Cutting (1 Viewer)

[-fish-]

Thank social media. Direct correlation.

Not really. Cutting existed before there was social media. It just hid in the shadows. But it was there.

Yeah, but nowhere near the extent

I could be totally wrong but I bet it's less prevalent now. I don't have any data to support this and am talking out of my butt here but 93.7318% of the time (made-up number) people make these kind of statements if you can find the data it ends up being the opposite.

Just like the "I used to just ride my bike around anywhere when I was a kid, but now the world is way too dangerous!" crowd and then, whoops, it turns out child abductions/murders by strangers are actually down by some huge amount since they were kids.

I think @Dickies has a point. Whether social media causes certain things to happen more or not I don't know. But one thing it does is make us much more AWARE of them. So we hear about a lot more awful stuff than before, even if there's less of that awful stuff happening than before. Just like those folks didn't hear about all the kids that went out on their bike and never came home because it wasn't their neighbor's kid who disappeared.

Normally I would agree with this, but I can't turn around without encountering somebody going on about some kind of mental health crisis affecting young people. I haven't seen much evidence of such a crisis personally, but if there was one, I would assume it would manifest itself in anxious activities like cutting.

"Stranger danger" was always a lie. Even when we were growing up, nobody was actually driving around in a van snatching kids off the street. It's wild that people still think that's a thing.

WRONG. Last month a 9 year old girl that I know was playing in the front fenced in yard with 2 of her friends. A man literally drove up to the house, waited until one of the girls wandered close to the fence, then grabbed her to pull her into his van. The girl fought out of his grasp, and the all of them screamed for help. The mother who was inside ran out to see the guy drive off. It's not a lie and it sucks that people like you telling others that it doesn't happen. The resulting trauma is also real for all the families and it would be even worse if the abductor had been successful.
So because it didn't happen to you - it doesn't happen? Kindly GTFOH with that S.

IK's take is bizarre. I'd be willing to wager that it happened even more frequently before social media, cell phone cameras and security cameras everywhere. Hell, some dude tried to kidnap me outside a grocery store when I was a kid.

 

[msudaisy26]

I don't think this is a social media or COVID thing. I believe cutting, eating disorders, bullying etc. was just as prevalent years ago as it is now.

I believe the big difference is awareness, when I was a teenager kids tried to just deal with it and suffered in silence. Now kids are speaking up more and get help and I think that is a good thing.

We may not be alive to see it, but maybe the heightened awareness and the fact that getting help isn't seen as a sign of weakness will help the overall mental health of everyone as we get older and they won't deal with some of the problems we have now.