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CDC Report on Teen Mental Health Is a Red Alert

Analysis by Lisa Jarvis | Bloomberg

February 16, 2023 at 7:04 p.m. EST

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Teens are struggling — and we’re not doing enough to help them. That’s the clear message from a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s biannual Youth Risk Behavior Survey offers a heartbreaking and, for parents, terrifying glimpse at the state of teens’ mental health, especially among teenage girls. The trend began before the pandemic but seemed to have been exacerbated by the isolation of the early Covid years.

The findings of the report are so striking that Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, which released the survey, was overwhelmed when she sat down to read it.

Among the most troubling statistics: Nearly 60% of teenage girls surveyed said they’d experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” in the previous year, while 30% had seriously considered suicide. Some 18% said they’d experienced sexual violence in the past year and 14% had been forced to have sex. The survey also showed similar declines in the mental health of LGBTQ teens.

Numbers like these are a code-red emergency — not only for parents, but for educators and policy makers.

Teens today are growing up under an umbrella of anxiety that would have been unfathomable during their parents’ adolescence. They live with the very real fear of someone barging into their classroom with a gun. They live with intense body-image pressures exacerbated by Instagram scrolling, and worry about the fallout from a momentary lapse of judgment on social media. Many are struggling with the existential threat of climate change.

“It’s the perfect recipe for the worst kind of stressor,” says adolescent-development expert Mitchell Prinstein, chief science officer of the American Psychological Association.

Adults have not only failed to address these concerns, they’re in some cases actively making them worse — such as, for example, pushing laws that target LGBTQ teens.

Higher rates of sexual violence against girls would help explain some of the decline in their mental health. Girls’ age of puberty onset has also been creeping younger, which might be exacerbating the differences seen in the CDC data due to a complex mix of hormonal shifts and adult pressures on still-young minds.

Every parent I know has the same question: Is there anything we can do to mitigate the damage? First is improving teens’ sense of connectedness. Ethier points to a large body of research showing that the more keyed in kids are to family and school, the better off they are. “Those young people who feel that sense of connectedness will, 20 years later, have better mental health, are less likely to have attempted suicide, and less likely to have used substances,” she says.

Connectedness also means forging healthy social relationships with peers. Teens missed so much critical in-person socialization time during the early stages of the pandemic, and social media was a poor and possibly even dangerous substitute — particularly for girls. “We have a lot of correlative data showing that social media use, especially at high levels, is associated with mental health problems,” says Jamie Howard, director of Trauma and Resilience Service at the Child Mind Institute.

Schools can reinforce in-person interactions by declaring school a social media-free zone, and limiting recreational use of phones during the day. “Kids have to learn sophisticated social skills in high school, and if we don’t teach them, they’re not going to have them,” Prinstein says. “We need to give them opportunities for practice.”

Parents need to step up their efforts here, too. That means setting rules around devices and social media use and modeling that behavior themselves. For those worried about being the mean parent in your child’s peer circle, blame the US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, who recently wisely said that 13 years old is too young for social media.  

Parents should be aware of the signs of depression, which often shows up as irritability rather than sadness in tweens and younger teens. Pay attention to whether your kids’ sleeping or eating habits are changing, or if they no longer seem interested in activities they used to enjoy.

The suicide statistics are particularly scary. The advice for parents on this topic is simple: talk to your kids. “If you’re worried your child is thinking about suicide, ask them,” Howard says. She stressed that bringing up suicide does not implant the idea in people who aren’t depressed. But raising it with a teen considering self-harm makes them much more likely to share their feelings.

Talk therapy like dialectic behavior therapy can be very effective for adolescent girls, particularly those who are suicidal, Howard says. But they can only change lives if they are deployed. As I’ve written before, there’s a capacity problem when it comes to mental health providers for kids. President Joe Biden’s administration has prioritized investment in mental health services; we need to see results from that effort sooner rather than later.

Parents reading these statistics might feel helpless or overwhelmed. As the mom of a tween girl, I certainly do. Yes, there are concrete ways we can help our teens through this critical period of development.

But as a society, we are failing our kids. It will take a society-wide response to help them.

More From  Bloomberg Opinion:

• Trans Teens Benefit From Gender-Affirming Care: Lisa Jarvis

• This Column May, or May Not, Cause an Allergic Reaction: Adam Minter

• Older Americans Need More Protection From Covid: Faye Flam

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion

©2023 Bloomberg L.P.

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/edcast

• 02-15-23
• 3:30 PM
• WORKPLACE EVOLUTION

ChatGPT won’t take this job: The most in-demand skill is something only humans can do

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently went on an anti-manager rant, but good managers are actually in high demand. Here’s why.

2 MINUTE READ

The top job skill for 2023?

Despite some 10,000 daily headlines about how AI will take our jobs, the most sought-after skill has nothing to do with technology. According to LinkedIn’s new report on the most in-demand skills for 2023, it’s management. And it’s followed closely by other decidedly human skills: communication, leadership, and teamwork.

Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on an anti-manager rant, saying, “I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers managing the people who are doing the work.” Many viewed it as foreshadowing for the layoffs that were coming after the company announced it would cut 11,000 jobs in November 2022.

It’s easy to hate on middle managers. They’re in a pretty miserable position, after all. And it’s only gotten worse over the last few years as middle managers have been tasked as the go-betweens for upper-management desires (return to office, and more done with fewer resources, for example) and employee demands (better work-life balance and flexibility, to name a few).

And part of the problem with middle managers might be that many are simply not suited for their jobs. The 1969 book The Peter Principle gave a name to the phenomenon that’s gone largely unchanged, and one that we’ve all experienced: Employees being promoted to management roles based on their success in previous jobs, regardless of whether they have the skills or even desire to be managers. And perhaps Zuckerberg’s disdain for certain levels of middle managers stems in part from the same frustration that employees feel when they have an ineffective boss.

It seems kind of obvious, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Companies and individuals can invest in people-management training for those who genuinely want to be managers and find other ways to reward and advance employees who are good at their jobs but have no desire to be managers.

If the popularity of articles offering leadership and management advice is any indication, so-called soft skills like emotional intelligence, management, and communication are exactly the skills that many of us need most, AI revolution or not.

In the changing world of work—and especially in this new uncertain economic environment—we can’t expect to replace the efficiency of machines, but we can do something AI can’t: Learn how to lead with empathy and how to motivate and listen to our colleagues and employees. In short, if we want to keep our jobs, we need, perhaps, to learn to be more human.  

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• NEWS EXPLAINER
• 13 February 2023

AI chatbots are coming to search engines – can you trust the results?

Google, Microsoft and Baidu are using tools like ChatGPT to turn internet search into a conversation. How will this change humanity’s relationship with machines?

• Chris Stokel-Walker

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Months after the chatbot ChatGPT wowed the world with its uncanny ability to write essays and answer questions like a human, artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to Internet search.

Three of the world’s biggest search engines — Google, Bing and Baidu — last week said they will be integrating ChatGPT or similar technology into their search products, allowing people to get direct answers or engage in a conversation, rather than merely receiving a list of links after typing in a word or question. How will this change the way people relate to search engines? Are there risks to this form of human–machine interaction?

Microsoft’s Bing uses the same technology as ChatGPT, which was developed by OpenAI of San Francisco, California. But all three companies are using large language models (LLMs). LLMs create convincing sentences by echoing the statistical patterns of text they encounter in a large database. Google’s AI-powered search engine, Bard, announced on 6 February, is currently in use by a small group of testers. Microsoft’s version is widely available now, although there is a waiting list for unfettered access. Baidu’s ERNIE Bot will be available in March.

Before these announcements, a few smaller companies had already released AI-powered search engines. “Search engines are evolving into this new state, where you can actually start talking to them, and converse with them like you would talk to a friend,” says Aravind Srinivas, a computer scientist in San Francisco who last August co-founded Perplexity — an LLM-based search engine that provides answers in conversational English.

Changing trust

The intensely personal nature of a conversation — compared with a classic Internet search — might help to sway perceptions of search results. People might inherently trust the answers from a chatbot that engages in conversation more than those from a detached search engine, says Aleksandra Urman, a computational social scientist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

A 2022 study¹ by a team based at the University of Florida in Gainesville found that for participants interacting with chatbots used by companies such as Amazon and Best Buy, the more they perceived the conversation to be human-like, the more they trusted the organization.

That could be beneficial, making searching faster and smoother. But an enhanced sense of trust could be problematic given that AI chatbots make mistakes. Google’s Bard flubbed a question about the James Webb Space Telescope in its own tech demo, confidently answering incorrectly. And ChatGPT has a tendency to create fictional answers to questions to which it doesn’t know the answer — known by those in the field as hallucinating.

A Google spokesperson said Bard’s error “highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process, something that we’re kicking off this week with our trusted-tester programme”. But some speculate that, rather than increasing trust, such errors, assuming they are discovered, could cause users to lose confidence in chat-based search. “Early perception can have a very large impact,” says Mountain View, California-based computer scientist Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Neeva, an LLM-powered search engine launched in January. The mistake wiped $100 billion from Google’s value as investors worried about the future and sold stock.

Lack of transparency

Compounding the problem of inaccuracy is a comparative lack of transparency. Typically, search engines present users with their sources — a list of links — and leave them to decide what they trust. By contrast, it’s rarely known what data an LLM trained on — is it Encyclopaedia Britannica or a gossip blog?

“It’s completely untransparent how [AI-powered search] is going to work, which might have major implications if the language model misfires, hallucinates or spreads misinformation,” says Urman.

If search bots make enough errors, then, rather than increasing trust with their conversational ability, they have the potential to instead unseat users’ perceptions of search engines as impartial arbiters of truth, Urman says.

She has conducted as-yet unpublished research that suggests current trust is high. She examined how people perceive existing features that Google uses to enhance the search experience, known as ‘featured snippets’, in which an extract from a page that is deemed particularly relevant to the search appears above the link, and ‘knowledge panels’ — summaries that Google automatically generates in response to searches about, for example, a person or organization. Almost 80% of people Urman surveyed deemed these features accurate, and around 70% thought they were objective.

Chatbot-powered search blurs the distinction between machines and humans, says Giada Pistilli, principal ethicist at Hugging Face, a data-science platform in Paris that promotes the responsible use of AI. She worries about how quickly companies are adopting AI advances: “We always have these new technologies thrown at us without any control or an educational framework to know how to use them.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00423-4

References

1. Lu, L. et al. Comp. Hum. Behav. 128, 107092 (2022).

to fuel your mind

Re-Reading Is Inefficient. Here Are 8 Tips for Studying Smarter.

The memory researcher’s guide to studying.

Vox

• Joseph Stromberg

Read when you’ve got time to spare.

More from Vox

• Why Your Brain Loves Procrastination
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• How To Fall Back in Love With Reading

Photo by Photofusion/UIG via Getty Images

The way most students study makes no sense.

That’s the conclusion of Washington University in St. Louis psychologists Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel — who’ve spent over combined 80 years studying learning and memory, and in 2015 distilled their findings with novelist Peter Brown in the book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.

The majority of students study by re-reading notes and textbooks — but the psychologists’ research, both in lab experiments and of actual students in classes, shows this is a terrible way to learn material. Using active learning strategies — like flashcards, diagramming, and quizzing yourself — is much more effective, as is spacing out studying over time and mixing different topics together.

McDaniel spoke with me about the eight key tips he’d share with students and teachers from his body of research.

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1) Don’t just re-read your notes and readings

“We know from surveys that a majority of students, when they study, they typically re-read assignments and notes. Most students say this is their number one go-to strategy.

“We know, however, from a lot of research, that this kind of repetitive recycling of information is not an especially good way to learn or create more permanent memories. Our studies of Washington University students, for instance, show that when they re-read a textbook chapter, they have absolutely no improvement in learning over those who just read it once.

“On your first reading of something, you extract a lot of understanding. But when you do the second reading, you read with a sense of ‘I know this, I know this.’ So basically, you’re not processing it deeply, or picking more out of it. Often, the re-reading is cursory — and it’s insidious, because this gives you the illusion that you know the material very well, when in fact there are gaps.”

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2) Ask yourself lots of questions

Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe via Getty Images

“One good technique to use instead is to read once, then quiz yourself, either using questions at the back of a textbook chapter, or making up your own questions. Retrieving that information is what actually produces more robust learning and memory.

“And even when you can’t retrieve it — when you get the questions wrong — it gives you an accurate diagnostic on what you don’t know, and this tells you what you should go back and study. This helps guide your studying more effectively.

“Asking questions also helps you understand more deeply. Say you’re learning about world history, and how ancient Rome and Greece were trading partners. Stop and ask yourself why they became trading partners. Why did they become shipbuilders, and learn to navigate the seas? It doesn’t always have to be why — you can ask how, or what.

“In asking these questions, you’re trying to explain, and in doing this, you create a better understanding, which leads to better memory and learning. So instead of just reading and skimming, stop and ask yourself things to make yourself understand the material.”

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3) Connect new information to something you already know

“Another strategy is, during a second reading, to try relating the principles in the text to something you already know about. Relate new information to prior information for better learning.

“One example is if you were learning about how the neuron transmits electricity. One of the things we know if that if you have a fatty sheath surround the neuron, called a myelin sheath, it helps the neuron transmit electricity more quickly.

“So you could liken this, say, to water running through a hose. The water runs quickly through it, but if you puncture the hose, it’s going to leak, and you won’t get the same flow. And that’s essentially what happens when we age — the myelin sheaths break down, and transmissions become slower.”

Photo by Quasar/Wikimedia Commons

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4) Draw out the information in a visual form

“A great strategy is making diagrams, or visual models, or flowcharts. In a beginning psychology course, you could diagram the flow of classical conditioning. Sure, you can read about classical conditioning, but to truly understand it and be able to write down and describe the different aspects of it on a test later on — condition, stimulus, and so on — it’s a good idea to see if you can put it in a flowchart.

“Anything that creates active learning — generating understanding on your own — is very effective in retention. It basically means the learner needs to become more involved and more engaged, and less passive.”

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5) Use flashcards

“Flashcards are another good way of doing this. And one key to using them is actually re-testing yourself on the ones you got right.

“A lot of students will answer the question on a flashcard, and take it out of the deck if they get it right. But it turns out this isn’t a good idea — repeating the act of memory retrieval is important. Studies show that keeping the correct item in the deck and encountering it again is useful. You might want to practice the incorrect items a little more, but repeated exposure to the ones you get right is important too.

“It’s not that repetition as a whole is bad. It’s that mindless repetition is bad.”

---

6) Don’t cram — space out your studying

Johannes Simon/Getty Images

“A lot of students cram — they wait until the last minute, then in one evening, they repeat the information again and again. But research shows this isn’t good for long term memory. It may allow you to do okay on that test the next day, but then on the final, you won’t retain as much information, and then the next year, when you need the information for the next level course, it won’t be there.

“This often happens in statistics. Students come back for the next year, and it seems like they’ve forgotten everything, because they crammed for their tests.

“The better idea is to space repetition. Practice a little bit one day, then put your flashcards away, then take them out the next day, then two days later. Study after study shows that spacing is really important.”

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7) Teachers should space out and mix up their lessons too

Andy Cross/The Denver Post via Getty Images

“Our book also has information for teachers. And our educational system tends to promote massed presentation of information as well.

“In a typical college course, you cover one topic one day, then on the second day, another topic, then on the third day, another topic. This is massed presentation. You never go back and recycle or reconsider the material.

“But the key, for teachers, is to put the material back in front of a student days or weeks later. There are several ways they can do this. Here at Washington University, there are some instructors who give weekly quizzes, and used to just put material from that week’s classes on the quiz. Now, they’re bringing back more material from two to three weeks ago. One psychology lecturer explicitly takes time, during each lecture, to bring back material from days or weeks beforehand.

“This can be done in homework too. It’s typical, in statistics courses, to give homework in which all of the problems are all in the same category. After correlations are taught, a student’s homework, say, is problem after problem on correlation. Then the next week, T tests are taught, and all the problems are on T tests. But we’ve found that sprinkling in questions on stuff that was covered two or three weeks ago is really good for retention.

“And this can be built into the content of lessons themselves. Let’s say you’re taking an art history class. When I took it, I learned about Gauguin, then I saw lots of his paintings, then I moved on to Matisse, and saw lots of paintings by him. Students and instructors both think that this is a good way of learning the painting styles of these different artists.

“But experimental studies show that’s not the case at all. It’s better to give students an example of one artist, then move to another, then another, then recycle back around. That interspersing, or mixing, produces much better learning that can be transferred to paintings you haven’t seen — letting students accurately identify the creators of paintings, say, on a test.

“And this works for all sorts of problems. Let’s go back to statistics. In upper level classes, and the real world, you’re not going to be told what sort of statistical problem you’re encountering — you’re going to have to figure out the method you need to use. And you can’t learn how to do that unless you have experience dealing with a mix of different types of problems, and diagnosing which requires which type of approach.”

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8) There’s no such thing as a “math person”

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

“There’s some really interesting work by Carol Dweck, at Stanford. She’s shown that students tend to have one of two mindsets about learning.

“One is a fixed learning model. It says, ‘I have a certain amount of talent for this topic — say, chemistry or physics — and I’ll do well until I hit that limit. Past that, it’s too hard for me, and I’m not going to do well.’ The other mindset is a growth mindset. It says that learning involves using effective strategies, putting aside time to do the work, and engaging in the process, all of which help you gradually increase your capacity for a topic.

“It turns out that the mindsets predict how well students end up doing. Students with growth mindsets tend to stick with it, tend to persevere in the face of difficulty, and tend to be successful in challenging classes. Students with the fixed mindset tend not to.

“So for teachers, the lesson is that if you can talk to students and suggest that a growth mindset really is the more accurate model — and it is — then students tend to be more open to trying new strategies, and sticking with the course, and working in ways that are going to promote learning. Ability, intelligence, and learning have to do with how you approach it — working smarter, we like to say.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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One Third of Americans Would Use Genetics Tech to Make Their Offspring Smarter, Study Finds

ByVanessa Bates Ramirez

February 10, 2023

As technology advances and starts to push the idea of designer babies from the realm of science fiction into reality, concern is rising around the murky ethics involved. Scientists and government bodies have started laying out guidelines around human enhancement and germline editing.

But besides these extreme scenarios, where embryos could be tweaked using genetic engineering tools like CRISPR, there are similar technologies already being used—and their ethical implications are no less complex, particularly given their accessibility. A recent study found that a substantial portion of Americans would be interested in using genetics tech to make their babies smarter.

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health and published yesterday in Science. The team asked survey respondents who may conceive using in vitro fertilization (IVF) how likely they were to use polygenic screening or CRISPR-style gene editing to increase their kids’ chances of getting into a top-100 ranked college.

The researchers told respondents that for purposes of the study they should assume the screening and editing options would be both free and safe. Neither of these assumptions are reality; the technologies haven’t been proven to be fully safe (particularly using CRISPR on embryos), and they’re certainly not free. Since a high cost and unproven safety would both substantially detract from peoples’ openness to the tech, though, simply gauging their attitudes was simplified by operating under these assumptions.

Of the respondents, 28 percent said they were more likely than not to use gene editing to make their babies smarter, and 38 percent said they’d use polygenic screening. The researchers also noted what they called a bandwagon effect, where people who were told something along the lines of “everyone else is doing it” were more likely to say they’d do it too. This is logical; our comfort with decisions is buoyed by a sense that others in our shoes would choose similarly.

It’s important to note, though, that the survey made it clear that genetically enhancing embryos didn’t come with a guaranteed result of a smarter kid. “In this study, we stipulated a realistic effect—that each service would increase the odds of having a child who attends a top-100 college by 2 percentage points, from 3 percent to 5 percent odds—and lots of people are still interested,” said Michelle N. Meyer, chair of the Department of Bioethics and Decision Sciences at Geisinger and first author of the article.

The numbers—28 and 38 percent—don’t seem high. That’s a little below and a little above one-third of total respondents who would use the technologies. But imagine walking around in a world where one out of every three people had had their genes tweaked before birth. Unsettling, no? The researchers said their results point to substantial and growing interest in genetic technologies for offspring enhancement, and that now is the time to get a national conversation going around regulations.

They emphasized the danger of relying on polygenic embryo screening as a trait-prediction tool. Polygenic risk scores are based on your genes and can give you an estimate of your and your kids’ risk for diseases like diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, or schizophrenia. Analyzing an embryo’s genes can give some indication of their risk for these conditions, and companies are already offering polygenic screening to people trying to conceive through IVF. If multiple embryos are screened, would-be parents can choose to implant the one with the best scores.

It’s already gone a couple steps beyond screening for optimal health outcomes, though—people have provided their embryos’ genomic data to services that use it to make predictions about non-medical traits. It’s not only a slippery slope, but there’s not enough evidence showing clear links between these predictions and real-life outcomes.

“Polygenic indexes are already only weak predictors for most individual adult outcomes, especially for social and behavioral traits, and there are several factors that lower their predictive power even more in the context of embryo selection,” said senior author Patrick Turley, assistant research professor of economics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

The team noted the importance of a person’s environment in their gene expression—epigenetics—as well as the disparities that exist between the data available for people of European ancestry versus those of other heritage.

Economic disparities should be kept in mind too; since these technologies are far from free, the wealthy would have exclusive access to them, further widening gaps in equality that have already brought negative impacts on society.

Everyone wants to give their child the best possible chance at a healthy, happy life. Now that gene editing and polygenic screening are already “out of the box,” so to speak, they’re not going back in. But as this study emphasizes, they should be carefully studied, considered, and regulated sooner rather than later.

Image Credit: picjumbo / Pixabay

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Vanessa Bates Ramirez

Vanessa is senior editor of Singularity Hub. She’s interested in biotechnology and genetic engineering, the nitty-gritty of the renewable energy transition, the roles technology and science play in geopolitics and international development, and countless other topics.

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Fortune Favours the Brave Paperback – 13 Dec. 2018

by Michelle Marcella Clarke (Author), Prof John Crown MB (Foreword)

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Michelle Clarke takes us on an extraordinary journey, through challenges most of us would never know, were it not for her courage to write this story. In 1993, aged 32, she suffers a fractured skull in a horse-riding accident in Zimbabwe, an event which changes her life forever. The traumatic brain injury adds to her existing conditions of Bipolar, Anxiety and Chronic Fatigue. Her marriage fails and she returns to live in Ireland. In 2003, she meets KT at a bus stop in Dublin. He invites her for coffee, and they have been together ever since. The third member of their team is Freddie, a very special little rescue dog. In July 2017, the shocking diagnosis of breast cancer arrives via a routine mammogram and she enters the next phase of ill-health, but this time with the loving support of KT and Freddie. She records her journey through this cancer,

https://www.wsj.com/articles/without-consciousness-ais-will-be-sociopaths-11673619880?mod=e2tw

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