Recently, I was looking around the Internet

when I found a video telling me "You are not depressed!" "Stop it!"

with an angry looking guy in the thumbnail

who I recognised

This is Prince Ea

He's a Youtuber and rapper

who has more recently started making content which is motivating and inspiring

according to himself

You've probably seen some of the more successful stuff on Facebook

His spoken word videos have gone freakin' crazy viral

Now at first glance, it looks like he's spreading a good message

but underneath the surface there are some really fundamental things he's doing

which struck me as seriously dodgy

and watching the video behind the angry thumbnail pushed me over the edge

so today I'm calling out Prince EA on several things I think he's doing wrong

First, that video

okay so it´s obvious clickbait and that's understandable

we've all gotta do what we gotta do

tocompetewithbuzzfeed

youknowwhatI'msayin

But the problem I have is within the content

Did he just say that?

I'm so mad I'm seriously going to go off on this guy in the comments

How did he know?

Okay I'm gonna have to stop you there

No. Depression does not always go

See it looks like you're mixing up this wikipedia page with this one

"depressed" can be a mood like sadness or frustration

but "depressed" can also refer to major depressive

pffffrickinghair

major depressive disorder

a mental disorder people are genetically predisposed to

I'll let this professor from Stanford University explain it

It's a biochemical disorder with a genetic component

in early experience influences

where somebody can't appreciate sunsets

and that's what this disease is about

Seriously well worth watching the full thing

small Hagrid has some great insight

so let's see what else Prince has to say

If you have to tell someone something is life changing

then it probably isn't that life changing

Okay I get what you're trying to say

if you treat your emotions and thoughts as if you were a passive observer

you're more likely to be able to live with them

this is at the core of a type of scientifically backed therapy

which my therapist did called ACT

I actually e-mailed one of the people who created the therapy

Steven Hayes sent me a bunch of studies with evidence of it being effective

but there are a lot of people who are stuck with brains that do not let their sadness go

and this is why this part of his video is so problematic

For those people who have the mental disorder

it's like saying to someone in the middle of a heart attack

'You don't have heart attacks

you may be experiencing a heart attack

but you do not have heart attacks

heart attacks come...

they go....'

And judging from the comments it's not just me who felt strongly about this

In fact one of his fans uploaded a response video which really explained this well

First of all thank you

for

being an increadible force for change

it's fantastic but uhm

dude if this is depression

and you had been in my house yesterday

I would have thrown the fucking thing at you

it's not a choice that people make

it's a shift in perception that's caused by

or has it's basis in biochemistry

What you're saying now I think almost even errs on the side of being a little bit dangerous for folks [hard to hear, someone please check]

But I thought I'd give him the benefit of the doubt

maybe he just messed up once with this topic

until I found another video where he mentions the same concept

with some more mistakes

See this world we live in it creates depression

For the mood: yes.

For the mental illness: no.

Sunsets

This is where the damaging part comes in

See everybody suffers from depression

There's always this little voice between the lines there of "Come on, pull yourself together"

"we all deal with this sort of thing"

This video is going to encourage that voice in depressed people

which makes them feel inadequate

everyone else has a come and go but not me

That's the kind of thing that could contribute to the statisticky reference at the start of this video

Did you know that in ten years

depression will be the leading cause of death

Hang on, really?

Even over heart disease or cancer?

That seems really freaking high

let me check your sources

oh wait, there isn't one

wait is it here?

no what about under here

behind this?

HERE?

WHETHEHELLISIT?

and this is the next problem

The guy references studies all over the place

I read a study yesterday

Studies show the

There was a study done a hospital study

At a rate of 40 football fields every minute

But I can't find his sources any fricking where

not in the description

not on his Facebook posts

not hidden in the background of his videos

WAIT WHAT'S THAT

oh it's just bigfoot false alarm

*AHAAAH*

So I have no idea whether what he's saying is just made up

like in his video 'Can We Auto-Correct Humanity?'

did you know the average person spends 4 years of his life looking down at his cellphone

wow really?

well i'd love to research this to contribute to the conversation but I can't because

you don't CITE THE

FRIKIN' SOURCE

And this made me wonder just how much scientific misinformation

is this guy just casually throwing out there

so I started to check

Studies show the attention span of the average adult today

is one second lower

than that of a goldfish

Now this struck me as absolute crap and it turns out

that that's because it's absolute crap

The closest I could find to a source that he might be referencing

was a marketing brochure saying:

The average time a user spends to digest information has decreased significantly over the past twelve years

from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 in 2012

less than the average attention span of a goldfish

and after hours of searching I couldn't find the actual study at all

but even if we put aside for the moment the fact that he's citing a study that doesn't seem to exist

it still means absolutely bugger-all

because the study measured how long internet users spend on each page before moving on to the next one

it might show that websites load faster now

or that there's more crap on the internet that we have to wade through

before finding the good stuff

But it does not show that people are incapable of paying attention to important messages

which the next part of the video suggests

so if you wanted a few people or

aquatic animals that have yet to

click off or close this video

congratulations

CONGRATULATIONS

And not only did he mess up the part about human attention spans

but the goldfish part is also wrong

here are two studies proving they can remember things for months

and if that's not your thing

even fricking mythbusters did an episode proving it wrong

Thirty seconds I think is pretty good to make it through four holes

it's clear that they've learned and

and it's clear that they do, in fact, have a memory longer than three seconds

MYTH BUSTED

I just don't know how many more layers of wrongness it's possible to pile onto one sentence

except maybe this one.

Now that one was just a random fact trying to strengthen his point

but some of the things he claims have worse consequences

A line that made me fricking shake with frustration was:

Videos are 6 seconds at high speed

And you wonder why ADD is on the rise

Okay so as you might say:

Now here I know you didn't do any research

not just because you called it ADD when it's been known

in the psychological community as ADHD since 1987

but also

ADHD is one of the most fricking genetic mental disorders

I contacted one of the worlds leading ADHD experts

Dr. Russell Barkley

who told me that and then explained:

70 to 80% is the result of differences in genetics

across the entire population it exceeds the genetic variation in any psychological trait

if you have an identical twin with ADHD

the risk to you is 75 to 90, 94 percent roughly

So does watching short video cause ADHD?

But we found no real evidence of purely social factors that can explain this disorder

it really behaves very much like a biological trait

ADHD is fricking horrible

it's essentially being trapped in your own brain unable to control yourself like normal people can

this guy is spreading a lie that people could avoid it if they just stopped using their phones

rather than the truth that it is one of the most treatable genetic disorders with medication

and this from a guy who (according to himself) is

"making smart cool"

Imma make smart cool again

That is definitely not smart and it is

definitely not cool

So why would he do this?

Well if we take a look later in his video

it brings me to the final issue with Prince EA

Oh Princey! Princey wincey!

(Hey! Hey! Hey!)

Prince EA makes things seem a lot worse than they actually are

so people get emotional enough to share it

Mr Zuckerberg

not to be rude but

you should reclassify Facebook to what it is

an anti

social

network

yeah because some people are not using Facebook in a healthy way

the entire site

which has allowed billions of people to keep in touch across countries

is anti-social

he gives no sense of nuance to the argument and he often just totally lies

technoloGY has made us more

selfish and seperate than ever

here are several sources which found charitable giving has been growing for decades

but I'd love to see what you base your point on

but ohwaityouDIDN'TCITETHE SOURCEAANY

The news is 140 characters

I could have sworn that technology let us freely share our footage and re-

the news is 140 characters

issues like police brutality which ne-

THE NEWS IS 140 CHARACTERS

twitter didn't sto-

THE NEWS IS 140

okay okay what else is wrong

no longer do I wanna

spoil a precious moment by

recording it with a phone

wanna spoil a precious moment

precious moment by

precious mo

momnet by

recording it with a phone

I'm just gonna keep them

I've noticed this is a surprisingly popular opinion

but I just don't get what's wrong with it

what if you wanna share it with someone who couldn't be there

or if you have a bad memory

or if, heaven forbid, you enjoy looking at photo's

I don't wanna take a picture of all my

meals anymore I'm just gonna eat them

I don't see the appeal of taking pictures of food either but some people seem to enjoy it

what's wrong with that?

just don't follow them on Instagram

I don't want the

new app the

new software

or the new update

well in that case your cyber security is going to be severely comprimised

and if I wanna post an old photo

hang on you just said you don't w-

The news is a hundred and forty characters

oh my mistake

and it ends on this big point

I imagine a world where we smile when we have low batteries