Round two on the anxious generation. Well, honestly, round three. But we had a false start with round two, which is why this episode is a little late in coming. If you want to hear the gory, data-heavy details of our second attempt, you can access the episode by becoming a patron (https://www.patreon.com/c/Increments) (was there ever a better sell?).
We discuss
Whether the rise in self-harm rates was due to reporting changes
Whether education and common core could be affecting mental health
Whether cultural pessimism is on the rise
Cyberbullying
Martin Gurri's thesis on the digital revolution
How Vaden will handle social media with his kids
References
David Wallace Wells opinion piece (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/opinion/smartphones-social-media-mental-health-teens.html)
Our patreon episode (https://www.patreon.com/posts/subscriber-ep-23-124502992) on David Wallace Wells' thesis
Peter Gray on common core (https://petergray.substack.com/p/letter-51-common-core-is-the-main)
Revolt of the Public (https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millennium/dp/1732265143/)
Errata
Ben said The Revolt of the Public was written in 2014. It was written in 2018.
Vaden said he would list all four of Haidt's points about why girls are uniquely vulnerable to negative effects of social media, and only got halfway in before forgetting he said that. The four reasons Haidt gives are:
Girls are more affected by visual social comparison and perfectionism
Girls' aggression is more relational
Girls more easily share emotions and disorders
Girls are more subject to predation and harassment
Quotes
Here is a story. In 2007, Apple released the iPhone, initiating the smartphone revolution that would quickly transform the world. In 2010, it added a front-facing camera, helping shift the social-media landscape toward images, especially selfies. Partly as a result, in the five years that followed, the nature of childhood and especially adolescence was fundamentally changed — a “great rewiring,” in the words of the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt — such that between 2010 and 2015 mental health and well-being plummeted and suffering and despair exploded, particularly among teenage girls.
For young women, rates of hospitalization for nonfatal self-harm in the United States, which had bottomed out in 2009, started to rise again, according to data reported to the C.D.C., taking a leap beginning in 2012 and another beginning in 2016, and producing, over about a decade, an alarming 48 percent increase in such emergency room visits among American girls ages 15 to 19 and a shocking 188 percent increase among girls ages 10 to14.
Here is another story. In 2011, as part of the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a new set of guidelines that recommended that teenage girls should be screened annually for depression by their primary care physicians and that same year required that insurance providers cover such screenings in full. In 2015, H.H.S. finally mandated a coding change, proposed by the World Health Organization almost two decades before, that required hospitals to record whether an injury was self-inflicted or accidental — and which seemingly overnight nearly doubled rates for self-harm across all demographic groups. Soon thereafter, the coding of suicidal ideation was also updated.
- David Wallace Wells, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/opinion/smartphones-social-media-mental-health-teens.html
Studies confirm that as adolescents moved their social lives online, the nature of bullying began to change. One systematic review of studies from 1998 to 2017 found a decrease in face-to-face bullying among boys but an increase among girls, especially among younger adolescent girls.[47] ... According to one major U.S. survey, these high rates of cyberbullying have persisted (though have not increased) between 2011 and 2019. Throughout the period, approximately one in 10 high school boys and one in five high school girls experienced cyberbullying each year.[49] In other words, the move online made bullying and harassment a larger part of daily life for girls.
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- Haidt, The Anxious Generation p. 170
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