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Comment by raxxorraxor | Hacker News Reader

> girls who spend more than 4 hours a day on social media have two to three times the rate of depression as girls who spend an hour or less.

Not that it proves anything, but the converse argument, that depressed girls spend more time on social media or online in general, should also be examined. If the data could support this thesis to a similar degree, there is no conclusive statement about social media really inducing depression. It isn't just about effect size in my opinion but I don't see this problem answered.

That said, it doesn't need to be depression, there are other venues for negative influences. I am always ready to yell at the cloud for that.

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Something has to be behind the seemingly coordinated rise in depression among children globally, that's the leading indicator he's using to assess the problem. His argument is that it can't be anything other than social media.

You're making the case in the micro scale: what is one person's relationship with depression and social media, and he's arguing in the macro scale. Something has caused depression to spike in children worldwide. What could it be?

> Something has caused depression to spike in children worldwide. What could it be?

Maybe the state of the world around them? Look at the world. Young millenials and gen z have no future. Politicians and boomers are fucking us over in every possible way. The world is running towards a rise of 4.4°C by 2100, we'll never be able to retire, we're in a situation where years of training and a degree still only get you unpaid internships, how could we possibly be happy in such a situation?

All social media did was show us we're not alone. In a situation where all the adults around you calmly live in the fire and say "this is fine", knowing you're not crazy, knowing you're justified in being worried, is empowering.

You are describing a commonly shared sentiment of today. This spike started nearly a decade ago, long before our current economic situation materialized.

To your point, who largely gets to decide which news stories get aggregated and which don't? Who has an outsized influence in shaping people's realities? By many metrics, times are tough, but by many other metrics, we are living in prosperous times as well.

> long before our current economic situation materialized

2008 was 15 years ago

Not disagreeing with your statements, but the key question in the research is why did depression spike in children worldwide _after 2012_.

At various points in my lifetime there have been reasons to be sad about the world - but what changed in 2012 that predominantly appears to affect teenage girls, and has been observed in several countries globally?

I'm saying that social media didn't cause the fears, but that social media ended the millenia of social pressure to just accept everything the way it is.

Cities once did the same, by increasing the population density you could hang out with people that had the same thoughts you did. But many countries successfully ended that through suburbanisation, isolating people once again.

Sounds like you could make an argument that cities make people depressed as well then.

I wonder if population density is a driving force for depression, both online and offline.

I'd buy that. I find cities miserable.

oooh thats an interesting thought, I really like that.

As a personal anecdote, I moved from rural New Mexico to a highly populated New England county and my baseline anxiety level noticeably increased.

Maybe the Mayans were right all along?

In all serious, 2012-2013 coincides with 1/3 and 1/2 of the American population's owning a smartphone. Maybe that has something to do with it?

If children/teens weren't exposed to so much online doom-mongering, they would be finding things to live for rather than fearing the future.

Even if the world is a bit shit, there's still plenty of opportunities for love, family, friendship, art, music, sport, and plenty more. Maybe even working towards solving one of the big problems we face, whether that's through science/tech or politics/economics?

It's exactly this "we didn't start the fire" mentality that caused the situation we're in.

If you want the world to change, you need to do that. You can't just wait for it to happen.

The Internet, through social media and clickbait news, encourages people to get ever-angrier and ever-more-radical until they attempt to 'change things' by smashing and burning, or justifying violence against political 'enemies'.

I don't know what the answers to the world's big problems are, but I'm pretty sure that smashing, burning, and pushing for violent revolution, insurrection, or civil war is not the answer.

Most of the world's problems aren't solvable by everyday people. Better to focus one's attention on oneself, work, family and community, where a difference might be made.

(Obviously it's also great if a person can donate to charity or something of that nature. But obsessively following world events will make you miserable and solve nothing.)

Perhaps if they were narrowly focused on religion? It seems to work for the Amish and other intensely devout groups.

I've always been an atheist, but I'm starting to wonder whether the decline of religion has done more harm than good. We've certainly lost some of the basic human decency that was once passed on via religion. The concept of forgiveness seems to be one glaring example, and the rise of selfish consumerism and online narcissism.

Maybe we need something to replace religion, without the dogma, oppression, and conflict. Something other than the online tribalism and activism seems to be filling that void for many...

> What could it be?

The state of the world? Better measurement and diagnosis of depression?

The child mental health industrial complex which started in the 2000's and has boomed over the last decade as parents have been bombarded with the message that they need to rush their kids off to a therapist at the slightest sign of normal teenage angst or they are bad parents. Schools have bought into this and participate in the messaging. Once under "treatment" kids are repeatedly told they have anxiety and/or depression which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. What would have been normal teenage angst which in most cases resolves itself quickly now becomes a long-term issue of course requiring more therapy. This drives even more kids to think they have anxiety and/or depression because their friends have it.

Lately I have started to see push back among my teenage daughter's friends' parents as they have realized that their kids have actually gotten quite worse since starting therapy. Many have started pulling their kids from therapy and quickly seen their kids mental state improve.

> The child mental health industrial complex

This seems like a rational, evidence-based position.

I find it very hard to believe that an otherwise healthy person can spiral into depression simply by hearing about it a lot.

Therapists have a long history of creating entirely false memories in children, telling them that they were abused by satanists as a child! Teenagers often go through some depression-like episodes due to love interests or whatever, so telling them they're medically depressed is a much smaller leap than what came previously.

Formerly it was easy to find on Google, but I guess Corona "fortified" health information and the results are really bad right now because you cannot match the topic accurately.

I had no success, but suggestibility of illnesses and conditions is a huge topic in psychology. There were many induced cases of conditions that stopped when the "patients" stopped therapy.

There are many reasons why patients would accept such a false diagnosis. I don't believe this is the case here, though.

It's not a strong argument to say "what could it be other than X? therefore, X"

> What could it be?

Sense of community is gone. Trust is at an all-time low. Traditional social institutions and scaffolding that held society together are gone. Families are more broken apart than ever. It's an entire regime change, and we're still operating with our old instincts/hardware, which expects to be raised in a village by a largely familiar and empathetic community. The farther we get from that model, the more we'll be stressed out (until and unless we upgrade our hardware somehow, or, more likely, die trying).

Social media is small potatoes in comparison to the changes that have happened already, and especially to those that are coming.

> Sense of community is gone. Trust is at an all-time low. Traditional social institutions and scaffolding that held society together are gone. Families are more broken apart than ever.

Granting all of that to be true (though I think it could be argued otherwise), those things started happening long before the sharp rise in depression among teen girls.

And it’s all due to the very existence of progressing technology. Dr. Skrbina in the book Technological Slavery makes the case that humanity has no control over the impacts of technology on humanity, and that technology has an emergent will that is independent of humans who create and operate it.

https://ia600300.us.archive.org/21/items/tk-Technological-Sl...

It has been studied, with ~46 studies using three sorts of approaches. Haidt's writeup on causation. His conclusion is that the available evidence shows that social media causes mental health issues, not the other way around. Though you can look through the studies yourself if you'd like.

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/104255435/question-a-do...

If the converse were true it wouldn't explain the rise in depression.

But that’s not the basis of his argument. His argument is based on the timing of when social media usage started. I mint argue 3-4 hours or social media use alone didn’t cause depression, but had to be combined with a causal factor

The longitudinal factor is essential in this though. Teen mental health issues skyrocketed since 2012. That's really the whole point of his rebuttal of Proposition 1.

We are back to the rates of the 1980s. What caused mental issues to be so high back the ? In the long term it’s the 90s that seem like a strangely low level of issues.

> I am always ready to yell at the cloud for that.

Yell at the cloud? Nicely done.

No, I am just German and this is a language disability.

Well, in English it became a beautiful pun.

Or the two are linked via feedback such that social media makes depression worse and both are causally linked. It doesn’t have to be a one-way relationship.

I agree the research doesn't conclusively show direction, but in my experience so many psychiatry correlates are chicken/egg. Depressed people tend to get less physical activity because of their depression symptoms, but too little activity can be quite bad for one's mood. Lots of bad cycles with positive (in a dynamical systems sense) feedback connections.

The converse argument is far more plausible.

It's still just guessing. Can we please go from "plausible" to "we studied this"?

It's pretty hard to study beyond doubt though. You're not going to get much parental consent (or probably even institutional approval) to run a study where you require the experimental group of teenagers to spend 3+ hours a day on social media. And if the experimental group limits screentime, well I think parents of teens know how hard that can be to actually enforce across devices if the kid really wants to get on social media. You can't control what their peer groups are doing, and there are privacy limitations on what info you can even collect on specific phone activity from consenting adults, let alone teens.

In general, for studies of difficult long term behavior adjustments you basically need cooperative participants that will be honest when they slipped up. Teens are a tough population for this.

It has been studied, with ~46 studies using three sorts of approaches. Haidt's writeup is below. His conclusion is that the available evidence shows that social media causes mental health issues, not the other way around. Though you can look through the studies yourself if you'd like.

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/104255435/question-a-do...

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