4 ms·
No evidence social media use causes mental illness
- chrisjj 3y agoThis title grossly misreps the content. The content's own title is: "The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?"
- brudgers 3y agoPer Bettridge's Law of Headlines it is accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- darthrupert 3y ago>When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers. Teenage years are one big mental health problem. Thus this contradicts the whole point the article is trying to make. This is a similar situation to how tobacco companies knew about the problems they were creating, and at the same time spent lots of resources to try to disprove those facts. Here's Haidt's book: https://www.amazon.com/Anxious-Generation-Rewiring-Childhood-Epidemic/dp/0593655036/ https://www.amazon.com/Anxious-Generation-Rewiring-Childhood...
- BryantD 3y agoAt a quick glance I didn’t see any evidence that Odgers is funded by social media or smartphone companies, which is probably required before saying this is similar to the tobacco situation. If you’ve put more research into this I’d be interested in seeing it!