[HN Gopher] Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental...
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Is social media behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?
Author : herbertl
Score : 64 points
Date : 2024-03-31 21:27 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I always wonder when an "epidemic" gets reported if things really
| have changed or if we just recognize it better. When I grew up,
| we had a lot of kids (including myself) with problems like
| depression or not fitting in in other ways. Back then they were
| just labeled as "slow", "stupid" or "difficult". Nobody thought
| about mental illness or ways for addressing these issues.
| astrea wrote:
| Actually glad you said that. One of my recent shower thoughts
| that I was sure no one would understand. I distinctly remember
| growing up, people being "slow" or "different" or "<something
| now consider offensive>". Gender identity and mental health
| issues have been around forever, they're just now actually
| getting brought to the forefront.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Also it used to be the case that beating your own kids was
| normal. Of course now we got studies about how that screws kids
| up, but it was ubiquitous in my generation. And now that we can
| identify that children can be harmed from physical violence, we
| actually have ways to diagnose that sort of thing in teenagers.
| I wonder what our baseline trauma is supposed to be!
| Spivak wrote:
| And it's such a good thing that we're finally paying attention
| to this stuff and treating it (insert graph of left-handedness
| over time). But then everyone is out here trying to figure out
| what must be wrong with the world today when Boomers and Gen X
| are traumatized as hell and full of undiagnosed mental illness.
| But they grew up in a culture where unless it was life-
| debilitating or presented in exactly the stereotypical manner
| it was ignored and pushed down.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| Conversely, were over-diagnosing and now everyone is ill.
|
| Which necessarily follows because the closer you look the
| fewer people are "normal". In fact I'd go so far as to posit
| that everyone is aberrant, to nobody's surprise.
|
| And of course this is all derivated from a basis of largely
| qualitative soft-science which had ought be treated as an art
| than it is a science, however there are pressures which force
| both practitioners and researchers to justify it as a
| science.
|
| I'm sure there's some "law of self-awareness" as well. The
| closest analogy I have is the January Effect which describes
| an even in the market, a pattern of sell-off in the later
| year to mark a loss, and subsequent repurchase in January.
| Upon this pattern being disclosed, the market adapted
| strategies to exploit it which ultimately resulted in a
| complete silencing of the effect. In a sense more applicable
| to this, being diagnosed with some mental illness can also be
| leveraged to gain favor, I mean I can get a prescription for
| pharmaceutical grade amphetamines for fidgeting for instance;
| or excuse my bad behavior with some other diagnosis.
|
| My position is that it's all very unclear. I'm lazy and don't
| care to dig it up but there was a study from the UK that
| observed the measurable effects from school based, non-
| individual interventions and it found their effects to be
| significantly detrimental for some students - to the extent
| that they negated the aggregate benefits - which I think
| supports this position because treatment can _exacerbate_
| things. And that 's without mentioning pharmacological
| interventions which are... Interesting.
| anon291 wrote:
| Not fitting in is not a mental illness. And this attitude is
| behind the prevalence of many mental illnesses today. We've
| gone from a society that embraced difference to one that claims
| to embrace difference while mandating sameness. TikTok,
| Instagram, Facebook, etc, are all toxic for this reason.
| fennecs wrote:
| When did society previously embraced difference?
| levocardia wrote:
| >I always wonder when an "epidemic" gets reported if things
| really have changed or if we just recognize it better.
|
| Suicide and emergency room visits for suicide attempts among
| teenagers are also up, and also on exactly the same
| post-2010ish timeline.
| jowea wrote:
| Youth suicide rates are going up, I think that's quite
| objectively measurable.
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db471.pdf
|
| Not proof that social media is behind it of course.
| abirch wrote:
| There seems to be a lot of pressure on the youth today.
| Growing up I had a lot of unscheduled time but now kids can't
| play multiple sports due to games, practices, and
| expectations.
| xg15 wrote:
| _insert skinner meme here_
| diddypiddy wrote:
| The trends in increased mental illness, suicide and the
| unraveling social fabric pre-date social media. Bowling Alone was
| written in 2000. These are mostly economic issues manifesting
| itself in all sorts of negative social ways.
| williamcotton wrote:
| But they don't predate the mass electronic media that began
| with the radio, television, and into many-to-many computer
| information systems.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| The definitions, and diagnoses, of mental illnesses have been
| significantly redefined in the last few decades which is a
| significant confounding factor that I'm not sure can be corrected
| for.
| grzeshru wrote:
| For anyone who reads the comments before TFA: yes, it's just more
| Haidt.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| It would help if the author provided a definition of what it
| means to "rewire" the brain, or what it means to "drive" an
| epidemic of mental illness.
| astrea wrote:
| Couldn't possibly be the political turmoil, the daily mass
| shootings, 2 years of lockdown, poor healthcare resources, etc.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Maybe? Possibly?
|
| You know how many nerds didn't know they had any sort of issue
| other than being antisocial and lonely, and then someone made
| Slashdot aware of Asperger's and suddenly 90% of the site was
| self-diagnosed?
| dadrian wrote:
| All this article says is that Haidt's analysis is just
| correlation, and then cites a single metastudy from 2019, and
| doesn't go on to explain what Haidt did wrong. This is despite
| extensive writing from Haidt that deconstructs that specific
| metastudy.
| pama wrote:
| Only correlation can never explain something. A bomb will tear
| a building into bricks, but finding bricks every time after a
| building explodes does not help identify the cause. Suppose it
| ended up eventually that the causal source was a novel virus
| epidemic, say N1H1, instead of social media or the post-2008
| economic mess: it wouldn't help much if people stopped using
| their social media. I don't support social media usage for
| other reasons that are easier to quantify and assign causality,
| including the waste of time, but I understand the severe
| limitations of correlations and the differences to causality.
| Medical research has suffered greatly from errors in causality
| occasionally dismissing partial self-therapies due to observed
| correlations, whereas the careful delineation of causation is
| one of the key ingredients of what made physics such a mature
| science over the centuries. It is of course hard to try causal
| experiments for understanding the root of epidemics, and in
| this case any attempts for causality in therapies are also
| challenging.
| password54321 wrote:
| Here is a simple experiment. Spend the same amount of time on
| social media as your average teen for a month, and report your
| mental health before and after assuming you use it less.
| 'correlation does not imply causation' has become the most
| overused lazy argument to dismiss so many problems.
| twelfthnight wrote:
| Seems more plausible to me that young people are just realizing
| they will be inheriting the consequences of decades of selfish
| leadership and they are reasonably worried about the future.
|
| The narrative that social media is the cause and not the obvious
| looming climate change, war and wealth inequality is frustrating.
| andy99 wrote:
| The world had much bigger and more imminent problems in the
| past. People didn't dwell on them collectively in the same way.
| twelfthnight wrote:
| I don't mean to be glib, but you are in denial. Nuclear war
| is more likely now than since the early cold war, China is
| ready to invade Taiwan, climate change is poised to weaken or
| complete disrupt the Gulf Stream, America is months away from
| electing an insurrectionist as president, buying a house is a
| pipe dream for most Americans...
|
| How could you see that as a young person and not feel at
| least a little hopeless?
| password54321 wrote:
| We are talking about data that spans over a decade, not a
| year.
|
| Look at figure 1: https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-
| materials/2022/05/31/...
| twelfthnight wrote:
| I'm being admittedly a little polemical, personally I'm
| freaked out by the future. But that aside, I'm curious to
| hear more about your argument. Are you saying worry about
| the future can't be causing this issue because scary
| stuff only started recently?
| password54321 wrote:
| Some of the examples you gave are too recent to explain
| the rise in depression that has been going on for over a
| decade.
|
| And climate change worry has been going on for much
| longer.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Maybe. But also I've become a massive history nerd and I can't
| name a single period in the modern world without serious
| objective problems. There were wars and diseases and nasty
| politics and crises and injustices and environmental
| catastrophes aplenty. Our current slate is serious business,
| but not uniquely so.
|
| Based on the evidence available to us, what the little
| doomscrolling box has done is drive us crazy and actually make
| it _harder_ for societies to act on these problems.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I think capitalism is. Social media companies are driven by
| profit and not by well-being of their users.
| mavili wrote:
| The answer is YES, and you dont need any research to prove that.
| We can see it ourselves. We live it. It's not rocket science.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| The way in which this topic is discussed is endlessly infuriating
| because:
|
| While indeed, social media and specifically content algorithms
| (both in the present where they decide which content people see,
| and in the future where they may indeed create it entirely) are
| certainly worthy of scrutiny with regard to many mental
| illnesses, and the ongoing exploitation of the attention of young
| people especially by figures such as Andrew Tate are doing
| demonstrable, objective harm to tons and tons of young kids, and
| the entire notion that simply by virtue of making an account a
| child can, by default, access the entire breadth of content
| available on any of these sites, for zero money, with zero
| notification of their parents, etc., is certainly one that IMO
| doesn't get nearly enough time in popular discussions as to how
| we've simply shotgunned all of this into the faces of kids for
| decades now, with precious little data about what it does to them
| and it's only accelerating...
|
| THEN, when that conversation happens, it's to explain of all
| fucking things, anxiety and depression. Not body image issues,
| not rampant misogyny in young boys, not the growing slice of the
| crowd that "fails to launch" and remain stuck with mom and dad
| long after it's traditional to do so, no, none of those things,
| just anxiety. Anxiety which is a perfectly normal and
| understandable thing, IMO, to experience in a period of history
| that's got, in a non-exhaustive list:
|
| - A biosphere on the brink of collapse, and no one in power
| taking it seriously
|
| - War in Europe involving multiple international powers and one
| of the larger nations on the planet, which seems like it could
| incredibly easily boil over into World War III
|
| - Multiple ongoing ethnic cleansings and/or genocides
|
| - The rise of authoritarian fascist movements in several
| countries
|
| - The rise of unchangeable super-corporations that run more of
| our lives than ever with zero oversight
|
| Like, as an adult, who has SEEN some shit, I have to meter my
| intake of world news to avoid entering a depressive state in
| which I cannot function. I have already had a vasectomy because
| this world is not one I want to bring children into, and my wife
| got her tubes tied, because there is a non-trivial chance that
| she won't have the ability in a few years to do so and feels
| similarly. And it's all well and good to say "well the 24 hour
| news cycle is probably behind that," maybe? But maybe if said
| news cycle ever had anything but the worst shit you've ever heard
| of to report, maybe that would be less of a contributing factor?
|
| I dunno, this just sucks. This incurious response by the dominant
| media of "well it can't be that the world we're leaving them is
| fucking awful, it's gotta be those pesky iPhones" is so
| dismissive and shitty.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think it's the worst for teenagers and kids, but what about
| everyone else! The famous quote "comparison is the thief of joy"
| is attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, and social media is
| essentially about constantly comparing yourself to others. I have
| yet to meet a _single_ person who has taken an extended social
| media break (or given it up altogether) who hasn 't reported a
| substantial improvement in their mental state and wellbeing.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39812623
| Funes- wrote:
| The coupling of social media and smartphones has made parental
| negligence, laziness, emotional distress, and plain stupidity a
| hundred times more harmful. That's the gist of it.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| Absolutely coupled with excessive cell phone use, seed oils, and
| mineral / vitamin deficient vegetables.
|
| The pandemic did nothing to help this.
| stevenally wrote:
| Don't know about teenagers, but quite a few people close to me,
| 50 to 60 yrs old have have gone more than a little mad due to
| social media. Paranoia, conspiracy, and chronic anxiety. They
| were all quite sane 10 years ago.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| The problem with social media is it is a paralysis engine. It
| drives the most seemingly credible, brain-wormy and engagement-
| driving discourse to the top, promoting the most violent,
| exclusionary and aggressively undertoned rallying cries of
| trending angst-fueled ideologies. As a consequence, whatever your
| opinion, identity, or circumstances, you will surely encounter
| the echo chambers of people who want you dead or removed from
| society: calculated, memetically selected hatred that sows fear,
| uncertainty, and doubt in anything more that complete surrender
| and inaction.
| mistermann wrote:
| The causality here (and the fact of the matter) is far more
| complex than it seems though - for example, each person's
| perception of what is going on is to a large degree a function
| of their culture and education, and those two attributes tend
| to get a free pass _at least when it comes to oneself or the
| members of one 's ingroups_ in all such discussions.
|
| Our wonderful, purely well-intentioned politicians _could_ do
| something about this dire "need for more critical thinking",
| and yet what do they do to fulfill that need, despite it being
| _literally their responsibility_.
|
| https://search.usa.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=ed.go...
|
| See also:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_cow_(idiom)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation (what my
| comment "is")
|
| For example: these terrible people you are referring to out
| there....are you sure they are as they seem (where did you
| learn these facts about their intentions from, etc), and that
| they are enemy number 1?
| tbrooks wrote:
| Yes.
| looknee wrote:
| I always see discussions on this topic online immediately start
| discussing how the _content_ of social media is the driver of the
| mental health issues (comparison to others, everyone projecting
| their best selves etc).
|
| My own experiences with social media and phone addiction leads me
| to believe its not JUST the content, but also (equally, perhaps
| moreso) the fact that teenagers AND adults with social media and
| phone addiction are just spending so much of their time absorbed
| into a screen scrolling and getting quick dopamine hits for hours
| and hours.
|
| When that is your default that you revert to to distract yourself
| at almost any point of discomfort, slight boredom, lapse in
| focus, anxiety or feelings of sadness, all it does is just dampen
| those feelings momentarily. You live in almost a fugue state
| where those things just fester as you avoid them instead of
| learning to cope with them or respond to them in an agentic or
| healthy manner.
|
| Working to cut out social media, reddit, youtube etc on my phone,
| leave my phone by our front door while at home, never have my
| phone in bed, and spend time writing/journaling my thoughts and
| actually engaging with my feelings of anxiety or depression or
| stress instead of avoiding them has been by far the most
| significant improvement on my mental health compared to many
| other things I've worked out.
|
| This is definitely anecdotal, and its definitely my experience,
| but after the time i've spent working on these things and with
| what I see in the teenagers, young people, and friends in my life
| I feel very strongly about it.
| datascienced wrote:
| Not just social media but more broadly highly connected online
| environments like certain games, discord etc. You may cpunt these
| as social media already but I think most think of Insta, X, FB
| etc.
| longdog wrote:
| The author is way overselling how controversial Haidt's claim is.
|
| - The effect of social media at a societal level isn't something
| that can tested experimentally. And like all non-experimental
| research, results depend heavily on modeling methodology (for
| example, the meta-analysis linked by the author is literally just
| a regression of facebook DAU on life satisfaction polls [1]). As
| a result there will NEVER a universal consensus, same as with
| most "macro" level studies in social sciences. If you wait for
| researchers to reach an agreement, you will wait forever.
|
| - The most credible research I've seen on this is this quasi-
| experimental paper [2]. Since the timing of Facebook's rollout
| was staggered across schools, it can be used as a natural
| experiment. Schools should've seen declines in student mental
| health that correspond with the date of Facebook's rollout on
| their campus, which is indeed what happened.
|
| - The effect of using social media at an individual level (as
| opposed to a societal level) IS known and it is very clearly
| negative. See [3] for an example.
|
| - Most importantly, the fact is that mental health and suicide
| rates have been rising significantly since exactly when social
| media gained popularity (mid-to-late 2000s). The effect is global
| so you can't blame country-specfic policies. And the rise is most
| significant with demographics most exposed to social media (young
| people, especially girls). There's not a single other explanation
| that makes sense. Frankly, I think people are afraid to admit
| that social media is the problem because so many people are tech
| addicts and don't want to admit that their own addiction is part
| of the problem.
|
| [1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.221451
|
| [2] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20211218
|
| [3] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190658
| publius_0xf3 wrote:
| I'm guessing not just teenagers. Every day on Twitter, I see
| posts like [this](https://twitter.com/BGatesIsaPyscho/status/1774
| 1956933237925...) by accounts with hundreds of thousands of
| followers that are indistinguishable from schizophrenic ideation.
| These consist of extremely idiosyncratic delusions that, thanks
| purely to social media, find a community of believers who can
| reassure each other that no, they're not crazy, they're not
| alone, they're just the fortunate ones who've escaped the Matrix,
| etc. whereas in the past, their beliefs would have been penalized
| by the sane peers around them.
| mistermann wrote:
| [delayed]
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> the fact that teenagers AND adults with social media and phone
| addiction are just spending so much of their time absorbed into a
| screen scrolling and getting quick dopamine hits for hours and
| hours
|
| If everybody does it why are teenage girls most affected?
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