Why not declining social mobility? Why not climate change anxiety? Why not late stage capitalism? Nah, it's always easy to blame Tik Tok as if the chosen release isn't indicative of something much greater going on.
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Here are 13 Other Explanations for the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis. None of Them Work. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/13-explanations-mental-health-c...
She finally gets to the deciding modern condition - the one where kids are systemically denied critical growth time (daily blocks of adult-free time & safe places to roam [safe=no threat of police or other compulsive adults]).
And even tho she has this on her list of false suppositions she admits probably isn't as false as she infers.
But she then immediately minimizes this historic erasure of development by saying it's just 'independence' kids have lost. Gaslighting done, she bizarrely accuses devices & social media of causing it, even tho it was obvious by the 1980s that options for free-roaming and adult-free time were well on the way to being eradicated.
Perhaps being so invested in pregurgitated conclusions, she's unable to notice super-obvious competing factors.
If it was just about independence, countries like Germany or France would not had the issue.
All that said, the authors who publish on that site are also very pro-unsupervised free play and think its decline has caused mental health issues of its own (see Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind).
I think human social systems have a lot of 'anti-fragile' built into them. That is any one factor, unless it is insanely serious, isn't going to cause a mass collapse of society. We adapt and smooth things over. This is something we see in ecological systems all the time. The problems start cropping up when multiple stressors are introduced to the environment. For example, I'd say the disappearance of 'third places' forces more youth to social media thereby increasing said harm of social media.
Also, social media likely needs broken into a series of different factors on what is harmful about it. You have the direct "Kids going things to kids", but neglecting what social media is doing to their parents would be missing the forest for the trees. The 24 hour news cycle tapped into the fear sells, and online has taken it to 'fear gets eyeballs'. Add in advertisers being unscrupulous, and countless bots attempting to manipulate you, it's no wonder we're not all insane.
What is social media if not an aspect of late stage capitalism? Unlike a normal customer <-> business relationship social media companies don't give the slightest shit about your well-being or satisfaction. Indeed, you're not the customer at all.
I've never been able to figure out what the problem is with climate change was so I dunno; maybe that is fair. But nothing new seems to have happened in the last decade that wasn't also happening in the 2000s.
It's likely several factors at play and at different severities in different places.
Plus microplastics likely accumulate over your lifetime - a mental health issue caused by microplastics would show up much more quickly in the elderly of middle aged than in teens.