WhatsApp lowers age limit to 13 in UK

[scifisam]

Worse, Upper Basildon types. But heights people can be similar.

Upper Basildon?? I've never thought of Basildon as full of rich people...

 

[Chemical needs]

Cav Heights people you’re talking about here ?

I think smart phones are the new trainers/ backpack, in that there is peer pressure to have whatever is cool (i.e. iphone). My lad wanted an iphone a few years back. He said the android operating system was just ... eh .. or something. When I asked him what ios does that Android doesn't he couldn't name a single thing...

 

[souljacker]

I don't know about bus passes as he doesnt have one, but son's train photo card is an actual laminated card and he has a card for his bank account which he can use to pay with or withdraw cash. It's all pretty normal tbh.

You don't need the app for the bank but it's very very useful compared to non-app.

 

[souljacker]

Upper Basildon?? I've never thought of Basildon as full of rich people...

Not the essex one. The West Berks v posh one.

 

[BristolEcho]

I think smart phones are the new trainers/ backpack, in that there is peer pressure to have whatever is cool (i.e. iphone). My lad wanted an iphone a few years back. He said the android operating system was just ... eh .. or something. When I asked him what ios does that Android doesn't he couldn't name a single thing...

That's an issue that affects many an adult too.

 

[Magnus McGinty]

An actual Apple device or a tablet?

Good point. Not sure.

 

[magneze]

Jonathan Haidt On How to Solve the Teen Mental Health Crisis

Suicides. Self-harm. Depression and anxiety. The toll of a social media-addicted, phone-based childhood has never been more stark. It can be easy for teens, parents, and schools to feel like they’re trapped by it all. But in this conversation with Tristan Harris, author and social psychologist...

www.humanetech.com

Transcript: https://assets-global.website-files...vided-attention-Jon-Haidt-transcript.docx.pdf

This episode seems highly relevant to this discussion. Whilst it's somewhat US biased, the data presented shows the scale of the issue. Here's that section from the beginning, but It's well worth a listen to it all.

So now I'll transition towhat my book is more about, which is the mental health. But my point is across almost any assessment you want to make, Gen Z, born 1996 and later, is doing poorly. And it's very sudden. It happened very suddenly in the early 2010s. Sowe can see that I first saw this on college campuses. Greg Lukianoff actually was one of the first to spot it. Something was changing about students who arrived in 2014 compared to, say, those who arrived in 2012.

Up through 2012, they were all Millennials. But as we go on in the decade, you see a number of things rise a little bit. ADHD is up a little bit, learning disability up a tiny bit, but it's really this yellow line, which is psychological disorders.That's what rises fast. That's the big difference between Gen Z and theMillennials. Is that Gen Z has very high rates of mental illness, especially depression and anxiety. Now, this is data collected from university health systems, and what we see, so these are US undergraduates with a variety ofconditions. And all the graphs that I show, if you track the data up through 2010,you see nothing that is... Even in the '90s, and especially the 2000s, mental health was not getting worse, and on some measures it was getting a littlebetter. The Millennials actually were a little more mentally healthy than Gen X before them.

Gen X is 1965 through 1980. But what you see as we go on into the 2010s is this,everything goes up, but it's especially depression and anxiety. They are now atsuch high levels it's just a normal part of being a teenager in the United States.These are college students, but it's just a normal part of being a young personnow that you are depressed and anxious. It's not that the majority is, but it'salmost. I mean, it's around 30 or 40% are depressed and anxious. This graphshows that it's actually just the young people, because as we go on in thisp eriod, what you see is that the lines for older people don't really change, but the youngest generation is really where the increase is concentrated. The rise isalso gendered in a lot of ways. Boys and girls are doing much worse than they were before, but often the rise is larger for girls.

Now, in this case, the percentage increase is actually slightly higher for boys, but they started a much lower level. So they go from about 5% to 12% had a major depression in the last year, a big increase percentage-wise. But you wouldn't say,"Oh, boys, it's just normal for them to be depressed." They're not. It's 12%.

Whereas for girls, it went from 12% up to nearly 30%, which is a very large portion of our girls have had a major depressive episode in the last year. And I want you to notice, the data for 2022 just came in about two months ago, and Iwas able to add it to the graph. You can kind of see the COVID effect there if you look closely. See, COVID made things a little bit worse, but it really just... It went right back to the trend line. COVID is trivial compared to whatever happened in the early 2010s.

And it's not just that they're saying that they're depressed and anxious. Whenwe look at measures of behavior, this shows it's actually emergency room visitsfor self-harm. Again, no trend before 2010. And then after 2010, girls go way, way up, especially pre-teen girls. The CDC divides the data up into two age groups. The younger age group is almost always where you see the biggest percentage increase. Something really, really hit 10 to 14-year-old girls, very hard in this country in the early 2010s. And it's not just self-harm, it's also suicide, which boys commit more suicide than girls. They tend to use lethal means, such as a gun or a tall building. Girls make many more attempts. Butwhen we look at actual deaths, what we see is a very large and sudden increase.I mean, this is quite astonishing. Between 2012 and 2013, the suicide rate foryoung teen girls went up 67% in a single year.

And it wasn't a blip. It wasn't like an error that it went down the next year. It was the first leg of a rise up to 134% increase. And it's not just us. It's happening invery much the same way in all of English-speaking countries. This is Britain forself-harm. We see the same pattern. And this is Australia's psychiatric emergency department visits. Again, no trend before 2010, and then afterwards, up, way up for boys and for girls. Same in New Zealand, similar data fromScandinavia. It's not all over the world. We don't see this in East Asia, but it is allover Northern Europe and the English-speaking countries and North America.Now why? Why would this pattern be happening in so many countries at the same time? Everyone has a theory. People hit me with all kinds of theories to explain it, and I say, "Fine, that might work for the United States, but why didthat cause girls in Australia to start cutting themselves? It doesn't make any sense."