Dr. Vivek Murthy: Social media is a key driver of our youth mental health crisis | Hacker News Reader

Dr. Vivek Murthy: Social media is a key driver of our youth mental health crisis

cnbc.com

57 pointsdotcoma25 comments

Dr. Murthy understands social media and the headwinds that younger generations are facing.

With this in mind, are we underestimating the devastation awaiting the younger generations?

We have scientists cocksure of natural disasters in the medium term, four decades of increasing economic inequality, cost of living pressure, and in the U.S., and increasingly in other countries, price increases in health, rent, and education.

The kids see empirical evidence of their plight.

Dont forget a sham democracy were important issues like "pensioners first" always outweigh all other solutions on any issue.

Funny how every social media company launches commercials saying they will cooperate with congress once they got the spotlight on this issue.

This has been a problem for decades and I personally was in denial until I realized how much anxiety, depression, etc these things added to me daily from doomscrolling. I found a new love for nature and books after taking a serious look at my own mental health as a millennial who used social media as it became big.

Yes I mean we know this for a while. Facebook is like pumping drugs into kids.

Anyone who works there knows this and is OK with this.

Kids aren’t using Facebook. They are using TikTok (Chinese virus) and Snapchat.

Thankfully TikTok will be banned soon.

Banned just like we banned pirate iptv and hard drugs.

Except TikTok will be gone for good.

Now onto the rest of social media.

There was an excellent Netflix documentary several years ago about this: The Social Dilemma

I highly recommend it!

Nah it's just bad parenting. If a parent lets social media have that large of an impact on their child's life that's on them. The reason kids are psychologically messed up is because their parents aren't handling their responsibilities. If your kid has a problem with social media or anything else then deal with it and stop finger pointing

Parents are already spending way more time and effort actively parenting then was the norm in previous generations.

Just a generation before it was norm for 6 years old to play outside completely unsupervised and for teenagers to be about their own things with nothing but a list of chores from parents and deadline.

Result is that kids commit less crimes, get pregnant less often, drink less, smoke less ... but at some point you have to stop blaming parents for the whole society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

I think this is a lazy response to something that isn't a very good example of rosy retrospection. The rates of all of the things the parent mentioned do happen to have decreased. Studies have also been done on the relative freedom of movement that adolescents have been allowed, going back several generations, and there has been a marked decrease. The below link is to a paper on this phenomenon occurring in England.

"Decreasing experiences of home range, outdoor spaces, activities and companions":

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/94588/1/Woolley%2520and%2520...

Article covering another more recent study, called "Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Wellbeing", on this occurring in the US:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230309101330.h...

i grant you lazy response, and raise you another: the articles you cite are likely more rosy retrospection themselves. none of anything being discussed here is, in my opinion, reliably nor convincingly quantifiable.

Rosy retrospection of what? I think you're just repeatedly invoking the term inappropriately. The first link is to an article on home range, which obviously has nothing to do with rosy retrospection, had you even bothered to glance at it.

Is the fact that suicide rates in the US have been rising steadily over the last two decades and are now at the highest point in the last 80 years also rosy retrospection?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/11/29/2022-suic...

> Rosy retrospection of what? I think you're just repeatedly invoking the term inappropriately.

don't be daft.

> Is the fact that suicide rates in the US have been rising steadily over the last two decades and are now at the highest point in the last 80 years also rosy retrospection?

i'll attempt to make my position clear one final time: i don't accept any of your premises as fact. not about the reason/s behind rates of suicide (who that's actually committed suicide can tell us why they did?), nor the statistical measurement thereof for that matter. not about rates of homework assignment nor "home range" nor "relative freedom of movement" nor the degree of parenting... intensity? none of it.

again, these 'phenomena', let's call them for the sake of argument, in my opinion, are not convincingly nor reliably quantifiable. you are also entitled to your own opinion, whether based on the opinions of others or conceived of yourself. but we should be careful when branding something as fact just because someone else has assigned some contrived numbers to their own unprovable opinion.

Your first response is ironic considering that the first article that I posted didn't take a position on how the past was relatively better, yet you referred to both as being "rosy retrospection", which doesn't make any sense, since that article is not taking a side that the past was better, but only showed that successive generations of children in an area had progressively smaller ranges that they were allowed to wander from the home. This is precisely why I asked, since it makes absolutely no sense to call it "rosy retrospective", yet you lazily blanketed both articles with the term, showing that you obviously didn't look at either. I wanted to see if you were able to provide a direct response to as to why you made your assertion on at least one article, but you instead again just made lazy generalizations that don't have anything to do with the articles I posted.

Your example premise of "the reasons for suicide", is not something I ever proposed. I never attempted to explain the reason for the increase. I simply posted an article showing that the suicide rate has increased over the last couple decades, since you kept blanketing everything prior as "rosy retrospection". Do you not believe that the suicide rate has increased over the last two decades?

"The suicide rate per 100,000 people in 2022 was 14.3, according to a report from the Centers from Disease Control and Prevention released early Wednesday. The rate was 15 in 1941."[0]

> Do you not believe that the suicide rate has increased over the last two decades?

per capita (assuming that's what you mean), that's correct. i do not.

we should stop now. very unproductive exchange.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40779141, citing https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/11/29/2022-suic...

typical comment blaming the parents instead of the decades of innovation leading to addictive technology behaviors.

In this thread: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

i get it. i really do. social media is not for the faint of conformant heart.

but devil's advocate and all—is there really a "crisis" afoot? is it really not just the modern version of teen angst?

Is a 62% increase in youth suicide since smartphones became ubiquitous just typical teen angst?

that's obviously a striking statistic. do you have a cite for anyone interested in assessing for themselves the veracity of such a claim?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/suicide-homicide-rates-young-am... > ...Americans ages 10 to 24 ... group experienced a 62% increase in its suicide rate from 2007 to 2021.

this seems to be the source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db471.htm#secti...

Being near the higher end of that age range, I distinctly remember that I stopped being a happy kid once I started using the Internet (at around age 12) even before addictive algorithmic feeds. This statistic does not surprise me in the slightest.

imo computers and the internet are such potent dopamine feeds that our brains get used to the constant stimulation, making real life boring and causing us to be anxious when we’re not getting our fix. And this is heightened when we use the computer as an alternate world to escape to, and feel more comfortable in, when we don’t feel safe or welcomed in reality.

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