Weird question. Obviously this is terrible for teenagers, and younger. Any evidence that this is no less bad for adults? We talk about restrictions for youth, which I agree with in general, but am unclear on the larger societal impact given we now have adult generations who have "grown up" on social media.
my first thought is that yes - social media can have a negative effect on adult mental health, but theoretically adults' brains have finished developing(ish) and they already have social circles built in meatspace. So if social media has negative effects... those effects are different than the challenges posed to younger adults/teens. (not to mention the effects that adult/parent social media use has on their own children, e.g. neglect, unrealistic expectations, etc)
(I'll see myself and my pop-psych out)
It's a Gallup poll, but aside from "how do you feel" polls your other likely proxy is utilization? Which is definitely correlated with our fucked up healthcare system. And it's most assuredly picking up the tail end of COVID which was worst on teen mental health.
That said, it says a lot.
The biggest trend in child-rearing of the past 30 years has definitely been the decline of autonomy. You get most of that back when you become an adult - whether you know what to do with it or not is another question - but any expert you ask, from Turkle to boyd to Skenazy, will argue that the biggest contribution to teen mental health issues is the decline of autonomy.
- Almost 3 in 5 teenage girls reported feeling so persistently sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row during the previous year that they stopped regular activities — a figure that was double the share of boys and the highest in a decade, CDC data showed.
Girls fared worse on other measures, too, with higher rates of alcohol and drug use than boys and higher levels of being electronically bullied, according to the 89-page report. Thirteen percent had attempted suicide during the past year, compared with 7 percent of boys.
Teen girls ‘engulfed’ in violence and trauma, CDC finds
- Even so, he said, “girls are more likely to respond to pain in the world by internalizing conflict and stress and fear, and boys are more likely to translate those feelings into anger and aggression,” he said. Boys are more likely to “mask depression,” he said, while girls may be more vulnerable to social media and “a culture obsessed with attractiveness and body image.”
AAP-AACAP-CHA Declaration of a National Emergency in Child and Adolescent Mental Health
HYPOTHESIS: Johnathan Haidt thinks the teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012 because he published The Righteous Mind in 2012 and got a fuckton more traffic to his survey site, yourmorals.org.
He's hardly the first person to notice the problem. Sherry Turkle started in on it in '81 and has done five or six books since. danah boyd made a big splash in 2014 saying pretty much the same shit as Sherry Turkle in general or the three or four Frontline episodes on the same subject since 2006. Haidt's working with Jean Twenge, whose book is shit and has nothing to add to danah boyd's or Sherry Turkle's since 2017. Here's an RSA on the rise of ADHD and depression as related to the rise of screens from 2010:
Instagram launched in 2010 and was bought by Facebook in 2012. We saw their internal polling what, last year?
So any mental health professional you care to consult will go "yeah, online stuff ain't healthy for kids." The problem here is that Johnathan Haidt mostly seems to use his blog and substack to pick fight with Twitter critics so it's not like any of this will be particularly edifying. Did it begin in 2012? Does it matter? The important thing is it's yet another attractive nuisance that people aren't insisting isn't a problem and will continue to do so until it's obviously a problem. Remember - Dr. Spock said you should let kids watch as much TV as they want until the 1973 edition.
Jonathan Haidt is the one who wrote The Righteous Mind which has been discussed here. That book has an interesting viewpoint that I find useful to remember in some Thanksgiving conversations, but Haidt doesn't do much useful with it in the book.
In his about page:
- But the transformation of society in the 2010s was not caused by anxious college students. They were simply the “canaries in the coal mine” — the first generation to have moved their social lives onto social media platforms. As soon as they did so, around 2012, an epidemic of mental illness began.
There's a number of places that statement could lead, but he skips over the "transformation of society" part as far as I can tell. His policy proposals are to change the "Must be 13+ to register" checkbox to 16 and he wants Congress to make Facebook give him access to data for research.
I think he's found a real issue. I don't think he has a useful idea of what to do about it though.
Also from his about page:
- We showed how this anxious new generation arrived on campus and demanded new norms, procedures, and bureaucratic responses that are incompatible with the older truth-seeking culture of universities.
University are so much rosier when we forget about the arms race of tuition and student loans and credentialism.
The thing about Haidt that sticks in the craw of the intelligentsia is that he argues that Western liberal thought is the outlier, not the norm. I have personally found that if I approach conservatives from the standpoint of "my holy tenets are blasphemy to them" I have an easier time making a convincing argument. Importantly, Haidt doesn't make any value judgements other than to point out that if you are dependent on rationality to win an emotional argument you will not only lose, you will deserve to.
The "transformation of society" canard goes back to Bowling Alone, the Silent Spring of online anxiety. Worthy of note, Bowling Alone was written before Friendster so it misses a lot of the specifics but nails the generals.
- University are so much rosier when we forget about the arms race of tuition and student loans and credentialism.
I dunno, man. On the one hand, there's a lot of bullshit associated with college these days. On the other hand, it's caused college students to double down on their bullshit. My two recent quarters were fucking grim from a quality-of-life standpoint - active shooter signs and food banks while paying fuckin' $3k a quarter for community college? Yeah that's some bullshit. On the other hand all the bullshit accomodations every student was stacking and the combative bitchy student life orgs? Fuck I can't make it to the Flat Earth Society because my Quiddich team is meeting and then we're going to pajama night!
I think both sides have a legitimate beef and I think it's caused entirely by what a rapacious scam college has become.
- I think he's found a real issue. I don't think he has a useful idea of what to do about it though.
This is exactly how I feel about it. In general, I agree with Quatrarius. I don't think it's a particularly good article, but I do think there's some decent articulation of the issue itself.
thought daddy detected - you'd think that a scientist would understand that if you go juicing what you expect to find before you look for it, you'll find it
i dunno, it's so tiring to see this kind of thing over and over. the befuddled articles of "i just don't get it. according to the metrics we've created, the world we created is great. so why are the kids upset? it must be those damn phones"
- thought daddy detected
Ryan Holiday's only good book has an insightful chapter about snark. Broadly speaking, if you can say something dismissive and pithy about someone or something you don't have to make a substantive argument against it. It's not a real debate tactic, it's a way to amass clout without earning it. Holiday goes on to elaborate on the sort of people who benefit the most from snark, singling out Nikki Finke. After all, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter were institutions with an elaborate, symbiotic relationship with the entertainment industry. But they were both nearly extinct because of a bitchy shut-in who mostly talked trash like a bitchy, drunk Walter Winchell. And since THR and Variety actually had to publish (on paper!) while Nikki could just launch whatever the fuck she wanted whenever she wanted, people followed Deadline first. After all, if she was wrong she could just delete and pretend it never happened.
Nikki Finke was done in in the end by the same shit she dished out. It only took a couple well-placed articles to paint her up as a bitter housebound shrew that no one had seen in public in a decade or more. It's the same problem and the same solution as Matt Drudge, Chaia Raichik, you name it - if you can snark your enemy then their voice is silenced.
Here's the thing, though. Haidt has research. He publishes it. He'll still be here when Tumblr and Twitter move on to some other off-handed hashtag pejorative. Because he's hardly alone in documenting that the technology available to kids is not a universal good. And yeah - you can say "thought daddy" and score cheap points without observing that the whole of your argument requires denigration of someone for their age and gender.
for the love of god, i'm not retarded, i understand that putting somebody down isn't a good argument. i'm not in a debate club, i'm not on twitter or tumblr, i'm not looking for a pat on the back and a "great comment, slugger!", i am posting emotionally between customers at my shitty job. save the cheap psychoanalysis. i'd rather you pull out the age card than call me a clout shark. just stop, please.
I do find a good amount of fun reading those befuddled articles. As a millennial, I've killed off so many products, concepts and organisations. I can't wait to inadvertently sink my teeth into another.
"This group won't gargle our balls and shovel our shit. Waah."