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.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262

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?

Some of these issues are solved! People seek help, or are referred to help, and they get help. The article is showing in part that more people are seeking help, not that they're not getting help.

Though with minimal mental health funding, any kind of sustained help is out of reach for most people.

And speaking of men, it doesn't surprise me that the data is showing a larger increase among women. Men really seem to fetishize "handling things themself" and that kind of nonsense.

I agree with your general sentiment (more recognition and treatment of mental illness is a good thing), but this line troubles me. Most of what happens in my family should stay in my family. Our business is our business. It's no one else's business. There's nothing absurd about this. There may be exceptions (and a child with severe, untreated mental illness may be an exception), but like all exceptions, they are special cases, not the norm. Let's not do away with all privacy in a rush to "turn the tide"...

The last thing most people want is turning their very real mental illness into an identity, but we've somehow made that the de-facto default.

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.

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?

It seems a little circular past this point. You may have diagnosed yourself, but if you saw a doctor, they would do the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide

And indeed, if you can be convinced those are the solutions to your problems, surely you can be convinced you have problems in the first place as well?

Instead think of social contagion as an additive/multiplicative factor that we don't know the value of.

So imagine a world where we're not allowed to talk about or problems. In that world you'll have your base measured rate X. Then you add a new stressor and get your increase over X.

In a model with social contagion you still have X, you still have your increase in your stressors, then you have the confounding factor of the social contagion.

The poster you replied to seemed to be looking for evidence that shows X was actually increasing by looking at an increase in reporting that wouldn't be solely caused by awareness of X and thus had to be because of an actual increase of X. To this end, your argument that the awareness of X is causing an actual increase of X would be one possible reason X is increasing, but that wasn't relevant to the previous poster's point, at least from my reading of it.

For example, are medical examiners back then, or even now, more apt to rule a suicide an accidental death? Wide social trends can affect how these individual decisions are marked at population scales.

Once you think you have it, you notice all the systems.

As a medical owner, I'm not going to deny someone money if they are coming. With grey areas, and the lack of science in medical, it very well could be a tracking thing.

I certainly wouldn't tell anyone I had a mental issue in the 90s or 00s. Today, its almost cool.

Which I'd imagine creates somewhat of an incentive to exaggerate even a diagnosis that doesn't actually meaningfully affect one's ability to finish an exam within the normal timespan.

I've seen an example of both kinds of cases, one student who clearly had ADHD, but was also clearly putting in the effort rather than seeming to abuse the benefits, and a roommate who just seemed to care more about gaming and used his diagnosis as an out for every responsibility even when the rest of us roommates tried to help him out.

So, while I am not in a position to judge who deserves or does not deserve those benefits, I wonder if that has contributed to mental illness becoming a bit of a badge.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/548381/quality-parent-child-rel...

[2] https://www.carolinajournal.com/report-conservative-parents-...

[3] https://ifstudies.org/blog/parenting-is-the-key-to-adolescen...

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.

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.

I think you have your history a bit backwards.

Galileo is considered the father of modern science, and he was one of the people that believed those goat herders. He argued that his views were in accordance with the Bible, not that the Bible was a bunch of random shit that was made up. Here’s his words on the matter:

>> Holy Scripture and nature both equally derive from the divine Word, the former as the dictation of the Holy Spirit, the latter as the most obedient executrix of God’s commands.[0]

The reading the rest of that letter also seems to indicate that he was pretty heavily invested in his beliefs of religion and science being supportive of one another. The father of modern science believing and arguing for religion kind of makes your whole argument a moot point.

[0]: https://web.stanford.edu/~jsabol/certainty/readings/Galileo-...

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.

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.

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.

I think phones may well be responsible. Before smartphones, people regularly experienced true downtime - unstructured moments with nothing to do except be in your surroundings, feel your own boredom, experience your thoughts. Now, the moment our attention isn’t occupied by something external, we reach for our phones to have something to fill the silence.

I believe this has negatively affected everyone’s mental health, but it stands to reason that children would be worse off because they’ve never known anything different: they’ve never had the opportunity to develop the ability to just be.

take a smartphone, remove its internet connection and you'll quickly discover it's the internet access thst causes all problems

At the end it would probably be about the lack of media competency, not knowing which apps and sites want to keep you as long as possible on their sites and which sources could benefit you better mentally.

And for children, aren't we adults (& probably also young adults) responsible to teach them about what media is and how to detect the bad apples?

From my experience, phone is an extremely common factor. If you randomly take a peek at any person in the 1st and 2nd world during their "downtime", I bet that you will 99% of the time see them on their phone. Phone have absolutely consumed everything we used to do.

I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly, they almost always are on their phone or listening to something.

Granted, these are two things that pretty much have a one-to-one counterpart on phones.

heh, i have to ask, what is so great/healthy/engaging/enlightening about staring blankly? I think anything, reading a book/newspaper, talking to a stranger, petting a dog, would have been better than "staring blankly".

That said: I don’t pull out my phone when waiting in line, I don’t usually have a book or newspaper handy, and I often don’t feel like talking with a stranger (though I will sometimes). That leaves me alone with my thoughts. Despite the implication of descriptions like “staring blankly”, though, my mind is absolutely active during those times. Sometimes it’s calm, sometimes it’s running a mile a minute. Maybe I’m daydreaming, maybe I’m replaying a book or movie scene in my head, maybe I’m making plans for the day, maybe I’m debating with myself or thinking philosophical thoughts or trying to work out what I should say in an upcoming meeting. Thinking thoughts is active, and I don’t consider it time wasted.

Humans don’t have to be fed stimulation 24/7—the mind is a self‐stimulating organ.

Now that might be psychopathic but being constantly poked by phones is not good either.

If you actually want to put your phone away but avoid doing so because you’re worried about what people would think, let me encourage you to ignore them. In my experience, one doesn’t suffer serious (or even moderate) social problems from being a phone‐skeptical person.

You don't see this shit in El Salvador. Parents don't pay $100 a month so their kids can ignore them and get their life lessons from Reddit.

Everyone is miserable because we need each other more than we admit. The kids really do treat each other worse than NPCs in a Westworld LARP. Those who grew up "trolling" (bullying) everyone around them online never learn how to interact with actual people in non-adversarial ways. Then they get bitter, resentful, and violent.

Every school shooter that doesn't stick the gun in their mouth at the end cites alienation and loneliness as a factor. Go figure.

It blows my mind that my kids will never know what it's like to wait for a bus with nothing else to do.

My point is not that smartphones and social media are great things. But I agree with OP that they are just filling a gap created by something else. It is still possible to be bored or have time solely with your own thoughts with social media available. Why? Because even kids can (and do) understand that social media is not all that great. Of course they have to experience that on their own before they understand it. It's nothing that you can teach them.

Someone will be well placed to make your argument - well at least you put your phone away at some point!

The socially challenging bit is the difference not the magnitude I think.

(And, yes, more and more people are putting away the phone because they realize how intrusive it is in terms of time spent doomscrolling, etc.)

Right now phones never end, there is no final page and nothing is reflected upon a second time outside phone time.

The phone as a babysitter is a big one, but also parents on phones / social media.

There's also an atomisation of society (fewer extended family and friends, and institutions like church groups). And parents work longer hours.

Kids go home and suck on a digital pacifier so their parents can do the same, and those parents haven't got anything else to do. What chance does the kid have?

Churches, I guess is the only other true community left…

I think it happens if you have kids. Parents make friends with their kids' friends' parents. "Soccer moms" and other parents whose kids are enrolled in sports make friends with other parents of their kid's teammates. Parents also make friends with their kid's teachers.

And kids still make friends at school, and after school during extracurricular activities like sports and jazz band.

Besides that, I think you're right, unless you make friends with your coworkers. There are also still parts of the US where you make friends with your neighbors. My parents recently moved to different suburbs a few years ago, and they're friends with their neighbors.

We have an unhealthy deficit of both third spaces and boredom.

The Finns, Italians, and Californians by and large have a very different idea of "community".

Furthermore, I shouldn't have to pretend to believe in some invisible god just to have community.

Or maybe governments just can't last as long as they have and they steal all progress eventually. (WW2 reset most, but not the US, would help explain why it's worse here?) Or maybe it really is monkey-brain things and normies shouldn't be on the Internet.

But when we view this as a commodity and allow housing to be an investment vehicle it really displays the lack of empathy and care for the humans around us we have.

That's the issue. All the basic human rights have been rolled back especially in the anglosphere. Housing, public health services, employment (proper jobs, non gigs)

Throw more parties. That’s one solution. It’s not easy either, but it isn’t pure hedonism. It’s creating real social bonds. And it takes real work!! Underappreciated.

Ok. So what do poor people do? Or folks living in spaces too small for such things?

Not that building these is or was ever that easy for the impoverished, but hey, before civil society became more secular, folks still managed to throw together churches even without the Vatican. Not that I think we need more churches, but makerspaces are a very good idea, and should ideally serve a larger segment of their host community beyond just hardware and software nerds.

Even though the post only covers the Anglosphere, I'm from Spain and the phenomenon also happens here and is often qouted as worrying (e.g. child and teen suicide trends: https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/OJt9haHrWhKMDEPsTtrj3g--/Y...)

I don't think the Spanish society is especially competitive - no one cares about IQ, just a minority (going into academic sector) cares about GPA, stack rank is not a thing in any company I know here (maybe it exists, but if it does, it would be rare), and income... well, people do care about that, of course, but as they have always done and more out of practical reasons than sheer competitiveness - in fact, many people would rather be a public sector worker with a super stable contract than earn a lot of money with more instability.

And still, our teens are completely messed up. So I think either phones, or social networks, or a combination of both are more likely culprits.

> 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

I hear this a lot, and this attitude does seem more pervasive on the internet, but in the real world, I find that people don't care about any of this any more than they have to, especially after college. The only people who I know who work "unhealthy hours" genuinely seem to enjoy work or are treating work as an escape. When you look at working hours in the US it's been mostly flat since 2010 and it's actually significantly lower than it was in the 1950s [1]. The real reason nobody is spending time with their community because they are too busy consuming media. The average teen spends over 7 hours a day consuming media [2].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8444888/

This is the actual problem, because the scope of realization is way too small for humans to comprehend. That is the reason why we're in a climate crisis, plastic waste crisis, middle east crisis, and housing crisis - all simultaneously.

How did that happen you might ask? Aren't people responsible for this?

Humans are very, very, very _bad_ at planning the future, and they should be absolved of that task, and absolved from the burden of making those decisions. We're in this mess because old people with old opinions lead our nations, and they were trained all their lifetime to only think for themselves and their small little community.

Right-wing populist propaganda works so well because they appeal to emotions around your "nice little community and its values", always painting a dangerous picture of change that people don't want to accept in their isolated world views.

Why humans still drive cars powered by oil today is the best example. Because they're not good at making decisions, and their moral values are always undermined by economic incentives.

What are you talking about? Who would do that?

Having to worry about all that other crap is just a burden. It's had me down for years. I just want to do stuff, man..

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.

Social media is definitely a factor. I was still in the generation where we had social media, but phones had no or very shitty cameras and mobile internet was too expensive for us teens. Some people didn't have phones, period.

But those kids have a constant comparison to ideals, especially the girls, be it their peers or celebrities. And if there is mobbing it is way, way worse than in my generation, because it is easier to have a true all against you situation (with many passive bystanders) and because it doesn't end when you are at home.

Definitely agree.

> Evidence points to the fact that the structure of society is not causative of a new trend we are seeing.

Trends can't exist without metrics. What's recent are the observations of the behaviors and new politics and moved goalposts, not the behaviors themselves.

And, just to add yet another layer of complexity, there are few certain things about the future regarding what you need to know or do to thrive in it. Most jobs today might be obsolete by the time kids graduate. .

1) a LOT/most people don't care about their own kids. This has not changed from history, of course. A lot of people have kids for a hundred different reasons, not to have kids. You're supposed to, to keep a marriage together, to get attention, to feel superior to others, ...

2) hence, they neither explain to kids what is expected of them, don't help. Kids grow up in a directionless vacuum.

3) People's (average) abilities have not gone up in 20-30 years. So this is a much worse problem than simply not wanting to help. A worse problem than simply adults needing to put aside 30 minutes every day for the kids. Adults don't have the knowledge expected in high school. Nor do they have practical knowledge (it's not that most adults don't know math, or don't know how to be a plumber or open a shop, it's that they know nothing)

Which means most adults CAN'T provide direction for kids. Not even if they wanted to. Not before putting in a lot of effort themselves first.

4) The traditional escapes have been closed off: factory work, marriage (as a means to escape jobs), clergy (as a means to escape normal jobs). All this has diminished or even disappeared.

The marriage thing is a double whammy since marriage helps both partners on a lot of different fronts. Not just jobs, but housing, stress, cooking, housework, calling the doctor when something's wrong (or generally administrative stuff), and of course an outlet, someone to talk to and even sex.

5) most easy jobs that have replaced this, have global competition. "Influencer" for example. So, they're not at all as easy as they look.

6) and the solutions for this are "psychology". In case anyone failed to notice, this fundamentally means blaming the kid (therapists are only supposed to fix the symptoms), while making it as hard as possible to see that you're blaming the kid.

Psychologists/therapists are not capable people that will teach kids that, say, a career as programmer, consultant or engineer is open to them, and then learn them math, economics or ... Again: they're totally incompetent. They won't do that, as it's not expected of them, but they also can't.

7) and like any other neural network, if you don't a human mind enough feedback, it'll start by having wild swings in output, and eventually the signal to noise ratio in the output breaks down, which for humans probably means the person "in" the human mind effectively (eventually) disappears, replaced by wild, big, excessive, even violent impulses.

8) what therapy/psychologists do is ENTIRELY the wrong thing: they "focus on the negative", the symptoms. In other words, they take a human mind, and complain about the noise. Think of it like this: If you had to guess a number between 1 and 2 million, and numbers divisible by 314 (for example) are valid answers. If I only tell you "no", and discuss how bad your decision process to arrive at an answer is ... it'll take a while. If I help you and tell you how to arrive at the right answer, you'll have it in 2 or 3 guesses.

It is almost impossible to overstate the difference you'll see in "performance" between a kid that is left directionless for their first 15 years and someone who is "led up the ladder". Constantly explaining what they're supposed to do, and where their reasoning is flawed. Now you can can overdo this, but frankly, if you overdo it, the kid will become angry ... and still be extremely capable. Perhaps not ideal, but hardly a situation where the kid's life will crash and burn.

My impression of failings of parenthood is quite a lot about (resignation in face of) partial cluelessness and the complexity of guiding your children. Every parent has aspects of personality where they find themselves clueless about how to guide the child. That can probably tie in to a lot of what you write. Focusing on the negative as you describe regarding psychology seems to be one important common theme.

P(aren't): Don't do this, don't do that.

C(hild): But why?

P thinking: I don't really understand why. I have learned this by trial and error over a very long time. You will have to do the same. There is probably better ways to do this but I wouldn't know. And you wouldn't really understand or be able to do anything with this information anyways because you're a child so I won't even say it.

P: Because I say so. Now tie your shoes. We're going to school (for some reason).

(Disclaimer: I'm 37 and not a parent but I observe friends and family who are parents of young children. I kind of expect I wouldn't have the energy left for any observations if I was a parent myself.)

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?

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

Basically, I don't think you can attribute the skyrocketing rate of various forms of mental illness to better diagnoses. And if big-event stressors (as opposed to things like internet) were the main cause, we should be having far better outcomes than in the past.

Yes, but the economy was doing better.

>Go further back and we get WW2

Before the war, most people were not expecting an apocalypse-level event that it was, and there were no nukes.

>These are all events that make any of our big-event concerns today look trivial.

You either underestimate today's threats and concerns, aren't affected by them, or both.

>Basically, I don't think you can attribute the skyrocketing rate of various forms of mental illness to better diagnoses.

That's what I said too. But it is a factor that must be accounted for, especially when comparing to the past when the statistics on mental health were not collected the way they are now.

Suicide statistics in particular.

>And if big-event stressors (as opposed to things like internet) were the main cause, we should be having far better outcomes than in the past.

This doesn't seem to follow from anything you said.

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.

But talking about population has become quite the taboo. Utterly unacceptable to restrict reproduction, but it's cool to take people's transport/heating/protein away to save the planet?

More like not necessary anymore, since birthrates tend do decline by themself in more afluent countries, once sex is decoupled from reproduction and children are not the primary retirement plan anymore. "Helping poor countries" is just easier to sell than "We must make them stop having babies".

China is in far worse shape, they restricted number of children for decades, and now they are presented with a demographics crisis that could halve their population in 60 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

I mean I enjoyed having neither but then most people weren’t lucky enough to grow up in the 90’s.

During the cold war it was quite literally minute by minute, alive or dead. Every day was news of airspace incursions, naval confrontations, proxy conflicts etc. "Slim chance" it was not.

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.

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.

The time for skepticism about the scale of the effect of social media has passed.

Social media is "adversarial" in the sense that yeah, most platforms want to maximize engagement, and maximized engagement might not be best for you. But that's also the relationship you have with companies selling you sugary food or expensive shoes. They're not your friends and they want you to spend money in ways that might not benefit you. We manage.

Ultimately, you have agency to shape your experience. You're not "addicted" to it any more than one gets "addicted" to chocolate or Louis Vuitton. Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design.

At some point, adults in the developed world decided at some point that it's not OK for children to play unsupervised outdoors, walk to school on their own, and so on. It's probably a function of increasing standard of living and plummeting birth rates. Just 50-100 years ago, you had multiple children with the expectation that not all of them will make it to adulthood. Nowadays, most families will have one kid - their single most important "investment" - and they have the means to tightly monitor and control their physical environment. The internet is sort of the only place where you can meet with friends and have fun unsupervised. It's an escape hatch.

I don't see how banning or regulating TikTok or Facebook really solves this.

The algorithmic feed and what is shown is absolutely by design. I don't use social media so I don't know how good / bad it is but there's clearly intent.

Comparing social media or Youtube to literature or D&D doesn't really work for me. This is more akin to a billion channel cable service where your remote only works some of the time. You use it to socialize with your friends, but you're also forcefed content that you didn't ask for, that may or may not be good for your mental health.

And yes, adults have agency but this article is about teens who have agency but are still growing and don't have the experience to make good decisions.

I don't see how you can compare it to Chocolate? It's in our pocket and it's infinite.

The number of people on social media even that can’t mentally withstand the negative effects absolutely dwarf the number of people who have ever placed violent video games.

Notice I’m not making a statement on games at all? The could be the absolute worst thing in the world for mental health, and by scale social media still is the larger issue.

> "the phone-based childhood"

We can take this even further: it's a Phone-Based Education and Social Discourse

What has happened in the "Anglosphere" is that we have opened a for-profit Pandora's Box of resentful and manipulative discourse that makes no damned sense to people who are looking to their society for sense and guidance.

As you say, the system is full of manipulative actors. Not all of them are foreign.

–Chris Cutrone

Karl Marx celebrated capitalism for the same reasons you do, while at the same time recognizing the unlikelihood of capitalism being the final form of human organization. Of course, that was before our current awareness of global warming.

Even if it did, the average height increase the world over shows that capitalism has been an enormous win in food production and elimination of starvation.

- It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction.

- It does this by sorting content to present "engaging" content first, which due to how humans' brains are wired tends to be content that is emotionally triggering in some way.

- It's primarily consumed on a device that people carry with you and that has an interface that makes infinite scrolling easy, replicating the basic design of a slot machine.

There were dumb panics about books, but citing those to dismiss concerns over social media is intellectually lazy. They are very, very different things. Books don't watch you while you read them and fine-tune their content in real time to maximize the amount of time you spend reading them.

Wikipedia on its own with zero-cost internal hyperlinks was also addictive. There were people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes well before they were getting themselves into Youtube rage bubbles.

That's to say-- I think it matters what one is getting addicted to.

Society can bounce back from people who got addicted to studying too much of various bona fide topics like constitutional law and industrial hygiene.

On the other hand, society would have a harder time recovering if a critical mass of citizens are quantized to mostly low-effort rabbit holes, like believing the earth is flat, or fiat declarations that maritime and common law are the only legally binding forms of constitutional power.

Social media mostly or completely removes these loci of control. You are fed "content" by the simple act of scrolling down the page and what you see is often determined by an algorithm. Because the feed is always changing it's often difficult or even impossible to get back to the same "state" so there's a sense of FOMO as well.

Fair point comparing infinite scroll to slot machines. Books end, newspapers and magazines get thrown away. Always more to scroll.

The medium is the message!

I think scapegoating advertising is a mistake, because I think we're missing the real problem.

Yes, advertising can and often is unethical and harmful. I can't speak for other advertisers, but I take ethics very seriously. I don't participate in advertising aimed at making problems seem bigger than they are for the sake of selling a product. It's effective (in terms of sales), but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did that.

But: What exactly changed about advertising around 2010 if we're going to say advertising is responsible for a radical decrease in mental health since that time?

On balance, I don't think advertisers today are less ethical than they ever were. The same bad actors exist. There are more laws today to prevent the worst abuses, but there are still ways to legally manipulate the public that I would consider horribly unethical.

Yes, we have access to more data. But from my perspective, I haven't seen data used effectively for much more than targeting, i.e. prioritizing ad budgets towards the people most likely interested in your product. It still makes me uncomfortable, but can that alone impact mental health at these levels? I don't think so.

And so my problem with scapegoating advertising isn't that it's unfair to advertisers. We deserve a lot of the vitriol sent our way. My problem with it is that if we're wrong in our diagnosis, the real problem(s) remain unchecked.

The vast majority of the people I know in advertising didn't want all this data in the first place. We were happy to just work on creative ideas, to try and paint a product in a new light so that the general public would take notice.

What changed is social media, and the social media companies themselves. I truly believe the problem is with engagement metrics and all the crap they do to keep people addicted. Advertisers, in turn, are forced to play the game, because it's the only game in town. If you're not advertising on social media, you might as well not exist. And if you don't play the engagement game, you might as well not be on there at all. It's a trap.

That's not to say there's no one in advertising who is genuinely content to do harm. They exist. They've always existed. But they didn't, and couldn't have, created the platforms and the algorithms that multiplied the problem since 2010.

Further, when I look at my own use on social media, the most toxic content isn't sponsored content or ads, it's stuff that's gone viral by content creators and political actors. It's "recommended content" that should have been flagged as wildly inappropriate rather than promoted for more engagement. Saying the problem is advertising misses all of that horrible stuff.

So again, not trying to say advertising is good for the soul. Not saying it's a net positive for society (although I think whether or not it's a positive has more to do with WHAT is being advertised than the act of advertising in it of itself).

But let's not mistake advertising as the cause of the mental health crisis, at least not without solid evidence to back that up. I don't think the evidence in the original post would support that conclusion at all.

Advertisements in the past had always been fairly simple to ignore. Billboards, commercial breaks, and print or even radio ads were disconnected from the content.

Today ads are in many cases often indistinguishable, even if labeled from content.

Facebook ads look like regular posts, and many ads ARE regular posts. A fitness podcast talking about their sponsors product with the same tone and passion as the content or simply being paid to influence on a product.

Everyone pretty universally used to recognize and be annoyed by commercials and pay little attention to ads.

Now, especially young people, can barely even recognize ads. Especially those done by so called influencers which are just part of the regular content flow.

Google, Amazon, And Facebook are 3 of the 6 largest companies in the US and are effectively advertising companies.

That's a huge change.

So I'm not arguing that that's not a bad thing. It is a bad thing, in my opinion. Anything that's done to deceive the audience in any way is unethical.

I'm saying it's not new, and certainly didn't suddenly take off in 2010. It's been a mainstay in mass media for almost as long mass media has existed.

Further, what Facebook has done is treat all ads the same as regular content. That's not something advertisers chose to do; it's something Facebook chose to do. Blaming advertisers for a decision they had no part in is missing the mark.

To be clear, I think many advertisers are probably pretty happy with what Facebook did there. But that's not the same as the advertisers being responsible for that decision. Facebook did it because it led to more clicks and therefore more revenue for Facebook. Same thing with how Google has progressively made search ads nearly indistinguishable from regular search results. Advertisers didn't do that. Google did. Advertisers didn't decide to make the first 75% of results on Amazon be sponsored or promoted products. Amazon did that themselves.

> Google, Amazon, And Facebook are 3 of the 6 largest companies in the US and are effectively advertising companies.

They're media companies, not advertisers. They sell advertising, as virtually all media companies do (with exception for publicly funded or high-subscription-fee companies). Advertisers buy advertising space.

So if your argument is that Google, Amazon, and Facebook are making advertising worse, I agree. If your argument is that advertisers (the people buying the ads) are making things worse, and that this correlates to the drop in mental health, I don't completely discount the theory; but I'd need to see a lot more evidence to support that contention.

• Slushy machine!

• Buy our cereal, it has a buff friendly tiger with a dashing neckerchief!

• Buy our chocolate, the sexy cartoon rabbit lady/ambassadorial guests say it's wonderful!

• Here's a small man made of butter playing a trombone!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGHLriHhvtg

• This anthropomorphic telephone wants you to get a loan!

• Weird adverts that turned out to be for perfume or sometimes beer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mp646_H_xo

None of this seemed to be aiming at getting anyone depressed.

Every single one of those adverts gave the message "If you don't buy this product you'll be unhappy/unattractive/hungry/missing out/uncool." Every single one. None of them aim to make people depressed, but they all do exactly that if you don't buy the product.

It's worth noting that all the adverts you remember are for products that were wildly successful at the time. People are very willing to pay to avoid being unhappy, even if when the message is coming from a cartoon rabbit.

At this point, though, young people are far more likely to doom scroll, fantasize about influence or whatever online than they are to be watching television.

It's also worth noting that this is a "teen mental health crisis"- television has been around long enough for several generations to go through teenage years without a similar experience.

These teen mental problems are a result in a shift in attitudes in America - the attitude that everyone is a victim, achievement is bad, one should get everything for free rather than the old idea that kids should work for their goodies, the mounds of presents kids get for Christmas, participation awards, everyone gets an A, parental supervision of kids play even into mid teens, testing is bad for kids' self-esteem, kids are too fragile for testing, and so on.

I.e. the old virtues of industriousness, thrift, personal responsibility, etc., have all but disappeared.

For example, in my day (when people walked uphill to school both ways) kids routinely got jobs as soon as they turned 16. Today, many peoples' first jobs are not until they graduate from college. That's a massive change.

Kids need to learn how to deal with adversity as they grow up. Parents these days are able to remove all adversity from kids' lives, up until the mid-teens. Then, parents cannot do that anymore, and the kids have not developed coping skills for adversity. No coping skills, parents can no longer fix it for them, leads to mental health crisis.

It used to be that you'd color in some pictures to save the rainforest or the whales. Now, it's we need to radically change society or else climate change will kill us all. Despite more people being killed by fists and feet than rifles, school shootings sound like a daily occurrence and might happen at any moment. Having white skin makes you guilty of having too much privilege. Accidentally calling someone by the wrong gender is practically a crime. If your grades aren't good enough or you don't have enough extracurricular activities for college you'll never make enough money. Anything you say online will haunt you forever. Being popular among your peers doesn't just mean being cool at school, everyone is always online spreading influence. There's no way to turn off anymore, and they're convinced they can't or they'll miss out.

They're literally surrounded by existential crises day in and day out. Going through puberty is hard enough, but somehow we've made it harder for them.

~ Socrates

Seems like every generation is doomed to lose touch with the next generation and pontificate as to why they are the worst generation yet and everything is falling apart.

But we're talking about societal problems, not your particular case. You've no shortage of neighbours whose brain turns off the moment the boob tube turns on to some talking head screaming about something or other.

Social media is a problem to in societies and economies that are wildly different to the US, unless you mean us forming modern societies with groups bigger than 100 people is the problem or you mean those factors lead to the shape of social media as we have it today.

I would imagine that social media would fuck with teenagers in ancient Rome in a similar way than it would with todays teens. There is something universal there.

The problem is that social media in the way they are structured have zero incentives to build good structures for young adults to thrive in and 100% incentives to keep them in a state where they can be influenced. And that is an astable state of insecurity. Which is why many want to be influencer, because then at least you are the one doing the influencing.

The linked substack frequently asks why social media is like that.

I can't imagine an entirely neutral social media platform would be any different.

people are going to follow whoever engages them the most. the inventives, regardless of the algorithms used, are exactly the same. no manipulation by the social media companies required. all that's needed is a public voice and followers

But I still remember the internet of old. Not only the small, semi-gated internet forums, but at also when Facebook just started out and you would just talk to your friends and not everything would be about polarising subjects.

This is clearly something that has changed due to social media algorithms, though maybe as a society we're now already brainwashed by it and I'm not sure if we can go back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage

The slightly alternative title is a play on words that was originally an error.

Looking at the data for the US, there seems to be an even more exponential curve between 2015-2020, which would imply that these trends could have been further exacerbated by the reduction of government regulation. The same is likely true for the concentration of wealth, the loss in small businesses, disenfranchisement, etc.

Regulation has driven a lot of industry out of America, as it made it too expensive to operate here.

In what area has government been reduced?

Do you have any sources? I think most offshoring is driven by significantly lower labor costs in other countries. For example, China has a highly controlled economy, but American companies still offshore work there simply because labor is cheaper. Indeed, we've seen some "onshoring" in recent years[1] now that automation is far more prevalent and labor cost is less significant as a portion of operating costs.

[1] https://www.engineering.com/story/automation-is-making-onsho...

In tech, while there are some regulations, I definitely believe that more need to be established, especially regarding the topic of the article. Tech is a bit too loose right now, with the exception of the health industry.

Are you sure? Hasn't government K-12 spending per student increased far faster than inflation? And how about all that federal money for student loans?

Keep in mind that money always comes with strings attached.

— Bill Clinton, 1990 something

We’re still living in Reagan’s World and they still don’t get it.

https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2023/world-happiness-trust-...

https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/livsvillkor-levnadsvanor....