The impacts of this lack of media literacy can be found in some of the mental health struggles we have across society, with anxiety, stress, burnout, etc. We’re overwhelmed by information with no tools to manage it effectively. We don’t know what’s true, so we keep scrolling for answers that aren’t coming.
Perhaps if we all focused on connecting with individuals and creating for one another, and less on consumption, we wouldn’t need to enact laws that prevent people from accessing the opportunities that the internet makes available to us.
You can see how it’s not simple. Mental health across a generation of individuals defies every attempt at a one-size-fits-all narrative, because we are not all one size. On the other hand, our brains want a simple narrative because what they want more than anything else is a reason to think that this won’t happen to our kids or us. So we run to simple solutions like bees to a hive. Sometimes that causes us to miss a lot of the details.
Let’s hope we continue to see improvements, but understand that there are a host of things we can and should be doing that don’t involve social media at all.
If we’re going to become a less lonely society, we need to take advantage of opportunities to gather together. It’s that simple. It’s also becoming more challenging to do as we hide behind social media and news media, more interested in keeping us afraid of “others” so that we will continue to give them our attention.
The same thing is true of adults, and this is why the lack of places where we can talk about difficult things without someone threatening to “ban” sites is also dangerous. We are cutting off the community that so many people desperately need.
It turns out that teens with safe places to talk about mental health and better access to resources are helped. There is still a lot of work to be done to close the gap between teens who need help and those who can get it, but this is the work that makes a difference in the lives of everyone when it comes to mental health. It’s also hard work. None of the possible reasons for the lower rate discussed in the article are overnight solutions. They take time, money, work, and dedication. Putting a warning label on the internet is easy, but it’s not clear that it has any effect.
