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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.
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???
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."
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...
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.
Well, she probably wants to be a writer and knows that this is one of the most common "phone it in" articles that get printed.
And she got it printed. Good job!
Relax, it isn't a real science.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
Indeed, my feelings exactly.
For my generation it was too much TV causing these issues.
What I see now are children who have zero social skills because their parents don't enforce any minimum standard of behavior. They get nowhere near enough exercise, nowhere near enough unsupervised time to just be kids and do stupid shit, far too much poor quality food, and are completely over-indulged.
My kids weren't allowed in the house after school unless it was pissing it down with rain, in which case, they were expected to be doing their homework. They had real chores to do from an early age including mowing the lawn, folding laundry, sweeping the floor, etc. I see none of this happening any more in any of my neighbours houses.
You simply can't let children do anything they want, all the time. Children need rules, and they need to do productive work too.
"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.
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?
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
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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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?
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.
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)
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.
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.