As a teacher I saw the wolves arrive in my classroom around 2011-12.
The wolves came in and stole my students' most precious asset -- their attention. The usurpers were too smart, too manipulative and brazenly uncaring. Here I was, at a teacher’s salary, pitted against youthful MENSA app developers in Silicon Valley whose pay scales and IQs exceed mine by factors of 100.
I saw the "causation" unfold right before my eyes.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't “structural discrimination, racism, sexism, sexual abuse, and economic hardship" existed for centuries?The opioid epidemic is a recent phenomenon, yes, as is social isolation (one that is CLEARLY related to social media), so it seems that Odgers is really grasping here.
I'm also fed up with the need to quantify everything, all the time, to justify taking action. Studies! Data! Research! Feh. Spend an hour with your average teenager today and you'll have all the evidence you need.
Keep up the excellent work, John. I'm grateful for you.
It is getting to the point where every time I hear someone blame “systemic racism” for something, I immediately dismiss them as brainwashed. I read White Fragility, which encourages white people to ask of themselves not if they are racist but how are they racist. It is no wonder some people see systemic racism everywhere. I completely believe that racism exists. I just don’t think you can attribute absolutely everything to it.
But how structural and systemic problems operate has changed over time. It's one thing to be poor, oppressed, and disenfranchised. Then add social isolation, vast inequality to a degree that has never existed before, rising rates of nearly every kind of illness (mood disorders, personality disorders, psychosis, dementias, autoimmune disorders, metabolic diseases, etc),, industrial toxins, agrochemicals, hormone mimics and disruptors, non-native EMFs, unnatural light, and other modern problems. That exacerbates the harmful and dysfunctional conditions to a whole new level.
I strongly support anecdotal evidence. It's similar to epidemiological studies. Such things are good for bringing up questions, focusing in on issues, exploring possibilities, and formulating hypotheses. But ultimately we need the highest quality of randomly controlled, long-term research.
As an outpatient psychiatrist, I have seen an alarming escalation in the last year of adolescents, mostly female, with multiple hospitalizations, multiple suicide attempts, multiple therapists, multiple medications, multiple somatic disorders, some declaring as being 'trans', most attending schools which are triage units for mental illness and disruptive behavior, most coming from broken families or from chaotic homes with checked out parents. It's tragic, and we in the mental health services, are not equipped as the old models and theories and tools and techniques and medications are failing our nation's youth.
Odgers website claims that her research foundation is receiving millions of dollars in grants from the Swiss based Jacobs Foundation ($11 million in 2021 alone).
the Jacobs Foundation is a full on technocratic institution focused on getting more, not less, technology into childrens hands by 2030 (they have spent over 545 million and have billions in endowments). I think this more than anything explains Odgers very thin Nature article.
Haidt and Twenges work is being attacked because they are right. every parent with their eyes open can see it. the gaslighting from the technocrats will continue tho...
check out the Jacobs Foundation website. it’s pretty interesting. in fact, almost all of the pushback against researcher like Haidt and Twenge, or journalists exposing censorship like Taibbi or Shellenberg can be traced back to a network of government funded NGOs. in many cases they hide in plain site with slick websites and sunny mission statements.
I think it is very interesting how the sausage is made in the wonderful, democratic, liberal, rules based Western countries we live in. It's funny, if a person was naive they might mistakenly believe everything is on the up and up, other than those damn Russian Propagandists, Muslim Terrorists, and Right Wing Authoritarians. And yet, if you *even scratch the surface* on pretty much anything, one finds incompetence, deceit, delusion, hubris, you name it. And yet, people worship this system....well, when they're not complaining about how terrible and broken it is that is.
Humans are funny, I hope they don't kill themselves (not *all* of themselves anyways) with all of their silly decisions and lies, what would I have to laugh at then? :)
good point. for the last 4 years the ‘sausage’ seems to always trace back to NGO’s, think tanks, non-profits or ‘academics’ who get paid to counter anyone who pushes back against the mainstream narrative of big tech, big pharma and big government. the funny part is that most of these organizations are hiding in plain site.
True, but at the same time, by the same logic, one could also argue that Haidt himself is in league with the World Economic Forum (WEF), and therefore biased in favor of the global oligarchy. It is important to judge ideas on their own merits.
Now we need a study to determine whether the relationship between the decision by "Nature" to publish a weak, hostile critique of Haidt, on the one hand, and his commitment to heterodoxy, on the other hand, is one of correlation or causation?
That would tend to be my view. I've been following Haidt for a decade or so now. He doesn't seem overly heterodox. More of a popularizer of ideas that are already out there. And there is nothing necessarily wrong with that.
As for his present argument, I don't see it as overturning mainstream thought so much speaking to what so many are already thinking. Not that this dismisses or denigrates what he says. It's more that, as well known public intellectual, he has access to the corporate platforms to be heard.
Still, if we are going for heterodox, there are for more challenging theories. Look into the effects of non-native EMFs (NNEMFs) and artificial light, such as the work of Jack Kruse, Sarah Pugh, Carrie Bennett, etc. This goes far beyond anxious children to the problem of increasing rates of disease over the past century.
There exist large online "communities" of young people (girls), specifically on Instagram, with dysphoric teens competing for who has the most acute symptoms of psychological disorders.
The "sicker" you are, the more "likes" you get. It is truly deranged.
Absolutely on target. The sheer number of videos of young women, teary eyed, wrapped in a blanket, hugging their knees recounting to the viewer their physical or mental pain that doctors can’t diagnose because well, - is mind boggling. But then the number of respondents giving likes or commenting “ You’re beautiful and strong and we’re here for you” is equally boggling. Here’s the deal though. As a near retirement first grade teacher, this behavior is also encouraged in classroom by a whole new generation of school counselors. A student is loudly proclaiming they don’t want to do addition. Instead of clearly spelling out that everyone is doing addition and it’s not “choice time” we are told to let that student know how smart and wonderful they are and how much smarter they will be when they do their work. And they can earn “choice time points” if they do the expected schoolwork. Which basically they get rewarded for being pains in the ***. The same goes for the girl crying because she and only she gets to be friends with another specific girl and all the other girls hurry to relieve her crying by insisting she’s marvelous and brave.
It seems strange for Odgers to criticize the authors' work for mistaking correlation with causation while also positing a possible cause (Great Financial Crisis) without any proof that it is truly causal rather than correlational.
She is speculating in a review article, not proposing a scientific theory that will be common knowledge eventually, not necessarily because of the science, but because of a best-seller.
Can't you just dismiss her theory by saying she has no data showing causality, just correlation? I don't understand why she thinks her own theory should be held to a lower bar.
Strange, yet perfectly normal. I'd be more surprised if there wasn't irony in the criticism, rare is the case where there isn't due to our hilariously poorly designed school curriculum.
> The lesson of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that after two false alarms we should disconnect the alarm system. In that story, the wolf does eventually come.
The lesson is we should disconnect the alarm *puller.* Because we know that the wolf eventually does come, and that if enough false alarms happen, people become desensitized and stop listening even when true alarms do happen, the only sensible thing to do is to fire The Boy and get a better watchman. Take false alarms seriously and punish those who knowingly generate them, for kicks or for political reasons.
The problem with that is Silicon Valley doesn’t believe in having “watchmen.” The industry is drunk on the new “Religion of Change.” That means any attempt to challenge the ethics of an application is immediately squelched because in the ethos of the industry, all change is good. History reveals otherwise — Thalidomide, lobotomies, eugenics, and many other supposed innovations hailed as beneficial to humanity turned out to be otherwise. Silicon Valley, given its predilection for hubris, will lead us to disaster. I’ll take “the boy” over that any day. And I say this as someone who spent 20 years in Tech on the testing side, a discipline the Tech is now abandoning.
God bless you Jonathan Haidt! Clear, concise, educated and urgent. Thanks for amplifying our scattered concerns and for cutting through the nonsensical arguments. A hero of our time.
Please note that you misquoted the Brailovskaia et al. (2022) study - the participants were assigned to reduce their social media use BY half an hour a day, rather than TO 30 minutes.
By the way, the methodology of that study is rather problematic - with a highly homogeneous sample and using self-reporting for both compliance with the protocol and results of the intervention - which undermine the validity and generalisability of the conclusions.
Perhaps not the best choice of example to prove your point.
Jonathan, I have come across a group of people online who claim the online social life is good for their kids. I of course totally disagree and think they’re setting their kids up for more isolation. These groups are from Parents of 2e kids. I speculate that it’s because kids who are intellectually gifted but social challenged find it hard to build friendships in real life (though often these kids are highly managed by adults all the time, as many have IEPs or 504s that require them to have a paraprofessional with them).
It would be interesting to research this cohort and their children. My own daughter is 6. She is profoundly gifted, but often acts like a 3 year old due to ADHD (big family history from my husbands side of 2e). But we give her more opportunities practice social skills in real life, and no screens beyond TV.
To give you an example of the parent’s (mostly the moms) thinking, they say things like it’s cruel to deny your child something they enjoy (we’re talking elementary schoolers here!), and that putting restrictions Denies the kid’s IDENTITY (yes, their identity is who they are online).
These parents are convinced their kids NEED the social media and gaming worlds because otherwise they’d be too isolated IRL.
Just wondering if you’d come across this attitude? I doubt it’s a widespread opinion but very concentrated in these types of groups.
As a former 2e kid now in my 40s, I sympathize with the view that online socializing can be more meaningful to 2e kids and for a long time I was resistant to the "alarm ringers" on this. I'm basically on board now, but I still have doubts about how age restrictions might impact 2e kids differently. Would love to see this addressed in more depth.
I think that all of the talk about correlation and causality misses a larger point which is that a very testable hypnosis has been put forward-a hypnosis that can be tested in so many ways. How often does that come along in the behavioral sciences? In that spirit, remember that Darwin's Origin of Species was largely a lot of correlational data from which he formulated a great testable idea. We have here a really testable idea, which I think is a tremendous contribution. (And I am aware J Haidt is arguing that it more than correlational data-but it is the testable idea that I really like)
'Odgers’ primary criticism is that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that “there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.” She also warns that my ringing of a false alarm “might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people,” which, she suggests, are social ills such as racism, economic hardship, and the lingering impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and its disparate impact on children in low SES families.'
Or maybe Odgers is blinded by her own urge to promote ideological "science", aka Lysenkoism. Social science has been especially plagued by the partisan infiltration of progressive/Post-modern/critical theory warriors. The best we can say about them is that they can't see beyond their doctrine. If we are less forgiving we might think their "anti-racism" promotes the structural racism narrative at every opportunity.
I think some ideological infiltration is inevitable. Noone is immune to this, not even Jonathan. Imagine if he suggested that it was capitalism that was at the root of our social ills, upstream of social media (but not as a Marxist critique, just as a scientist who notices a phenomenon and tries to test his explanation for it). Nobody can afford to do that because of their allegiance, dependence on and addiction to the global economy (socialism would have the same ills or worse)--their funding would dry up quickly.
Your speculation goes to a deeper issue. Capitalism would be something that is framing everything. And so it would underly any other hypothesis that was offered. But because the economic system is so pervasive that is all the more reason it can never be questioned on mainstream platforms, as they're almost entirely controlled by capitalists. As you point out, one doesn't need to be a Marxist to make this undeniable observation. But still it's just a possibility to consider, if it's interesting that someone like Haidt doesn't consider it.
It would be great if Haidt considered this hypothesis. It's not the only possible one to explain such things as the dissolution of villages, tribes, families, small companies (in favor of large companies) and even integrated brain modules with social media and the attention economy (we call them individual humans when they are integrated). Alternative (but not necessarily incompatible) hypotheses: modernity, humanism and its effects on religious beliefs, specialization and bureaucracy (intermediation, something even Durkheim suggested), individualist technology. I think funding sources might allow such an exploration even if most of the people involved owe their livelihoods to capitalism? Jonathan?
You seem to be taking a larger and longer perspective, as am I. But one can extend this back quite far. The enclosure movement began in the 1300s, which was the privatization of land that set the stage for capitalism. Though it didn't become a full force until the 1700s and was compete by the 1900s.
Some feudal laws and practices were still in place in the West within living memory. One can see that with how, during the Great Depression, Americans were still hunting, fishing, and gathering on open lands that were legally treated as commons. According to early law in many states, any land not fenced was considered free for anyone's use.
Or consider the experience of the socialist Joe Bageant as a child in a small rural farming town in West Virginia. The local economy was still operating under informal barter, as Westerners had been doing since the Middle Ages. Over in England, the last remnants of the Medieval Charter of the Forest, the laws applicable to the commons, weren't overturned until Thatcher's rule.
It's ironic that it took so-called conservatives to finally demolish the last traces of traditionalism; i.e., the Ancien Regime. Now after Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism has fulfilled that transition, we are now living in the wreckage. But there is no new stable social order to replace what neoliberals destroyed.
Born into that tumult, GenXers were the first to grow up in this new geopolitical order. And since then, that is what the following generations have inherited. So, this stress point, verging on a breaking point, is approaching some kind of culmination of centuries-long radical changes enacted by capitalists.
The problem is how to discuss this larger view. Most Americans are not only oblivious of other cultures and countries. Even worse still, they're ignorant of Anglo-American history, including much of the history that occurred within living memory. Understanding how we got here is not going to be part of public debate aired on corporate-owned MSM.
I will need to study your linked posts before I can give you good feedback. For now, I would say that you have already introduced one other hypothesis to explain rising suicide and depression: the Price nutrition hypothesis. It would be great to go beyond philosophy and opinions on historical events, and do some numerical hypothesis testing, the way modern sociologists like Haidt do. But even before that, we could probably eliminate some of these hypotheses qualitatively. For example, I think the Price hypothesis is not consistent with the fact that there is no correlation between diet and teenage girls' symptoms since 2012.
For clarity: what is it specifically about capitalism that you think increases suicide and depression (and among which populations)? Is it just alienation from labor? I hypothesize that this is a factor, but not the only one. There is also alienation from family, nature and community, and there is also what Schmactenberger calls "chaos", which in my understanding is due to a cost benefit effect https://iuval.substack.com/p/the-meaning-crisis-and-intermediate, applicable to biological systems, not just social ones.
It is possible that, empirically people who have satisfying jobs are less prone to suicide and depression (I bet there is data on this), but if we say that capitalism causes labor alienation, we have to show that job dissatisfaction has been decreasing per capita. This may not be easy to do: capitalism has also created new jobs that people find satisfying, and also in its later stages has eliminated some of the nastier factory/sweatshop jobs (not just exported them to third world counties). Also, doing monotone craft work is not very satisfying either in and of itself, though it may be more satisfying when coupled to an environment of a village where people are in need of one's craftwork (as opposed to selling it on a global market).
I just now finished reading your linked article. It looks interesting. Some of it I'm familiar with, such as your referencing Iain McGilchrist. But a lot of it is unfamiliar to me or even over my head. I'd have to learn more of the background ideas you're working from. And that would require reading more of your writings along with some of the source materials you're drawing upon.
That said, from what I was able to grasp, it looks potentially useful. It would help if there were more concrete examples to fill out the direct relevance. Maybe you flesh this out in other pieces you've published. Or maybe you could offer me some real world analyses of how this applies to our present predicament, specifically with Haidt's speculations and the problems he is focused on.
It might be helpful, though, to analyze another historical period. Being in the middle of capitalism and, more broadly, inside this entire system makes it hard to stand back so as to analyze it with fairness and insight. Besides, I sense that much that gets blamed on capitalism proper began much earlier. Capitalism may have sped up community breakdown, for example, but that was already happening in the late Middle Ages.
That is what partly fed into the changes involving the Black Death, Peasants revolts, Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, English Civil War, etc. The English Civil War, by the way, is sometimes considered the first modern revolution based on class consciousness and class war, though there was already a proto-class identity forming earlier in the Peasants Revolts.
There were other things involved, such as what I mentioned earlier with the enclosure movement that was precipitated by all of those above historical events. Also, there was the development of a new centralization of power, as aristocracy spent less time in their feudal villages and relocated to be near the King's court.
During this time period, there was the sudden appearance of concerns over mental health, such as melancholia. See Barbara Ehrenreich's "Dancing in the Streets." I'm not sure how any of that fits into your own framework. But to my mind, our trying to come to terms with capitalism first requires our coming to terms with what preceded it.
As a side note, you might consider some other theories about what can cause social dysfunction and anti-social behavior. Frist, there is the behavioral immune system, as related to sickness behavior, parasite-stress theory, and disgust response. And that is relevant since there was a pandemic that completely altered society following 2012 with major social disruption and stress, with repercussions that we'll be dealing with into the future.
Research shows that, in populations with high rates of pathogen exposure and/or parasite load, there is a decrease of the liberal-minded personality trait 'openness to experience' combined with an increase of socio-political conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism. Indeed, right-wing authoritarianism is spreading around the world. And it could be argued that the entire American political system, not limited to a single party, has become more reactionary in recent years.
As a second issue, consider high inequality. The US now has the highest inequality in the world at a time of the highest inequality in world history. That is no minor problem. Look at the research, as analyzed in the work of Keith Payne, Richard Wilkinson, and Kate Pickett. As inequality rises, so does multiple facets of anti-social behavior, social problems, mental illness, stress-related diseases, and fantasy-proneness (e.g., conspiracy theory).
This inequality, in relation to economic problems in general, has specifically worsened since the 2008 Great Recession. One can blame that on various factors. It can be seen as an inevitable end result of capitalism as many critics predicted this outcome. Then again, those like Walter Scheidel point to the evidence of social fracturing and destabilization every time inequality has increased in history, including before modern capitalism.
As you can see, there is no lack of hypotheses to explain what's gone so wrong. And with that in mind, I'm not sure there is anything special about the year 2012. Just because teenage girls' symptoms show up then, doesn't mean the causes originated in the same timeframe. It could've been trends that had been developing much earlier, even generations prior, before finally hitting a breaking point. We humans tend to miss larger and longer term patterns.
Well. I have no single hypothesis, much less an absolute conclusion. Everything I suggest is tentative and I hold it lightly. My writings are more like thought experiments. But I take them seriously in making the strongest case possible for a particular viewpoint. Though I might change my mind or revise an argument over time.
As such, diet and nutrition is just one issue among many, if no doubt important. But keep in mind that it's not a stable factor. The American diet has been continuously changing over the past century. Each generation has eaten more industrially hyper-processed foods than those before. And over time, there are new food additives, packaging chemicals, etc being added.
I couldn't even begin to guess all of the factors, dietary and otherwise, that have changed since 2012. We live in a society of constant, rapid change. But also many things go in cycles. If you look at long term data, you'll see that such things as the rates of suicides and homicides go up and down.
So, first we'd have to verify that the symptoms of teenage girls has never before been seen in that or any other demographic in any population around the world. Is this really something new? Moral panics about mental health, often framed in gender terms, have been popping up regularly every few generations or so. It would be important to see if there is either a trend or cycle going on.
All that said, it's not like I'm dismissing Haidt's theory. Even he admits that there have been media panics before. He mentions the similar media panic about romance novels right before the American Revolution. There were other media panics at the turn of the 20th century and in the post-WWII period.
Put that into the larger context of those like Joseph Henrich who point to the science on literacy restructuring the brain. No doubt each new media tech advancement restructures the brain and in the process seriously challenges the previous social order dependent on a different tech-mediated mentality. That is a disruptive process before society adapts to the change, normalizes it, and finds new stability.
Furthermore, the societal shifts have involved have been traditional community breakdown, hyper-individualism, secularization, mass urbanization, increased population density, increasing inequality, industrialization, industrial toxins, agrochemicals, hormone mimics and disruptors, higher levels of deuterium in food and water, non-native EMFs, ungrounding from native EMFs, artificial lighting, windows filtering natural light, less nature exposure, loss of green spaces, falling out of sync with natural cycles, etc.
I see the changes over time as being multi-factorial. About such complex socio-behavioral problems, I assume anyone proposing a single factor hypothesis is probably wrong. I never said that capitalism does anything, per se; and certainly not in isolation of all else. It's merely that alienation has correlated with capitalism, or at least a certain kind of capitalism within industrialization.
In some ways, capitalism (along with communism or any other modern economic system) is carrying over the results of much earlier changes, such as during the Axial Age. The propertied self, for example, predated capitalism proper (see the work of Brian J. McVeigh). That involves the enclosure of the self that corresponded with the enclosure of land. On and on we could go. A lot has been going on across the generations, centuries, and millennia.
Of course, one could note that Marx himself noted that a major detriment of capitalism was the dismantling of traditional communities and economic systems. It led to multiple aspects of alienation, such as workers being disconnected from the value of their own work. In feudal villages, a craftsman built something from beginning to end and then personally sold or bartered it with someone they knew, often a neighbor.
Marx wasn't only critiquing an economic system but an entire social system that had become dominant in his own lifetime. But it's not as if Marx was the only one noticing such changes and the impact they were having. That life was speeding up in causing social and psychological problems was a common complaint by the late 1800s and became moral panic at the turn of the century. What we are experiencing now is a stress point of long term trends.
Saying this is not proper academic debate etiquette, but since I'm just an anonymous commenter who fled academia many years ago: Does anyone believe that Odgers' claims are not influenced, perhaps wholly determined, by her ideology and politics?
Everyone's claims are determined to some degree by their ideology and politics, which is why we have civilized academic discourse and peer review (not only the formal one in journals, but also the process of checking each other with arguments in public debate) to correct for it. Haidt is doing a great job of rebuking the points without using ad personam argumentation.
Part of Odgers' intuition is correct: it's not just that the medium is the message, it's also due to the specific message in the medium. But she guessed the wrong harmful messages.
A clue lies in teen girls being more harmed than teen boys. Females on average have different receptors for mind viruses than males. And forums such as Tumblr have been doing gain-of-function research on mind viruses for teen girls for the past 15 years or so. That's where and when the modern idea of non-binary came from.
So I'd argue that mind viruses and their ever-evolving mutations are the true culprit, and these messages are merely fine-tuned to exploit the medium that Jonathan has identified. Yes, woke-ism and its variants are the primary attack vector, but there are others.
It's tempting to assign malicious intent to the sources of the mind viruses, and there may be some opportunity to rightly do so, but in general, viruses have no sense of morality or ill-will, their only purpose is self-propagation. Think of it like COVID and its variants. Sure, GoF and a lab leak might have jump-started it, but viruses have a mind of their own that is purely about exploiting whatever receptors they can find.
Unfortunately the incentive for social media companies is to make everything a superspreader event. The medium is virality for any message.
Jonathan's solution really does help: "social distancing" from social media.
Interesting idea with mind viruses. Maybe some day we can do an equivalent of measuring/sequencing their "DNA" (dynamic MRIs of brain activity?). I'm not an expert, so fact check me on the following. There are two known ways that "flesh" (non-mind) viruses harm us:
1. They compete with regular DNA replication and transcription so that less of our necessary endogenous DNA gets replicated (for replicating cells), and less of our necessary endogenous proteins get produced.
2. They have toxic-to-us proteins (or maybe other molecules?)
I suppose the equivalent of 1 happens with social media. It takes over other cognitive functions, like thinking about stuff in our immediate environment. Maybe also the equivalent of 2 happens, but it's not clear in that case that the message is always toxic. Or maybe it's toxic in the long run, but pleasurable in the short run (like any addiction).
What is your evidence and/or rationale for teenage girls having STRONGER "receptors" for mind viruses besides that teenage girls are getting sicker? Maybe they just have a weaker innate immune system.
What if we sequence the viral "DNA" and find that it codes for capitalism? And that social media is just the latest mutation of the virus that made it more infectious (and maybe also more toxic)?
> That's where and when the modern idea of non-binary came from.
The idea came from one specific man, who decided he was a woman for a while, eventually found that to be unsustainable in the face of reality, but didn't want to be a man, so he decided he was neither. He eventually came to himself and repudiated the entire concept of "non-binary" that he had invented to describe himself, but by then it was too late; the idea had spread. I wish I could find the article now where he describes how it all happened. It's a fascinating look into the way bad psychology, bad psychiatry, and bad legal officials give rise to insane outcomes.
As a teacher I saw the wolves arrive in my classroom around 2011-12.
The wolves came in and stole my students' most precious asset -- their attention. The usurpers were too smart, too manipulative and brazenly uncaring. Here I was, at a teacher’s salary, pitted against youthful MENSA app developers in Silicon Valley whose pay scales and IQs exceed mine by factors of 100.
I saw the "causation" unfold right before my eyes.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't “structural discrimination, racism, sexism, sexual abuse, and economic hardship" existed for centuries?The opioid epidemic is a recent phenomenon, yes, as is social isolation (one that is CLEARLY related to social media), so it seems that Odgers is really grasping here.
I'm also fed up with the need to quantify everything, all the time, to justify taking action. Studies! Data! Research! Feh. Spend an hour with your average teenager today and you'll have all the evidence you need.
Keep up the excellent work, John. I'm grateful for you.
It is getting to the point where every time I hear someone blame “systemic racism” for something, I immediately dismiss them as brainwashed. I read White Fragility, which encourages white people to ask of themselves not if they are racist but how are they racist. It is no wonder some people see systemic racism everywhere. I completely believe that racism exists. I just don’t think you can attribute absolutely everything to it.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail…
But how structural and systemic problems operate has changed over time. It's one thing to be poor, oppressed, and disenfranchised. Then add social isolation, vast inequality to a degree that has never existed before, rising rates of nearly every kind of illness (mood disorders, personality disorders, psychosis, dementias, autoimmune disorders, metabolic diseases, etc),, industrial toxins, agrochemicals, hormone mimics and disruptors, non-native EMFs, unnatural light, and other modern problems. That exacerbates the harmful and dysfunctional conditions to a whole new level.
So you propose anecdotal proof over research? Bravo! It's contrary to this article.
I strongly support anecdotal evidence. It's similar to epidemiological studies. Such things are good for bringing up questions, focusing in on issues, exploring possibilities, and formulating hypotheses. But ultimately we need the highest quality of randomly controlled, long-term research.
Your four recommendations cannot be any more logical or evolutionarily supported.
No phone, no social media, play outside with some risk.
The leap forward is by taking a slight step backward.
This is a good fight.
As an outpatient psychiatrist, I have seen an alarming escalation in the last year of adolescents, mostly female, with multiple hospitalizations, multiple suicide attempts, multiple therapists, multiple medications, multiple somatic disorders, some declaring as being 'trans', most attending schools which are triage units for mental illness and disruptive behavior, most coming from broken families or from chaotic homes with checked out parents. It's tragic, and we in the mental health services, are not equipped as the old models and theories and tools and techniques and medications are failing our nation's youth.
follow the money.
Odgers website claims that her research foundation is receiving millions of dollars in grants from the Swiss based Jacobs Foundation ($11 million in 2021 alone).
the Jacobs Foundation is a full on technocratic institution focused on getting more, not less, technology into childrens hands by 2030 (they have spent over 545 million and have billions in endowments). I think this more than anything explains Odgers very thin Nature article.
Haidt and Twenges work is being attacked because they are right. every parent with their eyes open can see it. the gaslighting from the technocrats will continue tho...
Useful insight, nice work.
check out the Jacobs Foundation website. it’s pretty interesting. in fact, almost all of the pushback against researcher like Haidt and Twenge, or journalists exposing censorship like Taibbi or Shellenberg can be traced back to a network of government funded NGOs. in many cases they hide in plain site with slick websites and sunny mission statements.
I think it is very interesting how the sausage is made in the wonderful, democratic, liberal, rules based Western countries we live in. It's funny, if a person was naive they might mistakenly believe everything is on the up and up, other than those damn Russian Propagandists, Muslim Terrorists, and Right Wing Authoritarians. And yet, if you *even scratch the surface* on pretty much anything, one finds incompetence, deceit, delusion, hubris, you name it. And yet, people worship this system....well, when they're not complaining about how terrible and broken it is that is.
Humans are funny, I hope they don't kill themselves (not *all* of themselves anyways) with all of their silly decisions and lies, what would I have to laugh at then? :)
good point. for the last 4 years the ‘sausage’ seems to always trace back to NGO’s, think tanks, non-profits or ‘academics’ who get paid to counter anyone who pushes back against the mainstream narrative of big tech, big pharma and big government. the funny part is that most of these organizations are hiding in plain site.
Thank you for this!!
this seems to be quite important for evaluating the validity of any information presented
True, but at the same time, by the same logic, one could also argue that Haidt himself is in league with the World Economic Forum (WEF), and therefore biased in favor of the global oligarchy. It is important to judge ideas on their own merits.
Haidt is in league with the WEF? how so?
Agenda contributor:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/jonathan-haidt/
so he is a member? or a guest speaker? the website doesn’t say.
Not sure
Now we need a study to determine whether the relationship between the decision by "Nature" to publish a weak, hostile critique of Haidt, on the one hand, and his commitment to heterodoxy, on the other hand, is one of correlation or causation?
Is Haidt's view really the heterodox one here--either among academics or the general population? I assumed they were the mainstream view.
That would tend to be my view. I've been following Haidt for a decade or so now. He doesn't seem overly heterodox. More of a popularizer of ideas that are already out there. And there is nothing necessarily wrong with that.
As for his present argument, I don't see it as overturning mainstream thought so much speaking to what so many are already thinking. Not that this dismisses or denigrates what he says. It's more that, as well known public intellectual, he has access to the corporate platforms to be heard.
Still, if we are going for heterodox, there are for more challenging theories. Look into the effects of non-native EMFs (NNEMFs) and artificial light, such as the work of Jack Kruse, Sarah Pugh, Carrie Bennett, etc. This goes far beyond anxious children to the problem of increasing rates of disease over the past century.
There exist large online "communities" of young people (girls), specifically on Instagram, with dysphoric teens competing for who has the most acute symptoms of psychological disorders.
The "sicker" you are, the more "likes" you get. It is truly deranged.
Absolutely on target. The sheer number of videos of young women, teary eyed, wrapped in a blanket, hugging their knees recounting to the viewer their physical or mental pain that doctors can’t diagnose because well, - is mind boggling. But then the number of respondents giving likes or commenting “ You’re beautiful and strong and we’re here for you” is equally boggling. Here’s the deal though. As a near retirement first grade teacher, this behavior is also encouraged in classroom by a whole new generation of school counselors. A student is loudly proclaiming they don’t want to do addition. Instead of clearly spelling out that everyone is doing addition and it’s not “choice time” we are told to let that student know how smart and wonderful they are and how much smarter they will be when they do their work. And they can earn “choice time points” if they do the expected schoolwork. Which basically they get rewarded for being pains in the ***. The same goes for the girl crying because she and only she gets to be friends with another specific girl and all the other girls hurry to relieve her crying by insisting she’s marvelous and brave.
That I can agree with
It seems strange for Odgers to criticize the authors' work for mistaking correlation with causation while also positing a possible cause (Great Financial Crisis) without any proof that it is truly causal rather than correlational.
She is speculating in a review article, not proposing a scientific theory that will be common knowledge eventually, not necessarily because of the science, but because of a best-seller.
This was my initial reaction, too.
Can't you just dismiss her theory by saying she has no data showing causality, just correlation? I don't understand why she thinks her own theory should be held to a lower bar.
Strange, yet perfectly normal. I'd be more surprised if there wasn't irony in the criticism, rare is the case where there isn't due to our hilariously poorly designed school curriculum.
> The lesson of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that after two false alarms we should disconnect the alarm system. In that story, the wolf does eventually come.
The lesson is we should disconnect the alarm *puller.* Because we know that the wolf eventually does come, and that if enough false alarms happen, people become desensitized and stop listening even when true alarms do happen, the only sensible thing to do is to fire The Boy and get a better watchman. Take false alarms seriously and punish those who knowingly generate them, for kicks or for political reasons.
The problem with that is Silicon Valley doesn’t believe in having “watchmen.” The industry is drunk on the new “Religion of Change.” That means any attempt to challenge the ethics of an application is immediately squelched because in the ethos of the industry, all change is good. History reveals otherwise — Thalidomide, lobotomies, eugenics, and many other supposed innovations hailed as beneficial to humanity turned out to be otherwise. Silicon Valley, given its predilection for hubris, will lead us to disaster. I’ll take “the boy” over that any day. And I say this as someone who spent 20 years in Tech on the testing side, a discipline the Tech is now abandoning.
BINGO
God bless you Jonathan Haidt! Clear, concise, educated and urgent. Thanks for amplifying our scattered concerns and for cutting through the nonsensical arguments. A hero of our time.
Please note that you misquoted the Brailovskaia et al. (2022) study - the participants were assigned to reduce their social media use BY half an hour a day, rather than TO 30 minutes.
By the way, the methodology of that study is rather problematic - with a highly homogeneous sample and using self-reporting for both compliance with the protocol and results of the intervention - which undermine the validity and generalisability of the conclusions.
Perhaps not the best choice of example to prove your point.
Thank you for pointing out this error.
Jonathan, I have come across a group of people online who claim the online social life is good for their kids. I of course totally disagree and think they’re setting their kids up for more isolation. These groups are from Parents of 2e kids. I speculate that it’s because kids who are intellectually gifted but social challenged find it hard to build friendships in real life (though often these kids are highly managed by adults all the time, as many have IEPs or 504s that require them to have a paraprofessional with them).
It would be interesting to research this cohort and their children. My own daughter is 6. She is profoundly gifted, but often acts like a 3 year old due to ADHD (big family history from my husbands side of 2e). But we give her more opportunities practice social skills in real life, and no screens beyond TV.
To give you an example of the parent’s (mostly the moms) thinking, they say things like it’s cruel to deny your child something they enjoy (we’re talking elementary schoolers here!), and that putting restrictions Denies the kid’s IDENTITY (yes, their identity is who they are online).
These parents are convinced their kids NEED the social media and gaming worlds because otherwise they’d be too isolated IRL.
Just wondering if you’d come across this attitude? I doubt it’s a widespread opinion but very concentrated in these types of groups.
Thanks for bringing this up. I've come across this view also, most recently on a the Atlantic's podcast: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/03/smartphone-anxious-generation-mental-health/677817/
As a former 2e kid now in my 40s, I sympathize with the view that online socializing can be more meaningful to 2e kids and for a long time I was resistant to the "alarm ringers" on this. I'm basically on board now, but I still have doubts about how age restrictions might impact 2e kids differently. Would love to see this addressed in more depth.
I think that all of the talk about correlation and causality misses a larger point which is that a very testable hypnosis has been put forward-a hypnosis that can be tested in so many ways. How often does that come along in the behavioral sciences? In that spirit, remember that Darwin's Origin of Species was largely a lot of correlational data from which he formulated a great testable idea. We have here a really testable idea, which I think is a tremendous contribution. (And I am aware J Haidt is arguing that it more than correlational data-but it is the testable idea that I really like)
'Odgers’ primary criticism is that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that “there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.” She also warns that my ringing of a false alarm “might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people,” which, she suggests, are social ills such as racism, economic hardship, and the lingering impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and its disparate impact on children in low SES families.'
Or maybe Odgers is blinded by her own urge to promote ideological "science", aka Lysenkoism. Social science has been especially plagued by the partisan infiltration of progressive/Post-modern/critical theory warriors. The best we can say about them is that they can't see beyond their doctrine. If we are less forgiving we might think their "anti-racism" promotes the structural racism narrative at every opportunity.
I think some ideological infiltration is inevitable. Noone is immune to this, not even Jonathan. Imagine if he suggested that it was capitalism that was at the root of our social ills, upstream of social media (but not as a Marxist critique, just as a scientist who notices a phenomenon and tries to test his explanation for it). Nobody can afford to do that because of their allegiance, dependence on and addiction to the global economy (socialism would have the same ills or worse)--their funding would dry up quickly.
Your speculation goes to a deeper issue. Capitalism would be something that is framing everything. And so it would underly any other hypothesis that was offered. But because the economic system is so pervasive that is all the more reason it can never be questioned on mainstream platforms, as they're almost entirely controlled by capitalists. As you point out, one doesn't need to be a Marxist to make this undeniable observation. But still it's just a possibility to consider, if it's interesting that someone like Haidt doesn't consider it.
It would be great if Haidt considered this hypothesis. It's not the only possible one to explain such things as the dissolution of villages, tribes, families, small companies (in favor of large companies) and even integrated brain modules with social media and the attention economy (we call them individual humans when they are integrated). Alternative (but not necessarily incompatible) hypotheses: modernity, humanism and its effects on religious beliefs, specialization and bureaucracy (intermediation, something even Durkheim suggested), individualist technology. I think funding sources might allow such an exploration even if most of the people involved owe their livelihoods to capitalism? Jonathan?
You seem to be taking a larger and longer perspective, as am I. But one can extend this back quite far. The enclosure movement began in the 1300s, which was the privatization of land that set the stage for capitalism. Though it didn't become a full force until the 1700s and was compete by the 1900s.
Some feudal laws and practices were still in place in the West within living memory. One can see that with how, during the Great Depression, Americans were still hunting, fishing, and gathering on open lands that were legally treated as commons. According to early law in many states, any land not fenced was considered free for anyone's use.
Or consider the experience of the socialist Joe Bageant as a child in a small rural farming town in West Virginia. The local economy was still operating under informal barter, as Westerners had been doing since the Middle Ages. Over in England, the last remnants of the Medieval Charter of the Forest, the laws applicable to the commons, weren't overturned until Thatcher's rule.
It's ironic that it took so-called conservatives to finally demolish the last traces of traditionalism; i.e., the Ancien Regime. Now after Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism has fulfilled that transition, we are now living in the wreckage. But there is no new stable social order to replace what neoliberals destroyed.
Born into that tumult, GenXers were the first to grow up in this new geopolitical order. And since then, that is what the following generations have inherited. So, this stress point, verging on a breaking point, is approaching some kind of culmination of centuries-long radical changes enacted by capitalists.
The problem is how to discuss this larger view. Most Americans are not only oblivious of other cultures and countries. Even worse still, they're ignorant of Anglo-American history, including much of the history that occurred within living memory. Understanding how we got here is not going to be part of public debate aired on corporate-owned MSM.
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2021/04/11/enclosure-of-the-mind/
I will need to study your linked posts before I can give you good feedback. For now, I would say that you have already introduced one other hypothesis to explain rising suicide and depression: the Price nutrition hypothesis. It would be great to go beyond philosophy and opinions on historical events, and do some numerical hypothesis testing, the way modern sociologists like Haidt do. But even before that, we could probably eliminate some of these hypotheses qualitatively. For example, I think the Price hypothesis is not consistent with the fact that there is no correlation between diet and teenage girls' symptoms since 2012.
For clarity: what is it specifically about capitalism that you think increases suicide and depression (and among which populations)? Is it just alienation from labor? I hypothesize that this is a factor, but not the only one. There is also alienation from family, nature and community, and there is also what Schmactenberger calls "chaos", which in my understanding is due to a cost benefit effect https://iuval.substack.com/p/the-meaning-crisis-and-intermediate, applicable to biological systems, not just social ones.
It is possible that, empirically people who have satisfying jobs are less prone to suicide and depression (I bet there is data on this), but if we say that capitalism causes labor alienation, we have to show that job dissatisfaction has been decreasing per capita. This may not be easy to do: capitalism has also created new jobs that people find satisfying, and also in its later stages has eliminated some of the nastier factory/sweatshop jobs (not just exported them to third world counties). Also, doing monotone craft work is not very satisfying either in and of itself, though it may be more satisfying when coupled to an environment of a village where people are in need of one's craftwork (as opposed to selling it on a global market).
I just now finished reading your linked article. It looks interesting. Some of it I'm familiar with, such as your referencing Iain McGilchrist. But a lot of it is unfamiliar to me or even over my head. I'd have to learn more of the background ideas you're working from. And that would require reading more of your writings along with some of the source materials you're drawing upon.
That said, from what I was able to grasp, it looks potentially useful. It would help if there were more concrete examples to fill out the direct relevance. Maybe you flesh this out in other pieces you've published. Or maybe you could offer me some real world analyses of how this applies to our present predicament, specifically with Haidt's speculations and the problems he is focused on.
It might be helpful, though, to analyze another historical period. Being in the middle of capitalism and, more broadly, inside this entire system makes it hard to stand back so as to analyze it with fairness and insight. Besides, I sense that much that gets blamed on capitalism proper began much earlier. Capitalism may have sped up community breakdown, for example, but that was already happening in the late Middle Ages.
That is what partly fed into the changes involving the Black Death, Peasants revolts, Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, English Civil War, etc. The English Civil War, by the way, is sometimes considered the first modern revolution based on class consciousness and class war, though there was already a proto-class identity forming earlier in the Peasants Revolts.
There were other things involved, such as what I mentioned earlier with the enclosure movement that was precipitated by all of those above historical events. Also, there was the development of a new centralization of power, as aristocracy spent less time in their feudal villages and relocated to be near the King's court.
During this time period, there was the sudden appearance of concerns over mental health, such as melancholia. See Barbara Ehrenreich's "Dancing in the Streets." I'm not sure how any of that fits into your own framework. But to my mind, our trying to come to terms with capitalism first requires our coming to terms with what preceded it.
As a side note, you might consider some other theories about what can cause social dysfunction and anti-social behavior. Frist, there is the behavioral immune system, as related to sickness behavior, parasite-stress theory, and disgust response. And that is relevant since there was a pandemic that completely altered society following 2012 with major social disruption and stress, with repercussions that we'll be dealing with into the future.
Research shows that, in populations with high rates of pathogen exposure and/or parasite load, there is a decrease of the liberal-minded personality trait 'openness to experience' combined with an increase of socio-political conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism. Indeed, right-wing authoritarianism is spreading around the world. And it could be argued that the entire American political system, not limited to a single party, has become more reactionary in recent years.
As a second issue, consider high inequality. The US now has the highest inequality in the world at a time of the highest inequality in world history. That is no minor problem. Look at the research, as analyzed in the work of Keith Payne, Richard Wilkinson, and Kate Pickett. As inequality rises, so does multiple facets of anti-social behavior, social problems, mental illness, stress-related diseases, and fantasy-proneness (e.g., conspiracy theory).
This inequality, in relation to economic problems in general, has specifically worsened since the 2008 Great Recession. One can blame that on various factors. It can be seen as an inevitable end result of capitalism as many critics predicted this outcome. Then again, those like Walter Scheidel point to the evidence of social fracturing and destabilization every time inequality has increased in history, including before modern capitalism.
As you can see, there is no lack of hypotheses to explain what's gone so wrong. And with that in mind, I'm not sure there is anything special about the year 2012. Just because teenage girls' symptoms show up then, doesn't mean the causes originated in the same timeframe. It could've been trends that had been developing much earlier, even generations prior, before finally hitting a breaking point. We humans tend to miss larger and longer term patterns.
Well. I have no single hypothesis, much less an absolute conclusion. Everything I suggest is tentative and I hold it lightly. My writings are more like thought experiments. But I take them seriously in making the strongest case possible for a particular viewpoint. Though I might change my mind or revise an argument over time.
As such, diet and nutrition is just one issue among many, if no doubt important. But keep in mind that it's not a stable factor. The American diet has been continuously changing over the past century. Each generation has eaten more industrially hyper-processed foods than those before. And over time, there are new food additives, packaging chemicals, etc being added.
I couldn't even begin to guess all of the factors, dietary and otherwise, that have changed since 2012. We live in a society of constant, rapid change. But also many things go in cycles. If you look at long term data, you'll see that such things as the rates of suicides and homicides go up and down.
So, first we'd have to verify that the symptoms of teenage girls has never before been seen in that or any other demographic in any population around the world. Is this really something new? Moral panics about mental health, often framed in gender terms, have been popping up regularly every few generations or so. It would be important to see if there is either a trend or cycle going on.
All that said, it's not like I'm dismissing Haidt's theory. Even he admits that there have been media panics before. He mentions the similar media panic about romance novels right before the American Revolution. There were other media panics at the turn of the 20th century and in the post-WWII period.
Put that into the larger context of those like Joseph Henrich who point to the science on literacy restructuring the brain. No doubt each new media tech advancement restructures the brain and in the process seriously challenges the previous social order dependent on a different tech-mediated mentality. That is a disruptive process before society adapts to the change, normalizes it, and finds new stability.
Furthermore, the societal shifts have involved have been traditional community breakdown, hyper-individualism, secularization, mass urbanization, increased population density, increasing inequality, industrialization, industrial toxins, agrochemicals, hormone mimics and disruptors, higher levels of deuterium in food and water, non-native EMFs, ungrounding from native EMFs, artificial lighting, windows filtering natural light, less nature exposure, loss of green spaces, falling out of sync with natural cycles, etc.
I see the changes over time as being multi-factorial. About such complex socio-behavioral problems, I assume anyone proposing a single factor hypothesis is probably wrong. I never said that capitalism does anything, per se; and certainly not in isolation of all else. It's merely that alienation has correlated with capitalism, or at least a certain kind of capitalism within industrialization.
In some ways, capitalism (along with communism or any other modern economic system) is carrying over the results of much earlier changes, such as during the Axial Age. The propertied self, for example, predated capitalism proper (see the work of Brian J. McVeigh). That involves the enclosure of the self that corresponded with the enclosure of land. On and on we could go. A lot has been going on across the generations, centuries, and millennia.
Of course, one could note that Marx himself noted that a major detriment of capitalism was the dismantling of traditional communities and economic systems. It led to multiple aspects of alienation, such as workers being disconnected from the value of their own work. In feudal villages, a craftsman built something from beginning to end and then personally sold or bartered it with someone they knew, often a neighbor.
Marx wasn't only critiquing an economic system but an entire social system that had become dominant in his own lifetime. But it's not as if Marx was the only one noticing such changes and the impact they were having. That life was speeding up in causing social and psychological problems was a common complaint by the late 1800s and became moral panic at the turn of the century. What we are experiencing now is a stress point of long term trends.
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/the-crisis-of-identity/
You might be interested in looking at some responses to Haidt's take on this issue:
https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-25-is-it-the-phones
https://reason.com/2024/03/26/blaming-tech-for-teen-troubles/
Saying this is not proper academic debate etiquette, but since I'm just an anonymous commenter who fled academia many years ago: Does anyone believe that Odgers' claims are not influenced, perhaps wholly determined, by her ideology and politics?
Everyone's claims are determined to some degree by their ideology and politics, which is why we have civilized academic discourse and peer review (not only the formal one in journals, but also the process of checking each other with arguments in public debate) to correct for it. Haidt is doing a great job of rebuking the points without using ad personam argumentation.
Part of Odgers' intuition is correct: it's not just that the medium is the message, it's also due to the specific message in the medium. But she guessed the wrong harmful messages.
A clue lies in teen girls being more harmed than teen boys. Females on average have different receptors for mind viruses than males. And forums such as Tumblr have been doing gain-of-function research on mind viruses for teen girls for the past 15 years or so. That's where and when the modern idea of non-binary came from.
So I'd argue that mind viruses and their ever-evolving mutations are the true culprit, and these messages are merely fine-tuned to exploit the medium that Jonathan has identified. Yes, woke-ism and its variants are the primary attack vector, but there are others.
It's tempting to assign malicious intent to the sources of the mind viruses, and there may be some opportunity to rightly do so, but in general, viruses have no sense of morality or ill-will, their only purpose is self-propagation. Think of it like COVID and its variants. Sure, GoF and a lab leak might have jump-started it, but viruses have a mind of their own that is purely about exploiting whatever receptors they can find.
Unfortunately the incentive for social media companies is to make everything a superspreader event. The medium is virality for any message.
Jonathan's solution really does help: "social distancing" from social media.
How about we declare a state of emergency and "quarantine" social media for all ages, for "just two weeks" then? I am only half-joking about that.
Interesting idea with mind viruses. Maybe some day we can do an equivalent of measuring/sequencing their "DNA" (dynamic MRIs of brain activity?). I'm not an expert, so fact check me on the following. There are two known ways that "flesh" (non-mind) viruses harm us:
1. They compete with regular DNA replication and transcription so that less of our necessary endogenous DNA gets replicated (for replicating cells), and less of our necessary endogenous proteins get produced.
2. They have toxic-to-us proteins (or maybe other molecules?)
I suppose the equivalent of 1 happens with social media. It takes over other cognitive functions, like thinking about stuff in our immediate environment. Maybe also the equivalent of 2 happens, but it's not clear in that case that the message is always toxic. Or maybe it's toxic in the long run, but pleasurable in the short run (like any addiction).
What is your evidence and/or rationale for teenage girls having STRONGER "receptors" for mind viruses besides that teenage girls are getting sicker? Maybe they just have a weaker innate immune system.
What if we sequence the viral "DNA" and find that it codes for capitalism? And that social media is just the latest mutation of the virus that made it more infectious (and maybe also more toxic)?
> That's where and when the modern idea of non-binary came from.
The idea came from one specific man, who decided he was a woman for a while, eventually found that to be unsustainable in the face of reality, but didn't want to be a man, so he decided he was neither. He eventually came to himself and repudiated the entire concept of "non-binary" that he had invented to describe himself, but by then it was too late; the idea had spread. I wish I could find the article now where he describes how it all happened. It's a fascinating look into the way bad psychology, bad psychiatry, and bad legal officials give rise to insane outcomes.