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.
When Karla Adkins looked in the rear view mirror of her car one morning nearly 10 years ago, she noticed the whites of her eyes had turned yellow.
She was 36 at the time and working as a physician liaison for a hospital system on the South Carolina coast, where she helped build relationships among doctors. Privately, she had struggled with heavy drinking since her early 20s, long believing that alcohol helped calm her anxieties. She understood that the yellowing of her eyes was evidence of jaundice. Even so, the prospect of being diagnosed with alcohol-related liver disease wasn’t her first concern.
“Honestly, the No. 1 fear for me was someone telling me I could never drink again,” said Adkins, who lives in Pawleys Island, a coastal town about 30 miles south of Myrtle Beach.
But the drinking had caught up with her: Within 48 hours of that moment in front of the rearview mirror, she was hospitalized, facing liver failure. “It was super fast,” Adkins said.
After years of heavy drinking to ease her anxiety, Karla Adkins nearly died from liver failure 10 years ago. “You can’t get much worse from where I got,” says Adkins. She now works as a coach to help people change their relationship with alcohol and published a book about her health ordeal.(Allison Duff)
Historically, alcohol use disorder has disproportionately affected men. But recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on deaths from excessive drinking shows that rates among women are climbing faster than they are among men. The Biden administration considers this trend alarming, with one new estimate predicting women will account for close to half of alcohol-associated liver disease costs in the U.S. by 2040, a $66 billion total price tag.
It’s a high-priority topic for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture, which together will release updated national dietary guidelines next year. But with marketing for alcoholic beverages increasingly geared toward women, and social drinking already a huge part of American culture, change isn’t something everyone may be ready to raise a glass to.
“This is a touchy topic,” said Rachel Sayko Adams, a research associate professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. “There is no safe level of alcohol use,” she said. “That’s, like, new information that people didn’t want to know.”
Over the past 50 years, women have increasingly entered the workforce and delayed motherhood, which likely has contributed to the problem as women historically drank less when they became mothers.
“Parenthood tended to be this protective factor,” but that’s not always the case anymore, said Adams, who studies addiction.
More recently, the covid-19 pandemic “significantly exacerbated” binge-drinking, said George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health, as people used alcohol to cope with stress. That is particularly true of women, who are more likely to drink alcohol because of stress than men, he said.
But women are also frequently the focus of gender-targeted advertising for alcoholic beverages. The growth of rosé sales and low-calorie wines, for example, has exploded in recent years. New research published by the International Journal of Drug Policy in February found that the “pinking of products is a tactic commonly used by the alcohol industry to target the female market.”
Also at play is the emergence of a phenomenon largely perpetuated by women on social media that makes light of drinking to deal with the difficulties of motherhood. The misperception of “mommy wine culture,” said Adams, is that “if you can drink in a normal way, a moderate way, if you can handle your alcohol, you’re fine.”
And while it’s unclear to what extent memes and online videos influence women’s drinking habits, the topic merits further study, said Adams, who with colleagues last year found that women without children at age 35 are still at the highest risk for binge-drinking and alcohol use disorder symptoms among all age groups of women. But over the past two decades, the research concluded, the risk is escalating for both childless women and mothers.
Research indicates stress is one of the main reasons that people misuse alcohol. Experts also say unique burdens lead many mothers to rely on alcohol. “It’s a vulnerable group,” says Rachel Sayko Adams, a research associate professor at the Boston University School of Public Health.(Chrissie Bonner)
These factors at play, coupled with the pressure to fit in, can make excessive drinking a difficult conversation to broach.“It’s a very taboo topic,” Adams said.
And when it does come up, said Stephanie Garbarino, a transplant hepatologist at Duke Health, it’s often surprising how many patients are unaware how their drinking affects their health.
“Often, they didn’t know there was anything wrong with what they’re doing,” she said. She is more frequently seeing younger patients with liver disease, including men and women in their 20s and 30s.
And public health and addiction experts fear that alcohol-related liver disease among women will become a costly issue for the nation to address. Women accounted for 29% of all costs associated with the disease in the U.S. in 2022 and are expected to account for 43% by 2040, estimated a new analysis published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology in February.
National dietary guidelines advise women to drink no more than one alcoholic drink a day. Those guidelines are up for a five-year review next year by the USDA and HHS, which has called a special committee to examine, among other questions, the relationship between alcohol consumption and cancer risks. The report will be made public in 2025.
When Canada published guidance in 2023 advising that drinking any more than two alcoholic beverages a week carried health risks, Koob sparked backlash when his comments to the Daily Mail suggested that U.S. guidelines might move in the same direction. The CDC report published in February suggested that an increase in alcohol taxes could help reduce excessive alcohol use and deaths. Koob’s office would not comment on such policies.
It’s a topic close to Adkins’ heart. She now works as a coach to help others — mostly women — stop drinking, and said the pandemic prompted her to publish a book about her near-death experience from liver failure. And while Adkins lives with cirrhosis, this September will mark 10 years since her last drink.
“The amazing thing is, you can’t get much worse from where I got,” said Adkins. “My hope is really to change the narrative.”
We recently took a trip to Texas with a trunk load full of old Legos to a Lego store that buys and sells Legos. Our entire intent was to de-clutter and get rid of some old sets and extra pieces. We were ready to donate the stuff. Give it away to Goodwill or another charity.
Well…
A Goodwill in Pennsylvania just sold a rare 14-karat gold Lego piece for $18,101.
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.
The TikToker touting “generational wealth” isn’t alone in promoting the benefits of slapping a child’s name onto credit card debts. TikTok is flooded with influencers who insist that authorizing minors to use their parents or older relatives’ credit cards will set them up for a bright future.
Many of the videos uploaded to the platform are captioned with the hashtag #generationalwealth and suggest that the authorized credit card user trick is a secret hack used by the wealthy.
Parents, don’t do this. TikTok should not be your source for financial advice.
Instead teach your children to save and invest, to live within their means, to understand the difference between needs and wants, to not become an indentured servant to the banking industry.
Some people on TikTok have been telling you to rub castor oil around and potentially into your eyes, even though it’s approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a laxative and not as an eye remedy. TikTokers have been claiming that castor oil can help treat all sorts of eye problems ranging from eye dryness to floaters to cataracts to poor vision to glaucoma.
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