If the health secretary is really ‘determined’ to help unhappy teenagers, he could start by sorting out adolescent mental health services
Technology changes the medium but not the message. We still send out party invites and birth announcements, but by text and email as opposed to Royal Mail, and we take photos of ourselves on holiday, but put them on Facebook instead of in family albums. And we worry about the images our children are seeing, but where once those images came from fashion magazines, now they’re piped directly into kids’ phones and laptops.
Molly Russell was only 14 when she killed herself in 2017, leaving behind a devastated family and a lot of anguished questions. Her father, Ian, has been extraordinarily brave in talking about his daughter. He has described his horror at discovering the images of self-harm she had been looking at on Instagram and Pinterest, encouraged by those sites’ algorithms, which had noted Molly’s interest in certain subjects. According to Ian, even after Molly died, Pinterest was emailing her harmful photographs. “There’s no doubt that Instagram played a part in Molly’s death,” he said last weekend.
Continue reading...posted from The Guardian
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