I was mentally ill as a teen in the 1980s though I didn't get diagnosed (that I know of — the US paychiatric sector tells minor patients their diagnoses much less often than they tell their adult patients.) until my twenties.
However all the reasons that I thought that might contribute to my melancholy, my delerium, my outrage, my hopelessness and my suicidality were valid. I might have been prone to major depression due to heredity and early-life family dysfunction, but school life was downright toxic and hostile. And then I was expected to learn the curriculum.
US schools are still about as conducive to education and healthy development as a toxic waste dump. This is not a place of honor. No esteemed are buried here. etc. We're still blaming other things for the same reason we blamed Doom for Columbine and attributed delinquency to Elvis. We just don't want to admit how much the establishment shortchanges its children.
Considering society's ongoing response to the climate crisis, we just can't find a single, solitary
fuck to give.
We're (American's specifically, but I see echoes in westernized European countries) propagandized into thinking angst is the natural state of teenagers rather than the natural state of teenagers within this specific system. I think teens can just more clearly see the brutal society they're about to be forced into and don't have the cognitive dissonance of benefiting from that brutal society yet.
Very well written piece, thanks for sharing! I'm one of the people that would be very fast to believe social media is one of the big reasons behind this rising levels of depression and anxiety. This text made me reconsider some thoughts I had
I daresay if young people could afford a home, a car, a family, and had some disposable income, free time, and any fucking prospect of a satisfactory life then they'd be a lot less depressed.
I don't think social media is particularly good but it's far from the worst problem facing young people today. The "phone bad" crap is just a lazy cop out.
I don't think it's a lazy cop out at all it's recognizing a complex issue that interweaves into the new realities of life for young adults.
What you stated is the lazy cop out, you're dismissing an entire problem space at the wave of a hand without critically thinking about it.
Everything is connected. An example would be heavy social media use being correlated to lower critical thinking capabilities, lower attention span, and more extreme political and emotional swings lead to a population being more manipulable and less cohesive.
Causing them to vote and act against their own interests at the behest of whoever has enough money to influence them though channels they "trust". Thus influencing a degrading social and financial situation.
It seems you are criticizing to the book the author quotes, not the article itself.
"
Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people
While you have a point you might consider what little free time young people have is largely spent on social media full of dark patterns and negative feedback loops and/or gaming stuffed with gambling. One does not detract from the other problems you outline.
"Phone bad" holds true as long as these big corporations insist on regulating themselves when all they do is feed people propaganda to keep anything from changing.
I feel like they're trying real hard to blame "screen time" when in reality people are able to keep up with all the horrid shit corporations are getting away with now. It's like some form of pseudo censoring. Blame too much screen time because people are more informed now than ever.
There are lots of reasons it could be, or could not be this. It could be related but not directly, like a lack of sunlight. That could be as a result of screen time instead of sunlight, but that's not necessarily screen time's fault—anything could keep you from going outside. The evidence that screens in particular are causing these problems is lacking. Same with social media, though I'd be more open to believing that.
nature.com
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