Transmission of Mental Disorders in Adolescent Peer Networks

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/texting-isnt-first...

“Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy?” wondered the Knights of Columbus in a 1926 meeting. “Does the telephone break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?”

Others worried that the inverse would occur—that it would be so easy to talk that we’d never leave each other alone. “Thanks to the telephone, motor-car and such-like inventions, our neighbors have it in their power to turn our leisure into a series of interruptions,” complained an American professor in 1929. And surely it couldn’t be healthy to talk to each other so much. Wouldn’t it create Too Much Information?

“We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other,” a London writer moaned in 1897. Others fretted that the telephone sped up life, demanding instant reactions. “The use of the telephone gives little room for reflection,” wrote a British newspaper in 1899. “It does not improve the temper, and it engenders a feverishness in the ordinary concerns of life which does not make for domestic happiness and comfort.”

Young ladies, some fretted, were at romantic risk. “The serenading troubadour can now thrum his throbbing guitar before the transmitter undisturbed by apprehensions of shot guns and bull dogs,” a magazine article in Electrical World noted. Scamsters loved the phone.

“It changed people’s ideas of social trust,” notes Carolyn Marvin, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and author of When Old Technologies Were New. We could no longer read someone based on face-to-face social cues.

This seems like an obvious and intended result. I don't think this is suspicious. If you tell more people about something, more people will have words to describe it.

I think in your comment there are multiple places where you conflate reported mental health and actual mental health, for example saying mental health is declining. Is it declining, or are reports increasing due to awareness? The answer would be non-obvious, and even if mental health was declining, I suspect that other factors like declining economic outlooks for the average person would be more likely causes than "mental health awareness campaigns".

These symptoms aren't actually the disease - just like our legs are not actually our phones.

> there’s a pretty direct line between the increase of mental health awareness campaigns and self-reported mental health

"Self-reported mental health" is very different from clinically diagnosed and treated mental health.

> I mean, look at this study, eating disorders spiked, are we suggesting people secretly unknowingly had an eating disorder they only became aware of through social media? It’s nonsense!

This is a nonsense line of thinking because "only became aware of" is not the mechanism. There is plenty of research out there about how social media actively changes mental and behavioural patterns - especially in young people - because that is what it is DESIGNED TO DO in order to increase engagement and revenue.

Changing your physical behaviour severely enough to become sick is a thing.

Changing your mental behaviour severely enough to become sick is a thing.

Mental health might be getting worse, but simply "awareness of mental health issues" is not the mechanism.

In the first one you see issues in yourself or someone else that you learn later match some diagnosis. In the second one you gain those issues that you didn't have earlier. I've been diagnosed and improved my life exactly because enough people discussed some symptoms that I could say "hey, that's the same as my problems! (that existed for decades before)"

I'm sure you could gain some issues, and empathic illnesses are a thing. But disregarding the difference here would be harmful.

Mountain biking as a sport would not be possible for the average person without the community. Sure, someone could be, and had to be, "the first" MTBer, make knobbly tires, build a suspension, go without a trail, etc, but that sort of spontaneous "new sport discovery" process is not going to happen at anything like the rate that people are attracted (via social transmission!) to the existing sport with everything in place.

The question seems to be whether being transgender, or being a mountain biker, is something that can exist purely in the mind, in the absence of the ability to realise it.

In some ways it feels like an unanswerable question because normal gender roles are socially transmitted anyway, so we can't even say whether "being a man" exists in isolation.

Thing is though, that during puberty there is a huge amount of internal tension as one's body goes through significant developmental changes. Especially for girls as they start to be sexualised by men. The idea that transition can be used to escape this makes for a tempting second option, and if there are peers who also think that way, it can be very encouraging.

We know that the number of detransitioners is on the rise, and their stories are very often along those lines. They became obsessively drawn to the idea of transitioning, often through social media and peers, and later, when they had the insights of adulthood and the obsession had faded, regretted what they'd done.

The problem is that transition isn't actually a change to the opposite sex, it just creates a poor facsimile at best, and the medical pathway of blocking puberty and taking cross-sex hormones causes irreversible harms to one's body. Loss of sexual function is a big problem. And of course, teenage girls who undergo mastectomy to affirm their idea that they should be boys, can't get those body parts back.

The point I am making is not that people are unwilling to concede, I don't see much change in that, but that debate itself rarely happens.

It's far more common in my experience for someone to attempt to shut down debate with a label like racist or woke, or draw a connection to a political philosophy in an attempt to discredit, rather than actually try to give valid reasons for why I should adopt their position.

Back in University I found that to be far less common. Looking from the outside in it seems as if nowadays campuses have become much more reactionary.