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> I'm surprised about this kind of takes. Is it assuming that kids aren't affected by their dad getting laid off, or money getting tight in the family in general, adults' reactions to the news or everyday events etc Except this trend didn't happen at any previous downturn, so now you're special pleading that this economic downturn specifically is different somehow, based on... What exactly? And again, these mental health trends are international and cross-cultural and none of the other explanations can account for this. In fact, your suggestion that it's due to economic downturn is essentially refuted since even nations that didn't experience a downturn saw these mental health declines. > Adults' feelings, anxiety, pressure usually propagate through kids. What about adult anxiety about the Vietnam war, the nuclear threat of the cold war, the anxiety over terrorism that took out the twin towers. No meaningful blips seen with those momentous events. You keep pointing to possible second and third order effects that maybe-somehow-sort-of indirectly filtered down to kids through mechanisms like "parental anxiety", instead of a direct and obvious first-order effect from a device that's literally in their hands 16 hours of the day, and whose use we know has been algorithmically optimized to drive engagement, fear and anger, and whose second order effects are known to disrupt sleep, which is particularly important for teens going through puberty. Like, don't you see how absurdly implausible your second and third order effects are by comparison? To say nothing of the fact that they don't even explain all of the data, which is not a problem for the social media hypothesis. |
This is the core of the issue. You are right that none of the examples I gave are definitive first-order causes of a suicide trend (nor do I believe they are, I see any specific cause as only a part of more complicated situation). And it's exactly the same with smartphones: you assume it's a first-order effect through circumstancial observations, but I'd argue that's just your personal bias, and we have no effective tools to split the different.
To step back, the starting point of this was whether we could just randomly blame smartphones just before they became popular following the trend. There's just so many other things, including the technical evolutions that allowed smartphones to get popular in the first place, the social changes that also happen as we get a more global society etc.
And I also see a difference between saying "it's the smarphones!" and "it's social media!" (getting rid of smartphones doesn't delete social media)
You (and the author) seem to assume that because other people aren't coming up with random guesses that look convincing, your own random guess has suddently extra weight and validity. My opinion is a random guess is still a random guess, what I'm trying to argue would be that there's probably a lot more to this than a single cause, and if it really was mainly the smartphones front and center, we'd have seen specific issues way before 2010, especially in SEA for instance.