Digital Madness

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

By: Nicholas Kardaras

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

From the author of the provocative and influential Glow Kids, Digital Madness explores how we’ve become mad for our devices as our devices our driving us mad, as revolutionary research reveals technology's damaging effect on mental illness and suicide rates—and offers a way out.

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras is at the forefront of psychologists sounding the alarm about the impact of excessive technology on younger brains. In Glow Kids, he described what screen time does to children, calling it “digital heroin”. Now, in Digital Madness, Dr. Kardaras turns his attention to our teens and young adults and looks at the mental health impact of tech addiction and corrosive social media.

In Digital Madness, Dr. Kardaras answers the question of why young people’s mental health is deteriorating as we become a more technologically advanced society. While enthralled with shiny devices and immersed in Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat, our young people are struggling with record rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety, overdoses and suicide. What’s driving this mental health epidemic? Our immersion in toxic social media has created polarizing extremes of emotion and addictive dependency, while also acting as a toxic "digital social contagion”, spreading a variety of 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, but also symptomatic of several mental disorders. Digital Madness also examines how the profit-driven titans of Big Tech have created our unhealthy tech-dependent lifestyle: sedentary, screen-staring, addicted, depressed, isolated and empty—all in the pursuit of increased engagement, data mining and monetization.

But there is a solution. Dr. Kardaras offers a path out of our crisis, using examples from classical philosophy that encourage resilience, critical thinking and the pursuit of sanity-sustaining purpose in people’s lives. Digital Madness is a crucial audiobook for parents, educators, therapists, public health professionals, and policymakers who are searching for ways to restore our young people’s mental and physical health.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press

©2022 Nicholas Kardaras (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Spectacular book. Rough listen.

I loved this book and author and it’s message. The reader sounds like a carnival barker so I had to listen in short bursts to get through it.

Wake Up!

This should be required reading in high schools. I particularly enjoyed the author sharing his personal journey out of addiction and into personal flourishing! My hope is more people wake up to the flaws of our digital age in order to forge a path of health and wellness for all people.

Not at all what I expected!

This book was not at all what I was anticipating, but in a good way. It was so much better than I thought it would be and I will be thinking of the things I have learned from this book and applying some of the principles for many days to come!

Couldn’t finish it, so repetitive and superfluous and dramatic.

Listened for the first 3 hours then skipped around to see if other sections were better. There’s just so much unnecessary content in it and sooo much repetition. And it’s really dramatic about hating big tech CEOs, it gets annoying when it’s repeated so much. The beginning was so dramatic that it felt exhausting. I think it would’ve been better to mix more solutions throughout and give real life examples from clients/people he knows and show how their lives changed for the better (without sharing personal info of course). I didn’t really learn anything, and I knew of all the lab tests and data he shared. I think it’s becoming more common knowledge.

Also the insults about religion weren’t needed, comparing it to dictators and mocking its existence just felt like a personal jab at something he dislikes and added nothing to the topic. And then it was ironic he talked about Philosophy like it was his religion and noted the same positive effects and practices people use in religion for healing so that was confusing near the end. Sounds like he mostly dislikes Christianity but says well Buddhism isn’t really a religion so it’s cool.

Basically the lesson is spend less time with technology and more time with family and friends and experiencing the real, natural world while also thinking outside yourself and make the world a better place with your positive influence and unique skills. (And go watch After Skool videos, they are more concise about this topic, well made, creative and free).

Some people may love the book but I couldn’t finish it.