just girls?
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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only girls matter
Amazing how Lemmy users are just at bad as Redditors when it comes to jumping to conclusions from the header, rather than actually giving a look into the article.
About half of the participants were girls (...) The results showed that girls reported substantially higher depression scores than boys at all ages. They also reported more hours of internet use per week than boys at age 15. Average Internet use times of girls and boys were similar at 13 and 17 years of age.
So it sounds like this is based on user reported data. Aren't boys much less likely to report depression symptoms regardless of whether they exist?
That's a possibility they hint at at the end of the article.
The scientist who conducted the study is definitely not on a list and can go near elementary schools.
- The study found that girls who spend more time online have more severe depressive symptoms.
- The boys had no such associations.
- Depression is becoming more common and can lead to learning and relationship difficulties.
- Adolescence is a critical period for the development of depression.
- Poor mental health during adolescence can lead to academic and relationship problems.
- The study found a correlation between Internet use and symptoms of depression in girls.
- The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the relationship between Internet use and depression.
- However, the researchers did not take into account the details of Internet activity and spoke French.
"researchers did not take into account the details of internet activity" seems like a pretty big hole in the study...
Probably means they didn't take into account the fact that boys were just blasting people in online games whereas girls drowned themselves in social media? I reckon it's nothing to do with actual gender and more about what those genders spend their time doing online.
As a girl who spent time in MMOs before social media was even a thing...
it was all the casual misogyny. Girls can't go to (online) games for a release, it's misogyny everywhere.
Oh fuck, good point :/
This makes a lot of sense. Video games is interacting with actual people online and I think exposes many more facets of people, than social media where everything someone posts is curated to show only the best parts of themselves.
As they say, you never truly know someone until you frag them
Yeah that's the next thing to measure.
They spoke French!? Sus. 🙃
As a french Canadian I support this comment!
No shit
Girls, it turns out, when exposed to unbridled misogyny, are affected.
Shockers.
This was downvoted so hard when I first found it but this is undeniably the reason and I don't care that some guys can't stand hearing it.
Look at this thread! LOOK AT IT. Every other comment is 'WHAT ONLY GIRLS?!' without reading the study that in fact says THAT YES ONLY GIRLS.
God lemmy, I had hope for you, but the internet is the internet and it's a fucking cesspool for women.
Data: exists Internet: "No."
I would guess it isn't causative though. Not sure how you could possibly test that hypothesis though.
Disagree. There's good reasons to suspect it's causative. There's a facebook study showing instagram is absolutely toxic for teenage self esteem that was leaked (definitely wasn't meant to go public), and I've seen headlines of several academic studies indicating social media contributes to mental health issues in places like /r/science (I've not read them because not very interested).
Intuitively social media tipping pre-disposed people into depression seems awfully plausible from what I've seen
Good point! It makes sense to me now.
But do the studies you didn't read make an effort to demonstrate people in similar situations get depressed after using social media at higher levels or did they simply say that heavy internet use is associated with depression?
It's a huge difference because isolating and distracting oneself is exactly what depressed people do, time travel to the 90s and go to a library you'll see plenty of depressed people getting their next stack of books - I never heard anyone tell me that I'm depressed BECAUSE I read a lot, probably because reading is seen as an established and good hobby where as social media is the big social poison of the day according to the older generation operating on the tradition of hating anything that's new or different.
The problem is 'social media bad' gets clicks while 'social media used by depressed people to disassociate' doesn't so of course the headline is always going to say the former, likewise sites like Reddit are always going to upvote those stories because everyone comes to the table expecting and wanting it to be true - this creates an environment where 'everyone knows' and tidbits of stories that have been exaggerate become the bedrock of their opinion, this then gets built on by ever more headlines that may or may not represent the article which may or may not represent the study which may or may not have a methodology capable of answering those questions...
(And yes I know it really feels like new thing is bad, I can't really think of a single example of a new thing being popular with the youth that older generations haven't said is destroying their brains, ruining the world and causing the fall of civilization. Video games, television, recreational use of anything besides alcohol, heck people are still crying about them updating math and gay people being allowed to exist.)
Replace "girls" with "people" and it's still true.
not only gurls
To say this only affects girls is laughable. This study can be thrown out.
The study doesn't say so
An analysis of data from a longitudinal study of child development in Canada showed that girls who spent more hours on the internet at 13 years of age tended to have higher depressive symptoms at age 15. In the same way, girls’ internet usage at age 15 was associated with more depressive symptoms at 17. These associations were absent in boys.
Oh ok.