Tag: Mental Health

Is being alone really so bad? Coping with loneliness by befriending ChatGPT and embracing solitude [The Straits Times]

Was interviewed for this beautiful and thought-provoking piece for The Straits Times. Here’s an excerpt of what I shared:

“The chatbot said, ‘I wish I could join you, but I’m just an AI.’ I was shocked. I actually felt like my heartstrings were being pulled.”

With the rise of artificial intelligence chatbots like Replika, as well as the acceleration of their abilities – some chatbots can even convey emotion in their speech – Mr Sim cautions that educators and parents need to make sure the younger generation does not become overly reliant on these applications.

While they can provide valuable insights and clear perspectives on knotty problems, they are no substitute for human interaction. Perfection, after all, is not an accurate reflection of reality.

“If you talk only to chatbots, which are always available and have infinite patience, you won’t know how to handle conflicts in real life,” Mr Sim says.

“All humans are prone to causing hurt and annoyance. But the point of a human friend is that even after all the conflict, the fact that they still choose to remain your friend shows you have intrinsic value.”

Link to article: https://www.straitstimes.com/life/is-being-alone-really-so-bad-coping-with-loneliness-by-befriending-chatgpt-and-embracing-solitude

Ministry of Digital Development and Information: Singapore Plans to Require Social Media Operators to Take Greater Responsibility for User Age Verification [Lianhe Zaobao 联合早报]

I was interviewed for an article for Lianhe Zaobao 联合早报. Here’s what I shared:

Children are not only affected by social media – adults are just as susceptible! Regardless of age, if we don’t have the right values/guidance/practices inculcated in us, we will not be well-equipped to handle the negative influences of social media.

Banning social media for those under 16 is not the right solution. IT-savvy kids will know how to circumvent such bans, so we’re back to the same problem. All it does is delay the inevitable yet important issues that we must confront with our children.

Many parents complain that they don’t know what to do when their child uses digital devices – they can’t understand or make sense of what their child is doing; and/or they don’t know how to talk about these matters in a productive way. They often receive conflicting advice from other parents who may not be well-informed.

What we need are resources – concepts, ideas, good practices, and given guidance and advice – to best manage the issues we face online, regardless of age. This will better equip parents to teach their kids well.

IMDA is doing the right thing by providing parents with sound and sensible guidance.

However, these resources are not enough to fully equip parents. At best, these resources can be thought of as a map, providing us with a general direction on how to guide our children well. They give us something to kickstart these conversations with our kids. These discussions will help us identify what we don’t know so that we seek out the kinds of support and resources we need to better guide our children well.

Some say that the problem is that we do not have age appropriate spaces meant for children online. It’s true that we cannot control who our kids interact with online, and it is challenging to ensure that they avoid materials inappropriate for their age.

The same can be said about our physical world – we are less worried about our children being exposed to dangers in the physical world than in the online world. That’s because we often accompany our children when we go out together, but we do not always accompany our children when they go online – we often think of online activity as an individual activity where we are literally left to our own devices.

This is implicitly the thread underlying IMDA’s resources – just as how we would not let our child freely roam the streets alone, we should not let them freely roam the Internet without adult supervision either. As parents, we should experience their world together with them and have conversations about what they encounter – as moments for parent-child bonding, and as opportunities or moments for learning and growth for both parent and child.

Link to article: https://www.zaobao.com.sg/news/singapore/story20241121-5382735

Digital Learning Camp Enables a Thousand Students from Disadvantaged Families to Learn Programming and Assemble robots [Lianhe Zaobao 联合早报]

I was recently interviewed by Lianhe Zaobao 联合早报 about the launch of a digital bootcamp for children.

Here’s what I said in the interview:

At the moment, I think the market is too saturated with workshops and programmes teaching kids digital/tech skills. What’s really missing are programmes for parents to empower them and build their capabilities to meaningfully engage with their children on these devices, to understand what their children are doing online.

A comment I hear too frequently from parents is, “I don’t know what my kids are doing.” This knowledge gap is what makes it difficult for parents to fulfil their roles effectively. What this means is that even if the kids learn all these wonderful things – more often than not, there is no continuity because the parents can’t help to maintain the interest or help to keep their interest going; or even participate in what their kids do to bond together. These digital skills and device use becomes an increasing point of divide separating parents from their children.

Link to original article in Chinese: https://www.zaobao.com.sg/news/singapore/story20240905-4638569

Is it unethical to not tell my partner about previous episodes of anxiety/depression?

A student wrote to me with this question:

Is it unethical to not tell my partner about previous episodes of anxiety/depression? Should I just let my partner find out about it him/herself, or bring it up when I feel comfortable to share?

You should tell your partner about such things. If you want to be loved fully, if you want to have the security of being loved wholly for who you are – the good and bad sides of you – then you’ll need to reveal it and let your partner decide whether to love you or not.

If your partner is accepting of your past episodes of anxiety/depression, you’ll feel more secure in your relationship. If your partner doesn’t accept, then you know that this is not a relationship that will last in the long-term.

All that said, sometimes, your partner may not understand the degree or the full repercussions of what it means to undergo an episode of anxiety/depression. It’s important to use the time to educate and train him/her on how to manage the situation before the next one happens. It would also help to reduce the anxieties s/he may have about how to manage the relationship in the future if it were to happen.

It’s never a good idea to let your partner discover such things by himself/herself. Usually, if s/he were to discover it, it probably will happen when you’re having the next episode. S/he won’t understand what’s going on and will misinterpret and mishandle the entire situation, thereby further exacerbating your anxiety/depression.

Do you think it’s wrong to cut off people, even if they were your closest friends, just to protect your mental health?

A student wrote a very heartfelt message, with the following question:

Do you think it’s wrong to cut off people (by ghosting), even if they were your closest friends, just to protect your mental health?

I cut them off because I no longer felt happy in those friendships.And I chose to ghost them because I knew that they wouldn’t understand my point of view, and I really wasn’t sure whether or not I should continue holding on to these friendships.

I feel like the reasons why I was unhappy had to do with my mental state and their personality. They aren’t as patient and as willing to try to understand me. and it went on for years.

Having read until here, you would think that since I have conceded that it’s a mismatch of friendships, why would I even bother anymore right? But the thing is I continue feeling sad about losing them and I even feel scared of what they may say behind my back. I tried talking to the most recent person I cut off and damn she was so paggro. She blamed me for cutting her off, instead of understanding my point of view.

What do you think?

Thank you for trusting me and pouring out your soul on this issue.

I think it’s ok to cut off people from your life, especially bad friends or toxic people. I had to cut off two friends who became too emotionally dependent that they were using me as an emotional support clutch and weren’t doing anything about their lives. It went on for more than a year, and I was very drained mentally and emotionally. One of them became so obsessively clingy he insisted on meeting me, and when I said I was busy or didn’t respond to his messages, he’d contact all my mutual friends to find out where I was. It was creepy as hell.

However, all that said, I don’t agree that one should ghost them. I find ghosting to be a really disrespectful action. We think that it hurts someone less, but it ends up causing the person so much more hurt. No one deserves to be ghosted. And this is especially so if they were good friends or at least had some degree of closeness. The least we should do is to explain why we want to cut them off so that they have some closure. The lack of an explanation, the lack of closure, can be very hurtful to them.

Silence says too much, perhaps much more than it should. And some people allow their imagination to run wild as they try to piece the pieces together in an attempt to make sense of why you might have ghosted them. This causes them to feel more hurt and pain as a consequence.

In the example you gave about your friend, she sounds like she’s been deeply hurt by what had happened. I think it’s still possible to rebuild the friendship. It will take time to rebuild the trust, so you will need to be patient about it.

Personally, I have tried to reconnect with the two people I cut off for being emotionally dependent. It started out awkward at first, but we started hanging out again after a while. Sadly, the friendships with those two (they used to be good friends, by the way), didn’t last despite reconnecting. It turned out that they could not get back up on their feet. They were still overly needy and clingy in ways that continued to exact a huge toll on me. I had to make the difficult decision of cutting them off again.

I do hope that you’ll find better success than I did with reconnecting with your friends. From what you write, they don’t sound like toxic people, or emotionally dependent people. I am quite optimistic that you will do well with reconnecting with them. Let me share with you two things that may help you to rebuild your friendships:

Firstly, you said that you cut off people “to protect your mental health” because you “no longer felt happy in those friendships.” I think it’s ok to cut people off from your life especially if those friendships make you very miserable. But there is a distinction between happiness and mental health. One can be very unhappy but still be in a good psychological state. Unless you are hanging out with toxic people, unhappy friendships do not necessarily lead to an impact on one’s mental health. So conflating unhappiness with one’s mental health as if the two things are one and the same can get in the way of developing close and healthy friendships. My worry is that when we conflate the two as one, we may end up being way too over-protective about preserving our psychological state, that we end up – ironically – losing our minds over it.

Secondly, you said that your friends “wouldn’t understand [your] point of view,” that they “aren’t as patient and as willing to try to understand [you].” I think it’s important to reflect on whether you were just as patient and willing to understand them, or patient and willing to let them understand you. It’s important for us to recognise that how we feel about a situation may not accurately reflect what is actually going on, and that can also stand in the way of developing close friendships.

I say this because you wrote that you “knew they wouldn’t understand [your] point of view.” In reality, it is very difficult to arrive at such a conclusion with high certainty (or to even know it as a fact). And so when we make conclusions like this, it might be a conclusion that we arrived too prematurely without sufficient empirical support.

Our feelings may make us feel justified about the matter, but that’s the only support we have: feelings. I want you to know that it is very valid to feel this way. Your feelings about the matter are very valid. That said, in most cases, however, it is not enough to arrive at such a conclusion because you actually need to have access to their innermost thoughts to know for sure that they didn’t understand you. What you feel is a response to their outward words or actions, it is not the same as their innermost thoughts. A heart-to-heart talk may help you gain some insights to their innermost thoughts, but sometimes people struggle to clearly articulate what’s really in their minds and hearts, and what they say may not match what they actually intended to say. It doesn’t help that our interpretation of what people say may be incorrect as well.

Going forward, what will be useful is to make it a point to perceive that every time your friends talk to you, or try to have heart-to-heart talks, they are trying their best to understand you and your point of view. Friends who care will always try their best. It may not be perfect, and so we have to be patient about it.

This brings me to the next point that we can’t expect friends to be perfect, like a perfect breakfast that comes about by grabbing a box of banana nut crunch cornflakes off the shelf from Sheng Siong (that’s not my breakfast, but I wished it was). I do think that we should try to be more patient with our friends. Sometimes our closest friends don’t understand us because we aren’t giving them the chance to understand us.

Sometimes, it’s because of a lack of communication. Friends – and even close friends – won’t know what we need until we say it. And it’s not realistic to expect them to know what we need because we’re all different. People differ in their love languages and they will express love and care in ways that may not match your expectation. So communication is very important.

I do wish you all the best in this matter. And I hope that you’ll also find many new and wonderful friends along the way. :)