In Digital Madness, Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, author of the groundbreaking Glow Kids, explores how our devices are driving us mad as revolutionary research reveals technology's damaging effect on mental health and offers a way out.
Dr. Kardaras is at the forefront of psychologists sounding the alarm about the impact of excessive technology on younger brains. In Digital Madness, he turns his attention to our teens and young adults, examining the mental health impact of tech addiction and corrosive social media.
As we become a more technologically advanced society, young people are struggling with record rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety, overdoses, and suicide. Digital Madness reveals how our immersion in toxic social media has created polarizing extremes of emotion, addictive dependency, and a toxic "digital social contagion" spreading psychiatric disorders.
The algorithm-fueled polarity of social media also shapes the brain's architecture into inherently pathological and reactive "black and white" thinking—toxic for politics and society, and symptomatic of several mental disorders. Dr. Kardaras examines how the profit-driven titans of Big Tech have created our unhealthy tech-dependent lifestyle in the pursuit of increased engagement, data mining, and monetization.
But there is a solution. Using examples from classical philosophy, Dr. Kardaras offers a path out of our crisis that encourages resilience, critical thinking, and the pursuit of sanity-sustaining purpose. Digital Madness is a crucial book for parents, educators, therapists, public health professionals, and policymakers searching for ways to restore our young people's mental and physical health.