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Comment by thefourthchime | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see headlines like this, I think of this clip from True Detective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLZGMcwi758

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There's always the risk of it just being "old man yells at clouds"....except in this case it's the kids themselves telling us there's something wrong. Self-reported mental health and suicide rates are trending in a bad direction.

Obviously the leap to causation needs to be taken very carefully, but "kids these days" are definitely a bit more sad and suicidal for some reason.

The latest studies have proven the causative link. It’s not just correlation anymore.

Self-reported mental issues are kind of like rape and sexual abuse reports in Sweden: when police started to take them seriously, the number exploded, apparently showing things were getting much worse when in fact they were getting better.

There was always a massive disease burden hidden away in the younger generation, schizophrenic and depressive adults don't just spontaneously emerge. It's just that they wouldn't know about it and their family strongly resisted the notion they have the "crazy" kid, because the stigma was unbearable. Those kids would show up as "slow learners", "attention issues", "troubled", "aggressive", in the penal system, addicts etc. and only much later, if they were lucky, get any kind of treatment for the underlying issue.

Remove the stigma and provide resources and many children will use them, perhaps to the point of over-medicalizing normal human variance.

At some point one change will be more drastic than all the changes before.

First generation to be exclusively raised on social media/smartphones/constant tech engagement is not simply, old man yells at clouds.

Sounds to me very similar to past situations. First generation to be exclusively raised on...

- MTV?

- video games?

- rock and roll?

- ...

They didn't have those things in their pockets 24/7, and the social media apps are designed to be addictive. Not exactly the same scenario

Did you seriously compare constant engagement of phone to occasional MTV or video games?

Read this book, Amusing Ourselves to Death https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0023ZLLH6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b..., but replace the word TV with Internet. You will be surprised how remarkably similar the arguments are.

D&D had way worse reps than either (maybe not rock and roll). People legit thought you were a horrible person if you played and that it warped your mind from day one.

That's false equivalence. Smartphones are much closer to an innate/biological shift than a cultural one.

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