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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.'”
has some very insightful things to say about children and social media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq8ULEfvF78
He has also written a very good book about child raising in general. I had good parents, but even so, I wish they'd had that book, or at least the insights in it, when I grew up.
is a concise summary of SJW-ism.
Not SJW-ism at all. Somebody is finally saying what many of us already knew.
I go to the mall and and every kid I see is staring at their phone, not looking at anyone around them, not even their friends who walking next to them. I go a restaurant and there are parents with children. And the kids stare at their phone the entire time, never looking at or talking to anyone around them.
It seems very abnormal and unhealthy.
In New Zealand, we haven't seen any change in the data for the last 20 years.
In the States the rate has gone down
In the UK , it has gone down.
In Wales it has gone down.
In Scotland it has gone down.
In North Ireland it has gone up.
TLDR: This person is full of shit.
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.
Except that the rate of youth suicides haven't gone up. She is pointing at net / phones as a cause for an effect that isn't there.
In short, she is full of shit.
There is a reported increase in 'mental illness'
There is a massive decrease in street violence.
There is an overwhelming rise in the availability of EVERYTHING on the internet.
Go figure.
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
When people migrate from a small village to the city, they can't go on treating strangers with contempt and fear, instead, they have to learn to live being surrounded by thousands of strangers everyday. There is some suggestion that it's the move to cities which has something to do with the civilising process (ie. a reduction in common violence), although it also has its own kinds of stresses.
Likewise, the internet allows people to interact across cities and nations and with thousands of people and frequently, and so it may be that it is a new challenge to our social behaviour. It isn't that cell phones are the problem, it may just be that the new complexity of a wider-connected environment means people have to learn new ways of dealing with it, mainly because everyone is going to be a victim to it, so everyone will need to start extending their empathy much further, not just to their village neighbour, not just the the stranger on the city bus next to you, but to "abstract" "avatars", human beings, out there. And also learn new skills for coping.
1) These violent movies are harming children...
2) These violent video games are harming children...
3) These violent websites are harming children..
4) These Social networks are harming children...
5) These Smartphones are harming children...
Do they have any evidence to back this up which doesn't draw conclusions without a control and without drawing conclusions they pluck from the air???
There's no reason for most children to have pocket Internet connected computers.
Heck, we have our family computer in the living room. So a pocket Internet connected computer would kind of defeat the point ...
Like the automobile and the television and the cities and money, "the Internet" (whatever that may be) is totally disruptive to life and health. Easy and constant access to the Internet obviously is harming kids in some respects. It's also harming everyone else. It's just that early-life exposure is much more pervasive since you don't remember alternatives.
Most religions and ideologies are similarly absolute in their impact. Most have up- and downsides, and while getting away from the influence of everything is a lofty goal, in reality it is quite saner to focus on increasing the upsides and attenuating the downsides. Which is a recurring task of modern life in many respects.
One can make life easier by strategically locking out some alternatives and no longer waste a thought over them. Some Amish communities do that in a manner that seems comparably nice. Most people simplifying their life make it a habit of also messing with the life of others, and that soon becomes a nuisance.
Hello, Ms Evans.
I cannot find a reliable recent source on this. However, older data suggests that the suicide rates for older people has been going down, but there is an uptick in rates for younger people. For instance, see Suicide rates by age from American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (based on CDC figures)
'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.'
It's not exactly thorough from a statistical point of view to jump to her conclusion. There could be all kinds of reasons, for her localised increase in cases, even if the change is national.
I could easily pull a counter argument from thin air if no one is going to bother doing studies... for instance phones and increased internet access could be making children more likely to reach out for help when they would not have before.
It's a UK article and the author seems to have found a source:
"Official figures confirm the picture she paints, with emergency admissions to child psychiatric wards doubling in four years, and those young adults hospitalised for self-harm up by 70 per cent in a decade."
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.
It seems very abnormal and unhealthy.
So is eating grains in large amounts, just ask your dentist. Damned Neolithic Revolution.
I wonder how the society of distant future will look like. If I were to extrapolate from your experiences, being a schizoid, I may find myself increasingly more accepted.
Ezekiel 23:20
And it’s not, she notes, simply a question of her reputation as both a practitioner and a writer drawing so many people to the door of her cosy consulting rooms in west London where we meet. “If I try to refer people on, everyone else is choc-a-bloc too. We are all saying the same thing. There has been an explosion in numbers in mental health problems amongst youngsters.”
Try reading. It's fairly painless and might make you look less like an arrogant computer programmer...
Old person blames imaginary worsening on things she didn't grow up with, claims anecdotal experience as evidence. I hope I don't become an idiot when I get older.
For some reason there isn't a single thing that isn't assumed to be bad for kids.
However there are plenty of changes I would roll back...
like when I was a kid, I was "free range," I decided how to spend my time, all of the time and I came and went as I pleased - that's almost considered a crime now.
I deliberately refused to join any extra classes or such organized things, which meant that I could play.
I keep seeing people say things like this, yet when I look around (even working at a school), I rarely actually see what you are describing. I wonder is it region, demographic, or selective vision?
Since over evolutionary periods we didn't have buildings or privacy, and since we evolved from apes, NOT SEEING that is what is new, different and probably harmful.
The problem with 'equalizers' is they become a vector for both the good and the bad. The point the OP seems to be trying to make is that they are not only speeding up access to information and good things like that, but they are also focusing and concentrating the type of stress and bullying that happens among school aged children.
One thing we tend to forget as 'geeks' is that new technologies have to be examined across the ENTIRE population, not just 'people like us'. Like it or not, there are potential problems that can not simply be written off by accusing anyone who brings them up as a 'dinosaur'. Technological shifts have consequences, and sticking your head in the sand never helps, it just makes you look blind and weakens your argument.
"“When they are 15, you don’t, for example, let them go to pub..."
She's saying that our kids are killing themselves because they aren't drinking enough ... and they're depressed because they know what wanking looks like. You know, I think any kid with a mirror already knows that.
Relax, it isn't a real science.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
There will be articles saying that our kids are sick because they don't troll enough on the internet, see enough porn or play enough video games.
When I was a kid, I had no say as to what I wanted. Sit still an be silent. Nobody cared what I wanted.
No I would not even get something to paint with. And yes, those were real restaurants, not visits to the local burger joint.
When I look back, I am a better person thanks to that. My parents are my friends now, but not when I was a kid. They were my parents.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You've got a point (I agree) about the monotheistic religions: they are inherently divisive.
Of course, before that, people divided according to blood ties, clans, tribes, etc., so monotheism was in a way an improvement... 2500 years ago, if resources were scarce and tribes were fighting. (If you're on Pandora and the next tribe is a whole forest away, with plenty of luscious food available for all, fine, stay in tribes).
But today we need so much more than, my group is going to Heaven and yours is inferior and going to Hell.
You can keep the afterlife, you can keep notions of eternal consciousness transcending material existence, you can keep the notion of higher wisdom, you can keep flying saucers and ghosts and all that, you can keep reincarnation, you just need to admit all humans equally to your club. Whether in this life or the next, you'd want ALL humans to be treated fairly and equally, and none of this, "we are the chosen ones, y'all are heathens, kaffirs, fallen", whatever.
Maybe you're a sentience which exists forever, OK, so what, you are here now, be nice to people equally.
but the stresses were always there and the statistics about actual events don't show them to be causing more suicides to happen. cyberbullying is bad yeah, but not as bad as getting hit with a baseball bat. or shot.
on the opposite they help make it easier to make others aware of what's happening.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I went to a library the other day, and all the kids stared at their books the entire time, never looking at or talking to anyone around them.
At least the kids on phones were constantly chatting with friends elsewhere via texts & IM. Sounds much healthier than hiding from the world with your nose in a book..
Or maybe I should just learn to stop judging them by my own preconceived notions.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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 have a 10 year old son and as much as I hate alarmism, I do find the allure of technology kind of scary.
We give our son "screen time" (PC, XBox or iPad) but we usually limit it to an hour per day. But if given the ability, he would play much more than that. It's like a compulsion. And it's often a struggle when his hour is up to get him to quit.
When we go places, I see lots of younger kids absolutely glued to a screen (iPad, iPhone usually). The touchscreen devices seem to have some kind of extra allure, which I associate with the fact that they have a tactile component different than a game controller or keyboard/mouse.
It has been shown that the happiest, least stressed people, are those who are the most ignorant of the world around them.
Generally because the world around them is a dangerous place, and can cause horrible painful suffering and death, at any time, without any warning.
80% of kids have smartphones? I'm glad I'm not a kid today. My father was too much of a Luddite to get a color TV - no way would we have been allowed to have cell phones. much less smartphones, and he probably wouldn't have tolerated a PC or the internet in the house either. We would have grown up in a strange informationless cut off parallel universe from all the other kids.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
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.
I am not a parent myself but the majority of kids of friends and family around me are good kids that I think and hope will grow up to be well-balanced individuals.
The common factors amongst all of them are moderation, and exposure to adults other than their parents who take a genuine interest in them, as well as parents who make time for them. When socialising with other adults who talk to them and listen to them, they feel valued and get self-respect and self-worth.
The problem with bad kids are the parents, period. We've bred a greedy have-it-now society in the rich Western World that means adults living in credit card debt, both having to work to keep two or more cars on the drive just to "keep up with the Jones' next door", and those same selfish people decide to bring kids into the world without having the proper time to give them - the result is fucked-up kids.
I am sick and tired of hearing how computer games, violence on TV, the Internet and modern gadgets are bad for kids. Of themselves, they are not bad, but when they are all used by selfish parents as pseudo-babysitters to keep the kids occupied whilst they work to fill their houses with expensive crap, and when the kids don't get attention and a counter-active balance of real live love and experience from their parents, that's when they get fucked up. How could it be otherwise if kids are spending most of their time in virtual (possibly violent) game worlds and the Internet?
People, and especially parents, need to get their priorities right. Extreme materialism and kids are probably mutually exclusive, they need to decide what's more important and stop being greedy "having your cake and eating it" people.
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.
I recommend you ditch your family, grab as much money as you can, then move countries and spend the next 5-10 years with a succession of Thai hookers.
Has the right to their opinion, and will find an audience simply to pay the bills. Psychotherapists practice psychobabble, purely and simply.
I've always felt that complaining how "X was cool in the past, but now they say that X is out/dangerous/harmful" is a bit of an argumentation error. The people who embraced the technology 15 years ago are not the same people who are complaining about it now. They were probably complaining about some other technological advancement then.
You can't hold the society in general accountable for the contradictory actions of its members.
An uptick in emergency admissions doesn't mean more children need care, it means more are getting care.
They don't even have to be female hookers either. Though you did say Thai so that may have been implied.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Cognitive bias is a self-deceptive practice in which a person (unintentionally) selects data to support his or her hypothesis. Understanding this principle is central to the critical analysis of scientific research. Is the person influenced by what they are seeing (due to their position, etc) when seeing a subset of the universe? Is the person drawing conclusions, abstracting from the subset to the whole, without realizing that the subset is not a representative one?
There are many issues for concern when reviewing this article. First, Dr. Evans is embedded in a nonrepresentative world, is seeing two changes (increased cellphone use and increased identification of issues within children), and is stating a correlation on factors that may well be coincident. Second, there is the issue of the definition of mental illness in children. For autism (a general example, not one of mental illness), the definition and boundaries have shifted over time. This has been one of the causes of the increased incidence of autism. I will hypothesize that the definitions and boundaries of "mental illness" in children has also changed over time, and this may well be a critical factor in the increased incidence of the same.
Dr. Evans proposes an interesting hypothesis (and one we have heard before). But the evidence quoted in the article is circumstantial at best, consisting of anecdotes. She does not quote any general studies. She focuses solely on the negative aspects of a changing environment, without quoting on the positive. Without baselining the definition of "mental illness", without a complete and neutral analysis of the overall impact of the *change* (both positive and negative), Dr. Evans's proposal is at best a weakly supported hypothesis.
And it has been report Steve jobs didn't allow his children to use iPads. I wonder why.
"Pocket rockets"? Uh, I'm pretty sure that term's already taken...
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."
Weird that we disapprove of Nazis so much isn't it? Kinda like meta-bullying.
or - fuck off.
*Especially* today, where technology can magnify the effects of an individual so greatly, some population of individuals being different is essential to the progress of the species. If we're all the same, we're all doomed to die as the ocean displaces us inland and the biosphere is ruined by our over-exploitation.
It's a genuine mechanism, but one that evolved to serve the selfish gene. The problem is that your fate (and the fate of your genes) no longer depends on your local tribe, but on the greater race of humanity. It's highly likely (whoever you are) that the solutions to our 21st century problems are not going to emerge solely from you and your immediate geneology, or from folks that think like you, dress like you, etc. So it's now become a retrogressive, anti-survival behaviour.
I'd humbly suggest that you go remove yourself from the gene pool... if that wasn't an example of the very behaviour we must overcome. I hope someone changes your mind and you find peace in this world of increasing diversity.
I like the "SJW" term, it is used by dickheads, who conveniently identify themselves as dickheads by using this term. Saves time.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Nah nah nah, only the part where they are using their phones to look up "top 10 ways to kill yourself discretely while at a restaurant with your parents".
Why? Is it better to kill yourself in steps or does the slow bleed-out from slit wrists put too many of them off?
:-)
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Mind aside, your neck is not designed to be pointed down at your chest the whole day.
http://www.today.com/health/te...
Well, they have to die in order for there to be a problem in the first place, yes. I realise it can seem complicated but stick with me, you'll get there in the end.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
She wants to be part of a narrative that spreads. e.g. Phones were good, but now they're bad, all these bad things happen because of phones.
In short, with some people I believe that the details of the story are irrelevant, the direction of the story is irrelevant. Negative stories are good because FUD spreads with ease.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
A pointless distinction given that it also highlighted a 70% increase in hospital admissions due to self-harm over a decade. Unless we have a plausible alternate theory for why there's such an increase in that time period then it's compelling evidence to start from.
It's very helpful when you use it in reverse. If you hear someone being called a SJW you can pretty much assume that the person doing the calling exists on a spectrum starting at "can barely interact socially, and feels oppressed for not being allowed by society to be the douche they want to be" and continues down to some pretty fucking disturbing sub-humans.
Could this be the "new normal" and just as healthy as the past?
Not taking sides, just asking the question.
all the crazy stuff the parents went through — and now the kids are screwed up.
is this really surprising?
And, the only thing that is tracked is "reported suicide attempts" - how many suicidal ideation episodes went unreported before the availability of "anonymous help in your pocket?"
Suicide counselors have been wishing for decades that people would come forward earlier so they can get help - is this the manifestation of them finally getting that wish fulfilled?
on the opposite they help make it easier to make others aware of what's happening.
Although this is indeed the case, it is not always an unmixed blessing.
That is all.
She habitually wears pearls. And she's clutching them right now.
cyberbullying is bad yeah, but not as bad as getting hit with a baseball bat. or shot.
Not as bad for the one doing the bullying you mean. Because for quite a few victims the end results are exactly the same. They're just pushed to doing it to themselves. It's much easier to hide that evidence on the Internet.
It exists in the animal world as well, though mostly on the more evolved species. Bullying is social hygiene.
Your point would be true genius were it not for the fact that bullies, typically, are not high-quality examples of humanity. They are typically socially repressed mental and emotional retards (much like yourself). The only reason I'm being so rude is I know you'd appreciate my efforts to socially hygienize some /. comments.
Joking aside; I wish I could say nice troll, but I can't because it's too obvious.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
This is a free society. You nor anybody else has the right to tell someone that they *can't* be a douche. Replace "being a douche" with "having an opinion different from yours" (which is essentially the only difference), and look in the mirror and see what you've become.
Religion would fail at most of its goals if it didn't have the divisive/chosen-people/"us vs them" angle. That's what makes it fun, we can castigate out-groups and do whatever the fuck we like, including but not limited to rape and murder, and as an added bonus we get to please 'god' into the bargain. Religion excels at what it is for - enabling cunts to do cuntish things.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
That makes no sense. This is in the UK, where they have socialized healthcare. Why would these people not be seeking care historically? It's not like the availability of health insurance has changed. Unless you're suggesting that people suppressed these feelings and just avoided treatment historically? That still doesn't explain the increase in attempted suicides. If it were just more people seeking treatment then you would think the attempted suicide rate should decrease (assuming the treatment is effective).
http://8ch.net/gamergate/index...
You are welcome on my lawn.
The problem is not the that the technology is harmful. It is not. The problem is that people are harmful.
On thing I do not like is this idea of schools as police. If a child bullies another child outside of school why is it any of the schools business?
The problem all comes down to manners, ethics, and morality which should be taught by the parents. The problem is how do you force parents to be parents? If a child is being a bully it should be the parents of the bully that puts a stop to it. A far too large of percentage does so we are left trying to fix the problem using other less effective methods.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
This is slashdot. There is no truth save for what you reconstruct out of a study which is the hight of human reason and porn is good for you. There is no intuition and you are a lie.
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
Luke 6:37? Yes, we could do with many more people trying to apply that rule consistently. Unfortunately most people still don't, whether Christian or not.
Contrary to popular Christian belief, I do think that everyone will be judged eventually, but not for whether we were nice obedient kids that kept all of the little rules. Instead, I think it will be about *why* we kept or didn't keep the rules in every situation. That will make for some interesting surprises (and not just for others, very probably for myself too.)
There are plenty of conflicting rules, it's up to us to decide which rules are the most important right now. A God that is only concerned about following every rule is no ideal Father, merely an ideal policeman, and that doesn't make sense in Christianity.
He was saying that from what is being told, we can't tell if it's better diagnosis or an actual increase. Yes, more people are going to the hospital, but it doesn't mean there are more people that need to go the hospital.
A pointless distinction given that it also highlighted a 70% increase in hospital admissions due to self-harm over a decade. Unless we have a plausible alternate theory for why there's such an increase in that time period then it's compelling evidence to start from.
"Self harm" is something that has a much higher profile than in the past. Until a few years ago, I had never heard of it. Today, there are on-line groups to promote it. There are other on-line groups to discourage it. My daughter's high school hands out pamphlets, and offers counseling on self-harm. It has become a very effective way to get attention. So an obvious "plausible alternative theory" is that it has become the go-to fad for young people signalling that they need help, instead of, say, attempting suicide, or running away.
Suicides for age 15-19 is 7.5/100k. In the 1990s it was around 11/100k. I can't find statistics on the number of teenage suicide attempts by year. I also can't find statistics on rates of teenage runaways per year. But I would be interested to see if these have moved in tandem with "self harm", or in the opposite direction.
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.
The issue isn't that constant Internet makes people more aware. The issue is that constant Internet means people are more prone to be constantly subjected to the factors which are the source of stress which are common causes of adolescent suicide. Previously to the ubiquity of smartphones a bullied individual was safe and free from the bully when not in the bully's presence. The bullied is safe. The bullied can let his or her guard down. Smartphones change this dynamic. Now the bully can bully remotely and can bully multiple people simultaneously. The anonymity of the Internet makes it easier and even worse it can make it easier for those that would not normally bully to engage in bullying behaviors because of the anonymity. All of these can lead to a dogpile where the stress from bullying online is worse than the stress from physical bullying but the worst part is that the safehaven for the bullied has been lost because the bullied is still "connected" and accessible to the bully.
That is why you need to make sure your children have hobbies that aren't online that they enjoy and want to do. If there's any sort of stress caused by people then it gives them the very useful safe haven to withdraw to in order to get away from the stress.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
That makes no sense. This is in the UK, where they have socialized healthcare.
Socialized medicine doesn't mean you can just walk in and get free medical care anytime you want.
Is it simply possible that access to a global internet community can increase suicide clusters.
Well as usual it depends upon what you choose as your baseline. By choosing the baseline year you can get either a very slight increase or more or less flat suicide rate for 15-24 year old up through 2013, the last year for which we have complete data. But it's nothing like the rate of smartphone or social media adoption.
This doesn't preclude a clinician from experiencing a dramatic trend in her practice that would alarm any reasonable person. That's why we have to look at both the statistical aggregate and clinical experience. When experience tells you there has been a dramatic change, and the statistically aggregated data say there's been no change, you put those together and what you're seeing is a change in the circumstances of suicide. That's not as alarming as a dramatic and systematic increase in rates, but it's still important.
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Have a look at https://www.afsp.org/understan...
It is US not UK, but you would expect to see a massive shift in the youth rates, which... just are not there.
Your citation is from an advocacy organization, that is doing some serious cherry picking. They conveniently start their graphs at the year 2000 in order to leave out the significant declines in teenage suicide rates that occurred in the late 1990s. Here is a chart the covers many decades, for many age groups. Summary: Suicide rates for teens 15-19 went from 11/100k in 1990 to 7.5/100k in 2010 (the last year available). There was less change for other age ranges. These data are also for the US, not the UK.
I go a restaurant and there are parents with children. And the kids stare at their phone the entire time, never looking at or talking to anyone around them...It seems very abnormal and unhealthy.
I don't really have a problem with that per se.
I think the real issue is that kids are spending an even larger percentage of their time interacting with their peers and not with adults. I don't think that is healthy. If they were on their phones interacting with adults I think they'd be fine.
I think kids do need to spend time socializing with others their own age, but I think that they'd be better off spending more time with adults. After all, the goal is to get them to be more like adults and less like children. Now, that shouldn't be about being dependent on adults, but rather about interacting with them.
Kids with pre-existing mental health conditions find their problems amplified by the use of smartphones and the various social media tools typically used on them?
My 12 year old daughter has a few issues (anxiety, depression, mood swings) and we wound up taking away her smartphone after it seemed to keep causing problems. (Everything from a constant stress inducer when she "forgot to charge it and it was almost dead" when we were out someplace, to forgetting where she put it, to fights over putting the phone away while we were eating at the table, to eventually catching her sexting a guy on it and having inappropriate IM chats using it.)
On the other hand, I don't see why for many kids, a smartphone is anything more than another useful tool to carry around in one's pocket?
That makes no sense. This is in the UK, where they have socialized healthcare.
Socialized medicine doesn't mean you can just walk in and get free medical care anytime you want.
Of course not - people have to schedule non-emergent procedures everywhere in the world. But my point is that the treatment was available. So why is there an uptick in treatment? It's possible there are more treatment resources, or a variety of factors. But my point still stands that a higher rate of treatment (assuming there is no increase in problems, which is what the GP suggested) *should* result in a decrease in suicide attempts.
This is absolutely right. It is definitely a fad, identifiable quite simply, because in the past, self-injurious behavior was most often a clear indicator of sexual abuse. Today, it's often being done in the absence of sexual abuse. This is a new phenomenon, but it's so new people in the mental health field are only able to determine this anecdotally, as it simply hasn't been happening long enough for there to be studies published.
There is no suicide attempt statistic. The CDC does collect stats on self-harm injuries but they don't differentiate between suicide and other self-harm injuries.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
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.
Did you RTFA? In the second paragraph, she used anecdotal evidence to imply that teenage suicides attempts have gone up 2400% to 4800% from the 1990s (1 or 2 per year to 4 per month), when the actual data shows that teenage suicides have gone down by about 30% over that time period. I think that qualifies as "full of shit".
Seriously.
The correct answer is 42.
At least 5 years ago, I heard the exact same complaint about what it looked like on your typical college campus.... Dozens of people wandering around the courtyards, faces buried in their phones.
Perhaps it only "seems very abnormal and unhealthy" because we're all part of the older generation that didn't ever have the devices in the first place?
I, too, used to think it was a "disturbing" trend ... but I often find myself doing the same thing now, when I'm grabbing lunch at work or waiting for the metro train, or just waiting someplace in line. Truth is, the younger generation really uses these things as their primarily communications tool. When it looks like they're a bunch of zombies staring into smartphone screens, they're actually *interacting* with each other via those screens -- so it is a form of being social.
And I know in my own case, I was never a very social, outgoing person in the first place. Large social settings full of strangers were always uncomfortable for me. Looking back, I would have LOVED to have a smartphone back then to pull out, instead of just holding a drink and trying to look like I was having a good time.
Unless we have a plausible alternate theory for why there's such an increase in that time period then it's compelling evidence to start from.
1. TV. Shows a lot of skinny chicks and athletic dudes with perfect bodies, making kids feel ugly and insecure.
2. Accelerated lifestyle. The day is still 24h, bot more activites need to be crammed into the same space, both for kids and adults alike.
3. High expectations from kids. The number of children with crushing amount of extracurricular activities (from swimming to chess club to math club to piano to ballet to football to horseriding to god-knows-what-else) is rising, because parents look at various examples of successful people (see point 1) and push their own kids as hard as they can to outdo everyone else.
4. Helicopter parenting. Kids grow to teenagers without as much as one single day on their own. All of a sudden, they need to cope with life things they never knew. I've seen 14 years old kids having their shoelaces tied by their parents, I mean seriously WTF.
To summarize: correlation ain't causation.
Not saying that increased exposure to Interwebz isn't a risk factor, just saying it ain't THE risk factor. It's also heavily dependent on how thik one's kid skin is. if they are not educated enough to not make a life-ending drama out of a couple bad words thrown their way by some AC, well, yeah, they're at risk.
But I agree with the phone staring phenomenon spinning out of control. I had a big argument with one of my closest friends not so long ago because he was coming to our pool game session and staring at his phone for the entirety his stay when he wasn't playing. Told him that if he wants to stay on Facebook, he needn't come, he could simply stay home and enjoy that activity. Man, was he pissed. I compared his reaction to how some people behave when their religion is mocked.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The whole field of psychology is an increasingly weak science.
Mostly because they can't conduct experiments. Ethical issues with fucking with people's minds. But absent that it just boils down to a lot of theories that aren't especially testable.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
AC GP's link does not cherry pick. If you look at the relevant graph, teenage suicide has remained relatively stable over the last 15 years. The only age group that has seen significant rises in the last 15 years is the 45-64 year old category.
1) She's is full of it. TFA is really a saddening collection of the usual dumb clichés the "won't anyone think of the children" vomit in the pop media. Not suprising since she's a psychologist and 99.9% of psychologists are dumb nay extremely dumb. (And yes, i have experience in dealing with psychologists and psychology students since i thaught two years in a psycholgy faculty and i sometimes meet some online so it's not just my alma mater) I shudder at the idea anyone is taking her opinion seriously.
2) Only an idiot would let unsupervised children on the internet. Likewise, you don't let children unsupervised in front of the TV or picking whatever from your library. I have books i wouldn't want to be read by an average teenager else a young kid.
3) It isn't very smart to say you will never spank your children. Of course, i haven't been educated by beat ups but i knew if i crossed some lines i could get a spank. I knew i wasn't untouchable. If a kid is convinced he's untouchable he MAY not take other punishments seriously and become agressive towards others. Especially the ones he percieves as vulnerable. Likewise pretending you are non violent to the point you will never defend yourself no matter what happens only encourages assholes.
The cell phone is just a tool used in this changing psychological battle ground. The ever increase pressure to compete and constant media portrayal of a hyper-reality is the root cause. When a scientist gets to ride a float through downtown instead of a fucking baseball team is the day these problems will start being solved.
It's anecdotal. It argues a need for someone to take a good statistical look at the situation, but I wouldn't read much more than that into it. She's not the only practitioner in that field, and I would imagine an effect as dramatic as she paints it to have gathered a bit more notice. Probably grandstanding for professional recognition on her part.
You know who else fought for social justice? The founding fucking fathers.
AC GP's link does not cherry pick. If you look at the relevant graph, teenage suicide has remained relatively stable over the last 15 years.
... but was much higher during the preceding 15 years. Their "starting point" is immediately after a significant decline. That is cherry picking.
There is no evidence that "the Internet" is causing an increase in teen suicides. In fact, the correlation is the opposite.
Yeah, because our friends are very knowledgeable about the ways of the world. Seriously, WTF can you learn from reading books. You sure as shit can't catch up on the latest Facebook/YouTube/Selfie/Cat video...Wattevah!!!
Just another day in Paradise
Most Summer days, my parents (or grandparents) rarely knew where I was from mid-morning until dinner. And, that was in Detroit! Maybe they were just hoping I wouldn't come back!?!
As for free range parenting being "almost considered a crime"... http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Just another day in Paradise
Or a whole lot of kids are making "half-hearted" suicide attempts that are recorded as such, but are not actually self-harm that would have any chance of killing themselves. This is definitely a thing.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Duh. Have you ever met anyone who demonizes what he actually knows?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"I'm scared. My kid is acting strange suddenly that he got into puberty and doesn't want to do anything with me. It has to be that damn ".$thing_I_know_jack_about_but_kid_uses_all_the_time.
I can't claim copyright of that statement. It's been in use far, far longer than I've been on this planet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I have seen this even in the 90's on the Internet, I can only imagine it has grown. Much of it is seeking attention whether the people doing the harm realize it or not. You are going to be less likely to do it if nobody is there to notice. With the online world you have all sorts of people in the same mindset, and people to get attention from.
I don't really think the phones themselves are the problem, I mean who really wants to socialize on the public bus etc.? I think the problem is when people do not pay attention to where they are going while on the phone and run into other people, or are up to order their food and don't realize it is their turn, or where they have to check their phone 40 times while at a meal. Just have some manners and it will not seem like such a big problem.
I was already wondering what's going to replace those dreaded "killer games" as the boogeyman.
And it's not like it's new. Somehow I can even imagine some Mesolithic father looking with worry at his Neolithic son who keeps polishing his tools long after they have reached a "good enough" state. But not quite as far back, can you imagine that what we now consider "classic literature" was once thought to ruin, twist and wreck young minds? Tom Sawyer was such a mind wrecker. But people who read it grew up and they didn't turn out to be lazy idiots, so a new boogeyman was needed. And as time went by, various things got the blame. Radio, swing music, TV, beat music, rock music (interestingly it really used to be music a lot in the not too distant past), D&D, horror movies, computer games ... did I forget something important?
Now, what do they all have in common? One, and only one, thing: They were at the time when they were demonized new technologies, discoveries or developments that were gladly embraced by the young generation but poorly understood by their parents. As these young people grew up, this boogeyman could no longer be kept alive simply because those that do the demonizing now knew that what used to be demonized was not a problem at all. But no worries, new technologies, new trends, come and young people will pick them up so you can be scared of something your kids like and you don't understand, too!
It's never been the technology. It's always been the kids. It's not the phones that turn our little angels into antisocial monsters. They ARE antisocial monsters. Think back to your time at school. And if you can't think of any antisocial assholes, well... maybe a mirror would help.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah this darn technology making us antisocial.
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It's a UK article and the author seems to have found a source: "Official figures confirm the picture she paints, with emergency admissions to child psychiatric wards doubling in four years, and those young adults hospitalised for self-harm up by 70 per cent in a decade."
But your quote says nothing about suicide. It only mentions an increase in admission to child psych wards, and it then talks about "self-harm" which isn't the same thing as suicide.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Or a whole lot of kids are making "half-hearted" suicide attempts that are recorded as such, but are not actually self-harm that would have any chance of killing themselves. This is definitely a thing.
Perhaps. There are two possibilities:
1. The Internet really did cause a 4800% increase in teenage suicide attempts, and there is a vast right wing conspiracy, funded by Koch Industries, and run by the Illuminati, to cover it up, and make sure all the available statistics show a decline in suicide attempts, to deceive the public because ... well, um, they must have a reason.
2. A psychologist in the UK is full of shit.
Golly, I wonder what William of Ockham would think.
Opinions in psychotherapy, psychology and psychiatry seem to change with the seasons, and to depend upon whom it is you ask. Such opinions should not be used as the basis for sound reasoning. End of story. Sure in some cases internet addiction is a problem, but trying to generalise from a few children with problems to all children is stupid. That said, this is what I posted on facebook a little earlier today (the relevance is stimulus addiction):
Violent video games are like hardcore porn without the sex. They're just as addictive and it is just as important that the mental discipline is learned to know fantasy from reality, and when enough stimulation is enough. It is society's responsibility to teach parents the principles of separation so that patents can teach their children. Else the bad knock on effects of explicit media will simply not go away, and will be rediscovered and reinvented time after time. Management of stimulation must be a parental responsibility and society must be structured so as not to make thus too hard a task. Right now we are having an Adhd epidemic as children get stimulus addicted and in desperation we turn to (charlatan) mind doctors and their magic pills in the hope that they will make this problem go away. Fail to manage stimulation levels, and it won't.
John_Chalisque
Actually, The Social Sciences have been fairly heavily criticized for being unscientific. They seem to be more concerned with perpetuating a politically correct model of human behavior than an accurate one.
Steve Pinker has written extensively on the subject.
Therapysters today are what european banksters were in the late 1920's leading to war and violence. They're everywhere, they corrupt education, they fight technology and science and they seem to wish a freud compliant world where life is drugs and magical thinking. Since last decade mental diagnostics exploded like never before and it's not clear if there is real basis for this or we are on hands of a mental robber barons linked to big pharma. Please have in mind the DSM-5 handbook had been dismissed because it has embarrased american psychiatry whose said they would support indpendendent research. Real therapyst does not fight internet, actually they would support aspie it personnel for making it more useful for their legitimate goales, please don't let BigPsy fool you and society.
Therapyst are the cancer of modern society
At least you parade your ignorance in your first sentence.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
i've reading the rest of the story.. i think that its not the internet what harms, its how it's used. being a parent today i'ts not what in the 1980s.. we need proper education about internet, no psychologist saying it's harmful... child / teen wich uses internet for antisocial activity should be punished for real, but what's wrong with the ones wich use it for legitimate purposes like learning real skills? antisocial behavior on kids in part is caused by a broken society, wich has been perverted by psychologist washing brains of several generations and helping psychopats to rot and degrade our society, our lifes and our future. the key here looks like that our society is turning into a psychopat friendly one, please read "without conscience" by Robert Hare and probably you will get it better..
As a kid in the late 80s and early 90s I had my Gameboy with me all the time. At dinner with my family I would play until my food came. Now granted I would put my game down, usually off as well and eat, as most kids would eat and stare at their phones now. This is also a parenting issue as well. My parents set some rules early on and would have had no issue taking my gameboy away if I didn't answer to questions or stop to eat. Another part of this is the helicopter parenting problem. Parents over protect their kids these days too much, never letting them deal with things on their own very young so they don't develop coping skills when they are away from parents influence more. I dealt with some very mean bullying in grade school and some of it did come from me being very sheltered by my mom, she meant well, but it also held me back from knowing about some things at the same time my classmates did. I really can't believe that a psychiatrist with 25 years of experience just wants to blame mobile phones for kids problems. She's pushing an oversimplified agenda/theory. Not only are more parents willing to take their rotten teenagers to a shrink they're expected to by society and sometimes forced to by the court when the teen acts out. Ms. Evans may see some glaring issues and maybe even have a valid point that kids are not unplugging enough, but it doesn't seem that she's looking at the bigger picture/data, she's looking at it through the eyes of her generation when parents just couldn't get kids to put the landline phone in their room down at night. As I saw my older brothers, 8& 10 years older than I, do and all the lectures my mom would give them about their phone use and the trouble they got into with it. Kids aren't meaner now than when we were kids, just more efficient and able to reach back into the bullied kids room when in our time it was just at school. This is the thing that we haven't figured out yet, how to teach our kids that school is not their whole life, the popular kids now probably won't be after school ends, this time will pass and something better will come.