• DoreenMichele 3y ago
  Dupe. Exact same article, different URL. Posted 10 months ago and discussed at length. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35359271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35359271
• vjk800 3y ago
  I would like to see a chart that shows "physical activity vs mental illness". Physical exercising is known to be one of the most effective methods to prevent and cure mental illnesses and especially kids' activity levels have plummeted in the past one or two decades. I think this might easily be the whole story and no other intervention is needed than to get the kids to play outside and do sports again.
  • yellow_lead 3y ago
    Physical exercise also has many confounding variables, like going outside, or seeing other people.
• VinLucero 3y ago
  I’d argue that the author glosses over 2008 recession as the underlying issue by saying that the recovery was well underway by 2012. The reality of the recovery wasn’t shared equally and those who got the short end of the stick for the last decade likely shared those worries with their children (directly or indirectly) Does anyone know how the child’s parental income impacts the growth of depression / anxiety over the same time period?
  • thejohnconway 3y ago
    The effect is there in countries that didn’t have the 2008 recession (Australia for one).
• mike_hearn 3y ago
  This is a super interesting thread, but (un)fortunately Haidt's claims about a teen mental health epidemic have been pretty convincingly debunked. 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... Aaron Brown checked a sample of the papers Haidt relies on to build his case and found that they couldn't support his claims. They're of the sort of quality we've come to expect from the field, dominated by tiny unrepresentative samples, bad methodologies, bad statistics, weak signals and so on. Unfortunately Haidt's initial response was to make a circular argument, saying you can't demand a high quality of evidence for the crisis because there's a crisis, and to engage in a subtle form of gish gallop by saying that surely not all 300 papers he selected can be bad even if a subsample were. https://twitter.com/JonHaidt/status/1641850836287356930 https://twitter.com/JonHaidt/status/1641850836287356930 Still, to his immense credit Haidt engaged seriously with the criticism and so Brown wrote another response: https://reason.com/2023/05/30/not-every-study-on-teen-depression-and-social-media-is-bad-only-most-of-them/ https://reason.com/2023/05/30/not-every-study-on-teen-depres... I didn't express "concerns" about specific studies; I argued that the majority of the 301 papers cited in his document are garbage. I went through each category of studies on Haidt's list, chose the first one that studied social media and depression to get a random sampling, and then showed that they were so embarrassingly bad as to be completely useless. They were guilty of coding errors, fatal defects hidden in mid-paper jargon, inappropriate statistics, longitudinal studies that weren't longitudinal, experiments in name only, and red flags for hypothesis shopping and p-hacking (that is, misusing data analysis to yield results that can be presented as statistically significant). "A bad study is like a bad mortgage loan," I wrote in my original piece. "Packaging them up on the assumption that somehow their defects will cancel each other out is based on flawed logic, and it's a recipe for drawing fantastically wrong conclusions." It's quite probable that there is no teen mental health crisis.
  • naasking 3y ago
    > Haidt's claims about a teen mental health epidemic have been pretty convincingly debunked [...] It's quite probable that there is no teen mental health crisis. I don't see how you can reach this conclusion when it's very clear in the data that hospitalizations for teens due to self-harm has gone up significantly. Are you suggesting that hospitals are not now or were not previously correctly reporting this data?
• katzenversteher 3y ago
  I believe the big 2016 bump is due to Trump. Does that have international impact? Since I'm German and still had daily news about his behavior I say yes. As far I can remember we never had so many news about any other US president. I mean Trump was very active on social media and was very attention seeking, much more than other presidents. Why would Trump cause depression? First of all he basically said all the things young people care about (climate change, environment, social justice etc.) are nonsense. Secondly his "diplomacy" was pretty aggressive. None of us non-US citizens wants to get drawn into a (possibly nuclear) war. Thirdly he caused a very big divide, not only in the US population but worldwide. Everything has become black and white. You're (as seen from the proponents of the other side) either a weak woke justice warrior soy boy snowflake or an old white racist Nazi hillbilly sociopath. There is no "gray" zone. In addition to that the divide, his "free speech" approach made many topics that were previously taboo (also outside the US) daily topics again. Extreme nationalists but also extreme antifascists dared to speak out loudly again worldwide. Their extreme plans cause anxiety and stress.
  • mersenne 3y ago
    I agree with most of this but my opinion is that Trump was the symptom, not the cause.
    • standardUser 3y ago
      I see it both ways. If you are the type of person Trump targeted with his insults and attacks, which is a lot of people in the US, and you're young and don't really 'get' the political situation, that could cause some significant psychological distress. Imagine you're 17 and the president says "Mersenne and people like them are destroying our country".
      • selimthegrim 3y ago
        I think I would be shocked at his penchant for recreational mathematics.
  • kwere 3y ago
• bambax 3y ago
  I don't know much about kids from the "Anglosphere" but I do know that preventing kids from making their own experiments and adventures is the craziest approach ever (parents being interrogated by the police for letting their kids walk back from school when they're 10...!!!) In France my kids walked to school by themselves at age 7, including taking a bus and the metro, and coming back at night in the winter. I'm currently in Morocco and here one sees scores of very young children running around everywhere, with no adult supervision whatsoever, at all hours. That's how it should be, IMHO.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• Joking_Phantom 3y ago
  Not a big fan of Heidt. Way too much political, unsubstantiated and handwavy rhetoric from him. And his track record has been entirely unconvincing. The only reasonable way I can interpret his work is that of a ideologically driven puritan, trying to make the data fit his perception. In doing so, he often misses the forest for the trees. In particular, this interpretation of teenage mental illness is predicated on data. But the data sucks. Why should we assume we have accurate data on mental illness? It's ridiculous when you consider our society's terrible history in dealing with this stigma. Sexist notions like female hysteria, gross misuse of sedatives and psychoactive drugs by medical charlatans, repression of discussion about mental illness, bias/inexperience/abuse by governmental and health care institutions, horrible conditions at sanitoriums, the list goes on. Give it another 100 years and maybe we can draw some better patterns. In no particular order, here are some highlights on medical data and institutions in history... 1. The consensus on normal heart rate is still erroneously assumed to be 60-100 bpm. For over 100 years, this myth was predicated on poor data and grossly misinterpreted literature. Our current, best consensus based on better data is 50-90 bpm, though virtually all textbooks and educational programs have failed to update themselves. If we can't even get statistics on heart rates right, how are we supposed to get statistics on mental illness correct? 2. There is no consensus on average breaths per minute. Textbooks often contradict themselves, quoting different fabricated ranges for respiratory rates within the same page. Data in this area is sparse and and lacks adjustment for demographics. The most comprehensive data is from a study done in 1846... We just don't know because we haven't put in the rigorous effort to definitively identify this range. Again, this basic measurement is much easier than mental illness, and we haven't done it yet. 3. The most established field of medicine is considered to be Obstetrics. That is to say, this is the medical field with the oldest depth of knowledge that we consider to be accurate or useful. Which makes sense given the significance of managing childbirth for societies. And yet there are still severe deficiencies in this field. We have a long way to go in the most mature field of medical science, and an even longer way to go in every other field. In comparison, mental health was not even mentioned in writing until 1946. 4. Prior to the gross misuse of opioids perpetuated by the Sackler family, was the gross misuse of benzodiazepines (Xanax, Valium). Prior was of Barbiturates. Prior to that was alcohol. And countless more medications in between those broad categories. Humanity has abused substances to numb itself from crippling anxiety for centuries, and in the modern sense has almost always sought to mass market these drugs before careful consideration of their appropriate use. Each medication was so abused that each generation has their own idioms and memes regarding their misuse. I'm certain that we can do better. It's just going to take time, and Heidt's work just seems like reading tea leaves and putting people in arbitrary pigeon holes.
• lynx23 3y ago
  I find it fascinating how--according to these comments--easy it is to identify a single culprit, the all-mighty smartphone. Seems like gaslighting. Don't get me wrong, Always-Online is likely a contributing factor, but I highly doubt it is the root cause. I cant help but think of Smith: "it is purpose that defines, purpose that binds us", that purpose is something that we--in our modern society--lack more day by day. In essence, nobody needs nobody else anymore, because frankly, we dont need each other for survival anymore. Individualism is advanced enough to have destroyed most need for sticking together. And in a sense, that isn't only a bad thing. I remember "communities" I was forced into which I am very happy to have left behind. All humans are not nice to be around.
  • Aerbil313 3y ago
    > In essence, nobody needs nobody else anymore, because frankly, we dont need each other for survival anymore. Individualism is advanced enough to have destroyed most need for sticking together. Fascinating to see how far people are willing to go to not name the root cause: technology itself. It’s unthinkable to so many that modern technology as a whole may in fact be a bad idea.
    • lynx23 3y ago
      While I am sometimes tempted to just blame it on technology, as someone who is arguably more dependant on tech then most people, I cant really just blame it on tech. Me is blind, and without technology, I am not even sure if I wouldn't be placed in some sort of institution. IOW, without technology, I might have been enslaved by humanity because "they" likely wouldnt have known how to integrate me in a useful way. With technology, I can at least free myself in a few situations, with adds up to at least allowing me to exist independantly. But that is a very specific example... I am aware of that. So maybe your intutition is still right. Without technology, some of us might be worse off, but nobody knows what it would do to humanity as a whole.
      • Aerbil313 3y ago
        To be clear, I want not only a pre-modern-technology but also a muslim world. I know enough history to know that the non muslim version sucks. To serve just as an example, see how our prophet pbuh. treated blind people, making one his representative and making him a muazzin (person who makes the call for Islamic prayer). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Umm_Maktum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Umm_Maktum
• Sparkyte 3y ago
  I first blame firstly parenting. People give their child an iPad and walk away. I second blame introductions to education as a toddler. When you are a toddler and inspired to learn you grow and don't stop. I third blame the use of social and personal ideals over community and connectivity. I fourth blame the lack of independence given to a child to make mistakes and learn. I fifth blame the lack of analogue input in a child's life. Interacting with physical objects can not be replaced with pads a person swipes on. I sixth blame short form media. It is addicting way to consume information. It is also unfortunately a very unproductive way to consume information. I seventh blame the lack of censorship information has on the web to dictate whether or not something provided is informative or brain mush. Like the difference between Smarter Every Day vs some stuff Logan Paul posts. I am not opposed to free speech but it is obvious that giving youth the ability to listen to factually incorrect people is bad. I eighth blame social media it isn't as bad as the rest. It used be terrible, however parental controls in place very safe.
  • weatherlite 3y ago
    > I first blame firstly parenting. People give their child an iPad and walk away. were parents any better 50 years ago? There were no ipads but fathers were much less involved in child rearing. Also - beating up kids was routine. > I second blame introductions to education as a toddler. When you are a toddler and inspired to learn you grow and don't stop. Again , what changed since 2008? Why is this worse now?
    • arkey 3y ago
      > Again , what changed since 2008? Why is this worse now? Because of 16 more years of a downwards trend. > were parents any better 50 years ago? Probably not, but they didn't have iPads to give. They were probably as bad as now, but maybe pointing to better or higher standards. Since we're using generalisations here, I'd risk saying that generally speaking (in my view of South-Western Europe), a few decades ago it was less possible/socially accepted to become a 30-year-old useless bum. Nowadays I'm no longer surprised about having a conversation with a 20-something-year-old and finding out he doesn't quite understand the idea of the need to work in order to survive, let alone provide. Of course, these are generalisations, but I'm afraid they are increasingly becoming indicatives of how things are.
• drewjaja 3y ago
  Our society is teaching us to seek money, power, intelligence, beauty, bodily satisfaction, all of which will never satisfy us. “If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.” ― David Foster Wallace,
  • muragekibicho 3y ago
    True. I'm not religious but when people stop worshipping the invisible sky daddy they turn to worshipping OnlyFans models, Amouranth-style twitch streamers and toxic masculinity gurus like Andrew Tate.
    • thaumasiotes 3y ago
      > they turn to worshipping OnlyFans models, Amouranth-style twitch streamers and Are these supposed to be two different categories?
    • maipen 3y ago
      People were already struggling before any of those people became popular. The population always did this through the ages. Social media came and came in fast. Today's society is still figuring out it's effects on people and what they can do about it. Andrew Tate has been preaching the young folks to work hard, which in fact, is something they need to hear because they are extremely lazy (I agree from personal experience in dealing with young men). Onlyfans, on the otherhand, is probably one of the most dangerous things on social media right now, since it's glorifying and promoting e-prostitution while hiding in the lie of it not being so.