TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)
wsj.com
wsj.com
Edit: I’ve also learned to accept things about me that I can’t change. For example, I have a better outcome if I plan to be distracted rather than trying to fight my way through distraction.
https://old.reddit.com/r/adhdmeme/top/?sort=top&t=all
The socks one was a childhood fight in our family constantly. I hated certain socks and my siblings loved them. I can remember my dad berating me in a walmart parking lot about my sock preferences and still associate walmart with parental shame to this day. The way the inner sewn lining on the toes got occasionally stuck on my toenails when walking. They still gives me the creeps and heeby-jeebies, just these little mind grabbing zings with every 'wrong' step.
If you think you might have ADHD go see someone who specialises in it and get it checked out. I was certain that I had it when I was 20, but my local doctor told me I was "trying to get out of work". Top bloke. Nearly 20 years later I'm vindicated with a diagnosis. Get it checked out!
That being said, I'm in no way implying that the internet can't contain useful information.
Personally, I suspect that people who incorrectly self-diagnose are desperate and grasping at straws. They misdiagnose themselves because proper diagnostics are really hard to get in for.
However, I would be willing to bet that people who misdiagnose themselves with DID still have some other underlying mental health condition that they are misunderstanding.
I remember talking with one guy who was genuinely sad when his psychiatrist told him she might need to revisit his autism diagnosis and she thinks there might actually be some other class of diagnoses that fit his condition better. You would think she told him he had cancer or something. It helped him a lot to know that there was a box he could fit into and not having a box was distressing for him. It had him feeling unmoored and unstable.
Now after reevaluating she did end up settling back on autism and his relief was palpable.
On the latter point, these kids are acting out these disabilities with such sincerity and 24/7 consistency that they effectively are disabled for all practical purposes, it's just that the diagnosis might be different than the one they self-diagnose themselves with. I think the TikTok videos are a symptom, what's the cause?
I'm disabled (I have MS), and the one benefit to it is that I have a 'get out of social expectations free' button I can push if things get too difficult. If I'm not feeling well, it's acceptable for me to cancel plans, call off work, make sub-optimal decisions (putting my health above my earning capacity, etc.).
In short, disabled people are allowed to be fallible, have needs, and make mistakes. I think that the kids feel under too much pressure and want a release valve for it. An invisible disability gives them a 'this is too hard, I need out' button. Disabled people are also given some empathy, and that is at a major premium right now.
He does the opposite, and uses it against me all the time. "I have MS, and I can do this, so you'll be at the race with me right?"
It usually works :)
I'm not sure what the answer to that is.
Why don't you think TikTok videos specifically (and social media generally) are not a cause? At this point, we know the addictive and viral effects of social media, especially as it pertains to teenagers and kids (and especially teenage girls).
I was listening to a cbc program about autism on adults the other day. One person being interviewed stated she "identified as autistic". She had done some online test that said she had 70 out of 100 autism traits or something.
I was incredulous. Are these people for real?
There's people who are more like this for more ideological reasons. Some people feel doctors underdiagnose the poor, women, and minorities, and consequently, don't know why they should be obligated to fight an uphill battle to get diagnosed from a system not treating people like them correctly.
In any case, a fair amount of these "I identify as autistic after taking an online quiz" types actually are autistic. So my policy is to give any such person the benefit of the doubt, at least at first.
Psychology is not engineering. They're not diagnosing based on log files or material stress reports. They're using precisely the same criteria and weighting as these silly online tests do.
We celebrate failure and not success. As a simple example no one gets praised for not being an addict, but we keep hearing about the stunningly brave addicts who became barely functioning members of society.
TikTok is different, and that has nothing to do with China or whatever other cultural/political topic. It is the amalgamation that results many years of optimising user interaction and dependence on social networks as an advertising platform. While in some aspects it is just a repackaged version of what has been there before, we shouldn't just dismiss the previous attempts as harmless, just because their dosage was less.
Yes, people have been saying "beware the influence of technology on children" for decades, maybe centuries. That doesn't prove that the warnings are false. And even if the past warnings were false for past technology, that doesn't prove that the current warnings are false for current technology.
"People have been saying that forever" is not a rebuttal of "TikTok is bad for kids". It's not even close. It's basically DH2 on Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
These days, you linger on an auto-playing video too long (that is quite possibly intentionally engineered to bait you in) and suddenly the algorithm gets a lock on you and absolutely rams more of that shit down your throat.
It's not even just propaganda either. The exact same cycle is what's at play here with preying on children's weaknesses. Mental health, body image, etc. etc. can all be weaponised the same way. And kids are espeically susceptable to it given the age they tend to start getting on social media is precisely also the age where they feel most socially awkward and trying to find their identity in the world.
Every pissed off goth kid I knew in the 90s had a copy of the Anarchist cook book on a 1.44mb floppy disk.
We probably burned more than our fair share of holes in our backyards, but it wasn't access to information that was limiting us doing harm to our peers. If anything I think it was having a group of like-minded people to burn holes in your backyard with that ultimately allowed us all to feel less alienated. We may have felt individually ostracized, but found camaraderie in trying to put out the homemade napalm fire in the back yard before someone's parents got back or the neighbors called the fire department.
I get more worried about teens today because I no longer see packs of kids getting in trouble together. The only kids I know that ended up in real trouble where the ones that eventually got alienated from that pack as well.
Spending time physically around other people fires off a lot of nice neurotransmitters, even for people who are introverted and who would rather not be spending a lot of time around other people.
One figures COVID lock downs would have hammered this point into the global consciousness.
Of course too isolated of a group and things get super weird and everything can quickly go off the rails.
My broader point is that you can replace that scenario with just about any subgroup with an extremist representation and it holds. Incels are a prime example. QAnon too. The list goes on. The people who end up extreme in those viewpoints don't start there, they get taken on a journey to there though lots of very marginal successive influences.
A social media algorithm is purpose-built to achieve that because it turns out that is the exact same pattern as 'you hovered over a cute cat video once, so we guess you like cats, so we're going tto bombard you with cute cat vids to drive up your engagement'.
Some kids did this and didn't grow up, because someone in their online community committed suicide and that prompted them to do the same.
This is a real problem. It's been a problem since the 90s, yes, but it's getting worse.
I'm not saying these things don't exist, but much of it seems very difficult to falsify -- which needs to be the gold standard of determining these sort of things; e.g. "By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?"
> By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?
Easy: is the severity of the ADHD and Autistic traits you exhibit low enough that they do not impair your ability to function on a day-to-day basis in society? If not, you don't have ADHD or Autism.
What does not impaired look like compared to impaired?
- Struggling to focus on something for minutes or hours, vs. being unable to concentrate on a task.
- Occasionally struggling with overcoming mental hurdles to perform a task vs frequently being incapable - yes, literally incapable, no matter the reward or punishment - of performing a task.
- Focusing on a task you enjoy while still being aware of the state of your body - keeping reasonably hydrated, fed, and use of the facilities - vs. not being aware.
- Occasionally forgetting words - like "watch" - or names, vs frequently.
- An occasionally compromised working memory (typically with an outside trigger like alcohol or lack of sleep), compared to a permanently compromised working memory. Compromised being able to store 4 items in your short term memory when the average for the populace is 7.
- Occasionally forgetting that items and people exist if they are not in your direct sight, versus constantly forgetting, where constantly means remembering is the exception instead of the norm.
One final note - ADHD is not some new disorder unique to the TikTok generation. ADHD has been formally recognized and studied as far back as 1902 by Sir George Frederick Still.
Easy: define "function on a day-to-day basis in society"
You get diagnosed with it if you tick enough of the boxes of behaviours/dysfunctions associated with it - you can fall short of a diagnosis by one behaviour and still be in a very similar condition to a diagnosed person, or tick enough boxes but fall short based on the diagnosing physicians judgement of severity.
The interesting thing is that despite the condition being composed of a wide gamut of seemingly unrelated behaviour, ~90% of people with ADHD respond extremely well to the same treatment - stimulant medication. We also observed notable neurological similarities in aggregate among people with the condition, but not enough to have much utility as a diagnostic tool.
This is constantly presented as some sort of ultimate validation of these disorders and every time I read it I'm absolutely baffled. Stimulants used in ADHD medication improve focus and productivity for almost everyone, the fact that they also do it for people with chronic focus/attention issues should be surprising to no one... They're literally performance enhancing drugs.
But doesn't everyone respond extremely well to stimulants? They're some of the most common recreational drugs and neurotypical people seek them out for performance enhancement on cognitive tasks.
I suspect it's this latter group that social media diagnosis appeals to most - if you're not doing as well as you (or your parents) would like then normally you just have to feel stupid/worthless. These (self) diagnosis provide a level of explanation (and therefore comfort).
I self-diagnosed myself with mild ADD many years ago and even self-medicated (which in terms of productivity worked well). But meeting people with severe ADHD made me reconsider my alleged issues - sure, I can't concentrate for as long as I'd like but these people couldn't sit still for 15 seconds.
It's quite straightforward, albeit involved (as in technically easy, but takes time) to falsify. You have to work with a licensed medical professional who will evaluate traits, strengths, and difficulties, and to what extent they impact functioning as a person in society. Basically, are they "well-adjusted"? If they make it through school, college and adulthood without a ton of struggling, therapy, possibly meds, you can almost certainly rule out neurodivergence (at the very least, it won't be clinically significant )
This is a radically behaviorist interpretation.
A common criticism of the diagnostics for ADHD (and Autism, for that matter) is that it ignores the person’s internal experience.
I was formally diagnosed with ADHD in 2017. I’d been visibly quite successful in that time, but at the expense of my own mental health because I was fighting a constant uphill battle. ADHD was a set of shackles I didn’t even know I had.
This is so easy to game. People read the diagnostic criteria online and echo it back to their doctor for a prescription. Their proof of needing adjustment can be little more than pointing to their grades and attributing their less than stellar academic performance to the list of ADHD symptoms they memorized online. EZ way to get yourself a stimulant subscription. This was particularly common during the pandemic when you could do it entirely online without actually meeting a doctor in person. I saw a lot of people explicitly advocating this sort of deception to get stimulant prescriptions; all described it as very easily done.
I tend to think those drugs should be legal OTC, so part of me thinks "so what?" But the problem is that right now it isn't legal OTC, so the system is giving a leg up to anybody willing to lie to a doctor, while honest people have to make do with lesser PEDs like caffeine.
was a terrible choice of words on my part, but I can't edit now. What I mean here by "well-adjusted" has nothing to do with "appears functional from the outside". I mean "they appear functional and actually are and didn't have to contort themselves to do so".
Does the patient self-medicate with nonmedical stimulants/stimulation? (caffeine, nicotine, other drugs, adrenaline junkie)? Did they have to struggle and claw to overcome executive issues and get some semblance of normalcy? Did they find a particular niche/trade where they can be successful? Do they succeed on the outside but feel burned out constantly inside? Those are not the folks I'm talking about. I'm saying folks who didn't need to go way out of their way to adapt in order to achieve an outward sense of normalcy.
My father is one of the least-ADHD people I know. His life wasn't easy by any means (grew up very poor, had to work his way through high school and college), but also he didn't have any of the kind of turmoil growing up that I see in myself and each and every neurodivergent person I know.
You can't conclusively prove or disprove that I have ADHD. I may describe my experiences in a way that aligns with such a diagnosis, but for all you can tell I may be a P-zombie merely acting as though I experience things. For what you're able to measure, I may not even have an experience.
So with Autism, probably the most common disqualifier in practice is that the disorder requires childhood presentation and a lot of people don't know this. So somebody will come in, say "oh I wasn't autistic at all as a child, but I felt very autistic as a teenager, so I asked a doctor, and he said I wasn't autistic". People will respond with "oh, doctors don't know anything about autism, they underdiagnose minorities and women all the time, that proves it" and "oh, women actually don't present as autistic in childhood, they can just be masking, but that doesn't mean they aren't actually autistic". This happens EVERY time, especially if a woman is involved, and means that you can't falsify the idea that somebody was autistic in childhood.
I have been banned once for saying that disabled people should doubt other peoples disabilities (on the grounds of preventing exploitation and misallocation of resources), I got told that I was spreading ableist myths that disabled people are responsible for other disabled people lacking resources, that I was reinforcing the ableist myth that disabled people are just exploiting non-disabled people (of course, disabled people do just as much for the able as the able do for them, and thus there is no advantage to faking disability), that it was inappropriate to talk about doubting disabilities on an autism community, and that they wished I had a number of painful disabilities that I couldn't receive pain medication for because I wasn't believed.
Generally by having a full workup with a psychiatrist. They will do various interviews. Possibly might have to interview parents and teachers in pediatric cases or in adult cases where ADHD was not diagnosed in childhood(childhood onset is a diagnostic requirement for adult ADHD).
In more difficult cases a neuropsychologist might be consulted and can perform various neurological tests to more thoroughly rule out other disorder. There's some promising work on blood biomarkers and brain imaging but nothing in clinical use yet afaik.
What would be the diagnosis for adult-onset ADHD symptoms without a childhood history of those symptoms?
Isn't that called differential diagnosis?
For me they were essentially post-diagnosing childhood ADHD. Not much of my present existence was relevant other than the effects it had on my life now (whether I need meds or not). Sure I could have lied but it would have been a hell of a lie to build and keep straight across my appointments.
I was also asked if I'd heard of ADHD from TikTok.. not sure what the result would have been if I had.
You can ask your question without them and it will feel a whole lot less patronizing.
Now, ask yourself -- in a forum that's supposed to be about discussion and answering questions, why do you think it's very important to police how I use punctuation?
So the issue isn't so much falsifiability per see but instead the whether you trust the judgement of people who decide what is "normal" or "not normal".
One problem is that there's a pop culture understanding of ADHD and there's the medical version. Because ADHD is poorly understood and is diagnosed by ticking boxes, I get the feeling that some people just say what they need to say to get the diagnosis/meds/whatever. (I am unmedicated and have been my entire adult life. I felt a bit like a zombie on Adderall, and my heart was constantly racing.)
On the other hand, I do think there's probably a better, deeper explanation that has eluded the professionals. I suspect that ADHD has something to do with a lack of free play for young children. When kids are able to free play, they invent their own games and set their own boundaries and learn to regulate themselves; this does not happen when they are under adults' direction. As a consequence, we see that the US has extremely high ADHD rates in children, whereas in other countries, especially ones where early education consists almost entirely of free play, especially outdoors, is encouraged, the rates are quite low.[0] Further, within the US, we see that children born in August seem to have a higher chance of an ADHD diagnosis than those born in September.[1]
I suspect that the disorder is "real," but with a very strong "nurture" component. In the US over the past 60 years or so, children's lives have become increasingly directed by adults, from time spent in school to time spent in sports or clubs organized by adults to time spent at home doing homework. At the same time, Americans have become increasingly hostile to the idea of children's free play. "Where is that kid's adult?" is something I hear from other parents when I take my kids to the playground.
If I could summarize my own experience, I would say I have trouble self-regulating along the spectrum of being bored or interested in a topic. If I'm bored, or think I will be, I have almost an anxious response; if I'm interested, I may get lost in the task or topic till a phone call from my wife breaks me out of it. For what it's worth, when I'm healthy, I can rarely sleep more than 6 1/2 hours per night.
[0]https://academic.oup.com/shm/article/30/4/767/2919401
[1]https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/could-being-born-in-augu...
tl;dr - everyone's probably just doing the best they can.
Another thing TikTok does is provide a venue for sharing stories - "you're not alone" - and sharing coping mechanisms. Good things.
In the actual test, you had to watch a square flash on the screen at random intervals and click a clicker if it flashed on the bottom. That's it. It took an hour. Afterward, you get your results based on mistakes and reaction time over time. The data and statistics associated with it are really interesting, too.
People have been talking like this since at least the 90's and always claiming it's a new, recent, thing.
Plus, before it got the name ADD (and after, ADHD), it was studied by the names "Hyperactive child syndrome", "Hyperkinetic reaction of childhood", and a few others.
This has been recognized and studied for over a century.
[0]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-tuberculos...
Just because you can't doesn't mean you're right.
Or maybe it wasn't a common thing for friend groups to do and mine was strange. We didn't have the WSJ to tell us.
This reminds me of the "otherkin" fad that occurred primarily on Tumblr about a decade ago[1]. It was where teenagers believed themselves to not be humans but rather other creatures like dragons, bears, and so on. I remember reading about one girl who argued with her mother over whether or not she needed to eat diamonds because she was a dragon.
0. https://old.reddit.com/r/SystemsCringe/comments/w95q5q/alter...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin
Edit: Corrected a typo. Added more explanation of how I discovered that sub. It seems some are misinterpreting it as a judgment.
That community is called tulpas and the subreddit bears the same name.
By one token you could seemingly accurately describe the discussion there as unchaperoned children and teens actively trying to become mentally ill through meditation and self-talk.
On the other hand, I remember when I was a kid we used to talk about how maybe if we wished hard enough we could become more powerful like the characters in Dragonball Z. And I remember a web forum where kids talked about how maybe Digimon was real and there was a parallel universe where Digimon existed and how the forumbase could merge that world with our own if they wished hard enough.
So maybe kids have always been quite out there and it just looks more alarming when you are an adult.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Mode...
But now after clicking these links I’m reminded why I stay on the surface of the internet.
It has nothing to do with... whatever this TikTok/Social Media thing is.
Kinda wonder if Marvin Minsky had something useful to say on this? I recall he wrote a book on how the mind is socially organized
That, in turn, is made more difficult by clinical perceptions of MPD: many psychiatrists are openly skeptical that it’s a “real” disorder, meaning that they’re less likely in turn to be empathetic towards a prospective patient who claims (perhaps incorrectly, but perhaps not!) that they have MPD.
"Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a <i>rare condition</i> in which two or more distinct identities, or personality states, are present in—and alternately take control of—an individual."[0]
0. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/conditions/dissociative-i...
One of the problems is that the kids themselves are so awash in information and misinformation about this stuff, including awareness of how things are defined in the DSM-V, that they can muddy up your attempts at evaluating them.
It's kind of like if you take enough personality tests, like the MBTI, you eventually just sort of know how each question is being evaluated and you can, consciously or unconsciously, start optimizing your responses around the result that lines up with your narrative about yourself but isn't necessarily the most honest set of answers.
My view of it, for my own personal reflection, is to first define identity. I opt to have two prongs to it, rooted in game theory: executive identity & motivational identity. Given a decision matrix executive identity is the actor being able to choose. Motivational identity is what determines the pay off values of the outcomes
It's possible to have conflicting motivation, which ends up debating itself until it's decided by your executive identity. In various contexts these motivations will overtake each other on executive identity, causing one to behave rather differently
There's a range on how cohesive these behave for people, for some it can be distinct enough to feel like a different person
you wear one mask with one group, another with a different group. Wouldnt say multiple identities though.
But yeah, the mutual reinforcement is a BIG problem.
You're just establishing that for a given persona there is a spectrum from 'Mask' to 'Identity' and insisting that there is an arbitrary threshold.
For a moment, embrace a worldview that there is no singular, core Identity -- in fact all personas are masks to some degree. An Identity may be a mask you're particularly dedicated to wearing, but it's still a mask. The rest of these "systems" people's perspective follows from this point and emphasizes certain experiences -- that you may suppress -- over others that you may hold on a pedestal.
Otherkin is not a fad, and it's not confined to Tumblr; it's been around for decades, all over the net and real-life society. There's considerable overlap between otherkin and furry; otherkin is basically furry for fictional species.
Anyway, furry/otherkin and plural people read and post here to Hackernews all the time -- often as experts in their professional field. One of the most consistent producers of high-quality content featured here, Xe Iaso, appears to be both. Mind your manners.
Reactions like the GP are why we prefer to be more tactical about plurality in public. We've found it's better to be seen as an expert in your field AND THEN be more safe with talking about plurality topics than it is to be a vocal example of being plural and then having to fight uphill to be seen as an expert in things. Stigma is a bitch and a half to deal with.
We'd like to think that our writing and advocacy helps destignatize our form of existence in some way, but we have no way to track that other than the occasional kind comment. Maybe this job will be the one where we are more honest and open about plurality, but we've also found that it's an ultimate relationship strength test like coming out as transgender to people (I'm pretty sure it's why my brother refuses to talk to me). We don't want to lose more people, so we have defaulted to this quietly, but accurately describing how we experience reality thing and not emphasizing it too much. The blog is a team effort ;)
Interestingly enough, I've found that plural people tend to understand distributed systems problems at a much more intuitive level than others. It's to the point that if I was ever building out an SRE team to handle distributed systems problems, I'd probably try and hire as many plural people as I can and make them accommodated to the best of my ability so that we can leverage that innate talent in ways that were previously undoable. Maybe some day I'll get my wish, but not any time soon it seems.
Personally I'd say that otherkin and furry have overlaps but are not fundamentally the same thing. Think of it as the difference between being a fan of baseball games and aspiring to be a baseball player. They are in similar veins (both baseball related), but they are wholly separate things. Being furry and being otherkin are similarly different. I can ask around for a resource if you want, if you want to reach out privately please email me at xeiaso dot net.
I'd second the suggestion to avoid hate groups like /r/systemscringe, nothing good can come of it but continuing the cycle of needless hate. I'd like to think that people on this website are rational and can overcome the innate tribalistic feelings that those hate groups capitalize on, but I can wish in one hand and spit in the other then see which one fills up faster.
"Furries run the internets", and as a result the tech side of the furry fandom gives you a vast professional networking opportunity that you could never really get anywhere else. It makes fiscal sense to be a furry if you value having a large professional reach.
Unfortunately we have.
>And don't hang around /r/SystemsCringe; it's a hate sub.
Stop. Stop right there. Laughing at the deranged lunacy of this stupid subculture is NOT HATE. Stop diluting the word "hate" to mean "any slight that goes against my narrative or the narratives of those I ally with." There are real hate groups out there spreading their filth and getting people killed. By diluting the seriousness of hatred, you're inadvertently giving them power. STOP. IT.
>Otherkin is not a fad
Yes it is. It's a fad like emo and goth, with tons of overlap.
>and it's not confined to Tumblr
Unfortunately.
> been around for decades, all over the net and real-life society.
So has emo and goth at this rate. You're proving my point.
>There's considerable overlap between otherkin and furry; otherkin is basically furry for fictional species.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SystemsCringe/comments/ov4bsc/this/
>Anyway, furry/otherkin and plural people read and post here to Hackernews all the time
Chronically online people are online. Shocked I tell you!
>often as experts in their professional field. One of the most consistent producers of...
And often experts in our field are like me: tired of the attention seeking shenanigans like the "system" losers that we have to deal with and manage day to day. Every day chronically online socially awkward people will find some community of invented nonsense to differentiate themselves and play the victim. Nothing like a persecution fetish mixed with fantasy.
I also suspect that systems cringe might not be the best source for understanding plural folks... It might be worth trying to understand before casting aspersions.
Adolescents tend to engage in community-seeking behavior to a great extent, and if they're not finding it in their schools or local community, they'll almost certainly look to find it online.
I know plenty of plural systems. They're just people who happen to also be people. Nothing exceptional one way or another. They're rocket scientists, sysops, janitors, baristas, etc. Just like anyone else.
I went through the first two years of a psychology degree alternately diagnosing myself with every mental illness under the sun, despite me knowing deep down that it wasn't really the case. The thing that stopped it dead was watching clinical videos of people who really did have serious mental illness. I wonder if the same would work for some of these people, presuming they're being suggestible.
I remember in particular one video of a man with bipolar disorder in a manic phase, who was in his mid-20s when the video was filmed during the late 80s, and who was convinced that he'd been the Rolling Stones tour manager in the 1960s. There was nothing anyone could say to convince him otherwise, and he had all sorts of explanations for the mismatch in dates. We were laughing a bit because it was so clearly delusional, when the lecturer pause the video and said something like "yeah, it's kinda funny, but I remember getting a call from a friend who asked my clinical opinion about the fact he thought that the adverts for a bank on TV were telling everyone he was gay." We got pretty quiet after that.
It chimes with the trivialisation of terms like OCD, which are use very filppantly, but anyone who's seen a clinical video of someone with full-blown OCD, which can be completely crippling, wouldn't use it so lightly.
+ Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1 at line 1392: bad argument #1 to 'pairs' (table expected, got nil).
That's new to me. I didn't know wikipedia had adopted lua for its templates.
For example, all infoboxes use this module.
Us boys certainly had our fair share of weird and destructive online communities, but not like this I am sure.
I think LGBTQ curious kids probably tend to be especially vulnerable since the internet is such an important gateway for so many of them to seek out answers to the questions they're starting to have about their own identity and self-conception. But the logic of the curation model isn't a "natural" or "organic" friend group so they're really being jerked around by these things at a very impressionable and vulnerable age.
(this is a fact, and was proven with things like the anorexia epidemic)
It really boils down to the basic cultural tendency for men to simply not trust what women are saying on nearly any subject. There's no way you could know what's wrong with you, there's no way you could understand math, there's no way you can tell me how to patch drywall, etc.
and that community has left zero ability to criticize or question that, since its a unilateral choice
does that make me Queer or Pansexual for dating/hooking up with a completely feminine cisgender woman who calls herself nonbinary or using they pronouns alongside she/her
I would definitely consider this a fad, even as “allyship” to actually nonbinary or even trans people its borderline offensive to pretend to relate if there are no consequences for doing so for the cisgender person compared to the persons being attacked and invalidated and fearing for their lives
The fad reminds me of high school girls being into “yaoi” which is just manga with gay guys
It's probably how we're built to some extent.
Bullying still exists tho.
They don't. Nothing harmful can come out of reading a book.
> DnD leads to Satanism
It can't, ever. No subculture can wander so close to satanism that would lead their elements to coopt it.
> TV rots brains
It doesn't. There's no way of consuming TV that has a negative impact on people.
> movies lead to illiteracy
They don't. Having the choice of a movie never prevented anyone from having to practice spending time learning to consume literature.
> books lead to dangerous thought
They don't. Nothing dangerous can be transmited in print.
Well done, everything is harmless.
I would start to worry only if I had them during the day while awake.
He was asked if he was shown proof that would change his mind could he and he said he couldn't, because his entire identity was built around this belief. If he changed his mind he would lose everything.
This is one of the dangerous things about echo chambers and micro communities produced by social media, it gives people a global identity even if their identity is based on nonsense.
The problem with TikTok is that you have little control over what you see. All it takes is for you to stumble across an ADHD related post, engage with it and you're more likely to then see those types of posts again and again.
Anyone can have a voice on TikTok like other social media apps and ADHD in many social media circles seems to be an attention seeking type of content that makes people think "oh maybe I have it too". It's very similar to the classic scenario of people self diagnosing themselves with cancer, because they've googled it and believe they have some of the signs/symptoms.
I'm not saying that ADHD isn't real, but it is a type of diagnosis that is open to ambiguity unless appropriately diagnosed.
Does this have a lasting impact or do the kids simply move on with no negative changes to their lives?
I remember thinking a lot of dumb stuff as a teenager. Just because I thought it doesn't mean it was bad that I did.
I also see a parallel with HN and developers with impostor syndrome. Before HN, and even before Slashdot, I was a good developer. I wrote some impressive C, C++, and Java code that went into some serious projects. But now, thanks to HN, I know that I'm a below-average developer. Perhaps I'm not, but it sure feels that way because of what I see presented and discussed here.
If I had grown up with HN, I might not have done some of the things I did; rather I might have given up and chosen a career which I didn't feel inadequate at. This is how I imagine kids today feel with all the stuff they have access to. I mean heck, you can even go to youtube and see 10 year olds making amazing creations out of just about any material you can think of. How does that feel when you're still trying to cut straight lines on paper?
You could say that someone who performs a dance well and gains positive attention from an audience is expressing capitalism. The idea that putting work plus talent to get appreciation (in monetary or other forms) is not necessarily bad.
I think what we currently experience as capitalism is a skewed, min/max version which loses sight of the main value and focuses too much on simple financial return.
It certainly matters.
Much lower than it probably is. Most people, by my estimate, aren't perfect 0 or 6 on the Kinsey scale [0]. The majority of people are somewhere between 1 and 5. It's still a bimodal distribution but I'd estimate most people aren't purely gay or straight.
Sexuality is similar to mental illness in my opinion (STAY WITH ME!), most people have sub-clinical cases of lots of mental illnesses, maybe a facet or two due to maladaption because of being a human (sexually wise: having a fetish, having a 'thing' for secondary sex characteristics of their sex, etc) but it doesn't cross a threshold where it becomes behaviourly significant.
Ask someone "If you had to sleep with someone of the same sex, who would it be?" If they have an honest answer of a specific person, they aren't _technically_ straight.
So they're exploring their sexuality, and you think this is wrong? I remember questioning my sexuality as a teenager... in the 90's, long before the internet functionally existed for me.
> imagining wrong things ... biological, empirical nonsense
Oh. Nevermind. You've already decided to cast normal behavior and questions as immoral, so I'll never change your mind.
> There's a whole detrans movement of such folks who regret doing such, often irreversible, massive damage to their body.
I looked into this a while back and found that the vast majority of this "movement" was british transphobes making up stories about their friend who this definitely happened to. Didn't seem to have a whole lot of legitimacy to it.
Why British specifically? Beats me but they were definitely over-represented amongst these stories.
Could it be the case that there is now less social stigma to address and speak about mental health publicly?
Speaking from anecdotal experience (which is, yes, the worst), I struggled in school on mathematic topics, and just about never did my homework. My high school pushed me for a study, which was performed. My parents and I were invited to a meeting to review the results, but they did not allow me to come along, and I was not allowed to view the results of the study, but my school did grant me extended time on tests but was not allowed by my parents to elucidate why. (I did not need the extended time.)
These days, I went to a psychiatrist and had more studies, done, it turns out I have a rather textbook case of ADHD which was not disclosed to me and was left untreated. I also casually think that a small slice of my family, possibly including myself, is on the autism spectrum (on the DSM-5 style definition).
So, while I partially agree with some of the perspectives here, I also firmly believe a non-zero amount of the change is that we're getting better at understanding and speaking about mental health—where definitions and processes from a psychiatric perspective are evolving, and that socially it's no longer something that must be bottled up and kept hidden (as much).
There is a big, seeming North American sentiment that children are incapable of functioning without an adult and need to be protected at all times, rather than fostering their capability for independence. This is not to say you don't watch over them, but they have the capacity to learn from the world just as you do.
With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to untold bad influences, etc.
It’s no wonder so many kids think they have mental disorders or any of the other mind viruses going around.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
Previously, bad influences were limited to what your local neighborhood kids were telling your kid. This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely. And that floor could be raised by society as a whole improving.
Now, with TikTok, the only limit is what TikTok will ban. Which isn't much. The population segment of kids who aren't supervised in any way used to have an inherent limit. Not any more.
So I suspect there's not necessarily a decrease in parents keeping their kids from bad influences, and more that there's an increase in access to (and severity of) bad influences.
Edit: I should be clear, I want to minimize banning stuff as a solution as much as possible. I think the goal should be to move kids back into supervision and teaching by their parents, and just real people in their life. Parents, friends, educators, etc.
The problem is much of America (and much of the world) is completely boned on this front by living in places that just don't form a community, like suburbs, or just low-density non-walkable areas in general. Complicated by the fact that the vast majority of parents are getting non-work time squeezed out of them by increases in cost of living without any increase in pay.
Banning more stuff is the single-line-item solution, the simple way, the just-get-biden-to-do-an-executive-order way. But I would be horrified if that's all we could manage. I hope we can do the real solutions, not the deeply flawed patch that banning stuff is.
This is the change that has never occurred in human history. Every thread brings up that all complaints about this new media were applied to past forms of media.
This may be new-ish but I’m not sure it’s that new. I grew up with the early web in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it’s always been pretty unfiltered. It wasn’t centralized in the way TikTok is, but plenty of us grew up on the web with little supervision, and web circles were/are much wider than the neighborhood.
I find it astonishing that this is the limit of "bad". There are people alive today who were at lynchings in the US as children and cheered them on.
Setting cats on fire by comparison was a harmless past time.
It also worth noting that in the past there were more supervisory resources: homemakers. Now both parents tend to work and have far less capacity to manage those bad influences.
Why do you think you’re less likely to form a community in suburbs? I live in SF in an apt with a walk score of 98 and I don’t think there is much of a “community” here at all.
Every older generation has said this about the incoming generation - without fail.
I'll take the flip side.
There are so many great social medias about loving yourself, loving your kids, crying is okay for dudes, and men don't have to be a certain way (i'm a dude). It's okay not to know how to change your oil or shoot a gun, better to hug someone, allowed/proud to be gay, black, etc etc.
You should not show your feelings to just anyone. You should have self worth and share with those you trust. There is a reason why PR exists for people in the public sphere. Most people will treat you kindly and it is important to remember that, but a good lesson for the internet would be to be keenly aware of the pitfalls of sharing too much and that includes your feelings very often.
Changing oil and car tires, shooting a gun, fishing and performing basic repairs critical life skills that everyone should learn. If you are an adult male and can't complete some of the most basic tasks without help, you will have a difficult time living on your own.
Loving yourself, being "proud" of homosexuality (I find this rather odd; why make your "sexuality" your core identity?) and knowing how to navigate the world are not mutually exclusive.
Not to be pedantic, but is this actually true? Parents used to send their kids to work in the factory at 10. Was that "keeping them away from bad influences"?
If you're saying something is "across every culture", I think some citation is required.
Fairy tails is essentially teaching kids to stay away from bad influences. Telling to not go into the forest alone because X/Y/Z might happen is not far from telling to not go into a bad neighbourhood or visit a certain kid. And fairy tales did happen in pretty much any culture for thousands of years.
There maybe be some technical reasons for this.
But feeding into the psyops narrative, it's good practice to separate your intelligence gathering into domestic and international. Ex. CIA and FBI
I'd imagine that for China, US/Western Tik Tok is a literal treasure trove of useful information on the state of practically every facet of US/Western life and culture. Oh the subtle and untraceable mischief you could get up to by just turning a few knobs.
Some parents. Elite schools in Manhattan and Palo Alto send home fliers that parents (or at least those I know) read.
Screen time of all types is monitored. And the children have a somewhat hilarious self-protecting pride in their control over digital intake. (Most of them. Thinking of two brothers, one who eats his veggies because he, and I quote, doesn’t like his poop going soft, and self moderates cartoon watching and phone fucking around. The other who steals my phone to watch loud videos.)
This is proved by science, of course this is not easy to communicate to a child of that age that is a culture demonstration of yours how to handle.
This is also a good recipe to plant prejudice. I'm glad parents no longer have such a strong influence.
Although Quintilian agreed that public schools can be a bad influence, he argued that parents were the worst influence on their own kids.
“If only we did not ourselves damage our children’s characters! We ruin their infancy by spoiling them from the start. That soft upbringing which we call indulgence destroys the sinews of mind and body. If a toddler crawls around in purple, what will he not want when he grows up? […] No wonder [why children have bad character]: it was we who taught them, they heard it all from us. They see our mistresses, our male lovers; every dinner party echoes with obscene songs; things are to be seen which it is shameful to name. […] The wretched children learn these things before they know they are wrong. This is what makes them dissolute and spineless: they do not get these vices from the schools, they import them [vices] into them [the schools].”
As an aside, a TikTok employee told me TikTok is known to trigger old maladies like anorexia etc. I was told this after mentioning that trying TikTok gave me my first nicotine cravings in several years.
A community that controls the narrative its members hear, will very likely turn into a a society full of prejudices imposed dogmas.
A dystopia that the many have chosen to believe in who's goal is to only worsen the digital crack cocaine addiction which that is already just as bad and present in society.
We do not need society to regress any further with platforms like TikTok.
With my brother I've found that if you treat younger adults and children with seriousness and listen to them as though their POV is valid, you build a trust there where they have a sense of where to discuss their doubts and insecurities so they don't fall prey to hypes and misinformation.
I mention this because I had a huge amount of influence on him growing up, almost the opposite of my experience with my parents dismissing and ridiculing my concerns. Although when I was a teen social media was mostly all chat rooms, forums, myspace, and then facebook (YouTube barely existed until the end of my adolescence) where I found people who listened- and there was the potential for them to have an influence which may have led to something very similar to this article.
Although social media now is vastly more powerful and common, it is not the sole variable. For many of these children it is filling a gap where a solid foundation of reality and context should be- with family members and social support structures who can be trusted to provide a reality check. I can see why many young ones listen to online personalities (many adults do, too) and although the medium through which they're getting these concepts (tiktok) plays a large part, it is not the root nor is avoiding tiktok the solution.
I would add, my parents moved us far from the town with the intent to take us away from bad influences of kids who hung out downtown- what this actually did is prevent me from being able to walk to the library, while my sister still found a way to get in trouble because lo and behold, her friends had cars or knew older kids with cars. The isolation they thought might be a solution proved ineffective, but I think if their parenting had been more nutruring and less abuse/neglect she might have avoided a lot of the trouble she got into.
We live in a different world as it is radically connected like never before. Taleb refers to our current age as "Extremeistan" and the previous world history as "Mediocrastan". It's about power lawn distributions and this happens overnight now across vast swaths of the population. [1]
[1] https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html
Normalize keeping children away from the obscene and stop letting grown adults normalize exposing weird shit to children, should be obvious innit
That is a very curious statement.
My preferred outcome would be if the companies involved performed mutual annihilation by making social media as a whole look as bad as possible.
I don't blame social media for this, while it is true that it has heavily increased knowledge of various real illnesses, and therefore increased the case of false positives - clinics should be able to differentiate between this. That's the point. The professional should be able to properly diagnose, because the patient themselves doesn't know what the problem is or how to treat it.
But there in comes the "do no harm" idea. Where we have to do something because if we get it wrong and didn't prescribe pills then the patient may kill themselves or harm others. And conveniently we can point and say "we did it by the book, no liability.". It should be recoined "do harm to everyone equally" for correctness.
Is it healthy to be so acutely aware of mental health when you're a teen, though? Why is disability valid social currency? Is it because we also see adults tap into victimhood as currency?
However, there is another huge offender in the psychiatry misinformation space: Reddit.
The amount of incorrect, oversimplified, and downright weird psychiatry and psychology information they pick up from Reddit is astounding. The most common self-diagnosis is ADHD. Do some of them actually have ADHD? Sure, statistically speaking some of them will actually have ADHD. However, there’s something about Reddit’s hive mind that has convinced these people that the bar for ADHD is very low, such that they see everything as ADHD. It’s so bad that entire cohorts will come through and convince each other that they all have self-diagnosed ADHD, despite most of them functioning just fine in their personal, academic, and work lives.
They say things like “My brain doesn’t produce dopamine” (ADHD has dopaminergic involvement but it is not a disorder of decreased dopamine production, thats Parkinson’s) and other such statements that would be easily disproven with even cursory research on the topic. This is one of the most confusing aspects to me, as these are the same people who will spend hours researching the intricate details about front-end frameworks or other topics. There’s something about Reddit psychiatry that short-circuits past their normal logic and leads to blind acceptance.
I suspect the root problem is that they’re not actually going to Reddit for psychiatry advice or self-diagnosing with the goal of learning how to work with a mental health condition. It seems to be more about identity and adopting an explanation that makes them different and unique. ADHD has become especially attractive as a self-diagnosis because it’s trendy right now and it gives people a sense that their accomplishments are that much greater due to starting from a disadvantaged point.
Meanwhile, I have worked privately with several mentees who admit struggles with doctor-diagnosed ADHD and they behave completely differently. They usually don’t want to public announce their condition and go to lengths to avoid letting it be obvious to their peers or employers. The trivialization of genuine ADHD is massively frustrating to these people.
Self-diagnosis aside, I had this exact thought after a conversation with a teacher. The number of kids on medication for ADHD in their school was just too much. Sure, the school could just be lucky but I doubt it. More likely pressure from educators and parents for a "quick fix" for what should be correctable (sans drugs) behavioural issues.
The best way I can describe my use of TikTok is, it makes me happy. There are fun people doing fun things, and it makes me happy to watch. Even if I'm older than most of them.
Whenever I go on the platforms I mention in my first paragraph I instead get insulted, provoced, accused, questioned, and depressed.
I'm sure there's some bad stuff happening on TikTok, but on the whole it's a happy, friendly place. That simply cannot be said about the others.
As usual, the real "problem" with TikTok is that it's not owned and controlled by a western tech giant. That's why it gets attacked in western media.
This is a long winded way of me saying I agree, and this doesn’t seem like a particularly new phenomenon.
I use to joke with my sister who would go online and read things then come up with self-diagnoses.
I think people have to be more aware that not everything you read of see online is real.
Pretty broad statement to make about an app with 1B+ monthly active users. Are 7% of the world's population narcissistic?
I think you have to break apart those 'using' TikTok by anonymously consuming content, and those who are 'using' TikTok by producing content with the aspiration of hitting it big. Narcissism seems connected to the second, but not so much the first.
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.
I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.
I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:
“Well, what’s the matter with you?”
I said:
“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is not the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I have got.”
And I told him how I came to discover it all.
Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn’t expecting it—a cowardly thing to do, I call it—and immediately afterwards butted me with the side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.
I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back.
He said he didn’t keep it.
I said:
“You are a chemist?”
He said:
“I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers me.”
I read the prescription. It ran:
“1 lb. beefsteak, with 1 pt. bitter beer
every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on...
I wouldn't want my kid spending hours each day scrolling through various social media, but likewise I wouldn't want them making pointless garbage videos just because... well because I guess that's what some people feel they should do?
My son watched gaming streamers for several years in his early teens, and that drove me nuts. I understand watching people who are good at something do their thing, but most of the gamer stuff I saw was just obnoxious punks who really needed a life. I'm still baffled at how successful (followers, income) many of these garbage can kids are. If they tried to talk to people, or even just talk out loud, in public the way they talk on their videos, they would be getting broken noses weekly.
There's an actual term for it but I can't find it for the life of me. I don't believe it is echolalia but it is a precise word for people 'catching' tics from loved ones.
I'd rather my business fail than get addicted to it.
TikTok knows this and they thrive in knowingly damaging the mental health of their users of this addiction.
It's all so tiring.
These contagious social phenomena seem to arise most in young adults, especially women, who are heavy users of social media.
I mean, that's what religion is. It's a shared delusion that functions as a mind virus, where the conceptualization of deities that are on your side (but not the other side's) is mistaken for there actually being such a thing. The fact that it's normalized doesn't change the fact that it's a delusion.
In addition what people have learnt is that focusing on illness prevention isn’t the best approach. Focusing instead on more positive alternatives works better. Hence the rise of the body positivity movement.
Finally, anorexia and other eating disorders are much better known so parents and children receive information and education about them through normal channels. Their doctors and school teachers. So discussing it through news media isn’t as important.
In the 90s, there was a study done on "sensitivity to environmental toxins," where people would complain about sickness and headaches and similar things from new carpet or new paint in offices.
IIRC, the study found that the reported cases were in a kind of "line of sight," i.e. one person would complain about it to another person, and before long it had passed all the way through the weird social groupings in cube farms, passed from person to person.
It's odd, but important to remember, that humans are still just smarter than average herd animals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twhvtzd6gXA
I mean watch this and tell me you don't want what they're selling.
And considering the shallowness and speed of socnets... It seems a very bad combo.
Old world may be what it is but there were some natural brakes.
You jump over the gaps in the tiles on the road? You must have OCD. You broke up with your bf/gf.. you must have depression. You're happy a bit? Bipolar disorder. You're a guy and play with a barbie... trans. Less horny, asexual. And let's not forget a bunch of adhd/autism and other disorders, when a kid gets bored in school.
On the other hand, we have professionals (doctors, etc.) reinforcing this, by (eg.) giving pills to kids who can't sit still for 8 hours in school without any physical excercise during that time, and parents give their kids pills,because it's easier than actually parenting that kid.
It’s willful blindness
Now, those sites are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Can't afford to do the right thing.
https://www.science.org/content/article/new-paper-ignites-st...
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I think levels of anxiety are also on the rise, which causes many symptoms which are similar to more severe mental illnesses. Which also reinforces my first point.
Other than becoming a social media influencer, what goals are young people actually striving towards? I'm not sure what you're seeing, but I'm not seeing hordes of young people crying because they're trying to become a medical researcher or engineer or achieve some other tangible goal and can't make it for some reason.
For example it's still not clear to me whether I consider my adhd a disorder in a vacuum. It definitely is here, I can't consistently execute the tasks that that will allow me to safely live.
But there have definitely been times and places where "weirdo who is good with kids, calm in an emergency, and knows a lot of infrequently-used-but-valuable skills" is a role people are allowed to occupy.
I'm definitely disordered within a context where each individual must labor effectively or die. There have been other arrangements though. This is probably true for some, but not all or even maybe most, mental illnesses and neurological disorders as well.
I seem to recall tiktok zoomers also eating tide pods and dying after doing the blackout challenge so maybe they do have a mental disorder.