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> "reporters" take their “emerging and growing problem” list from Netflix?

Your point was actually the authors point too. Quite a truculent critique from Guardian's Martha Gill:

"It probably shouldn’t work like this. Policy decisions would ideally not hinge on the quality of an actor’s performance (Adolescence had some spectacular ones, which explains its success), and whether politicians manage to catch the latest Netflix series. It makes us look a little emotionally incontinent, as a country, when the decisions of TV drama commissioners weigh quite so heavily in our politics. But the fickle spotlight of political attention has landed here, for now."

However, it's always worked like this since Plato feared the Poets and Shakespeare shaped Elizabethan England. I think politics by artists is much preferable to politics by "engineers", though the latter get the ears of the engine the former speak directly to the hearts of the people. Both are needed.

Smartphones and social media have destroyed society and TV series "Adolescence" is only a tepid glimpse of the mental-health and cultural epidemic that we've been avoiding talking about for decades now. Whether you trust the "data" or people's "emotions", the picture looks the same now.