Lake County Ohio Weal

  STATISTA: Social Media and Teen Mental Health by  Felix Richter,   Jun 30, 2025 In 2010, Mashable declared June 30 as Social Media Day, intended to celebrate the impact of social media on communication, connection and culture. Originally launched to recognize the positive impact that platforms like Facebook, Twitter (now X) or Instagram have on human interaction around the world, we’re marking the occasion by acknowledging some of the downsides of social media’s unstoppable rise over the past two decades. Specifically, we’re looking at its impact on children and teens, whose lives have changed fundamentally since social media platforms became ubiquitous. According to a survey of U.S. teens conducted by the Pew Research Center in the fall of 2024, 48 percent of Americans aged 13 to 17 now say that social media has a mostly negative effect on people of their age, up from just 32 percent two years earlier. Only 11 percent of teenagers in the U.S. now describe the impact o...

  US Catholicism; 47% of Adults Have Connection   BIG TENT CATHOLICISM – PEW STYLE   US  Adults The Following Are Mutually Exclusive Categories Total 20% Catholic : They say they are Catholic when asked about their present religion. 20%     The following do NOT identify as Catholic when asked about their present religion     27% 9% “ Cultural Catholics ”: They  say “yes” if they consider themselves Catholic in any way ( ethnically, culturally, or family ties ) but do not identify as Catholic religiously   29% 9% “ Connected to Catholics ” they say “yes” if they have a Catholic parent, spouse or partner or ever attend Catholic Mass. But do not identify as Catholics religiously or as Cultural Catholics or as Former Catholics 38% ...

  Autism Rates By Allen Frances Dr. Frances is a psychiatrist. He led the American Psychiatric Association’s task force charged with creating the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health and human services, is correct that reported autism rates have exploded in the last 30 years — they’ve increased roughly 60-fold — but he is dead wrong about the causes. I should know, because I am partly responsible for the explosion in rates. The rapid rise in autism cases is not because of vaccines or environmental toxins, but rather is the result of changes in the way that autism is defined and assessed — changes that I helped put into place. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was the chair of the task force charged with creating the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the D.S.M.-IV. Sometimes called the “bible of psychiatry,” the D.S.M. influences medical practice, insur...

  n March 2022, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced a revision to its widely influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The revised manual, known as DSM-5-TR, included a new diagnostic category: prolonged grief disorder (PGD). The announcement ignited a firestorm of controversy. “Pathologising grief is an insult to the dignity of loving relationships—it proclaims grievers as mentally ill and will too often result in the careless prescription of antidepressants or other drugs to treat enduring symptoms, without consideration of the context.” So wrote the authors of a short and scathing article in the medical journal The Lancet Psychiatry, published not long after the DSM-5-TR was released. The outrage and debate were not confined to psychiatrists and psychologists. The controversy over recognizing PGD as a mental disorder took many forms. Studies followed that questioned whether the empirical evidence justified introducing a new diagnostic ca...