A look at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport overnight as thousands of travelers (including me) are still trying to navigate home after the Windows/CrowdStrike outage late last week pic.twitter.com/Zq2b1JsS6b
In the pursuit of “fine” to “great,” we chase products. Through no fault of our own, we fall prey to messaging from social media users, algorithms, and expert marketers, urging us that this shampoo or this rug will shift the scales toward enoughness. “This is how the marketplace continues to work,” says Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communication at Cornell University, “which is by amplifying our inadequacies and insecurities.”
Baked into these social platforms is a natural ecosystem for comparison. In the past, people weighed themselves against celebrities in the media and those within their immediate social circles, Duffy says. Now, we can compare ourselves to the idealized version of millions of strangers online — who may be perpetuating an aesthetic trend inspiring us to buy in order to participate.
In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt lays out his argument that smartphones and social media are the key driver of the decline in youth mental health seen in many countries since the early 2010s.
The early 2010s were crucial, Haidt argues, because that was when smartphones really began to transform childhood into something unrecognizable. In June 2010, Apple introduced its first front-facing camera, and a few months later Instagram launched on the App Store. For Haidt, this was a fateful combination. Children were suddenly always online, always on display, and connected in ways that were often detrimental to their well-being. The result was a “tidal wave” of anxiety, depression, and self-harm, mostly affecting young girls.In Haidt’s telling, though, smartphones are only part of the problem. He thinks that children in the West are prevented from developing healthily thanks to a culture of “safetyism” that keeps children indoors, shelters them from risks, and replaces rough-and-tumble free play with adult-directed organized sports or—even worse—video games. For evidence of safetyism in action, Haidt contrasts a picture of a 1970s playground merry-go-round, (“the greatest piece of playground equipment ever invented”) with a modern set of play equipment designed with safety in mind and, thus, giving children less opportunity to learn from risky play.
Next steps? Go back online, find a venture capital backed mental health provider, take a quiz, get a diagnosis that confirms your self-diagnosis, have drugs sent to you in the mail.
Nurse practitioners had the largest increases in prescribing incident prescriptions across the 5 drug classes. This is consistent with a study that found that behavioral health visits among Medicare beneficiaries conducted by psychiatric behavioral health nurse practitioners increased by 162%, whereas those by psychiatrists decreased by 6% from 2011 to 2019.35 Our study, based on incident prescription data, suggests an increasing contribution of nurse practitioners initiating medication treatment of behavioral health conditions compared with other health care practitioners.
Chai G, Xu J, Goyal S, et al. Trends in Incident Prescriptions for Behavioral Health Medications in the US, 2018-2022. JAMA Psychiatry. Published online January 10, 2024. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2023.5045 — https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2813980
Welcome to our new world of self-diagnosed ADHD, online pill mills, and “shortages” of prescription medications.
The past couple of decades have seen a continuous increase in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses. National population surveys reflect an increase in the prevalence from 6.1% to 10.2% in the 20-year period from 1997 to 2016 and experts continue to debate and disagree on the causes for this trend.1
I was doing my usual Saturday morning routine, catching up on whatever was catching my attention and I came across this Scary Chart looking for ADHD incidence in Millennials. Whoa…check out the early CAD percentage increase.
Counsellor Hilarie Cash, the co-founder of reSTART Life, a residential treatment center for tech addiction, told The Epoch Times that screen use is classified as problematic when it starts eating into time necessary for normal human functioning…
Ms. Cash, whose program to treat people struggling with addiction to internet pornography and video games began in the 1990s, has observed a worrying trend. While her earlier clients also experienced major upheaval due to their screen addictions, they had sufficient life skills. In contrast, many of her clients today lack necessary life skills, such as knowing how to cook, maintain personal hygiene, hold down a conversation, make meaningful relationships, keep a job, etc. These people are more challenging to treat.
I see this every day. People cannot drive a car responsibly, process a restaurant meal order correctly, make the correct change when presented with cash not credit, and cannot tell you what time it is unless the clock has a digital readout.
lifeunderwriter.net 
You must be logged in to post a comment.