Young people were becoming more anxious long before social media – here’s the evidence
theconversation.com
Here’s why I disagree with Jonathan Haidt. Young people have been on a trajectory of worse mental health since before the advent of social media.

Thanks to bestselling authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the public has become increasingly aware of the rapid rise in mental health issues among younger people […] Their warnings about the destructive impact of social media have had an effect, reflected not least in a wave of schools across Europe banning smartphones.

While it’s good to draw attention to the rising rates of depression and anxiety, there’s a risk of becoming fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables like “screen time”.

[…]

A hallmark of Twenge and Haidt’s arguments is their use of trend lines for various types of psychological distress, showing increases after 2012, which Haidt calls the start of the “great rewiring” when smartphones became widespread. This method has been criticised for overemphasising correlations that may say little about causality.

[…]

Numerous academics […] have pointed to factors such as an increasing intolerance for uncertainty in modernity, a fixation – both individual and collective – on avoiding risk, intensifying feelings of meaninglessness in work and life more broadly and rising national inequality accompanied by growing status anxiety. However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.

[…]

It seems unlikely that the political and social challenges we face wouldn’t influence our wellbeing. Reducing the issue to isolated variables [such as the use of smartphones], where the solution might appear to be to introduce a new policy (like banning smartphones) follows a technocratic logic that could turn good health into a matter for experts.

The risk with this approach is that society as a whole is excluded from the analysis. Another risk is that politics is drained of meaning. If political questions such as structural discrimination, economic precarity, exposure to violence and opioid use are not regarded as shaping our wellbeing, what motivation remains for taking action on these matters?

  • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
    15·
    25 days ago

    I suspect this is part of it, but I also suspect that it’s even little things like more people living in dense cities and spending less time in serene nature.

    The rise in near sightedness is tied to kids not spending enough time outdoors literally just focusing on things far in the distance, it seems to me that it would be more surprising if there weren’t also related mental health consequences.

    • InevitableList@beehaw.org
      17·
      25 days ago

      Actually near nearsightedness is due to brightness levels being much indoors rather than focal points. Even on cloudy days it’s much brighter outdoors. There’s also evidence that natural light has a calming effect on people.

      • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        24 days ago

        I was born and raised in the third largest city in North America and still live here. Gtfo of here with your baseless assumptions.

        City life is efficient and culturally awesome; the country and nature naturally induce senses of calm, peacefulness, are empirically shown to reduce stress in humans, and is where we evolved.

        Both of these things can be true.