There's a correlation with the uptick in prescriptions of psych drugs that have suicidality as a side effect. Must be examined in order to get the full picture.
How do you use the suffering to twist it around like that? If it was a sodgen, then it would always be high. Misogyny didn't uptick. It's always been there.The censorship made it worse.
Thank you for bringing together the international data. I agree that the rise in suicide among adolescent girls deserves serious attention. The evidence increasingly suggests this is not simply an American phenomenon.
Where I think we need to be careful is the step from an international trend to an international cause.
The figures demonstrate that something has changed for younger cohorts. They do not tell us what that change is.
For example, the Japanese data are particularly interesting. Female suicide rates appear to decline until around 2016 before reversing sharply. That raises questions about timing and mechanism that deserve investigation rather than assumption.
More fundamentally, I wonder whether we are asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking, "What is social media doing to children?", perhaps we should also ask, "What makes some children vulnerable to social media in the first place?"
Adolescence has always involved comparison, status, rejection, belonging and uncertainty. Social media may have industrialised those experiences, making them continuous, measurable and inescapable. But that is different from saying it created the underlying vulnerability.
If social media is primarily exploiting vulnerability rather than creating it, the implications are profound.
Removing social media may reduce one source of harm, but it does not necessarily make young people more resilient. AI will almost certainly become even better at identifying and exploiting individual vulnerabilities.
That suggests our long-term challenge is not simply to protect children from technology, but to prepare them for a world increasingly designed to manipulate attention, emotion and behaviour.
Perhaps the more important question is not, "How do we regulate social media?" but "What kind of human beings should childhood be developing?"
If we get childhood right—secure relationships, sleep, movement, autonomy, curiosity, emotional regulation and critical thinking—we may find that social media becomes less able to exploit the vulnerabilities that concern us all.
This is unfortunately not a surprise. The teenage years are especially hard for kids to navigate at the best of times, and these are NOT the best of times. Adults divided and angry, Job scarcity, High cost of rent, No hope for their own home, No hope to start a family. It is very very very sad.
The more categories, subcategories, "factors," we select out to analyze, the less likely we WON'T find an abnormality. I don't see any theories why floated. The headline could be: teen boys' suicide rates stabilizing in many places around the world -- no? Why this less newsworthy, notable?
I am not being overdramatic, nor am I discussing myself re this comment. It may well be that, in the future, mental health problems, including possibly suicide, may increase among the blind & visually impaired, given that there are & will probably continue to be tech bans for many schools & now some workplaces also. Independence is king in societies & people with disabilities crave it, owing to the desirability of doing things for themselves & the sadness & fear as a consequence of the non disabled either becoming angry or impatient at the thought of giving help or not having the time to do so. These attitudes have been a major stumbling block for the blind & for people with other disabilities. There is also the anxiety of the blind re the possible public reactions to the use of smart glasses & phone apps in public for help, using apps and/or paid or volunteer remote visual interpreting services for orientation & mobility help, for picking up guide dog poop, for finding something dropped on the floor, for reading mail, handouts, restaurant menus & so much more. Our current & future AI is opening doors for independence, including for doing things on your time & in your way, which seemed like science fiction not many years ago. If the blind feel that their needs & solutions are being discarded, some blind people may feel that the only way out of "being a burden" is not to be here.
It's also when the net started getting more constrained. Censorial. Especially for south korea.
Suicide survivor myself, I know that's what it is for me.
By the way, the kids act appears to make sure that social media companies cannot be sued for their algorithms, but meanwhile, they'll be punished. If they don't take down a post that the f t c doesn't like.
Expect to see more suicides in the future. As the FTC and project 2025 block off more lifelines and age gate the internet. This is going to have negative health impacts.
None of it makes sense.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was economic factors as well. Teen girls suicide rising up. This isn't the kind of equality I was looking forward to.
There's a correlation with the uptick in prescriptions of psych drugs that have suicidality as a side effect. Must be examined in order to get the full picture.
Do you know the stat for teen boys? I don't know but I would suspect it has also risen.
misogyny is now universal.
???
How do you use the suffering to twist it around like that? If it was a sodgen, then it would always be high. Misogyny didn't uptick. It's always been there.The censorship made it worse.
Thank you for bringing together the international data. I agree that the rise in suicide among adolescent girls deserves serious attention. The evidence increasingly suggests this is not simply an American phenomenon.
Where I think we need to be careful is the step from an international trend to an international cause.
The figures demonstrate that something has changed for younger cohorts. They do not tell us what that change is.
For example, the Japanese data are particularly interesting. Female suicide rates appear to decline until around 2016 before reversing sharply. That raises questions about timing and mechanism that deserve investigation rather than assumption.
More fundamentally, I wonder whether we are asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking, "What is social media doing to children?", perhaps we should also ask, "What makes some children vulnerable to social media in the first place?"
Adolescence has always involved comparison, status, rejection, belonging and uncertainty. Social media may have industrialised those experiences, making them continuous, measurable and inescapable. But that is different from saying it created the underlying vulnerability.
If social media is primarily exploiting vulnerability rather than creating it, the implications are profound.
Removing social media may reduce one source of harm, but it does not necessarily make young people more resilient. AI will almost certainly become even better at identifying and exploiting individual vulnerabilities.
That suggests our long-term challenge is not simply to protect children from technology, but to prepare them for a world increasingly designed to manipulate attention, emotion and behaviour.
Perhaps the more important question is not, "How do we regulate social media?" but "What kind of human beings should childhood be developing?"
If we get childhood right—secure relationships, sleep, movement, autonomy, curiosity, emotional regulation and critical thinking—we may find that social media becomes less able to exploit the vulnerabilities that concern us all.
This is unfortunately not a surprise. The teenage years are especially hard for kids to navigate at the best of times, and these are NOT the best of times. Adults divided and angry, Job scarcity, High cost of rent, No hope for their own home, No hope to start a family. It is very very very sad.
And do we continue to lie to the young, tell them it will all be okay?
The more categories, subcategories, "factors," we select out to analyze, the less likely we WON'T find an abnormality. I don't see any theories why floated. The headline could be: teen boys' suicide rates stabilizing in many places around the world -- no? Why this less newsworthy, notable?
I am not being overdramatic, nor am I discussing myself re this comment. It may well be that, in the future, mental health problems, including possibly suicide, may increase among the blind & visually impaired, given that there are & will probably continue to be tech bans for many schools & now some workplaces also. Independence is king in societies & people with disabilities crave it, owing to the desirability of doing things for themselves & the sadness & fear as a consequence of the non disabled either becoming angry or impatient at the thought of giving help or not having the time to do so. These attitudes have been a major stumbling block for the blind & for people with other disabilities. There is also the anxiety of the blind re the possible public reactions to the use of smart glasses & phone apps in public for help, using apps and/or paid or volunteer remote visual interpreting services for orientation & mobility help, for picking up guide dog poop, for finding something dropped on the floor, for reading mail, handouts, restaurant menus & so much more. Our current & future AI is opening doors for independence, including for doing things on your time & in your way, which seemed like science fiction not many years ago. If the blind feel that their needs & solutions are being discarded, some blind people may feel that the only way out of "being a burden" is not to be here.
It's also when the net started getting more constrained. Censorial. Especially for south korea.
Suicide survivor myself, I know that's what it is for me.
By the way, the kids act appears to make sure that social media companies cannot be sued for their algorithms, but meanwhile, they'll be punished. If they don't take down a post that the f t c doesn't like.
Expect to see more suicides in the future. As the FTC and project 2025 block off more lifelines and age gate the internet. This is going to have negative health impacts.
None of it makes sense.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was economic factors as well. Teen girls suicide rising up. This isn't the kind of equality I was looking forward to.