How Social Media Breaks Our Brains | Nicholas Kardaras | TMR

Emma hosts Dr. Nicholas Kardaras to discuss his recent book Digital Madness: How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis and How to Restore Our Sanity. Doctor Nicholas Kardaras then joins as he and Emma get right into looking at remote schooling during the pandemic as the full melding of education and technology, with COVID coming at the tail end of a decade-and-a-half-long decline of mental health coinciding with a massive increase in screen time and immediately seeing rates of depression triple and rates of screentime double. After a brief conversation on the greater proof of correlation between screentime and rates of loneliness and feelings of isolation (with a very clear generational trend), they dive into how the whistleblowing of Frances Haugen brought to light how actively aware Facebook/Instagram was of the impact of their platforms on driving these conditions, and why the greater toxicity of these platforms isn’t due to their unique algorithms (which really rely on the same playbook as any other platform) but their popularity. Wrapping up, they tackle the biggest policies the US government could take in breaking up the power of Big Tech and creating accountability for the impact of their products, exploring what a repeal of Section 230 would mean, what an anti-trust approach would entail, and the actual endpoints of their toxic programming.

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Dr. Nicholas Kardaras psychologist addiction expert and author of digital Madness how social media is driving our Mental Health crisis and how to restore our sanity. Nicholas thanks so much for coming or Nick however you prefer to be called. Nicholas is fine. Thank you for having me on the show. of course. so you're beginning your book talking a bit about the impact of covid and our relationships with technology and social media and one of the things that struck me was how remote you know school was this kind of melding of an experience that was mostly when you're my when I was a kid at least a bit of a break from when I'd you know want to play Sims on my computer for five hours straight. It was an opportunity to be away from screens and to have that learning happen in Social in Social spaces of course it made sense that learning had to be remote but it did accelerate a certain relationship between education and Technology. What were your observations as a psychologist and as somebody who's been studying this about that dynamic in particular. yeah well to be clear before covid we had a nuclear bomb on our mental health that was happening over the last 10 to 15 years. We had increasingly spiking rates of depression and suicidality and overdoses and anxiety disorders. so you know the narrative has been that you know one step forward for technology two steps backward for Humanity. so our mental health metrics were getting progressively worse up until 2019. and then covid was kerosene to that fire. it had already gotten really pretty bad. we had the worst suicide overdose depression rates as I just mentioned. and so covid was sort of a beta test that really Amplified all those Dynamics. made it double screened time and triple depression. and you just saw the disaster that happened with not just kids but you know the rest of us as the adults in the room were also severely impacted by being alone isolated and Screen staring.