Think about your biggest teenage insecurity. If you grew up before the age of social media, you might have compared yourself to other kids at school or to teens you saw on television. Maybe you were bullied based on your appearance, or for being nerdy or shy.
A teen in 2023 can measure their fashion sense, attractiveness, achievements and popularity against millions of Instagram or TikTok accounts. And an insult from an anonymous bully can hurt just as much as an IRL dis. On the other hand, they have access to positive messages about mental health, beauty, dealing with racism, you-name-it, that can make them feel like they are not alone.
Social media is changing the way teens think and feel. And recent research on teen mental health is alarming. In the past year, almost 1 in 3 high school aged girls reported considering suicide. And between 2009 and 2019 depression rates doubled for all teens.
Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association, spoke about how social media may be contributing to the teen mental health crisis before a Senate committee this week. He said that social interaction is key to every teen’s growth and development, but social media apps – with their algorithms that promote the most attention-grabbing content – offer the “empty calories of social interaction” without the “healthy ingredients necessary to reap benefits."
Plus, the need for attention and positive feedback that we all feel is magnified during the teenage years, and that can encourage young people to engage in harmful behaviors to get those likes.
I don't want to make assumptions about you, dear discerning reader. That said, if you’ve ever thought of yourself as a perfectionist, read on. Being a perfectionist can be stressful, but psychotherapist Katherine Morgan Schafler says perfectionism harnessed in the right way can be a powerful force for change.
That's the focus of her new book, The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power. After years of working as an on-site therapist at Google and seeing high-powered clients at her private practice on Wall Street, Schafler has identified five types of perfectionists. "Intense perfectionists" push themselves and others to the max, and "Parisian perfectionists" are more concerned with being perceived as easygoing. "Classic perfectionists" are highly organized, while "messy perfectionists" often have several projects going at once. "Procrastinator perfectionists" tend to want to wait until conditions are ideal before they start something new.
Up to 75% of new pathogens found in humans – viruses, bacteria and fungi that cause illness – come to us from other animals. The phenomenon of disease agents jumping from one species to another is called spillover, and scientists are learning more about how it works.
Epidemiologists used to consider spillover an extremely rare event – and this shaped how scientists searched for new pathogens – the kind that could cause a future pandemic. Since 2009, the U.S. government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trapping animals and attempting to catalog all the viruses in their bodies.
But recent research on coronaviruses shows that spillovers aren’t rare at all.
For example, one study in Kenya followed camels and their human handlers over two years. Throughout the study many of the camels caught MERS, with symptoms including coughs and runny noses. Many of the people who had come in contact with the camels also had signs of respiratory illness.
Spillover viruses can have severe consequences, especially for children and adults with compromised immune systems, though most of the time they have no effect at all.
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