Digital Madness: How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis—and How to Restore Our Sanity

Psychologist Kardaras (Glow Kids) delivers a sobering account of how social media damages mental health. Because humans evolved for face-to-face communication and physical activity, he explains, “our tech has outpaced our biology” by fostering a sedentary and fragmented lifestyle that leads people to feel overworked, exhausted, and depressed. Comparing social media companies to Big Pharma, Kardaras excoriates such platforms as Facebook and Twitter for creating interfaces that are addictive by design, noting that users need an ever-increasing level of stimulation to achieve the same dopamine rush in a process that renders offline activities unbearably dull by comparison. The consequences, he suggests, are rising incidences of personality disorders, depression, and obesity, as well as such sociogenic conditions as TikTok Tourette’s, in which TikTok users who follow influencers with Tourette’s syndrome sometimes start manifesting tics of their own. Kardaras uses easy to understand language to provide a bracing look at the toxic psychological effects of too much tech, though some of his pronouncements come across as over the top: “immortality-seeking megalomaniac tech oligarchs... want nothing more than to addict us, harvest our ‘digital exhaust,’ and put us in an alternate and illusory reality.” Readers will be unnerved. (Sept.)