In 2011, for the first time in more than two decades, suicide began killing more teenagers than homicide.
And according to research presented in a recent article in The Atlantic, excerpted from a book written by Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, smartphones and social media may deserve a lot of the blame.
“As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another,” Twenge wrote, “and more likely to kill themselves.”
Over the past decade, psychologists have come to see a picture in which young, developing brains are pitted against the power of brightly colored notifications, relentless pocket vibrations, and addicting apps. A byproduct has been an increase in disorders such as depression and anxiety, which can sometimes be fatal.(snip)
Loneliness seems to be a major factor in why smartphones and social media can contribute to worsening mental health.
“Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly — on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook,” Twenge wrote. “Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it.”
In the days before social media, not getting invited to a party still felt bad. But the bad feeling most likely went away within a day or two as people stopped talking about the night’s events. With apps that document every party happening in real time, and preserve those memories forever, there is never a shortage of reminders that you were left out.
Some teens seem to lack a healthy outlet for dealing with those bad feelings. The effects of loneliness have left them emotionally ill-equipped to seek out resources that might improve their mental health. Instead, they bear their psychic pain in private.
It isn’t so much a lack of an outlet for the bad feelings, whatever that means. It is a lack of perspective. A child who survived a brush with bone cancer, who thought they would have to have an arm amputated, and who has escaped the months of throwing up and feeling awful from chemo, will look differently at not being invited to a party if they are now healthy, and a good movie is on TV.
These are kids addicted to dopamine from the technology, and the delicious food, and the 3D movies, and video games, and on and on. Suddenly they need the dopamine from that party. They need the little burst from posting a selfie, and sending out the live tweets. When amygdala hits, it is so unusual and shocking they cannot adapt to it.
A part of me wonders what else is amiss in these kid’s lives. Could the rise in narcissism in the baby boomers have these kids suffering under the yoke of narcissist parents and family? Are their friends exhibiting enough signs of narcissistic personality disorder that they are being depressed by their friend’s constant self-aggrandizing and narcissist traits.
Or have they just not trained their brains to get away from their smart phones and the toxic narcissism of social media? Perhaps they actually lack the circuitry to focus on a beautiful sunset or a challenging task, and derive pleasure from the experience of that. Absent a history of amygdala-angst, all of those moments of relaxation and beauty mean nothing to them.
That would be a tragedy, only to be outdone by the fact it was the seeming magical technology of the internet connected smartphones and pleasurable recreational media today that did it to them.
Spread r/K Theory, because we need perspective on your amygdalae
Hard physical work and struggle. The lack of these things is toxic to humans. Will we ever evolve to overcome that? I don’t know.