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Child Psychotherapist: Easy and Constant Access To the Internet Is Harming Kids
First time accepted submitter sharkbiter sends note that one of the UK's foremost psychotherapists has concerns that smartphones may be harmful to the mental health of children. "Julie Lynn Evans has been a child psychotherapist for 25 years, working in hospitals, schools and with families, and she says she has never been so busy. 'In the 1990s, I would have had one or two attempted suicides a year – mainly teenaged girls taking overdoses, the things that don't get reported. Now, I could have as many as four a month.'.... Issues such as cyber-bullying are, of course, nothing new, and schools now all strive to develop robust policies to tackle them, but Lynn Evans’ target is both more precise and more general. She is pointing a finger of accusation at the smartphones - “pocket rockets” as she calls them – which are now routinely in the hands of over 80 per cent of secondary school age children. Their arrival has been, she notes, a key change since 2010. 'It’s a simplistic view, but I think it is the ubiquity of broadband and smartphones that has changed the pace and the power and the drama of mental illness in young people.'”
She seems to blame a lot of external factors for the unruliness of today's youth. I wonder if it could really be that these kids are watching their parents' generation continue apathetically watching as the world goes down the shitter, Nah, couldn't possibly. They're the ones paying her top dollar to psychoanalyze their kids, after all.
In the 1990s, I would have had one or two attempted suicides a year â" mainly teenaged girls taking overdoses, the things that don't get reported. Now, I could have as many as four a month.
Perhaps pver the last 25 years she become good at her job, and gets more referals because of that, or maybe there is some other explanation as to why she as an individual has seen more attempted suicides.
I think i know why she isnt a computer programmer
well, perhaps due to the constant internet people are more aware - and as a result of that she is getting more BUSINESS which she equates to more suicide attempts and just randomly chooses smartphones as the "thing" that causes them.
because you know why? it makes for damn easy counseling for her. just tell the parents to ban the smartphone and boom problem solved.
you know, doing like that you were thought of as a FRIGGIN NERD AND GEEK just 15 years ago if you spent as much time as you could "online" or using a computer to read what's happening in the world, but now that everyone is reading news, reading in general, watching community created content(!), having pen pals all around the world etc all day long people are now finding that as a problem, for some frigging reason.
and yeah smartphones are THE great equalizer of the 21st century. 80 bucks + 10 bucks a month (or none, whilst hanging around where there is free wifi) gets you a personal computer, library and media consumption device.
and no, having a media consumption device where you can look up why your crops are dying is not detrimental, having a device that teaches you to read. mind you it's not 1st world equalizer so much as people are quite equal with access to such things already but in the 3rd world it does a lot. perhaps even in the long term teaching them that ghosts are bullshit and you can't buy magic from the local village medicine doctor/monk/whatever-scam-artist etc...
really, what bothers me about the recent anti-smartphone nerd group is that 2003 it was super cool to be on the first waves of smartphone, always potentially connected crowd and the use cases were phenomenal and now that we have it the dolts are finding it abnormal? it's different, that's for sure but different than before can be an improvement in the grand scale of things - unless you're a dinosaur who's getting fucked up by the new order(or an elitist who doesn't find such stuff cool after it's widely accessible).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
When my kid reaches secondary school (aka High School), she will no longer be a "child", she will be a young adult. The idea that a 15+ year old can not be trusted with a smartphone, when they drinking, having sex, and in all likelihood doing drugs from time to time, is ridiculous.
People need to stop coddling their kids so much. Maybe that is the indirect cause of some of these issues, kids now unable to deal with the realities of the world as they get older because their helicopter parents never exposed them to it.
I'm glad I taught my daughter to be careful/paranoid. I'm also glad she listened.
What we're observing here and in many other different places is the classic problem of technological advancement: Powerful tools in untrained/unexperienced hands. Each of us here has seen the internet/web grow and trivial-to-stupid data-collection services come over us like the plaque. We have a natural negative reaction to post non-anonymous content online or giving some corporation or the public all our data just because they offer a flaky lock-in version of IRC or microblogging. For most users however, that is a very normal thing to do. I cringe each time I see others exposing themselves to abuse and fraud by posting everything under their real name and data. They are one identity theft or one online stalker away from having their entire life turned into living hell.
I set up my daughters Ubuntu Netbook with two mailaccounts, one fake on with a pseudonym and one with her name. I told her to specifically use the latter only for official real-world stuff - sending in homework, applying for some course, etc. and the other for everthing else.
When she went off for a student exchange in Malaysia, she set up a another seperate pseudonymed online Facebook account for the occasion, to be able to cut it lose should things get out of hand. That's daddys smart girl.
Fake/pseudonymed accounts and a general base paranoia about all things online is a must these days if you don't want to be over-exposed to crap from immature teenagers.
I'm glad my daughter caught the drift and didn't wave off her daddys advice on this matter.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm a millennial right on the divide with Gen X (~31 years old). My part of the generation was in middle school when the Internet started to become mainstream in the mid 90s. It was also around that time schools were permitted to adopt that adorable doctrine known as zero tolerance wherein they non-judgementally declared all parties equally guilty in utter defiance of state, constitutional and common law. Many of the pathologies that are just bewildering to many "experts" today were eminently foreseeable. Most of my own peers at the time, at the tender ages of 11-13, understood that the administration was setting things up for bullies to get worse and victims to get very nasty in retaliation.
Most of these problems from sexting to bullying happen today because there are few consequences for the people who violate social norms. Bullies don't get the shit kicked out of them by their victims for fear that the victim will be arrested and prosecuted for "victimizing their victimizer." Teens who sext don't get their social lives routinely ruined by their parents. Shit. If someone had tried sexting while I was in high school, their parents would have thrown their computer/camera/webcam in the garbage and grounded them until they turned 18. Today? Most parents couldn't even fathom doing that and if one did, they'd probably be called an abusive parent even though their child technically committed a serious felony.
As Socrates once said around 500 bc : "Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers."
I'm not sure why it seems psychologists are prone to this, or if it's just the nature of media and headline-grabbing pop-psychology, but I see these sorts of statements pretty often from this sector.
It's so very very hard to figure out what is making a person do what they're doing. We have problems figuring it out with rats in labs, and the best we have there is usually speculation and strong correlation. Humans are a whole other degree of complexity. Of course, with the rats, people are trying to do actual science: coming up with experimentally verifiable hypotheses, providing proper control and test groups, eliminating variables, and performing proper scientific testing. It's very hard to do well, and you rarely get more than confirmation of a component of a behavior.
Yet you see psychologists with years in their field making professional statements on to the nature of culture and individuals with absolutely no rigorous scientific study, with only their personally experienced anecdotal data and an obviously heavily biased opinion to support them.
There are a lot of things that have changed in the last 10, 20, 30 ... etc years when it comes the environment, manner, and culture in which children are raised. The internet and smart phones are just one part. Western nations have steadily been nurturing a culture of entitlement while removing sources of apparent confrontation and competition, which together may result in children who lack the ability to cope with difficult situations. Maybe the fact that it's now considered child abuse to spank (beat) your child? Perhaps the increased likelihood for parents to seek psychological help for their children along with a chemical fix? How about the longer and longer workday, or the increase in divorce rates? All the news about the low salaries and lack of jobs coupled with the price of education and the blame and mistrust of government and businesses, broadcast back at us 24/7 on every media available might affect one's behavior.
If we're going to claim it's cell phones, there's an awful lot of work that needs to be done to eliminate every other possibility - or at least the reasonable ones - first, and that's just not being done.
Perhaps it's unfair to label all of them, but this is one reason why people don't consider psychologists "real doctors". You see them make asinine statements like this.
In short, she is full of shit.
Maybe her perception is subjective. But I'd imagine her to be in a position where she can corelate these cause and effects more easily as you are.
Consider that, even if her clients find her via word of mouth and hence her specialism might skew towards this one demography causing an influx, noone would make such a claim without seeing probable cause.
I imagine many of her patients will mention a lot of the social interaction on "the internet" and "mobile". Which generates the belief this is a large factor and the way her patients relate to it or shift blame.
In the past you'd have the same problems (bullying, self-image issues, displacement, projected expectations, ...) the "always on world" with "instant gratification" with constant new hypes to "belong to or not". The intensity has become higher, the barriere has lowered. So I also think children should not be exposed without supervision and also think it's not a good thing to bring up children with a sense of instant gratification at the press of a button of a flick at a screen. While the "real world" becomes replaced for flickering pixels. And identity sticks only for a single selfie and measured by the amassed likes or views.. Which often borders self-prostitution. In a way which hasn't been possible before other as being manipulated or naïvely seduced into mainstream exploitation. Where there were supervising committées guarding the "boundary of decency or exploitation". Or there were at least people stepping up for others (which - in our immer more individualized society and "personal reinterpretations", people dare not to do out of fear being out of tune or out of sync with the value-systems of others).
So, "full of shit" ? Think not.
Maybe misguided causality ? Perhaps.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
My dad was reluctant to buy my brother and I a computer when we were kids in the mid 80s. "What do we need a computer for? What do we compute? And if you want to play with one, isn't there one in the school library?" But we whined and whined and begged and he gave in.
Big mistake. We spent all our time on that thing, taking it apart, putting it back together, programming it, instead of doing good, wholesome American activities like sportsball and racism. Now we're both screwed-up adults with engineering and computer science degrees, stuck in the dead-end tech industry.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.