[HN Gopher] The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
___________________________________________________________________
The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
Author : Dowwie
Score : 334 points
Date : 2023-02-08 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jonathanhaidt.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jonathanhaidt.substack.com)
| password54321 wrote:
| It doesn't help the fact that less teens now believe in God [1].
| Whether or not God is real, the belief of one gives more purpose
| to more people with religious text helping you think beyond what
| the limbic system wants but on your character and the people
| around you. And not people as objects but as other sacred beings
| also with a purpose.
|
| To degenerate a society, strip off traditions that have been
| formed over centuries collectively, including people with far
| greater minds than most of us and make everyone more
| individualistic.
|
| [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/09/10/religious-
| be...
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Looking at the graphs in the article, they just sort of have a
| line drawn at 2012, but I don't think there's an obvious change
| in trend in almost any of them, not that sticks out from the rest
| of the noise-level in the data at least.
|
| If anything, judging from the graphs (all of which have been
| cropped very close to the beginning of the span so as to not give
| much of a baseline), the change, if there is such a thing, seems
| to have happened at about 2006-2009?
| [deleted]
| pmontra wrote:
| > What is the evidence that the loss of free play and risky play
| contributed to the epidemic?
|
| And not being able to walk around alone. No freedom can't be
| good, even for children.
| karaterobot wrote:
| The dismissive statement "people have made similar claims before,
| therefore this claim isn't true" is one of my pet peeves. You see
| it a lot around issues like this as a way to not engage with an
| argument.
|
| It's an obvious fallacy: it doesn't matter if something was said
| in the past, or whether or not it was true when said before. The
| only thing that matters is whether it is true in this case.
| nimbius wrote:
| Perhaps related: the Affordable Care Act was passed by US
| President Obama in 2010. the US prior to 2010 had also
| experienced nearly seventy school shootings.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
|
| Since Mr. Haidt reports from the US statistics of the CDC:
|
| 1. could it be reasonable then to suggest the prevalence of
| mental illness in teens is evidence of more cogent detection
| systems coming online?
|
| 2. Could it also be reasonable to consider this detection to be
| in response to the epidemic of mass shootings in schools?
| verteu wrote:
| Not likely. The pattern holds for suicide rates, which are not
| very affected by ACA "more cogent detection systems."
| briantakita wrote:
| I wonder what the trend is since the concept of "teenager" was
| coined, which I believe J Edgar Hoover used & Edward Bernays
| encouraged...
| nluken wrote:
| While I don't doubt that social media can drive some of these
| mental health issues, I think most teenagers are simply stressed
| from the constant work that's necessary for the college
| admissions process.
|
| I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't
| have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience
| consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my
| primary extracurricular). Most of the little extra time I had
| remaining would go to additional extracurricular activities that
| had the potential to enhance my college application. I only
| really got to socialize by talking to my teammates on our runs.
|
| As a result, even when I had extra time I was so burnt out and
| stressed from everything else that I felt consumed by anxiety. I
| would sometimes start crying spontaneously after I got home in
| the evenings. Things only started getting better when I started
| seeing a therapist and worked on my issues over the second half
| of my high school experience. Not everyone is so lucky.
|
| If we want a healthier society, we need to take a step back and
| give teenagers a chance to actually live life. Sure, less social
| media would help, but it won't solve the root of the problem.
| Today's society demands so much from adolescents for so little in
| return. It's very easy to think that you're a failure if you
| don't know exactly who you are and what you want to be at age 17,
| and that's not a fair expectation for any 17 year old. We
| shouldn't be surprised that many break under this kind of
| pressure.
| ok_dad wrote:
| > If we want a healthier society, we need to take a step back
| and give teenagers a chance to actually live life.
|
| We (American here) need to take a step back and let _everyone_
| enjoy life. That means providing healthcare, food, and shelter
| to _every single person_ so that they can live their life and
| work in a non-anxiety-inducing way. Every therapist I 've
| talked to in the past few years has told me that they think the
| number one thing that would reduce their workload is if people
| weren't so stressed about paying for the most basic things for
| their family. Most of the people they see would still have
| issues they need to deal with, but wouldn't be on the precipice
| of suicide and taking loads of pills. That's an anecdote, but
| to me it's clear that the "hustle culture" and lack of social
| support have combined in the USA to make things very hard for
| the average American. This applies to kids directly, too,
| because that hustle has to start pre-college!
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| right, teen kids are so worried about healthcare costs!
| Gimmie a break, your comment has nothing to do with the
| article, it's low effort and a better fit for reddit
| romeoblade wrote:
| I'm not yet 40 but I am a male single parent. With the
| closest family being 1300 miles away. Last year between
| March-May my health deteriorated so bad that I went from
| being fine to walking with a cane in less than 2 months.
| Once finally diagnosed, I went from diagnoses to major
| surgery in less than 12 days.
|
| My daughter (just turned 16), picked up the slack as I
| become pretty much bed ridden.
|
| I can attest that this had a very destermental effect on
| her health. Not only having to manage the house, school,
| etc but also without any support from anyone. At the same
| time watching me go from someone who use to be able to
| squat 500lbs to someone who couldn't be trusted to wash
| dishes without breaking a few because I had lost all
| feeling, balance, and depth perception.
|
| Go one night, hearing your daughter sob in her room because
| she doesn't want you to see she's hurting and scared from
| what YOU are going through and then come back and comment
| because right now you are a very ignorant human to think it
| doesn't. Especially since see already lost one parent.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| I am sorry that you (and your daughter) went through
| that. Would socialized medicine in the US have prevented
| your health issue?
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Teen kids are worried about _having enough to eat_. https:/
| /www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/83971/...
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Well, in fairness, OP is _right_ : everybody would be under
| a lot less stress if all of their needs were met for the
| entirety of their lives with no expectation to ever
| contribute anything. He's missing the realization that
| somebody has to contribute something to meet the needs of
| all the people whose needs are being met regardless of
| their contribution, which is why communism always fails in
| practice.
| nocoolnametom wrote:
| Everybody would be under a lot less stress if [a basic
| level] of their needs were met [to avoid at the very
| least bankruptcy and preventable life-long injury or even
| death] for the entirety of their lives with no
| expectation to ever contribute anything. He's missing the
| realization that [everyone] has to contribute something
| [via progressive taxation] to meet the [basic level of]
| needs of all the people whose [basic level of] needs are
| being met regardless of their contribution, which is why
| [every other industrialized nation, even with failures
| and economic issues in parts of their systems, is able to
| provide at least this basic level for their citizens,
| except for the US because of for-profit healthcare
| lobbyists].
| snozolli wrote:
| _teen kids are so worried about healthcare costs!_
|
| _a better fit for reddit_
|
| Funny you should say that, since Reddit is packed with
| teens and the front page subs are pretty full of anxiety
| over healthcare and the environment.
|
| Teens today are absolutely flooded with horror stories that
| they have zero authority or meaningful ability to change.
| tasspeed wrote:
| you're ignorant or extremely privileged if you think kids
| dont worry. have you ever had a parent be ill and your
| family has no money for their treatment?
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| OK, you got me. A lack of socialized everything that
| started in 2012 is the cause of the teen mental illness
| epidemic. Get out and vote everyone!!!
| idontpost wrote:
| [dead]
| tasspeed wrote:
| are you an idiot? its not a "lack of socialized
| everything that started in 2012". Things have never been
| socialized in America and as wealth is hoarded more and
| more by the 1%, plus the effects of the 2008 recession,
| the economic situation for most Americans is becoming cut
| throat with a lack of socialized resources. As a result,
| parents struggle, which makes their kids struggle. Kids
| have little freedom nowadays because of how suburban +
| capitalist America has evolved to kill communities.
| NateEag wrote:
| OP is sarcastically pointing out that since the US has
| never had socialized health care, that cannot be the
| explanation for a sudden uptick in mental health issues
| circa 2012.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I was being affected by household money problems when I was
| 8. That shit rubs off on your kids no matter what.
| tasspeed wrote:
| I agree wholeheartedly. I was working a part time job in
| highschool to pay for my gas and other expenses, when I
| should have been doing kid things. Also as an early teenager
| I turned to online communities because there was no other way
| to interact with irl friends outside of school. It was too
| dangerous to ride a bike to a friends house (cars), I
| couldn't drive, and my parents were always working so they
| couldn't give me rides. I still needed some sort of social
| interaction though, so of course I turned to the internet.
| [deleted]
| nicoburns wrote:
| That only works in the US though. Colleges outside the US don't
| tend to care about extra-curriculars, etc.
| nluken wrote:
| Agreed: the data in this article only discusses the US, so I
| was only discussing the US here. I'm not sure if there's a
| similar crisis in other countries. Some in this thread have
| indicated yes, others no.
| sylens wrote:
| Unless you're really pushing for Ivy League, I don't think
| colleges in the US care either. Who is calling your high
| school to verify that they even had an Open Source Club and
| that you were the treasurer of it?
| Loughla wrote:
| >I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant
| work that's necessary for the college admissions process.
|
| I am 100% behind this, and a lot of my professional career has
| been spent in higher education, specifically working with
| college access programs for pre-college students.
|
| The amount of pressure kids are under today is just astounding.
| When I was looking at colleges, the pressure started slightly
| in 10th or 11th grade. Now, it's in the grade schools. Colleges
| are trying to get into 6th grade classes to "offer services"
| (read: recruit those kids under the pretense of supplementing
| underfunded school classrooms).
|
| This may come off as a "things were better in my day" but hear
| me out:
|
| I played baseball starting in kindergarten. There were summer
| YMCA leagues, and a couple of kids played baseball on travel
| teams in junior high and high school. The really good ones got
| scouted in college, but 99% of us were in it because we liked
| the game and liked playing. No matter what our parents may have
| dreamed, we knew it was a fun way to be part of something we
| liked.
|
| My oldest plays baseball, he started in kindergarten, and has
| played all the way to high school now. He loves the game, but
| we also made sure it was a game, not a job. All kids in his
| class who could afford it were on travel teams, starting in
| first grade. All but three have private coaches for whatever
| position they specialize in. . . starting in _first grade_. The
| parents sponsored tournaments. The parents made sure their
| travel team attended tournaments that college scouts or
| colleges sponsored. _Starting in first grade_. The kids on his
| school team (town population of around 1000, school k-12
| enrollment is around 400) have literally played or practiced
| baseball every weekend, barring some holiday weekends, since
| they were 5 years old. That is not an exaggeration, it is a
| statement of fact.
|
| I actually got cornered by other parents asking why out child
| (left handed) wasn't going to be on the travel team when they
| were little, because he'd be a great pitcher. In first grade.
| They were absolutely astounded that I said I just couldn't get
| behind putting that much pressure on a child.
|
| I don't think that people over the age of about 32 understand
| just how unbelievable the pressure is on kids these days.
| They're expected to be ON all the time, and their future is at
| risk if they're not. Parents see it as just trying to set their
| kids up for the best future possible. But it's so much
| pressure.
|
| It's astounding. I live in a poor, rural area. I have to
| imagine it's much worse in urban/affluent areas.
|
| And that's not even touching on the fact that social media and
| technology means the students literally cannot get away from
| social issues and bullying. That's a whole other thing.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > My oldest plays baseball, he started in kindergarten, and
| has played all the way to high school now. He loves the game,
| but we also made sure it was a game, not a job. All kids in
| his class who could afford it were on travel teams, starting
| in first grade. All but three have private coaches for
| whatever position they specialize in. . . starting in first
| grade. The parents sponsored tournaments. The parents made
| sure their travel team attended tournaments that college
| scouts or colleges sponsored. Starting in first grade. The
| kids on his school team (town population of around 1000,
| school k-12 enrollment is around 400) have literally played
| or practiced baseball every weekend, barring some holiday
| weekends, since they were 5 years old. That is not an
| exaggeration, it is a statement of fact.
|
| This is one thing I've noticed about kids' sports, too, now
| that I have (youngish) kids and I'm trying to find sports for
| them. What used to be the low-end leagues--which were a _bit_
| serious, but not too much--seem to mostly be gone, with a new
| ultra-casual tier that didn 't exist before replacing it, and
| then... nothing, until you're looking at _really_ serious
| leagues with lots of travel and a huge time-commitment
| ([EDIT] yes, even for like 1st-graders).
|
| All I can figure is parents' preferences changed--more of the
| half-serious players are pushed into the very-serious leagues
| now, for whatever reason, and the kinds of kids/parents who
| were always kinda unreliable and didn't seem to really have
| their hearts in it in the old-style somewhat-serious leagues
| are happier with the more-casual, even-lower-time-commitment
| replacement, leaving insufficient demand for what used to be
| just _standard_ youth sports leagues.
| monknomo wrote:
| Parks & rec funding has also cratered so the "little
| league" that you think of as a way of putting together
| local kids of all abilities to play a sport is less common
| that it used to be. The privatized equivalents are usually
| more competitive or religiously focused or both
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Oh man--is _that_ part of it? Now that you mention it,
| all the leagues I used to play on were either city-run
| leagues or YMCA (which seems to have shifted toward the
| very-casual end, too, but maybe that 's just our local
| ones) I think.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant
| work that's necessary for the college admissions process.
|
| Spoiler: it won't get easier :)
|
| I'm sure everyone has a different experience, but I find
| professional life to be much harder than being a student, even
| a student preparing for very selective admission process. You
| often work as hard as an adult (if not harder), plus have more
| responsibilities.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Grade inflation could be part of this. Look at canadian
| university admission averages. [1] What percentage of students
| had 95% or higher grade in high school?
|
| Waterloo: 8.1% (2010) vs 38.0% (2020)
|
| Western: 4.8% (2010) vs 25.0% (2020)
|
| [1]: https://uwaterloo.ca/performance-
| indicators/students/enterin...
|
| I got into Waterloo CS in 2012 with a 92% high school average.
| Pretty lucky.
| xg15 wrote:
| Meanwhile the comments below the article have already
| determined the unmistakable cause of the epidemic: Today's
| youth is just too coddled and the school environment is just
| not violent enough anymore.
|
| No further questions...
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > give teenagers a chance to actually live life
|
| You'd have to do it worldwide, though. Part of the reason my
| own teenage years were so (relatively) peaceful is because they
| took place in the late 80's, before globalization. I empathize
| with my own kids who've been on this treadmill since
| _kindergarten_ , but it's there because they're competing with
| kids from countries that have never had childhoods.
| e40 wrote:
| And the deteriorating job market when they get out. My son has
| struggled/struggles with this. I 100% understand and I would,
| too, if I were in his position. I compare his situation to mine
| and they are night and day. The prevailing sentiment when I was
| in college: get a degree (in anything) and you'll be OK if you
| want to work hard.
| nradov wrote:
| What deteriorating job market? Despite some recent high
| profile tech industry layoffs, the US unemployment rate is
| 3.4%. There are jobs available for those who want to work.
| They may have to move.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/yellen-you-dont-have-
| rece...
|
| A recent survey showed that most college students seriously
| overestimate their earnings potential. There is a mismatch in
| expectations. Students graduating with low-value degrees need
| to take whatever job they can get and work their way up.
|
| https://www.realestatewitch.com/college-graduate-
| salary-2022...
| e40 wrote:
| Yeah, that was badly phrased. I was replying too quickly.
|
| Yes, the job market has roared back in the last couple of
| years, but before that it was cooler. But, I should have
| mentioned other things besides jobs. The world is a pretty
| bleak place, in a lot of ways. Yeah, the cold war was
| always hovering about, but it was not really something that
| my peers really worried about.
| nradov wrote:
| The world is less bleak now than it has ever been in
| human history. If you zoom out and look beyond the news
| headlines we as a species are doing pretty well. Rates of
| extreme poverty are down worldwide and relatively few
| people are starving to death or being killed in wars.
|
| The world still has a lot of problems but let's be
| objective about the data instead of succumbing to
| defeatist narratives.
| browningstreet wrote:
| So many people here want to say, "That's not it, it's
| {something else}."
|
| Might be more fruitful to argue about a stack-rank of the
| things.
|
| But, as the father of a son who is a freshman in college at a
| Research 1 university, I'll say that his college experience so
| closely mirrors my enterprise organization work bullshit
| experience it's shocking. And he doesn't have a social media
| account or a mobile phone.
|
| So, my humble counter is: it's all of it. We've entered a peak
| bullshit culture moment in time. We throw a million negative
| and spurious cultural and professional expectations at young
| people and then couple that with the death of a reasonable
| middle class end-game, and then are shocked that so many of
| them, and the rest of us, are angry and unhealthy and
| impoverished in various "whole person" ways.
|
| (Not to mention climate change...)
| strangattractor wrote:
| IMHO peak BS is yet to come. Humans want to believe there is
| only one problem responsible for complex outcomes. Life seems
| simpler and understandable. Solutions consist of doing this
| or stopping that. The reality is much more complex and
| potential solutions always have consequences in addition to
| the ones desired. For me it always comes back to population.
| The population of the US (and planet) have more than doubled
| during my life time. Out psychological and social
| infrastructure that worked well for smaller groups of people
| has not scaled well.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You have an 18 year old son without a mobile phone?
|
| I would think it is at least needed for all the logins
| requiring SMS 2FA.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Yes.
|
| They gave him an iPad, but none of their systems use SSO of
| any kind.
|
| He doesn't really care for the iPad, doesn't have a mobile
| phone, and doesn't do social.
|
| He _does_ do Minecraft, KSP, and Davinci Resolve.
| officeplant wrote:
| I would assume at that point he's on other platforms like
| Discord/Telegram instead of the usual social networks.
|
| Or has a cheap prepaid plan and smart phone the parents
| will never know about.
| barking_biscuit wrote:
| Well then it must be Minecraft.
| Jun8 wrote:
| I have a son who's a sophomore (15 yo, second year in HS) and
| this comment absolutely rings true. He fences competitively (2
| HR training four times a week plus a few hrs with physical
| therapist) and his life pretty much consists of school,
| homework and sports.
|
| He has to be at school at 7:45am so gets up around 6am, goes to
| bed around 11am usually, so much for the 8 hrs of sleep per
| night!
|
| And he hasn't even started the college death March yet.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Serious question(s):
|
| 1. Why does he have to fence competitively? Is it not merely
| a choice/preference?
|
| 2. Same question but for any sports.
|
| As for college, what is he/you aspiring to? Is it some
| average university like Oklahoma State University or
| something like UCLA?
|
| I've yet to see evidence that it is hard/competitive to get
| into the former. And while people who go to highly ranked
| schools do have a minor advantage, it is fairly slight. I've
| been to both types of schools, so I have an idea.
| zabzonk wrote:
| 11 pm to 7 am (say) looks like 8 hours sleep to me.
|
| why does he _have_ to do anything you say he _has_ to do?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Not OP, but I think I get what you mean - my own son, who
| just started college, went through the same grind and
| honestly had been on it since elementary school. So
| technically, no, nobody _has_ to do this stuff, and in
| reality there 's a low ROI for most of it. My son (chose
| to) do a lot of extracurriculars to fluff up his college
| application in the hopes of getting into an MIT or a
| Stanford... and still didn't get in. He could have gotten
| away with doing a lot less than he did and still would have
| ended up in the same (good) state school he ended up in.
| But kids in affluent areas are surrounded by suggestions
| that you _do_ have to do this stuff to get into a "good"
| school, so they get caught up in it.
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| > around 11am usually
|
| presumably 11pm.
|
| School, homework, and sports. But what is he missing? Are you
| saying there is zero time for - hanging out with friends -
| going on outings with the family (skiing or to the movies) -
| self-directed activities - walking, photography, church
| groups, getting a job
|
| ?
|
| If you're saying there's ZERO time for those things, I find
| it hard to believe. Weekends there is no school. The days are
| not consumed with training and homework, I guess.
|
| When I was in HS, my mother strongly encouraged me to engage
| in competitive sports to keep me away from the neighborhood
| crew. Most days that meant a 530am alarm clock, 615am in the
| pool, and after-school workouts too. So more like 3.5 hrs
| daily. Then a nap before dinner, then homework. Keeping busy
| with structured activities kept me out of trouble. The
| control group, my brother, got in lots more trouble than I
| did.
|
| I had time for friends and self-directed activities,
| especially off season.
| nineplay wrote:
| I agree that this is a serious issue. I know 3 kids who
| graduated in 2019 and got into top universities. Three years
| later
|
| -- One flatly refused to leave home despite a lot of pushing
| from their parents. They are working at the local theater and
| taking community college courses here and there with no real
| future plans or goals
|
| -- One also decided to go to CC, with her parent's support this
| time. She's 21, just got married, and has decided to be a vet
| tech with the anticipation of being a SAH wife and mother.[0]
|
| -- One went to a top university and had a mental breakdown
| earlier this year - going back home and almost refusing to get
| out of bed or eat. Fortunately(?) this happened over a 4 week
| winter break, and with support from her parents and a
| prescription for anti-depressants she is back in school.
|
| Not very inspiring outcomes. I personally think that the
| pressure from high school really ended up convincing them that
| they never wanted to work that hard again.
|
| [0] I don't want to look down on women who wish to become
| SAHMs, but I think it's terribly short-sighted to make that
| decision at 21 and give up on pursuing a "real" career.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| > I don't want to look down on women who wish to become
| SAHMs, but I think it's terribly short-sighted to make that
| decision at 21 and give up on pursuing a "real" career.
|
| Certainly it requires a lot of trust and commitment, but I
| wouldn't call it short-sighted. It's risky, but if you do
| find a good spouse, it's not like you're missing out on
| anything (my wife is a SAHM and has never had nor wanted a
| career).
|
| To me people that go to grad school and take on tons of debt,
| only to be in a position to try to start having kids in their
| late 30s/early 40s seem a lot more short-sighted. I watched
| some consumer interviews while I was at my last employer. The
| market segment we were interviewing were very high achieving
| people, but some of them were 38+ and saying they're thinking
| about having kids soon; there's like a 25% chance that ship
| has already sailed, even ignoring the reality of being almost
| 60 when they graduate from high school.
|
| I suppose it comes down to knowing what you want out of life
| and what will bring you satisfaction with the time you've
| got.
| nineplay wrote:
| I don't trust a 21 year old to know if they've found a good
| spouse. I don't trust anyone to know if they've found a
| good spouse which is why I'd tell everyone, male or female,
| to have a career they can fall back to if something happens
| to their marriage. It might not just be a bad spouse, it
| might be a spouse who dies young and then a woman with
| multiple kids and a 10 year old vet tech degree has to
| figure out how on earth she's going to support herself.
| Life insurance only lasts so long.
|
| I'm old enough to have seen a lot of young happy couples
| turn into divorced bitter singles and I can't speak to the
| average experience but in my circle, the women end up
| screwed. They've got the kids, ( the ex wanted nothing to
| do with the kids ) they've got no income ( the ex either
| has no money or is fighting tooth and nail to avoid sending
| any money ) and they are living off of parents, friends,
| and social services trying to find some job they can do
| part time ( no daycare ) that has a hope of supporting
| them.
|
| Some of these women stayed in bad circumstances for a long
| time because they knew how hard it would be to manage
| without their spouse. Some women are still in terrible
| circumstances because they can't afford to leave.
|
| > some of them were 38+ and saying they're thinking about
| having kids soon; there's like a 25% chance that ship has
| already sailed,
|
| 25% is nonsense.
| kitsune_ wrote:
| You're making the mistake of extrapolating from your own
| personal experience.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Yeah... there's nothing wrong with growing up with a bit of a
| bubble, but yikes by 24 you'd think this person would start
| to be aware that their experience wasn't exactly universal
|
| As other comments pointed out, a large portion of society
| doesn't go to college, let alone "stress out about
| extracurriculars to make sure my app looks extra good"
| WalterBright wrote:
| > break under this kind of pressure
|
| They aren't being drafted to go fight in Vietnam. The Russians
| aren't bombing our cities. The main health problem is eating
| too much food, not too little. Teens aren't even expected to
| have jobs anymore. (In my day, teens got jobs at 16.)
|
| My dad volunteered in WW2. He expected to die in combat, as his
| cohort had an 80% casualty rate. 4 out of 5. Every mission
| meant holes in the airplane, and you stayed on course and took
| it. When he returned home, he thought the concerns on the home
| front were trivial. After all, they were going to live another
| day.
|
| We live in a golden age in America.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| The vast majority of kids are not focused on college like you
| were, while that might have been a problem for you, that
| doesn't mean it is the problem.
| xeromal wrote:
| > I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant
| work that's necessary for the college admissions process.
|
| I have absolutely no data to back this up but a difficult
| college admission process isn't novel to 2012+. This is also
| ignores the plenty of kids/young adults that never went to
| college and still suffer from whatever this epidemic is.
|
| We'd need to review data for people who didn't go to
| undergrad/grad to see if your idea still holds truth.
| RangerScience wrote:
| * people who didn't try to go
|
| If stress from college prep is an issue, it's only people
| that weren't going through that who you'd want in the other
| bucket.
| carabiner wrote:
| 40% of high school students don't go to college (of any type).
| Of those, only a tiny portion are focused on elite
| universities. Many are just going to Long Beach State,
| University of Redlands and other 4 year schools that you've
| never heard of. They have lax admissions. Among adult
| Americans, only a third have bachelors degrees. Certainly the
| high pressure scholastic environment of certain high schools is
| not common.
| marmetio wrote:
| You can probably generalize and say that most teens stress
| about competing or despair about their prospects. I'd nitpick
| your use of stats, but I don't want to miss the forest for
| the trees.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _40% of high school students don 't go to college (of any
| type)._
|
| > _Among adult Americans, only a third have bachelors
| degrees_
|
| So clearly things _have_ been changing in recent decades. I
| wouldn 't be so quick to dismiss this as a factor.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| Having a bachelors degree and going to college are
| different things. You can go to college and not get a
| bachelors degree.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Going to college is not the same as graduating with a
| degree. A ton of people go to college for a time and leave
| with little more than a mountain of debt. Also, a bachelors
| degree is not even the least degree you can get from a
| university.
| magicalist wrote:
| Fair point, but that's not an argument that things aren't
| changing, just that they might not be.
|
| From a quick search:
|
| Between 2011 and 2021, the percentage of people age 25
| and older who had completed a bachelor's degree or higher
| increased by 7.5 percentage points from 30.4% to
| 37.9%[1].
|
| It would be helpful to get an attainment by age by year
| breakdown.
|
| And this still doesn't address the OP's hypothesis that
| part of the increase in mental health issues is due to
| increasing admissions pressure over the years, which many
| people have brought up anecdotally. Whether or not the
| majority of high schoolers experience that pressure
| doesn't imply that it still couldn't be part of the
| problem (which also, incidentally, isn't experienced by a
| majority of high schoolers).
|
| [1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-
| releases/2022/educatio...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| eikenberry wrote:
| You forget the cost of "just" those state universities still
| requires many students to get scholarships to afford. So the
| pressure is not just about getting into a good university,
| for many it is being able to go at all.
| sizzle wrote:
| Most Cal States fit this criteria, but a lot end up at top
| companies. It's really all on the student and going to get
| advanced degrees helps.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Where did this 40% come from and is it lumping in all
| generations or just Gen-Z?
|
| I found this source that may or many not be authoritative
| that says 57% of Gen-Z is attending college, furthermore I
| have heard from the grapevine that Gen Z has been pushed more
| into STEM than any other generation.
|
| [1]:https://timely.md/blog/generation-z-college-
| students/#:~:tex....
|
| [2]:https://thejournal.com/articles/2022/06/21/stem-fields-
| are-t...
|
| Personally as a developer that is overseeing hiring, I see
| more and more Gen-Z people coming into the pipeline in
| greater numbers. Looking at my alma mater(public state level
| engineering college) the CS dept is exploding. When I
| attended in 06, it was more of a snoozefest.
|
| But this is one datapoint and probably biased. It just seems
| like every Gen-Z I encounter(im a millenial) seems very
| pragmatic and cynical in their choices and that may be
| leading to more practical career choices like STEM.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Hate to be that guy[1], but this does not refute the comment
| you're replying to.
|
| 1. There may be more than one important explanation.
|
| 2. Your data doesn't provide any information relevant to the
| evaluation of the hypothesis.
|
| 3. Many of the students at non-elite universities, however
| you define that term, are the ones that were not successful
| in their quest to go to an elite university. That's why the
| acceptance rate is so low. Those students would be the most
| likely to be affected by changes in the competitiveness of
| college admissions in the wake of the Great Recession, not
| the ones that were successful.
|
| 4. "Certainly the high pressure scholastic environment of
| certain high schools is not common." This is conjecture. It
| does not seem plausible that it is "not common".
|
| [1] Not really, but I'm supposed to say that.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Even if someone isn't going to an elite university, they may
| need to compete for scholarships, admission to selective
| programs (e.g. nursing), etc.
|
| It is also possible that some people competed for selective
| programs but failed to get in.
|
| Finally, it's possible that even people who didn't
| realistically need or want to get into a selective program
| still feel a social expectation that they keep up with those
| who do.
| loeg wrote:
| > Among adult Americans, only a third have bachelors degrees
|
| Sure, but this is very skewed by older Americans having low
| rates of degrees. A lot more than 33% of current American 24
| year-olds have Bachelors degrees. And that more accurately
| reflects the expectations on teenagers than low rates of
| degrees among Boomers.
| MisterPea wrote:
| For 4-year college, the enrollment number is 31% for 2020.
| Total enrollment including 2-year is 40%. The total number
| of actual graduates is probably slightly less than this.
|
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cpb/college-
| enrol...
| hector_vasquez wrote:
| In the U.S., around 86% of kids graduate high school[1],
| around 63% of high school graduates go to 4-year
| colleges[2], and around 64% of them graduate within 6
| years[3].
|
| By that logic around 35% of 24-year-old Americans have
| bachelor degrees. More than a third, but not by much.
|
| [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/coi/high-
| school-g... [2] https://educationdata.org/college-
| enrollment-statistics [3]
| https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40
| loeg wrote:
| You don't have to reverse engineer it from first
| principles; the rate is rising over time: https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/File:Educational_Attainment_in...
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Difference groups in the US face different pressures. Few
| people have it easy. I think it would be difficult to come to
| one answers. Some thoughts:
|
| GROUP A - growing population, roughly same number of "top"
| universities, resulting in ridiculous competition and
| pressure to succeed. Getting into Harvard 2012 <> Getting
| into Harvard 1972.
|
| GROUP B - working class. super hard. income barely grows but
| rents and costs grow faster. You're squeezed between two
| walls and it gets tighter each year. You work more only to
| stay afloat. Eventually you can only work 24hrs a day. Feels
| like my parents' life in 1980.
|
| GROUP C - already doing well because dad is a CEO. But
| because of income earning potential inequality, the top 0.01%
| makes 20x as much as 0.1%, hence brutal pressure to make it
| into upper-upper-echelon. Cry me a river, i get it.
|
| GROUP D - Immigrant. immigration is harder. lines are longer.
| there is nationalism and racism. You work hard, but feel
| trapped by the system, even if you're doing OK income-wise.
|
| GROUP E...F...G...
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| You're going to get a bias in here because a lot of folks are
| STEM focused / high achieving high anxiety types :)
| [deleted]
| carabiner wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. There are tons of schools outside of this
| that still shape kids into productive members of society,
| even if non-elite. Places like University of New Haven
| (acceptance rate 94%, founded 1920), Central Washington
| University (88%, 1891), Western Washington University (96%,
| 1886), Stetson University in Florida... The list goes on.
| The vast of US college students attend these decent and
| non-selective schools.
| mouse_ wrote:
| I guarantee most of these "high achieving high anxiety
| types" live with significantly less anxiety than customer
| service reps/bag handlers/food service workers.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| You are talking in terms of externalities.
|
| Anxiety is an internal response that can be expected to
| be different for different individuals under the same
| circumstances.
|
| Trying to judge whether or not another individual "ought
| to" experience anxiety in a given situation is a matter
| of opinion and it has no bearing on what the other person
| is experiencing.
| matwood wrote:
| I've done waiting/service type jobs. For me, the stress
| during the work period was way higher than anything in my
| software/business jobs. But, every night when I got off
| work, the stress was immediately gone. That shift was
| over, and the tomorrow really was new day. With my office
| jobs the max stress is lower, but it also never really
| goes away.
| officeplant wrote:
| This is it. I never took home stress from any previous
| job until I got an office job. (AutoCAD Draftsman for
| Fire/Gas Industrial systems).
|
| My life as a radioshack wage slave began and ended when I
| clocked in and out. If something was fucked when we left
| the previous night that was tomorrows problem. It's
| retail, no one is being paid enough to truly care.
|
| Doing contract work for engineers who are willfully
| ignorant of fire code causes me lasting stress in my
| soul.
|
| Either way the biggest stress is still financial and I'll
| stop stressing about that when I'm dead.
| tdesilva wrote:
| Why do you think that?
| rfrey wrote:
| Because most of us can afford food for our families, even
| in the last week of the month.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Yeah. I did a decade where that wasn't the case. Poverty
| is longer and harder in southern states.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| None of them make six figures while browsing HN
| ipaddr wrote:
| Those browsing HN still have sprint deadlines. Browsing
| HN creates more stress.
|
| Or keep online 24 hours or spend the night mentally
| trying to solve an abstract issue. At 5pm they are done.
|
| Different stresses / pressures. How many are learning a
| new language in their freetime just to keep employed. How
| many people create side projects to land employment at a
| coffee shop?
|
| To compare employment how many coffee shops test if an
| employee can make a cup during the interview? How many
| people are excluded from an interview because they only
| made starbucks coffee at a previous position.. no way
| they can figure out McDonalds coffee machines.. How many
| are asked to go through a take home coffee making task?
| None..
| panzagl wrote:
| How many developers clock out then go to the second job
| they need to make rent?
| api wrote:
| Nurses. Lots of people around here would be in tears
| after attempting that job for a day.
| jahsome wrote:
| Do you honestly see value in comparing scars? Does that
| matter in any meaningful way?
|
| The worst stress of someone's life is the worst stress of
| their life. It's unproductive and petty to bicker about
| who has it worse.
|
| If life is stressful for anyone, regardless of status,
| title, age, etc. there's a good chance it's undeserved.
|
| The takeaway is to treat people better, not dismiss their
| stressors as less significant.
| nradov wrote:
| I honestly see value in having scars, both the physical
| and mental varieties. Scars create resilience. We saw
| this during the recent pandemic. The upper-middle class
| "high achieving, high anxiety" types who had never faced
| any real danger or hardship were the most likely to panic
| and demand all sorts of ridiculous lockdowns and
| mandates, even though the vast majority of them were
| never at any significant risk. Whereas blue-collar
| workers and those accustomed to engaging in physically
| dangerous activities were generally much more sanguine
| and level-headed about the whole thing.
|
| Some people just need to harden the f*** up and quit
| catastrophizing every little thing.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I don't think that's why the upper middle class demanded
| lock downs and blue collar didn't. I think the driver was
| financial stability. Upper middle class likely has a nice
| emergency fund and could do their job from home.
| Essentially a nice vacation. Blue collar workers got to
| choose between welfare and starving.
| nradov wrote:
| The blue-collar construction workers and farmers that I
| know all thought the lockdowns were stupid and ignored
| the rules. Financial stability or lack thereof was not
| the reason.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| The blue collar workers reward for their scar induced
| mindset was to go back to work. White collar workers in
| large part were able to parlay the lock down into
| permanent work from home.
|
| Perhaps it's not scars and just the ability to make
| lemonade when given lemons?
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Oddly, I think the population density will turn out to be
| a factor. Son was in Laramie for most of it and the early
| strains of Covid didn't do much there, I suspect because
| people were farther apart over unit of time.
|
| Rather than being in a cube farm with the A/C recycling
| the air over and over.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| >> Some people just need to harden the f** up and quit
| catastrophizing every little thing.
|
| You assume that this is simply a matter a making a
| decision and acting on it -- which for you may be true.
|
| There are others that will find this difficult-to-
| impossible to achieve regardless of their intellectual
| desire to change. Their experience of anxiety may not be
| a result of "catastrophizing" or "being soft."
| wara23arish wrote:
| Im not trying to be argumentative, but at that point is
| this behavior worth encouraging?
|
| I guess whose fault is it but their own? We can all blame
| our upbringing and it definitely does affect us, but how
| else can you change the cycle without telling someone to
| snap out of it ?
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| There is no evidence that scars are an inherently better
| tissue than non injured tissue. Torn ligaments, cut
| tendons, skin marring from burns, etc... these don't
| bounce back 110% from their original.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Scars innately look different from healthy tissue. The
| lessons learned in response of trauma can likewise be
| maladaptive. Certainly people, especially those most
| self-isolated during the pandemic, could use more contact
| with the so-called "real world." But not everything
| formed as part of resilience is as it should be.
| brookst wrote:
| The parent comment was asserting that STEM types are
| "high anxiety" and implicitly dismissing non-STEM people
| as somehow having less anxiety. I think it is fair and
| healthy to acknowledge that, as you say, everyone has
| "the worst stress of their life", regardless of STEM-
| ness.
| LeroyRaz wrote:
| I interpreted the comment differently. I thought it was
| saying that the pressures and anxieties of 'high anxiety'
| STEM people are not necessarily representative of the
| average person's experience. I.e. saying that the readers
| of hacker news are more likely to feel the stresses of
| feeling the need to be hyper successful, whereas others
| migh on average be more well adjusted
| jibe wrote:
| I don't think it dismissed non-stem people, but there is
| plenty of data supporting anxiety correlates with
| intelligence. It is not surprising that HN is an anxious
| group.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3269637/
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Our new cultural leaders have convinced everyone to out-
| victim everyone else. The more of a victim you are the
| better.
| mouse_ wrote:
| Do you honestly not see how your own narrative could be
| seen as dismissive to the vast majority of the world? And
| yes, I do see value in comparing scars, as do most people
| who do not reside in the high tower. I understand the
| social rift between you and I is comparable to living on
| a different planet, and I forgive you for not getting
| that, but others may not. Please just understand that our
| current situation is particularly perilous and likely
| will not last long. I hope you are prepared and able to
| cope with greater stressors.
| fjdiemsloien wrote:
| What's the worst stress you've ever experienced?
|
| What's the worst stress the person you're replying to has
| ever experienced?
|
| I'm very curious about how you know so much about the
| parent commenter's life compared to your own.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| The physical experience and effects of enduring a
| stressful environment is the same for everyone regardless
| of who they are, where they're from, or what they are
| doing.
|
| An equivalent high stress environment can occur whether
| working in an executive office, working in a call center
| or selling bracelets on the street.
|
| Learning to overcome high stress experiences is a
| transferrable skill regardless of the context in which it
| was learned.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > An equivalent high stress environment can occur whether
| working in an executive office, working in a call center
| or selling bracelets on the street.
|
| This doesn't necessarily mean an equivalent high-stress
| life. The call center employee has fewer or worse options
| for dealing with stressors outside their job which they
| share with the executive.
|
| > I need to eat.
|
| > I need to travel.
|
| > I need somewhere to live.
|
| By and large these things cost money and the person who
| doesn't have to worry about having enough money for such
| things is going to have less stress in their life.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > our current situation is particularly perilous
|
| How so?
| derefr wrote:
| Taboo the word "anxiety" here -- you're using it to mean
| "environmental stressors" while the GP is using it to
| mean "a psychological trait of not dealing well with such
| stressors, due to a higher baseline feeling of stress,
| and/or a magnified experience of stressors."
|
| Compare/contrast: "living in exurban Detroit is
| _depressing_ " (= has many environmental depressors) vs
| "poets are usually _depressives_ " (= depressive
| disorders being common among people who choose to become
| poets.)
|
| We use different words (most of the time) for these two
| things when speaking of depression, but often aren't so
| careful with anxiety.
| atlgator wrote:
| As someone who got started as a bag handler at Winn
| Dixie, I can tell you I'm a lot more stressed out now
| managing a career than I ever was working a "job."
| [deleted]
| lubesGordi wrote:
| As this sort of argument always boils down to privilege,
| I'll throw my two cents in and say probably the biggest
| privilege (for a regular ass middle class person) is
| having a parent who knows math.
| nluken wrote:
| A good point that exposes some major bias behind my anecdote.
| With that said, if these expectations start at elite schools
| and slowly trickle down, would that not cause a rise in the
| aggregate across all teenagers over time?
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| "Trickle down" isn't necessarily a good mental model here.
| Maybe the high achieving types from across the country and
| world are increasingly concentrating their attention into
| admission to a few top universities. So the max effort
| expended by the top students may be increasing, but the
| median effort could be unchanged or dropping.
| imbnwa wrote:
| > and slowly trickle down
|
| Seems like a strong assumption that it _necessarily_ does
| splash damage beyond a certain cohort. I went to a public
| HS of 4K in the 00s only AP Juniors /Seniors were concerned
| with this kind of thing and AP kids were only friends with
| other AP kids (for obvious reasons); I'd doubt that've
| changed by 2012.
| Khelavaster wrote:
| Many badly-envisioned schools restrict access to AP
| classes or even AP tests, instead of letting kids follow
| their passions and meeting demand.
| asdffdsa wrote:
| I think this is mistaken; there was a lot of pressure in
| the 10s for AP classes
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| At your school, sure. Not at the one I taught at in the
| 10s. And from knowing other teachers then, I'd guess the
| pressure was high at only one, _maybe_ two, of the six
| high schools in the area.
| nabakin wrote:
| > I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant
| work that's necessary for the college admissions process.
|
| If this was true, you'd expect there to be a similar trend
| between Major Depression and college admissions. The data
| doesn't seem to show that[1][2]
|
| [1] https://educationdata.org/wp-
| content/uploads/74/Historical-C...
|
| [2] http://substack-post-
| media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/a6...
|
| Most teenagers don't stress over college admissions in my
| experience. The top like 30% academically successful teens
| probably do, but I believe this effect is seen across teenagers
| of all groups
| ethanbond wrote:
| Presuming people who aren't stressed about college admissions
| aren't instead stressed about _not_ going to college and
| having extremely stunted career prospects.
| [deleted]
| psychlops wrote:
| Here we go, everyone gets to share their stress story. Time to
| filter all comments that start with "I..."
| [deleted]
| partiallypro wrote:
| I think this is your personal anecdote and there isn't much to
| support it, but I do think, separate from college, that kids
| simply just can't be kids today. There is social, political and
| academic pressure that just didn't exist when most of us were
| growing up. I think the pandemic made it much worse.
| purpleblue wrote:
| My son is 10 and is naturally accelerated across many subjects
| (12th grade proficiency in ELA, 9th grade proficiency in Math,
| talented in music, writing, etc).
|
| We have been actively indoctrinating our kids with the idea
| that college is not the be-all-end-all, that they should NOT
| apply for Ivy schools, 3rd tier schools are very good and if
| they want to go abroad or even eschew college altogether, we
| will support them. I've seen the effects that college
| admissions have on kids, especially in schools like Gunn and
| Palo Alto high in the Bay Area. Children committing suicide
| because they screw up a test is disgusting.
|
| There is NO WAY I'm letting my kids go through that mental
| hell. And from some of the TikTok videos I've seen, you can
| dedicate your entire life to having a top application (sports,
| grades, extra curricular activities) and still get completely
| rejected by all Tier 1 schools. I won't allow my children to go
| through that just to be subjected to the whims of a racist,
| capricious admissions board.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| To be a good parent is to sacrifice your child's future like
| a pawn to save the queen of your own moral grandstanding.
| zabzonk wrote:
| you do know that "indoctrinating" is not a positive thing to
| do?
| tom_ wrote:
| I hope you remind your children not to believe everything
| they see on social media.
| rychco wrote:
| Completely agree with this opinion. Teens expected to attend
| college are under tremendous admissions pressure. You don't
| even realize how much more difficult it gets every year for
| them. For some students, nearly every waking moment is spent on
| something to fill an application/study/practice. While this
| itself isn't new, I'd wager that the number of students having
| this experience has grown tremendously.
|
| However, as someone who was in high school right when
| Facebook/Instagram became ubiquitous amongst teens, I can't
| emphasize enough how horrible the pressure of appealing to your
| peers was. There is a constant, deeply unsettling fear of being
| publicly shamed/embarrassed online at any time & for any
| reason. I am confident that this is still present & stronger
| than ever.
| waboremo wrote:
| Part of the distinction between why this process has been
| made harder is primarily due to finances. If you do not get a
| scholarship, you are expected to have a job. Not a good job
| either specifically crafted for 18 year olds so they can get
| used to work and also handle school properly. No, we throw
| them into the depths of dealing with ghoulish customers with
| no way to climb so of course they feel they have to go to
| school to get out. It's a self reinforcing cycle of pressure.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| You're in a bubble. It's nowhere near that hard to get into
| non-elite universities, which the vast majority of college-
| bound students attend. Just keeping your grades up and doing
| well on a standardized test will get you into a good (well-
| regarded in at least some fields, very well-known at least
| regionally) state school--and the ones in the next couple tiers
| under that are even more lax. Then there are community colleges
| --ask nicely and they'll probably let you in at least on a
| probational basis, even if your grades were incredibly bad in
| high school and you don't have much else going for you.
|
| And that's for the students that go at all.
|
| [EDIT] Incidentally, from tales told by my various teacher
| friends, the students who genuinely have _crazy-busy_ schedules
| are almost always the ones who are extremely into playing two
| or more sports. Even half-serious participation (so, maaaaybe
| gunning to play college ball, plus the mostly-delusional but
| fairly-common parental aspirations of having a pro-league kid)
| means being in a league that makes you travel a lot, and lots
| and lots of practice, _for each sport_ , plus extra training
| camps and shit like that. I believe tales of some schools where
| the students are stressed over academics and non-sports
| extracurriculars (plus the single requisite sport to keep
| Harvard from binning your application) but out in the vast
| reaches of non-elite America, only a few students have very-
| high schedule pressure, and most (not all, but most) of those
| are because of a strong focus on sports.
| nluken wrote:
| > You're in a bubble
|
| Yeah that seems evident from the breadth of replies I've
| gotten. Perhaps it's just one factor among many.
| wara23arish wrote:
| Im an immigrant that attended a community college,
| transferred to a "top 10 CS Uni".
|
| the CC didn't even acknowledge the school I went to exists so
| i just took some placement tests that landed me at Calc 1 etc
|
| most americans dont know how good they have it, sure things
| could be better but you're literally better off than most of
| the world no matter what class you're born in here
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I think community colleges are one of those under-
| appreciated _excellent_ institutions the US has (in
| addition to our institutions and systems that actually do
| kinda suck, compared to our peers, that get a lot more
| attention). They 're available just about everywhere that
| many people live, it's pretty easy to get them to give you
| a chance unless you have a _very_ recent history of being a
| committed academic screw-up--even if your history 's a bit
| unusual, or you've had some screw-ups farther in the past--
| and in a couple years you can establish a record that
| represents a big step toward achieving an at-least middling
| life outcome, while opening up access to the next steps.
|
| I hope the admissions process and the rest of it was still
| relatively painless, despite their not recognizing your
| school. I'm sure immigration itself was pretty unpleasant--
| sorry about that :-/
| woah wrote:
| Did you get into a good college or whatever?
| [deleted]
| johnfn wrote:
| I agree that the college admissions process is quite stressful,
| and we should take a critical look at it. But did it really
| only begin happening around 2012? Across all demographics? I
| don't think that this explanation really fits the data.
| waboremo wrote:
| It's also important to note that social media doesn't operate
| in isolation. We can blame social media all we want, but when
| we keep preferring candidates in the hiring process who have
| presentable social media, it's just amplified for teens. Now
| they have to keep up a grand social media presence, good
| grades, stay in physical shape, manage their changing family
| dynamics, get and hold a job, and their own internal systems
| changing on them.
|
| It's no wonder stress levels are peaking. We demand they carry
| immense burdens the second they're able to hold a full
| conversation, but without any of the freedoms associated with
| responsibility. Can't move out, can't afford help, so what do
| we really expect to happen when people are placed into such
| conditions?
|
| We place them under constant pressure, and act surprised that
| this pressure hurts. Why can't you be more like your sister
| who's doing good in school? Look at your cousin he got a job
| already and he's only 16. When you turn 18 you need to have
| your act together because I'm kicking you out. Endless pressure
| because we are unable to process our own feelings of
| insignificance, we just project it on kids all without the help
| of social media.
|
| The rising wealth inquality amplifies these problems more in
| every way.
|
| Social media gets a lot of negative attention but there's also
| a huge positive here. You can connect with others who get you
| and can maybe help you get through those unbearable days - they
| make it feel tolerable. And so for people to pin the blame
| entirely on social media, we're just going to cause so much
| more harm when we realize how many teens are out there that are
| only avoiding suicide marginally because of social media.
| tasspeed wrote:
| I only avoided suicide because of social media. I had no way
| to hang out with friends because my parents were always too
| busy working to take me places so I talked with my online
| friends to numb the pain.
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| It's sad that you depended on your parents for transport to
| your friends. Ideally a teenager would be able to walk or
| ride a bicycle to hang out with peers. Or take a bus. Did
| you live in a place where homes were very far apart?
| candiodari wrote:
| Societal acceptance of such dangerous activity has been
| dropping lately:
|
| https://reason.com/2023/01/30/dunkin-donuts-parents-
| arrested...
| iueotnmunto wrote:
| > Things only started getting better when I started seeing a
| therapist and worked on my issues over the second half of my
| high school experience.
|
| I'm curious, would you mind sharing how a therapist helped you?
| I'm in a similar (but not the same) space mentally, and put
| everything down to environmental issues (high pressure job,
| etc) and disregard the thought that a therapist could help with
| this (unless they had a time machine, etc).
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| therapy helps you develop efficient thinking ime. This is
| evaluating your emotions without added judgement, addressing
| problems without the added emotional burden of shame, and
| rapidly and genuinely accepting things (like past harm) that
| can't be inherently changed without the added agony of
| fighting yourself over it
| HEmanZ wrote:
| I understand your point, because I was the same. But I'm not
| sure our experience is a super common one among teens.
|
| Reason I think this now, is that I have volunteered at large
| local high schools for college admission help. There just
| aren't that many students who get pushed or push themselves
| like this. The majority in the US don't go to college, and the
| vast majority don't put in a stressful amount of effort into
| college/career prep and extra-curricular activities.
|
| I don't know what theory to replace it with, but I don't think
| the majority of the students in the US are overworked like
| this.
| codeslave13 wrote:
| Having a child that hit teens then and hindsight being 20/20.
| Crazy parents and social media i feel can be the root of the
| majority of. Really location specific and not the deciding
| factor but it laid a solid foundation for mental health issues
| even today.
|
| No citations or anything just my exp as a Dad.
| eecc wrote:
| very well said, although allow me to make a minor correction.
| Where you wrote
|
| "Today's society demands so much from adolescents for so little
| in return. "
|
| I would simply generalize to
|
| "Today's society demands so much from anyone for so little in
| return."
|
| There, perfect
| nradov wrote:
| Society doesn't demand anything. You're free to drop out and
| live in a van down by the river if you want.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| And many, many do.
| roundandround wrote:
| I don't agree. If you past the point where you are rising new
| potential and you have any income or some kind of right to
| income virtually nothing is expected of you. Kids in the
| mandatory school years face a fair amount of expectations in
| return for nothing tangible and only receive a smaller
| portion of the modern ultra conveniences.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Public school schoolwork is so easy. So is applying to a
| college. How is anyone stressed by it?
| neuronic wrote:
| This is a tad bit insensitive. I have excelled at public
| school for the first years, then there was a rough patch in
| life caused by parents which TANKED my grades and social life
| for years.
|
| I recovered and eventually got an excellent Master's degree
| in Bioinformatics but it is condescending to assume that
| everyone was dealt the same hand as you in life and that
| anything at all is fair.
|
| Maybe schoolwork isn't so easy if you're being abused by a
| parent once a week?
| candiodari wrote:
| I had some serious incidents in High School, mostly with
| other kids, and while my grades dropped, I never lost the
| ability to make up for weeks, sometimes months of doing
| nothing for school in a matter of hours.
|
| Didn't stop me from getting bad grades for those
| weeks/months and making stupid mistakes like not completing
| assignments and the like.
|
| It's _very_ easy. It 's just that in a
| depressed/anxious/... state people aren't capable of
| sustaining even the most basic levels of effort after a
| while. Frankly, I bet that if it was a lot harder, that
| would have helped me.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| For about 2.5 years starting in 2015 I was a high school
| teacher at a Title I (low income area) school. There was a lot
| of anxiety and depression -- obviously not far outside trends
| around that. Very, very few kids were doing extracurriculars
| beyond maybe one sport, or a part-time job for a minority of
| the juniors and seniors. The (very) few kids who were
| oversubscribed the way you were didn't seem to have a rate of
| anxiety or depression greater than their peers, and the
| greatest incidence seemed to be in the lowest-achieving
| students.
|
| Obviously this is anecdotal, and there can be multiple causes,
| but teaching gives you a lot of anecdotes and they don't seem
| to fit this narrative.
| nabakin wrote:
| This is my experience as well, having multiple relatives who
| have worked at Title 1 schools and going to public school
| myself which was on the poverty side of things.
| wirrbel wrote:
| Coincidentally 2012 is IIRC the year I bought (then a
| university student) my first smart phone. IIRC when doing my
| abroad term overseas the american students all had smartphones
| in like 2010, I think most where on plans that provided
| smartphones eventually.
|
| So I would not be surprised if smartphones are part of the
| reason for a poor state of mental heath.
| nixass wrote:
| I feel like this is because school, especially college, and
| particularly exams, is about as high-stakes as most people's
| lives ever get, so they look back at that time as peak-anxiety.
| Think about it: you're being evaluated and the result of that
| evaluation shapes the next step in the pipeline, and ultimately
| the trajectory of the rest of your life! Well, at least that's
| what the university officials, professors, your peers and
| parents all tell you. You pretty much have a series of "one
| chance" events that you must pass or you're done for. Failure
| of any step is permanent, and affects your average (seemingly)
| forever.
|
| The whole path from elementary school through to college
| graduation feels like a career development game where the
| stakes are raised every year. Fail once off the path, and it's
| Walmart Greeter for you, forever! It's no wonder I still wake
| up in a cold sweat over it, 30 years on.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| sounds like the process of becoming a civil servant in
| imperial china.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
|
| > During the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), authorities narrowed
| the content down to mostly texts on Neo-Confucian orthodoxy;
| the highest degree, the jinshi (Chinese: Jin Shi ), became
| essential for the highest offices. On the other hand, holders
| of the basic degree, the shengyuan (Sheng Yuan ), became
| vastly oversupplied, resulting in holders who could not hope
| for office. Wealthy families, especially from the merchant
| class, could opt into the system by educating their sons or
| by purchasing degrees. During the late 19th century, some
| critics within Qing China blamed the examination system for
| stifling scientific and technical knowledge, and urged for
| some reforms. At the time, China had about one civil
| licentiate per 1000 people. Due to the stringent
| requirements, there was only a 1% passing rate among the two
| or three million annual applicants who took the exams.[3]
| coredog64 wrote:
| Something to consider is that many European countries
| aggressively track students in conjunction with that
| free/cheap college. As a consequence, failing during early
| education can put them onto the vocational track much earlier
| than you'd see for a U.S. student.
| strangattractor wrote:
| We need to stop knocking vocational programs in the US IMO.
| College has a learning modality that is not well suited for
| everyone. I wish I could find the Youtube video but there
| is a German Manufacturer of CNC machines in the US. Their
| apprentice program looked excellent/fun. The students were
| building electric bikes and motors - learning undergraduate
| level electronics in a hands one fashion - using CAD - then
| milling the parts out on a multimillion dollar machines.
| Mostly learning by doing. Getting paid to do so and would
| likely have a job when finished.
|
| In the US there is a perception that the vocational or
| trades route mean failure. We tend to think of trades as an
| expense, dangerous or someone that works on an assembly
| line. Some people just get bored sitting in a classroom.
| brewtide wrote:
| 100%. Stuff that needs done, will still need done and a
| lot of it is going to be difficult to robot away.
|
| The trades have never been busier, and all the different
| trades I see at different job sites have the 30 whatever
| being the young person.
|
| Not only are they in demand, but can pay pretty decently
| as well, plus have directly applicable individual life
| uses, causing most of us tradesmen to spend very little $
| maintaining our own things (cars, houses, etc).
|
| Go to college, awesome. Or learn to use your hands and do
| something well, awesome.
|
| The stuck in retail / service middle ground seems to be
| the hardest path in life, and obviously so very
| subjective, but I'd find that long term path not very
| internally rewarding, either.
| itronitron wrote:
| Yeah, probably the main reason that US high schools seem to
| perform worse than other countries is that the US doesn't
| kick students out in middle school.
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| > It's very easy to think that you're a failure if you don't
| know exactly who you are and what you want to be at age 17
|
| I'm 26 (almost 27, so let's say 27) and I think this echoes my
| experience fairly well. I felt like a failure because I didn't
| get into the top schools for undergrad even though I struggled
| so hard and objectively had good stats that I (at the time)
| thought would've made me a compelling/competitive applicant.
| Varsity athlete, played instrument, loads of APs and top of my
| class, yadayadayadayadayada.
|
| I think the evolution of the college application process and
| the perpetual rising bar has definitely affected teens mental
| health. Anecdotal but I experienced pressure to do well from
| peers, the school, and my own family.
| vkk8 wrote:
| Anecdotally, I was (as probably many here were) ahead of the
| curve in digital devices usage when I started hanging out in IRC
| and various web forums as a teenager in early 2000s. At some
| point I noticed that just using computers induced some amount of
| anxiety compared to "old tech"; whenever there was some period of
| time when I used my computer less (like christmas, vacations,
| etc.) and joined back to the "world of the normal people", I felt
| much calmer and happier. Even though I noticed this, it was
| difficult to log off during normal times since most of my life
| was in the internet.
|
| Now everyone is using digital devices all the time and the
| "normal people world" has ceased to exist. Also almost everyone
| is anxious and/or depressed. I think this is not a coincidence.
| However, I do not think that this is due to social media per se,
| but using digital devices for anything (social media being just
| the reason why most people use them).
|
| My theory is that just using digital devices for _anything_ is
| somewhat stressful; you have to keep the eyes focused all the
| time (Can you think of other activities that require this? There
| aren 't many and they are all somewhat stressful), you have to
| navigate all the various applications and menus, you have to
| occasionally solve minor problems that you run into when using
| the devices, etc.
|
| Using digital devices is the same for your brain as heavy,
| repetitive physical labour is to your body; in small amounts it
| might even be healthy, but several hours every day is going to
| destroy your body/mind.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| > My theory is that just using digital devices for anything is
| somewhat stressful
|
| I don't know, talking to the government and figuring out stuff
| about your taxes or health coverage over the internet is soooo
| much less stressful than if I have to call, or worse, go there
| in person, wait an hour, and have to talk to someone who really
| doesn't want to solve my problem.
|
| I can now pay my property taxes online and know it's done,
| instead of sending them a letter and hoping for the best,
| that's such an improvement.
| narag wrote:
| I have another hunch: that working as a programmer, and maybe
| with computers in general, is anxiety-inducing. As Campbell put
| it, computers are like old testament gods: lots of rules and no
| mercy.
| dkn775 wrote:
| Exactly, everything (outside some probability (which is still
| a discrete decision point) comes to 0 and 1. I am a big
| believer of the core assumptions in any system having
| outsized effects in practice
| gnramires wrote:
| > Can you think of other activities that require this?
|
| Well, reading books (and other documents). I also am suspicious
| of screens (and specially spending too much time on them... I'm
| certainly guilty), but the existence of books is somewhat
| confusing in this regard. However, I really don't think the
| population as a whole was reading quite as many books/documents
| as we today use digital devices or social media. That could be
| cutting into other things, like sun exposure, exercising,
| perhaps face-to-face social relationships, social support
| networks.
|
| Something I've noticed since about that time as well is a
| growing unease and pessimism with our collective future (and
| even present!). Some things are bleak (like climate change,
| uncertainty with technologies, etc.), but there's a sense of
| little hope that definitely should have an impact on the youth.
| I remember the 90s as a quite hopeful time and that definitely
| had an impact on my mood. My personal contribution would be
| spreading more hope about life.
|
| My favorite author w.r.t. this right now that I recommend is
| Jane Goodall:
|
| https://bookwyrm.social/book/391141/s/the-book-of-hope
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > Something I've noticed since about that time as well is a
| growing unease and pessimism with our collective future (and
| even present!).
|
| This is why I like movies and stories about the world coming
| together to overcome great difficulties. Like Pacific Rim,
| for instance. I'd love to hear more stories like that, no
| matter how far-fetched. I'd especially like to get some of
| the pariah states (North Korea, Iran) to be welcomed in for
| some more team high-fives. We really do need optimistic
| visions of the future to keep us going.
| andai wrote:
| Growing up in the 2000s I remember there was much more
| excitement and optimism for the future. Now it seems to range
| from cynicism to dread to abject paranoia. Or perhaps my
| liberal use of cannabis in my younger years shifted me into a
| more paranoid timeline... alas!
|
| Re: books being less stressful, I think e-ink is a great
| example. It feels more solid, more permanent, even though the
| text changes when you swipe the page. It seems to be a
| combination of the "paper" look making it seem less virtual
| (than the blinkenlights matrix), and the impossibility of
| scrolling on e-ink making it by necessity a more calming
| medium.
|
| Real books are even better, of course, in both regards, but
| can't compete on price / delivery time.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| I think it's the connectivity of the digital devices that is
| specifically at fault, and that offline-only digital devices
| wouldn't cause this. At any moment, my phone or computer may
| deliver unwelcome news to me. My boss asking me about some work
| shit, my family with some sort of unwelcome sad news, or
| whatever. In the past these would have been relatively mundane
| stresses, but now there is a social expectation that everybody
| be attentive to incoming communications at all times. You get
| at most a few hours a night where people don't expect you to
| respond, but even then sometimes they forget about timezones
| and freak out when they don't get a prompt response. There is
| never any real reprieve and it's starting to seem like this
| represents a permanent cultural shift.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Ugh, I guess it varies from person but for me (nearly?) every
| human contact is somewhat stressful, even watching humans
| interact can be very stressful. Using devices is downright
| bliss and calmness in comparison. I'm so happy when I see
| people interacting with their devices. I feel they are more
| like me and I feel safer with them than with people who don't.
| macspoofing wrote:
| Social media, and smart phones are partially (or even largely
| responsible) ... However I wouldn't discount 'social contagion'
| as a contributing factor since 2012 was around the time focus on
| "mental health" (specifically focusing on 'mental health' and
| related issues) came into wide prominence, especially amongst the
| younger crowd.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Right around when Obama was elected again and the Mayan calendar
| predicted.
|
| But I am partial to his conclusion. For what it's worth, I am
| diagnosed with a half dozen mental illnesses, but if I'm being
| honest I just memorized the DSM-V criteria and appropriately
| played along and I have a bunch of prescriptions. I never use
| them, but it's nice to know I can get amphetamine and ketamine
| whenever I want.
|
| America requires you to play sick to do certain things. So I can
| play sick. I wonder if the kids have found this loophole too.
| They're usually smarter than us adults and have less wisdom, so
| probably.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8JtnUpkP0s
| kderbyma wrote:
| 2012 was a major shift in culture. Major hacks, social media,
| phone culture, the beginning of the 'scandals', globalisation was
| on full tilt, people had never really moved along from occupy
| movement, and this was when corporations decided to just feign
| support to avoid getting targetted. I think this was the wokening
| across the culture which came hand in hand with mental health
| crisis.
| [deleted]
| kneebonian wrote:
| Interestingly enough there was another major shift that
| happened in 2012, some say in reaction to the Occupy Wall
| Street movement.
|
| https://tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net/production/ca8d4b10f55ed...
| kpennell wrote:
| If you're interested in learning more about Jon Haidt's work -
| Tim Ferriss and Malcolm Gladwell both have great interviews with
| him.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elo89pPREYE
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGTS9vZFV2o
| zug_zug wrote:
| This article is great because it looks at the self-harm and
| suicide data, which is pretty compelling.
|
| Obviously everybody's willingness to talk about their issues has
| gone up, but perhaps something else is happening too.
|
| It's already scientifically concluded that sperm counts and
| testosterone is down (for better or worse) [just google scholar
| it for journal articles], and one correlate of low testosterone
| is worse mood. So there would be precedent and reason to look for
| environmental causes.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| > sperm counts and testosterone is down (for better or worse)
|
| Sorry to nitpick but why did you qualify it "for better or
| worse"? It struck me as misandry. The implication being that
| masculine traits are bad and perhaps low sperm and testosterone
| is a good thing!
| frozenport wrote:
| Rather misanthropy?
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Misandry - from andro, meaning man (male)
|
| Misanthropy - from anthropos, meaning human
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think you're reading too much into that statement. The
| connection between masculine traits and t/sperm count is not
| 1:1. I think the obsession over testosterone levels and the
| implicit association between t levels and masculinity is far
| more damaging to men than the low t itself. See also:
| https://youtu.be/C8dfiDeJeDU?t=729
| hcurtiss wrote:
| The role of testosterone in the behavior of cattle or
| monkeys is obvious to any casual observer. I don't know why
| we try so hard to overlook it in humans. Like the GP, I
| don't view it as an objective negative, but there's
| definitely a reason 90+% of the humans in prison are males.
| And that's true in every culture across the entire planet.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Poverty is correlated with suicide rates, for obvious reasons:
|
| https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/poverty-may-have-a-greate...
|
| There was a notable increase in poverty rates after the 2008
| economic collapse, along with a decrease in home ownership and
| increased unemployment.
|
| https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...
|
| The fact that this article doesn't even mention this obvious
| contributing factor certainly undermines its thesis.
| anikan_vader wrote:
| Child poverty has declined significantly since both 2007 and
| 2012 (although they did rise momentarily after 2008).
| marcusverus wrote:
| The increase in poverty was pretty small (<5% over the recent
| average), disappeared by 2015 and the poverty rate has been
| generally trending down ever since.
|
| [0]
| https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
| scythe wrote:
| If poverty were a major contributing factor, it should be
| immediately obvious in terms of who's affected. The children of
| the professional-managerial class should be roughly exempt.
| What we see is in fact the opposite.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This is a good piece, with the author consciously examining their
| own biases and assumptions. I do think underdiagnosis is _an_
| issue; when I sought mental health treatment in an earlier
| period, there was a veritable line of people telling me I couldn
| 't be mentally ill because my clothes were clean and my sentences
| coherent.
|
| I think the author errs in not projecting his data far back
| enough into the past and looking for correlations with previous
| rises or falls. I agree that social media is probably a main
| driver; the ability to _receive_ mass communication at scale is
| not something the brain evolved for, and there 's a lot of
| maladaptive online behavior that doesn't show in these statistics
| but is nonetheless problematic. I'm honestly appalled by the
| pervasive tendency to rely on repetition of cliches in favor of
| original communication, for example.
|
| But I think there are other factors in play, like the 24-7 news
| cycle and deep political polarizations, both of which have a huge
| impact on adult behavior and create an unhealthy psychological
| environment in which kids have to operate.
| paulmd wrote:
| > I'm honestly appalled by the pervasive tendency to rely on
| repetition of cliches in favor of original communication, for
| example.
|
| Shaka, when the walls fell ;)
|
| honestly there's an interesting argument to be made there that
| memes and cliches provide a higher symbol density to our
| communications via shared context/subtext. A meme has
| additional layers of context and nuance that are implicitly
| carried along with the actual words themselves, it has higher
| "meaning-density".
|
| Whether or not you like them, this is how human communications
| are evolving, and have been for a long time, particularly as we
| reshape language around our new technologies. "lol" as an
| interjective is a tonality carrier, just like vocal tone.
| Emojis are short textual-form memes. Etc etc. Image memes as
| high-density multilayered communication are just another form.
|
| I mean half the time when I write out a longform comment, the
| response I get is "I ain't reading all that shit" even here on
| HN. ;). People just want higher symbol density, it's the same
| reason they don't read the article or watch the video. The
| human brain is a meaning-density machine and we inherently seek
| ways to increase the amount and preciseness of meaning-
| interchange. Higher meaning-density per symbol is a great way
| to do that given our physical limitations at processing more
| symbols.
|
| In ironic contrast to the rise of youtube-driven content
| production - I think people inherently crave symbol density and
| meaning. But since we've monetized attention, there's a
| perverse incentive to decrease symbol density/meaning-density
| to allow greater time for monetization... but I think that also
| rubs against what our brains want to do.
|
| In the aggregate, the way memes bounce around communities
| nowadays is also not dissimilar to a neural network working
| with higher-order objects instead of zeros and ones or floats.
| Memes that don't get passed between groups are the ones that
| are less relevant - so we have activation energy in some form,
| short-term storage, and cross-group linkage between neurons.
| And the memes are symbolic encodings of some groups of features
| (concepts). They are an emergent cluster of features that
| activates various groups reliably.
|
| Higher meaning-density is also the reason some people prefer
| face-to-face communication or phone calls. Things like facial
| expressions and tone of voice also increase meaning-density as
| well. People say things like "it's less ambiguous/more
| immediate" but I think that's _because of_ those sub-channels
| increasing the meaningfulness. And while meme culture /emojis
| isn't all good, maybe it's best viewed as replacing some of
| those sub-channels we lost in the shift from verbal to written
| communication rather than a regression to repetitive
| communication.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Temba; his arms wide.
|
| I agree with all of this, and I'm fond of memes myself. They
| are definitely an important sense-making tool. But there's a
| distinction that I can't quite articulate, between memes as
| shared shorthand, and cliches that are actually reflexes or
| performative gestures, but are meant to be processed by the
| recipient as original communication.
|
| As an extreme example, I used to know someone who was quite
| brilliant and would regularly make profound statements on a
| wide variety of topics, which he could explain in depth if
| needed. Some years after getting to be friends with this
| person, I wound up living with him for a few months and had
| access to his extensive library. I was surprised to discover
| how many of his profundities were actually quotations from
| books, but were uttered without any attribution or reference
| to the book. It would be like a HN commenter systematically
| lifting vc quotes but never mentioning their originators by
| name.
| monknomo wrote:
| maybe the difference between a meme and a thought
| terminating cliche?
| golemiprague wrote:
| [dead]
| leashless wrote:
| Impact of the 2008 financial collapse on their lifestyles and
| career prospects? How's the data from the 1929 financial collapse
| impacting teen mental health?
|
| (not that we have that data, I am sure)
| ever1337 wrote:
| The author of this piece is responsible for lobbying Congress to
| pass legislation that I think the HN community would be opposed
| to:
| https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Haidt%20Testi...
|
| One of the author's suggestions is a strengthening of COPPA:
|
| > Second, Congress should toughen the 1998 Children's Online
| Privacy Protection Act. An early version of the legislation
| proposed 16 as the age at which children should legally be
| allowed to give away their data and their privacy. Unfortunately,
| e-commerce companies lobbied successfully to have the age of
| "internet adulthood" set instead at 13. Now, more than two
| decades later, today's 13-year-olds are not doing well. Federal
| law is outdated and inadequate. The age should be raised. More
| power should be given to parents, less to companies.
|
| I don't think it takes a genius to see that this suggestion would
| have virtually no effect on the problems the author is trying to
| address. These COPPA age limits are impossible to enforce,
| raising it would only mean more kids lying about their age when
| making accounts on websites, or just getting parental consent.
| And even if it were possible to enforce, how does it address
| social media causing mental illness?
|
| One of the author's other suggestions is to pass a version of the
| UK's Age Appropriate Design Code(!!!!)
|
| California passed its own version of this law in September 2022.
| It has already been commented on and critiqued extensively on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32587592 Dear California:
| How Can I Comply with Your New Age-Appropriate Design Code?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32646043 Age Verification
| Providers Say Don't Worry About California Design Code; You'll
| Just Have To Scan Your Face For Every Website You Visit
|
| Putting aside the main subject of the OP, it is important to
| remain vigilant and watchful for legislation that will hamper
| privacy on the internet in the name of "saving the children". I
| myself can agree that "social media" is a contributor to
| increased social discord and depression, but these problems
| affect everyone, not just teenagers. And I think the root cause
| is, of course, the design of these sites; the way they crudely
| attempt to quantify "likes", the way they use metrics like the
| "like" and the "view" as the sole guiding principle behind their
| design philosophy, rather than productive and humanistic
| conversation. It is the way these platforms lie to the user,
| presenting content as if it is the user's hidden inner desires
| discovered by an external algorithm, when in reality it is the
| user being shaped by the platform, not the other way around. The
| way these platforms prioritize content meant to inflame, to
| provoke, to get "engagement".
|
| This is the real problem of social media, the product itself, the
| structure of it. But those with power in our society are addicted
| to it, and instead propose all kinds of useless "safeguards" like
| age gates and ID checks that only serve to increase the power of
| these platforms as surveillance tools. The mantra of each side of
| the aisle is, "if only we were the ones in charge of moderation."
| I think it is clear to see that this is a naive and unconsidered
| approach.
| jasmer wrote:
| Social media, and more controversially a public orientation
| towards their 'values' defining their identities, which maybe has
| roots in some nice thinking and especially in trying to get kids
| with non-standard identities to not feel bad about it - but which
| ultimately causes a morass of confusion for all the kids.
|
| I think kids need at least some structure and guidance on social
| development and this 'chose your own identity' thing is leaving
| them listless.
|
| We don't become men and women arbitrarily, we grow into those
| roles with guidance. Given a new 'social convention' towards
| basically not defining those things, we're seeing a lot of kids
| fall off the side of the boat.
|
| When you add constant social media into the mix, which reinforces
| all of these things from peers, other toxic things, life
| pressures it's all too much. You used to have to 'compete'
| against kids from HS, now it's a national competition.
|
| I can't fathom how hard it is just to be a regular kid.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Smartphones + Social Media
| bluescrn wrote:
| This should be incredibly obvious, especially to adults who've
| realised (particularly during the pandemic) the effect that
| social media use can have on themselves.
|
| Smartphones should be banned from schools entirely, and parents
| should be much more careful about keeping track of what their
| kids are up to online.
|
| (But it's probably too late, we've got a generation of young
| teachers who've grown up hooked on this technology, and who see
| the world through the distorting lens of social media)
| brg wrote:
| Another data point that should point out the obvious, is this
| coincides with the unexpected rise in traffic fatalities in
| 2012-2013. It is the societal effect of smart phones.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Yep but the canary was how all of the big IT CEOs didn't let
| their kids even have a phone.
| [deleted]
| somecompanyguy wrote:
| [flagged]
| somecompanyguy wrote:
| [flagged]
| maxbond wrote:
| Saying a bunch of conspiratorial nonsense and then predicting
| downvotes doesn't prove you right, it proves you ought to
| know better.
| [deleted]
| briantakita wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| vatotemking wrote:
| We didnt know when it happened, but we are now at the mercy of
| AI. Scary times. Everything we do is controlled by algorithms.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| A lot of the stats cited are ultimately subjective assessments of
| things like mental health. Calling more people "bipolar" or
| "depressed" or "anxious" can just as easily be a change in
| language as to what those words mean, as easily as they can
| reflect a change in the underlying language and how people
| express things. Notably the definition of most mental illnesses
| in the country Haidt is pulling his data from changed in 2013 due
| to the release of the DSM-V, so I don't really think pre-2013
| data is comparable to post-2013 data at all, as these words in
| question are not medically or socially defined in the same way
| that they were before. In fact one of the most common criticisms
| of the DSM-V when it was being drafted to the present day is the
| allegation that it leads to more mental illness diagnosis's.
|
| Attempted suicide is one of the few stats I treat as grounded
| relatively firmly in reality because it's not nearly as
| subjective, but this measure seems to have started skyrocketing
| in the mid 2000's not in 2012.
|
| If the conclusion is that the rise of the internet has caused
| more and more teens to label themselves as mentally ill, I would
| say that's a conclusion I'm firmly convinced of. The conclusion
| that mental illness is actually increasing population wide, I'm
| very very sceptical of. I could imagine that it's happening to an
| extent due to things like economic pressures and increased
| inequality, we are seeing things like declines in lifespans and
| increases in suicide, but I don't think mental illness is
| increasingly nearly as much as the stats would lead you to
| believe at face value.
|
| Plus quite simply, using time series data about when mental
| illness increased in society doesn't really shed much light on
| WHAT caused the mental illness to rise even if you can establish
| such a rise was happening, but I'm not even convinced by the date
| "2012".
| strawpeople wrote:
| > we are seeing things like declines in lifespans and increases
| in suicide, but I don't think mental illness is increasingly
| nearly as much as the stats would lead you to believe at face
| value.
|
| This just seems like a flat out contradiction. How would
| suicides 'skyrocket' if mental illness is not increasing.
|
| Agreed that 2012 may be irrelevant and we may not know the
| cause.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| It's not a contradiction, I'm saying that an underlying
| increase in mental illness plausibly explains some of the
| effect, but I'm unconvinced it explains the entire effect.
| strawpeople wrote:
| What could explain the increase in suicides if not mental
| illness?
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I'm drawing a distinction between "mental illness" and
| "mental illness diagnosis" that I maybe didn't make
| entirely clear. I think the former is increasing, but the
| latter is increasing faster than the former.
| monknomo wrote:
| I'm not sure suicides strictly are the result of mental
| illness. I, for example, have an uncle that killed
| himself. He may have been clinically depressed, but
| mainly, he was an alcoholic. I think it's likely what
| depression he had would have resolved if he successfully
| dealt with his substance abuse problem.
|
| Did he die because he was mentally ill, or because
| drinking can be a pretty bad problem?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| So 2 years after Instagram was created, and a few years after
| touchscreen cell phones became commodity devices.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I don't recall anyone I knew using Instagram very much in 2012,
| people still used facebook a lot back then and Instagram felt
| really niche. It hit 110 million users in 2013, which is around
| when I recall people I knew starting to use it, but rally it
| blew up in 2014.
| treis wrote:
| Yeah, Facebook started in 2004 and it was much more Instagram
| like in its early days before everyone's parents joined and
| started ranting about politics.
| munificent wrote:
| One of the core dilemmas of raising the next generation:
|
| 1. We base much of our own sense of self-worth on difficulties we
| have overcome and our ability to take care of others.
|
| 2. We fairly extend that same metric to others and judge others
| by the difficulties they've overcome and what they do for others.
|
| 3. Therefore, the better we are at living up to our own values
| and improving the lives of the next generation, the less we
| respect them for it.
|
| If kids had it as hard as us, it would indicate a failure on our
| part to provide for them. If they don't have it as hard us, we
| see them as soft.
|
| (The current generation has tackled this dilemma both by
| destroying the climate and functioning economic and institutional
| systems they had the luxury of growing up under thus making it
| worse for the next generation, _and_ still calling them weak for,
| unsurprisingly, wanting to tune out of the horror show that is
| the world by staring at their phone.)
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I think adults forget how much time and opportunities they
| frittered away. Heaven knows I've done that through my teens,
| twenties, and even some of my thirties.
|
| Live and learn.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > wanting to tune out of the horror show that is the world by
| staring at their phone.
|
| Yikes--dead wrong way to do it. About the only other way to get
| 1/10 as much exposure to the "horror show" would be cable news.
| munificent wrote:
| A lot of people looking at their phones are just watching
| TikToks of people dancing to 80s songs with their dog and
| weird shit like that. They aren't all doomscrolling the news.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Sure, fair point.
| basicallybones wrote:
| It is remarkably easy to expose yourself to truly horrifying
| things on the Internet. Stories, images, and videos of deaths of
| all kinds, from videos of terrorists cutting off people's heads
| to people live streaming their suicides to Reddit stories about
| motorcyclists having limbs ripped off in traffic accidents. News
| sites, forums, and social feeds are a parade of horrors. You
| cannot get away from the Internet, even if you want to, because
| your job constantly pings you on email/chat/whatever.
|
| It feels like the "learned helplessness" experiments where
| researchers randomly shocked animals, who could not stop or do
| anything about the shocks.
|
| I wonder if we are all traumatized by what we have seen over the
| years on Reddit, Twitter, etc.
|
| There is an incredible recent song "Oh No" by Wet Leg that
| captures some of this. Here are the lyrics (sorry about the
| formatting):
|
| I went home All alone Checked my phone Oh no Oh my God Life is
| hard Credit card Oh no You're so woke Diet Coke I feel gross Oh
| no I went home All alone I checked my phone And now I'm inside it
|
| On my phone All alone In the zone Oh no Hours pass Pizza rat I
| like that Oh no 3 AM I feel Zen Fucking Zen Oh no Suck the life
| From my eyes It feels nice I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling, ah
|
| If you're going to the party I heard there's gonna be some arty
| People talking 'bout themselves Or whatever it is that you always
| talk about, ah
|
| I went home All alone I checked my phone Oh no I went home All
| alone I checked my phone And now I'm inside it
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| My highschool, like most of the time, was full of kids who sent
| Iraqi beheadings and shock sites to each other. Voluntarily
| viewing something disgusting isn't a traumatic experience. Nor
| is being tricked into it when you can just press a big red X
| and never have to think about it again.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Nah, gore is gore, death exists, farm kids have been doing this
| for years. Kids deal very well with death as long as they
| understand the concept from an early age.
| jeltz wrote:
| Yeah, I see no reason to think it is the gore. There are so
| many other things, including social media, which are much
| more likely candidates.
| arp242 wrote:
| Another possible explanation is that we _are_ simply diagnosing
| these kind of mental health issues better - due to decrease in
| stigmatization and /or more attention to it - but that our
| treatment is worse than doing nothing, and is leading to higher
| rates of self-harm and suicide.
|
| I have no idea if that's the case - and if it is a factor at all
| it probably doesn't account for all of it - but it seems
| something worth exploring. Certainly in my own teen years I
| benefited more from the occasional swift kick in the backside and
| being told to "man up" than treatment with school counsellors and
| such. Not that counsellors are bad, but sometimes you can take
| things "too serious" which can make matters worse, in spite of
| being well-intentioned.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _Another possible explanation is that we are simply diagnosing
| these kind of mental health issues better - due to decrease in
| stigmatization and /or more attention to it - but that our
| treatment is worse than doing nothing, and is leading to higher
| rates of self-harm and suicide._
|
| I think this explains a lot of it, in particular in regard to
| rising rates of autism. Doctors are looking for symptoms, hence
| more people will be diagnosed.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| If it's less stigmatized you'd expect fewer suicides right?
| More people getting help. Perhaps it's less stigmatized because
| a larger part of society has real mental health issues.
| wakefulsales wrote:
| i'm kind of in agreement - i think there's an extraordinarily
| strong nocebo effect and dearth of belief in agency after being
| diagnosed with something like that. At the same time, nearly
| all treatments are effectively worthless. so what's even the
| benefit? at the same time, I do believe mental health issues
| partially exist to signal to the tribe that something is wrong
| with that member and it's a call for help. so there should be
| some way to triage and provide support. but idk if our current
| transactional system that exists to pay pharma is good
| brodouevencode wrote:
| The increase in suicide rates for both genders (but especially
| females) are astounding. I really don't believe that any
| changes in treatment have been so radical as to cause this to
| manifest the way it has.
| NickM wrote:
| SSRI use has skyrocketed, and multiple meta-analyses have
| confirmed that they lead to an increase in suicidal thoughts
| and behavior when used by children and adolescents.
|
| I don't necessarily agree with the grandparent poster's point
| of view, as I do think there are big societal changes leading
| to decreased mental health that are unrelated to the way we
| treat mental illness...but I do think the increase in usage
| of psychiatric drugs is a big problem, and may at least
| partly explain the increased suicide rates.
| samtho wrote:
| > SSRI use has skyrocketed, and multiple meta-analyses have
| confirmed that they lead to an increase in suicidal
| thoughts and behavior when used by children and
| adolescents.
|
| The prevailing wisdom on this is that many people suffering
| major depression won't even have the motivation to go
| through with suicide. Once the depression has begun to be
| treated, certain executive functions start to amplify
| giving sufferers newfound task salience and resolve to go
| through with it. The problem is that all the symptoms of
| depression take far longer to subside with consistent
| SSRI/SNRI usage as prescribed. These drugs take on average
| 90 days to reach their full effectiveness but not
| everything happens at once during this adjustment. Along
| the way, you do reach a strange state of: "well I'm still
| depressed but I feel empowered to do something about it
| now."
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I remember this stage when I started taking SSRIs when I
| was an older teenager. I was warned about it and was
| seeing a short-term therapist and so I dealt with it
| well, but there's a short 2-4 weeks where the crushing
| demotivation that has dominated your life is lifted but
| you still are stuck in the life-despising thought
| spirals. I assume that much of this can be mitigated by
| regular consultation with mental health for the first two
| month while trying a new medication, but it's possible
| that isn't true.
| arp242 wrote:
| I don't mean changes in treatment, but rather that some
| people previously went undiagnosed and "just got over it" on
| their own. As I said, in my own case treatment _didn 't_ help
| and actually made matters worse as I saw myself more as a
| victim who "couldn't help myself". n=1 of course. And many
| people of course _do_ benefit from treatment.
|
| As I mentioned: even _if_ this turns out to be factor - and I
| 'm not sure it even is - then I don't think this accounts for
| 100% of the increase. I don't profess this is the full
| explanation, merely a possible factor, out of several.
|
| I'm also reminded by my uncle, who was born with a serious
| and debilitating heart condition; he always said that if he
| had listened to his doctors he'd be a "victim" in a
| wheelchair inside all day. Of course he did need serious
| medical attention, including a heart transplant, and he did
| end up dying from his condition at the age of 51, but overall
| he led a "good life" and just carried on with things without
| seeing himself as too much of a victim. It probably would
| have been a different life if he did. Mental feedback loops
| can be pretty powerful.
|
| It's also worth pointing out the charts look a bit less
| drastic if you zoom out to the 70s; in fact, suicide for boys
| especially was a lot higher in the 80s than it is now. The
| author does address that briefly at the bottom, and provides
| a link with more detail (which is too much to quote here, but
| tl;dr is that they believe it's correlated to lead exposure
| and crime rates - this link also contains the longer
| timeframe charts).
| xwolfi wrote:
| Not sure of the value of this tidbit but I heard that in
| the US, blacks suicided a lot less than whites (quick
| google seems to say rate of black suicide is a third of
| white) and it could be because they grow up explaining
| their issues with external factors, while the whites have
| no convenient escapes, and even are told they are
| privileged due to their skin color... so self blame.
|
| Really flimsy, I am not an expert but... fits a bit the
| idea that just looping around yourself self introspecting
| how much of a failure YOU are might not help.
| notch898a wrote:
| I would offer the really flimsy statement most blacks in
| US are descendants of slaves, who were bred for
| generations to be optimized for unskilled labor that was
| given very little mental and health support which meant
| anyone slightly suicidal just killed themselves off.
| Slavery is pretty stressful. Society tends to want to
| ignore the fact the colonists and early Americans
| literally bred slaves under stressful conditions for
| centuries and that tends to have ... effects on the
| genetic pool particularly in remarkably stressful
| environments where risk factors can cause rapid attrition
| from reproductive population.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| I think a more plausible theory is that white people feel
| more entitlement than black people, not because of some
| weird genetic memory thing but because they see other
| white people (or maybe even their parents or great-
| grandparents) enjoy much higher success than they are.
| Higher expectations = more pain from shitty circumstances
| = worse reactions.
| notinfuriated wrote:
| This might be true, although I think it depends on the
| age group of the people committing suicide.
|
| I forget where I heard this, but I believe a significant
| number of people committing suicide have a high
| correlation with other issues like chronic pain (e.g.,
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24916035/) or addiction.
| I'm suspicious that those white people have the kinds of
| problems you're referring to because I suspect their
| peers are less likely to be successful or affluent, as
| people with chronic pain issues probably are more working
| class, performing physical labor that results in their
| issues.
|
| (Granted, I suppose there is probably a racial element
| that would account for why, if this is the case, more
| white people with chronic pain issues kill themselves vs.
| black people with chronic pain issues.)
|
| This is obviously speculation, but so is your comment. I
| find both to be potentially likely. The scenario you came
| up with seems more likely for younger people (probably
| not experiencing chronic pain), and the scenario I came
| up with is potentially more likely for older people. But
| we're just spitballing some hypotheses here.
| justsocrateasin wrote:
| n of 2, this has been my experience as well. I was almost
| killed in a shooting in 2021, and in 2022 I started seeing
| a therapist. Going into therapy made me relate to my trauma
| more, think about my trauma more often, and self identify
| as a "traumatized individual". I don't think any of that
| helped. The only thing that really helped was daily
| meditation/mindfulness, which does the opposite - it
| teaches you that the thoughts and experiences you have are
| fleeting and rather than hold on to them you can let them
| go.
|
| That being said, I don't think this is a strong enough
| phenomenon that it explains the rather large trends upwards
| in self harm/mental health. I think a good control is the
| graph that shows Schizophrenia - a 67% uptick shows that
| the diagnosis rates are probably a lot higher than the
| early 2000s, since I doubt that schizophrenia is really
| becoming more common due to social media.
| beamgirl wrote:
| Relating this back to social media, I've noticed that at
| times younger people almost exert a social pressure to
| link all behavior to anything remotely traumatic. I've
| had some shitty stuff happen to me, life has had it's
| rough points, but I've always felt pretty lucky overall.
| I've noticed in arguments with roommates/friends/etc who
| are younger by a few years, there is significantly more
| forgiveness towards anything that can even be
| tangentially linked to something that can be identified
| as a trauma. I noticed it because over time it led me to
| start slowly reframing experiences and actually focusing
| more on the damage they'd done. And its funny, the most
| traumatizing experience of my life has probably been the
| push to open up and focus on my traumas. My mental health
| has improved a lot since distancing myself from people
| who are too eager to focus on trauma. I wonder how that
| plays into the whole social mental health conversation.
| Like when does starting a conversation and destigmatizing
| a topic turn into feeding it and enabling it? Not to say
| by any means mental health was handled well before, but I
| think we might have made something of a deal with the
| devil in how we frame mental health on social media.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Tell someone with an issue with their physical condition that
| it is because of diet and lack of exercise and many would
| change habits, tell them it's due to a incurable but perhaps
| treatable cancer and some will chose suicide.
|
| Tell kids that they are unhappy due to choices made in day to
| day life and they might change those choices, tell them it's
| due to a incurable but maybe treatable issue with their brain
| and some will chose suicide.
|
| The problem may be classifying typical human misery as
| incurable illness.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| _Tell kids that they are unhappy due to choices made in day
| to day life and they might change those choices, tell them
| it 's due to a incurable but maybe treatable issue with
| their brain and some will chose suicide._
|
| The thing you are trying to say isn't really true, though.
|
| Tell some kids that it is all their fault, and some kids
| will commit suicide. Some of the kids already think this
| way and someone telling them this stuff is just going to
| intensify it.
|
| Especially considering that getting treatment isn't such a
| stigma now, a lot of the folks being told that it is the
| cause of the disease will feel relieved and certainly not
| choose suicide _even if_ they refuse medication.
|
| So no, that probably isn't the issue.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Not at all, it's exactly the opposite. People feel
| understood and very relieved when they are diagnosed mental
| illness. Accepting and managing some condition give people
| hope.
| willcipriano wrote:
| To respond I need to separate mental illness into three
| categories.
|
| The first category contains illnesses like schizophrenia,
| with schizophrenia you can induce symptoms of the illness
| in healthy people by giving them medicine used to treat
| parkinsons. We can point to specific structures and
| chemical reactions in the brain as a cause for the
| illness, it may not be perfectly understood but we have a
| good understanding of what is going on.
|
| The second contains things like personality disorders.
| It's not clear these are actually related to physical
| defects, at least in the same way the first category is.
| For example people who meet diagnostic criteria for
| antisocial personality disorder often report no symptoms
| and are successful in day to day life, some even thrive.
| Borderline personality types are often distraught over
| the state of interpersonal reletionships, that is the
| primary source of their suffering, however they behave in
| ways that destroy those reletionships. These behaviors
| aren't accidental, they involve sophisticated thinking,
| borderlines spin complex webs of lies to justify and hide
| these behaviors.
|
| The third are things that are normal human suffering.
| Most people feel anxiety for a big date or a job
| interview. Most people feel sad when they lose a loved
| one. Negative emotions are a part of life. It's hard to
| draw a line on what is normal but a nonzero number of
| people are medicated for having normal human emotions.
|
| It may not be helpful for the second and third category
| to be enabled in the way they have been.
|
| For the second group, as the root of their strife is
| generally interpersonal, and only changing day to day
| behavior, over a lengthy period of time will have any
| effect in alevating the true symptoms of the illness. We
| can pretend the problem "isn't their fault" but
| essentially all their issues can be tied directly to
| their own behavior, it may not be their fault but it's
| certainly their problem.
|
| For the third it isn't clear that they need to be treated
| at all, if you are too sad to go to work because your son
| died a month ago, nothing is wrong with you. Perhaps
| people are sad in society in general because the society
| in general sucks, medicating them in mass lowers the
| collective motivation to fix the society, what's the end
| game there?
| orwin wrote:
| Untrue, at least for functioning autists. It's incurable,
| but knowing there is others in the same situation, reading
| about coping mechanism and that what you feel is indeed
| normal, albeit atypical help a lot.
| [deleted]
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| That's not how this works. Having a reason for why you are
| struggling so badly is a relief.
|
| Your problem now has a name and it's not your fault. Having
| a name opens up a lot of support and treatment options.
| This gives you hope that your suffering isn't endless and
| infinite.
|
| You may not be able to be cured, but you can have a much
| better life.
| kneebonian wrote:
| I've found the opposite usually happens in my experience.
| It is easy to give into the temptation to then blame all
| problems on the condition, and start to abscond
| responsibility for your behavior. This leads to
| increasing feelings of helplessness, and not taking any
| actions that could help.
|
| This ultimately results in you feeling miserable
| powerless and see no hope.
|
| I think that the framing around this is very important. I
| had a teacher that constantly used the phrase "Don't let
| your reasons become excuses." Knowing there is an issue
| can bring relief and be helpful only if it empowers one
| to act.
|
| An example I have seen in my life is two people that have
| anxiety, one started using it as a reason to avoid
| interacting with people, to avoid school, and to
| basically hide in her room and read books all the time,
| to the point they would have a breakdown when forced to
| talk to a grocery store clerk, her sibling had a similar
| struggle but forced themselves through it, to learn how
| to interact, to push themselves to be in difficult and
| uncomfortable situations, and eventually although still
| struggles with social anxiety presents a pretty passable
| facade of being able to function in society.
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| That is a very optimistic outlook. One person's new
| relief is another's new label, stigma and anxiety. People
| experiencing depression-related mental health conditions
| could lean towards the latter.
|
| In addition, many diagnoses in mental health aren't
| really tangible or helpful to think about as a layperson,
| they're just a vague description of a symptom (this
| applies across a lot of medicine, see IBS, etc.).
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I think your take is totally ignorant, and your problem is
| that you imagine people are being diagnosed with mental
| illness and/or committing suicide because of "typical human
| misery".
|
| Physical condition is an excellent analogy. Many obese
| people are told that _any_ physical complaint is caused by
| their weight and told to go exercise. This includes people
| who are later correctly diagnosed with asthma, broken
| bones, hormone deficiencies and appendicitis. How do you
| think they feel to be told that they are causing their own
| problems and should stop doing that?
| Spivak wrote:
| This shit is a rabbit hole that never ends. If there is
| anything about you that is seen as abnormal by a doctor
| (including being a woman yikes -- and age also yikes) it
| gets blamed for _everything_ regardless of whether it
| makes any sense at all.
|
| I swear so many doctors treat medical diagnosis like it's
| a game of spot the difference between you and the
| reference 25 year old white man.
| notch898a wrote:
| It could be that being diagnosed with an illness, even with
| excellent treatment, symptoms can become a self fulfilling
| prophecy. If you believe you are at increased risk for
| suicide, maybe you start thinking more about that and it
| comes to fruition. Or maybe you take some meds, which make
| you better 99.9% of the time but that one time your flight is
| late or whatever and miss the dose and the rebound is twice
| as bad as never having been on them.
|
| Also ultimately suicide by definition is based on _most
| harmful decision of life event_ rather than what a doctor is
| probably optimizing for which is best day-to-day ability to
| function. These are two different optimizations that can be
| at odds. Almost nobody would choose to feel worse 99.9% of
| the time to reduce the risk in that 0.1% of the time they 're
| suicidal.
| kypro wrote:
| I think the opposite could be true - that we're too quick to
| diagnose mental illnesses in kids today. In the last few years
| I've witnessed several kids in my family get referred to
| doctors for potential mental illnesses and then end up on a
| cocktail of drugs as a result.
|
| It's something I've found really difficult because I was never
| personally convinced they were mentally ill in the first place
| and in many cases these drugs have really nasty side effects. I
| don't think it's going too far to say part of that child dies
| when they're given high doses of depressants, anxiety and ADHD
| meds.
|
| Imo we probably need to stop telling kids they're mentally ill
| and giving them medication, while also finding a way to be
| compassionate about their struggles. I'm constantly trying to
| convince one teenage girl in my family at the moment that it's
| okay to be shy and anxious sometimes. That she doesn't need
| medication and there's nothing wrong with her. But it's a hard
| argument to make when certain teachers and family members are
| telling her she possibly does in an attempt to be
| compassionate.
| Myrmornis wrote:
| This is spot-on. Over-diagnosis and over-medicalization of
| questionable mental illnesses is a huge problem in (at least)
| Anglophone societies. Many people know that privately, but it
| has become a hard thing to say publicly due to the large
| numbers of people who have received such diagnoses from
| medical/psychology professionals who they, understandably,
| believed.
| kitsune_ wrote:
| ADHD is underdiagnosed, especially in women.
| Spivak wrote:
| Neurodivergence in general is under-diagnosed, especially
| women. One of my close friend struggled with OCD her whole
| life but since it didn't present like it does in the movies
| she nor her doctors had any idea. She didn't get diagnosed
| until she was an adult which, while good, 20 years of
| unnecessary struggle isn't exactly a win.
| barking_biscuit wrote:
| Well my friends weren't really convinced either when I told
| them about my ADHD diagnosis. Luckily for me I seriously did
| my homework on it, and finally getting treatment has helped a
| lot.
|
| In the last several years since getting diagnosed I have done
| a lot of reading on the brain, trauma, mental illness etc.
| I've come to learn that actually a surprisingly large number
| of people have something going on, and whatever that
| something happens to be is complex enough that laypeople
| aren't in a position to understand it very well or at all.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I understand this perspective, but I think that it's an
| overcorrection. I grew up with depression that went untreated
| until my late teens, and if I wasn't medicated when I was or
| soon thereafter I would in all likelihood not be alive today.
| My sister has really severe ADHD and she was unable to
| function until she got medicated for ADHD before
| teenagerhood. Saying "it's ok to be anxious and shy
| sometimes" is all well and good, but being shy and anxious
| can often be painful and prevent people from interacting
| socially in ways that they want to do but are too painful. I
| think it's probable that we are overmedicating psychological
| ailments, but I also would be loathe to stop medications
| without another solution.
| DanHulton wrote:
| _sigh_
|
| Well, _I_ think it's going too far. Way too far.
|
| Myself, for example, I had raging ADHD throughout my life and
| only recently in my 40s started to get treatment. And
| incidentally, treatment isn't _just_ drugs, it's also
| counseling, to help identify coping mechanisms, work through
| trauma, identify strategies to help you to become effective
| despite working differently from how neurotypical people
| work. I'm in a good place now, but it is largely due to luck.
| It took a lot of work for me to not feel grief over how my
| life could have been different if I had been diagnosed
| earlier, if I had had the level of treatment available now,
| back then.
|
| And I don't want to get too far into it because it's not my
| story to tell, but I have friends who are way worse off. They
| dealt with far more than I ever had to, in terms of
| depression, anxiety, etc, and they did it by themselves, with
| no or limited medical and psychiatric support, while
| suffering the stigma of a society that did not respect what
| they were going through at all, with friends and family who
| could only suggest that they "toughen up". Many of them I'm
| not in contact with any more, for reasons related and
| unrelated, but overall though, I _wish_ they had the options
| and respect for their conditions that kids today have. I
| can't even imagine the difference it could have made.
| Spivak wrote:
| > It took a lot of work for me to not feel grief over how
| my life could have been different if I had been diagnosed
| earlier, if I had had the level of treatment available now,
| back then.
|
| That shit is way to real.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Why is more diagnosis better diagnosis? I hear this constantly,
| literally every time people point out we might be calling
| people mentally ill now that we wouldn't have called mentally
| ill 20 years ago people go "wow we must be diagnosing people
| better". To me better diagnosis would be reflected in things
| like the suicide rate dropping, drug abuse falling, general
| health metrics improving, and so on, not in simply increasing
| the amount of people we give labels and medicalise.
|
| I am so incredibly unconvinced that labelling a bunch of people
| as mentally ill is "better" because the more we're diagnosed
| people as mentally ill, the more things like suicide have
| increased. Now obviously that can be due to an underlying
| increase in mental illness driving suicide, the thing is the
| diagnosis itself and the resulting differential treatment of
| society and your self-perception of yourself can be the cause
| of that mental illness. Making the diagnosis a self-fulfilling
| prophecy.
|
| So far the increase in diagnosis over time has completely
| failed to actually improve peoples mental health. I am
| constantly perplexed at why nobody is worried about this. It
| seems how we diagnose people is totally unconnected from any
| empirical data on if a culture more willing to diagnose people
| is making people healthier on a population-wide level. To me it
| seems like most evidence points to the population-wide trend
| getting worse and the increase in diagnosis being a failure
| making people sicker, and I can't help but also notice many of
| those who advocate that the increase in diagnosis is a great
| thing have a conflict of interest and financially benefit from
| more people being labelled ill.
| ok123456 wrote:
| It's not. There are Physician Incentive Plans that
| incentivize doctors to prescribe SSRIs for anyone complaining
| about generalized anxiety or depression.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I've seen it. I've watched in my lifetime an industry and
| doctors push SSRI and "mental health medicines" to target
| children for lifetime use.
|
| This is the real crisis, and I don't think we've peaked
| yet.
| mrj wrote:
| True, of course labeling is only the first step before
| treatment. Maybe the root cause of the rise is then we are
| telling kids they're depressed and we have relatively
| ineffective treatments for it.
|
| Labelling wouldn't be a problem if we could actually help
| everybody with the diagnosis, but they're too often stuck
| with a "ehh. maybe this pill" approach.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _It seems how we diagnose people is totally unconnected
| from any empirical data on if a culture more willing to
| diagnose people is making people healthier on a population-
| wide level._
|
| Speaking of an absence of empirical data: People are being
| told by doctors that their brain has a "chemical imbalance"
| which medication can fix, despite those doctors not
| performing any chemical tests on the patient's brain at all.
| Supposed "chemical imbalances" for which the science of
| chemistry can produce no empirical data. My brother lost
| years of his life in a drug-induced haze before he questioned
| the wisdom of doctors, got off the psyche drugs, and saw a
| massive improvement in his outlook on life all around. Turns
| out he had real problems to address and the drugs were only
| helping him to ignore those problems instead of actually
| confronting them. He never needed drugs, he needed a mature
| mentor.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Generally I think mental illness will remain in the dark
| ages so long as there is a divide between neurologists and
| psychiatrists, and so long as the ICD and DSM are the gold
| standard of diagnosis. Mental illness is mostly defined
| based on others perception of you, and is rarely defined
| based on any sort of psychological testing. There are a few
| which can be objectively tested for like Alzheimers but
| they're in the minority.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > I benefited more from the occasional swift kick in the
| backside and being told to "man up"
|
| Practically you are saying that pedagogy and psychology are
| wrong and harmful on a fundamental level.
|
| Either you are in denial or a whole field of science is wrong.
| arp242 wrote:
| No, that is not what I said. Aside from that fact that these
| two fields are hardly exact sciences and have different
| schools of thought with large fundamental disagreements, I
| never said that _all_ of psychology is bad. I specifically
| said "Not that counsellors are bad, but sometimes [...]".
|
| In my _specific_ case it didn 't help and was more harmful
| than helpful. For other people it _is_ helpful. n=1 but I 'm
| probably not a very special individual, so situations similar
| to mine probably apply to other people as well, although I
| have no idea how many exactly, or if this number has been
| increasing or decreasing.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Are you suggesting that people should ignore their personal
| experiences if they do not align with what the science tells
| them? Why would you declare that anyone is in denial about
| their own reality?
| wtcactus wrote:
| That would imply that suicides would at least stay the same,
| or, most probably, decrease due to earlier phycological
| support.
| banannaise wrote:
| All the things he cites are lagging indicators. Self-harm and
| suicide typically follow long, long battles with mental health
| issues; they're not the first thing that happens, or even close.
| Diagnoses are also typically far from immediate; having
| depression and being diagnosed with depression are two _very_
| different things. (And without increased awareness, many people
| never get care and are never diagnosed.)
|
| As such, the inflection point, if there is one, is likely much
| earlier than 2012.
| lostlogin wrote:
| How does that apply to children though? They haven't got a lot
| of time that's earlier as they would be too young.
| Additionally, a key part of a child's behaviour is that it's
| impulsive.
| banannaise wrote:
| The cohort before would have gone undiagnosed. Time works the
| same way whether you're looking at tranches or a rolling
| window of the population.
| kulahan wrote:
| The very first thing that comes to mind is this is the first year
| after the '08 housing collapse where all students in the school
| had experienced it before entering high school. I wonder if the
| massive housing instability had an oversized impact on mental
| health which just... never recovered?
| psychoslave wrote:
| Mind you, the kids aren't all right was recorder in 1998
| actually.
|
| Great songs age well of course.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_Aren%27t_Alright
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7iNbnineUCI
| password11 wrote:
| _girls 15-19 that self harmed: 0.45% - > 0.7%. A 47% increase!_
|
| _boys 15-19 that died by suicide: 0.01% - > 0.016%. A 34%
| increase!_
|
| Relative increase percentages (i.e. exponentials) are misleading
| when they are measuring linear phenomena like suicide rate. You
| could just as easily say there was a _0.1% decrease_ in the
| percent of boys who didn 't die by suicide.
|
| It's misleading because the new 0.006% of male suicides are
| unrelated to the existing 0.01%.
|
| Suicide rate is not a ROI or conversion rate. Use absolute
| percentages please. I get they're writing to accentuate big
| impact -- and suicide is a big deal -- but this is disingenuous.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Help me out. I don't see the problem. If there are 100 suicides
| per 100,000 people in a year amongst a cohort and the next year
| there are 134 per 100,000, that's an increase in total suicides
| of 34%. I don't really see why that's not useful as an
| indicator of how much worse the problem is getting. To me, it
| would be nice if they were clearer about what that percentage
| represents, is it the average from 2000-2010 vs the average
| from 2010-2020?
|
| A bigger issue to me is that small window of the data. It's
| hard to tell how bumpy this curve is over the long term. Like
| is a suicide rate amongst teens that fluctuates 34%, decade
| over decade typical?
| benrhodesuk wrote:
| While I don't doubt that social media can have a negative impact
| on teens... my own experience as the parent of a teen is slightly
| different and doesn't point to social media as being a driver. At
| least in my case.
|
| I have a teenager that struggles with anxiety, low self-esteem
| and depression. He's incredibly smart and is an honors student in
| high school. BUT he also thinks he's terrible and he's incapable
| of accepting a compliment or congratulations on a good grade or
| work which he immediately deflects and says he was lucky or he's
| not really smart or something negative.
|
| What does this have to do with the article as far as my
| experience? He's not on social media. While he might consume some
| social media (ex. TikTok) he doesn't have his own social media
| accounts. He doesn't have a Facebook account, Instagram account,
| etc. Which might sound hard to believe and you are likely
| thinking "I bet he has burner accounts..." but actually he
| doesn't.
|
| He didn't have a smartphone until he was 13. And while he used an
| iPad before that it was primarily for playing games and watching
| Youtube.
|
| What he is into is online gaming and Youtube. I guess you could
| count Youtube as a form of social media but even with that he's a
| consumer of the content and not a creator or commenter. So he's
| not posting videos on Youtube or getting into arguments with
| people in the Youtube comments, etc. He simply watches content.
|
| So I'm only a sample size of one but I deal with a teen who
| struggles with a lot of what is described in this article... yet
| it isn't being driven by social media.
|
| I think there are far more factors at play than simply
| smartphones and social media. And those factors could be
| different depending on the individual. Although some of the
| factors are obviously going to be shared. And I have no doubt
| social media can have a tremendous negative impact on mental
| health. But I think there is much more going on than just that.
| sublinear wrote:
| I struggled similarly when I was in school.
|
| As an adult I realized my attitude came from simply not having
| any example or basis for what I was doing. All I had were long
| term goals that always seemed just beyond the horizon.
|
| In that situation almost any expectations will seem lofty and
| it's just as easy to feel either pride or shame regardless of
| what is actually accomplished.
|
| This is not easy to deal with, but it is possible. As they say,
| you should surround yourself with people you can look up to.
| That's how you grow.
| jasmer wrote:
| That's also within the norm for teenagerdom historically.
|
| Also try sports. Team sports.
| gnramires wrote:
| How much gaming does he do, and what kind of games, if you
| don't mind?
| righttoolforjob wrote:
| Consuming is the worst. The Internet is a toxic cesspool, for
| the most part. Having an account and interacting with friends
| would be one of the few exceptions, and maybe learning some
| stuff now and then.
| benrhodesuk wrote:
| Yea. I agree there is a lot of bad things to consume.
|
| In general what he consumes tends to lean towards the toxic
| end of things. A lot of learning, science and educational
| content. And then gaming-related content (Minecraft, etc.).
|
| Obviously, some of the gaming content can get toxic. But he's
| always been pretty good about staying away from more toxic
| gaming content. And while he will watching gaming content on
| Youtube he's not really into watching live streamers (on
| Youtube or Twitch) which is where a lot of toxicity can be on
| full display (both on the stream and in the chat).
|
| So overall the majority of what he consumes tends to not be
| swimming around in the toxic cesspool end of things.
| whstl wrote:
| I think you're the first here in this topic that talked
| about Twitch and streamers.
|
| I know a few streamers and we're aware of people that spend
| sometimes up to 5 hours a day on every single stream they
| do. Some of those donating hundreds of dollars a month to a
| single streamer. The stream chat is their hobby and the
| majority of their social interaction. The streamers are
| also burned out.
|
| I'm all for people finding a community, and that's sort of
| what we do at HN. But that's a bit extreme for me.
|
| IMO things are only going to get worse from here.
| smolder wrote:
| Streamers who aren't big enough to be financially
| successful (which is 99.999%) but have dreams of high
| viewer counts and big advertising checks (they work hard
| at growing their channels) are like an underfed child
| army of influence. The desperation to be popular online
| fuels a tremendous aggregate effort with little return
| for the streamers, but which is very effective at drawing
| their peers and adjacent peer groups into this unhealthy
| viewership, all in the service of showing ads.
|
| The whole culture around twitch, TikTok, and social media
| influence generally is very exploitative of teens and
| younger people with more time and energy than wisdom.
|
| I don't think it's the technology itself that is harmful
| to kids, not even slightly. It's the environment created
| online by adults who act to make a profit that drives the
| pathological use of technology. It's exploiting people's
| psychology, their need for attention or belonging, and
| constantly _driving engagement_ that makes the impact of
| tech on society so ugly. The biggest danger to our youth
| online is arguably unfettered capitalism, not child
| predators.
|
| Capitalism can and does work synergistically without the
| kind of pathological, societal self-harm that's so
| broadly accepted. Modern technology has just enabled
| perverse new ways to chew up and spit out the young and
| disadvantaged en masse while essentially looking the
| other way, just seeing the participants as rows in a DB
| table. From most parents' point of view, the threats
| posed by the profiteering actors in tech are hard to
| detect and reason about, and hard to protect from in ways
| that aren't net harmful & draconian, so many young people
| are left very vulnerable.
|
| Further, for many tech workers, or for those that use the
| tech to generate business, it's hard to steer away from
| "evil technology" that is so effective in paying the
| bills.
| [deleted]
| NeverAnonymous wrote:
| Interesting article.
|
| FWIW, I graduated from Redwood High School in Marin County, CA in
| 2014. Redwood had ~1600 students and many were high achievers,
| and many came from middle-class or upper-class families. We were
| a blue ribbon school, probably with a hefty PTA budget and a
| myriad of AP courses and honors classes available. We had some
| dedicated teachers too. We even had a ceramics room, a music
| building, a beautiful gym, track, and field. There was a drama
| program, and of course the drama room smelled of illicit
| substances, but they did deliver impressive improv shows. Our
| graduating class had a record number of students who had achieved
| honor roll or higher GPAs.
|
| To my knowledge, there were some bullying incidents at our
| school, but the rate was said to be relatively low. I knew at
| least one person who had been cyber-bullied. We had one suicide
| that I can remember -- a girl who I didn't know very well but
| shared maybe one or two classes with my freshman year. It was
| tragic to hear of her family's loss when it happened, and looking
| back at the few interactions I had with her, I would not have
| pegged her to be at risk. She seemed like someone who would have
| no trouble making friends or performing in school. Most of the
| suicides we heard of came out of different schools in the Bay
| Area that were even more academically challenging. St. Ignatius
| or "S.I.", a private school in San Francisco was infamous for
| their suicides.
|
| In reflection, I didn't invest as much as I should have in
| getting to know more of these individuals while in high school --
| I was shy, but mostly bored, fixated on keeping my grades up to
| impress a favorable profile to universities, and fatigued about
| how fake so much of life seemed to be. During our graduation
| ceremony I realized if that I could have and should have taken
| more of an interest in getting to know more of my peers, and
| participating in their lives. High school students aren't fake
| people, even if high school feels fabricated and pointless.
| Social media wasn't a huge problem for me, but it did have an
| effect of making me think that some people appeared quite dull --
| I have learned my lesson not to be deceived.
|
| For me, social media amplified the feeling of being stuck -- a
| feeling that was already exuded by the physical form of our
| school, which was designed by the same architect who did San
| Quentin State Prison. It also amplified a story people could
| create about themselves or others. We saw that gave people an
| opportunity to weave themselves into a web of negative self-image
| or belief about others, or the world. It seems to do this
| effortlessly, while excluding the human contact that usually
| comes along with in-person communication. For kids who have an
| abusive parent, I suspect that this was particularly insidious
| because social media empowered parents to be more involved in
| their children's social dynamic than before. While a lot of
| people were saying that it's important to keep an eye on your
| child's internet activity, I suspect that some parents with
| abusive tendencies took advantage of this and misused it to the
| detriment of their children.
|
| There is the apparent option to delete one's profile, but that
| doesn't stop others from mentioning you or posting photos that
| you are in. And someone's absence on social media is potentially
| a statement itself. What would you make of a job candidate has no
| presence at all on LinkedIn? (To clarify, this last question is
| posed to ask you to consider it and I don't mean to plant a
| particular answer in your head).
|
| Perhaps the most damning impact of it on our generation is that
| it was a pervasive opportunity for kids to fail forever. The
| school would undoubtedly respond in some punitive way to anyone
| with online presence or interest that may, in any way, be deemed
| negative, and on top of all that, the media itself has its own
| algorithm and presumably saves all the data forever. Kids had to
| either censor themselves more carefully in communications online,
| or risk the consequences. This is the biggest issue I see that
| has contributed to a whole generation of people that doesn't feel
| safe to express a unique opinion, and perhaps fears being judged.
| It's one thing to be surveilled by the government. It is another
| entirely to be surveilled by people in your peer group, your
| community, and your friends. We've been taught that if you appear
| to think a certain way, then you are done. Period. Until then,
| come play in school rallies and don't mind the police officer who
| is watching you the whole time.
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| I suspect smartphones as a reason, but not for the "social media
| makes people compare themselves to others/opens themselves up for
| bullying" reason.
|
| I think the constant drip feed of dopamine that smartphones give
| you fucks up your brain chemistry, and that especially affects
| young people.
| zahrc wrote:
| Counterpoint: as we're more open with with mental health
| challenges in adult life, teenagers are more open as well, or at
| least we can tell better.
|
| The terms teenage angst and peer pressure existed before 2012.
|
| P.S. I'm not saying that social media isn't bad or making it
| worse, but there are other factors as well. And when I think of
| teenagers, I think of poor young humans that are just trying to
| find and prove themselves, and that is a lot of pressure.
| codeslave13 wrote:
| My daughter hit her teens in2012. It was a horrible couple of
| years not just for her but from about 8th grade up.
|
| Our HS had a suicide wave. Many attepts (my daughter being one)
| and quite a few of those attempts were successful later.
| Thankfully my child responded well to therapy.
|
| This was in a high competitive HS IN NORTHERN VA.
|
| My thoughts on factors:
|
| Crazy parents pushing kids to try and get in TJ who had no
| business there. (We did not)
|
| Peer pressure to over perform at everything (If you did t have a
| 4.5 gpa you were stupid)
|
| And the big bad social media really started going for teens then.
| And it was brutal
|
| Over scheduling for activities. We played travel soccer. Super
| competitive. We had girls that played travel basketbal,soccer and
| softball. One of those is almost year round. Three? Your never
| home
|
| We balanced it all with camping. It helped so much. One weekend a
| month minimum. No excuses.
|
| Rambled a bit but from about 2011 on kids have been fucked.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I taught at the high school level for about ten years before
| shifting into tech. I was always astounded by the level of
| devotion many families had toward traveling sports (notably
| hockey up here in Minnesota). Outside of truly elite athletic
| pipelines, I honestly believe competitive youth sports have
| gotten completely out of hand. Here's to hoping my son grows up
| to be a mediocre athlete.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Social media is global, so any effects it has should be visible
| globally.
|
| > Teenage suicides rates have, on average, declined slightly over
| the past two decades or so. While in 1990 there were, on average
| across the OECD, 8.5 suicides per 100 000 teenagers (15-19), by
| 2015 this rate had fallen to 7.4. Much of this decline occurred
| during the 2000s. Between 1990 and 1999 the OECD average teenage
| suicide remained fairly stable at around 8.4 suicides per
| 100,000, but this average fell across the 2000s before reaching a
| low of 6.3 per 100,000 in 2007. With the exception of 2008, the
| average rate remained lower than 7.0 until 2014, although it
| increased slightly in 2014 and 2015.
|
| https://www.oecd.org/els/family/CO_4_4_Teenage-Suicide.pdf
| jjulius wrote:
| >Social media is global, so any effects it has should be
| visible globally.
|
| I don't disagree, but that conversation also needs to include
| data around how frequently teens in different countries use
| social media/smartphones. Without that data, the data you cite
| about global teenage suicide rates is sorta worthless.
| hobom wrote:
| Comparing against 1990 is wrong though, as we should compare
| against the start of widespread social media use (2010 at
| least), and it's also pretty likely that other OECD countries
| are lagging behind with widespread adoption by a few years. If
| we don't see an increase from 2015 to 2022 THAT would be
| counterevidence.
| mabbo wrote:
| > Social media is global, so any effects it has should be
| visible globally.
|
| That isn't true at all.
|
| There may be a hundred factors at play, which are all different
| in different cultures, regions, countries, etc. The cultural
| context of an individual can dramatically change how they react
| to situations, pressures, and mental illness.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Do schools in other countries let kids--elementary school and
| up--take smartphones to school and (due to inability to
| harshly police it because of reluctance to take phones, since
| it pisses off parents) use them quite a bit in class? I was
| shocked to find out that's a widespread policy/practice in
| the US, these days, and I'd be surprised if other countries
| are following us off that particular very-stupid cliff.
|
| What's the median age of first smartphone for kids coming up
| in other OECD states?
|
| Social media has a much smaller effect if you have to go to
| the family computer to use it, or whatever, than if you've
| got it in your pocket all day and are checking it constantly
| when the teacher's not looking....
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Agreed. As an aside, I find it interesting that people are
| willing to attribute cultural differences to disparate
| outcomes in this context, but not in other contexts like
| racial income disparities.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Fascinating. It is a pity then that our culture is so
| terrible as to make teens have mental illness at rates that
| dwarf other nations (who have cultures that are far superior
| at keeping teens mentally healthy). It is a shame that we
| blame social media for this when clearly it is our culture
| that is the difference and the cause.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Which other nations?
| jmoss20 wrote:
| Social media may be global, but other countervailing factors
| may be local.
| ketzo wrote:
| Social media isn't totally global, though -- I would be
| interested to see this youth mental health data correlated with
| smartphone uptake in a given country.
| jocaal wrote:
| For all intents and purposes, it is global. Facebook claims
| multiple billions of users and I myself am from a pretty
| isolated area and can say that social media definitley has a
| big presence here.
| tux2bsd wrote:
| [dead]
| slackfan wrote:
| The Mayan end of the world actually happened, but this was
| actually the result.
| candrewlee14 wrote:
| I can't help but feel like our brains didn't evolve to understand
| the scale of competing against thousands of others to get
| admitted to college slots and get jobs. Once the internet opened
| the world to make comparisons against the hierarchy of everyone
| online, compared to a once much smaller local community, lots of
| mental issues have shot up. Things like body dysmorphia, imposter
| syndrome, etc...it just doesn't seem like our brains can handle
| the scale of the hierarchy now. That's just a personal theory of
| course
| Melatonic wrote:
| I am so damn happy I was born at that perfect time where
| cellphones just started to become popular in highschool and yet I
| never had to deal with Facebook. I got to start with mixtapes and
| end youth with my telephone as my vinyl player and the worst
| thing that could happen to me was that I might go to my friends
| Myspace page and accidently blast "CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES" from
| my family computer.
|
| We definitely owe it to the future kids to figure out how to
| replicate something similar to that in the modern era. But I have
| no idea how.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Teens are going to therapy a lot more and there are lots of
| mental illnesses that weren't defined earlier. Depressed,
| anxious, and angsty teens isn't new. All the diagnoses and
| innovative "billable events" are however.
| rabuse wrote:
| Yet suicide numbers keep skyrocketing, so much much is that
| actually helping?
| sportstuff wrote:
| Cerebral was pushing pills using ticktock. Interesting Softbank
| is an investor in Bytedance and Cerebral.
| notacoward wrote:
| It's a pretty good start. "Kids these days" doesn't explain
| teens' _self reported_ problems, or objective data such as
| suicide and self harm. Clearly something really is going on. Is
| social media the culprit? Maybe a case will be made in subsequent
| articles. One thing I don 't see mentioned is the fact that -
| regardless of whether it comes through "old school" or "new
| school" media - kids today are barraged by negative news. Incomes
| for most have stagnated (at best). Costs have skyrocketed
| (especially housing, health care, and education). Inflation is
| back. The political situation is an absolute dumpster file.
| Evidence of climate change is all around. And most of these
| things seem to be getting _worse_. Advances in science and
| technology are positive, but not quite as dramatic as going to
| the moon or as life-changing as electronics and plastics a couple
| of generations ago. If my life after ChadGPT is different than my
| life before, it 's likely to be in negative ways.
|
| Who can blame kids for feeling overwhelmed or defeated, which
| often end up being expressed as not-obviously-related mental (or
| even physical) health issues? They are, after all, facing a
| bleaker future than we did, including my own GenX and the Cold
| War. If social media is part of the problem, then we need to
| identify how much it's a problem _itself_ vs. as an avenue for a
| constant flood of depressing news.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Another random possibility: the social aftermath of Occupy Wall
| Street (late 2011), where global corporate interests found it
| very useful to pit the 99% against each other through endless
| support of smaller and smaller atomized groups that are told it's
| the highest virtue the hate each other (but pretend it's not
| hate... "we're against hate, honestly we are, just look at our
| manufactured PR slogans on our websites!").
|
| Children, being impressionable and the next generation, were
| especially heavily targeted by the media and big tech. Social
| cliques have always existed amongst the young, but those mostly
| developed organically. Now children are being victimized by
| companies worth hundreds of billions to ensure the kids don't
| grow up to be a threat to the corporate dominance of society and
| finance.
| profstasiak wrote:
| do you have any hint of evidence? Don't you think, people on HN
| would spill the beans? We found out from Snowden what the CIA
| is capable of, wouldn't someone working at big tech notice?
| Justsignedup wrote:
| Biggest issue I'm seeing is people in the digital ecosystems
| (even myself) often lack in high quality friends who they
| regularly see. I noticed how I would form bonds with people over
| a game, but as soon as we both move on, we effectively just
| fizzle away and lose friends.
|
| Meanwhile my daughter is having similar issues. She has more
| closer ties to people online than in the physical world, which
| means that when we want to host parties or she just wants to do
| things, she's unable to invite her closest friends because they
| may live on the opposite side of the continent.
|
| Now the shortcuts to social gratification are VERY easy, compared
| to before, and because of this, it is easy to spiral into the
| shortcut path, and not meaningful long term relationships. And so
| now more than ever it is important to be very intentional about
| keeping up friendships compared to before where you simply had to
| do things to create bonds. Even the "loners" would find friends
| in comic book stores, but now that moved online and less regular
| or connected.
|
| I don't think it is social media. I think it is just the ease of
| remote communication. I am sure there was a similar problem when
| the telephone came out because people could now keep in touch
| with friends outside their neighborhoods. Hell at this point I
| only know 1 non-family member in my neighborhood who I interact
| with at all.
| causi wrote:
| Indeed. Real people are just so danged _inconvenient_. Even
| just talking to them involves this degree of ritual where the
| desired communication is bookended with wasted time on
| introductory small talk and then a denouement you 're never
| quite sure where it ends. If you're meeting up in person it's
| almost guaranteed you're going to be tired of their company
| before you actually leave, and then you have wasted time again
| traveling home.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| in the past this was the only way, now there's an easier way,
| but easier is not necessarily better. But easier is the way
| most would choose.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| I think it begun with teletubbies
| expazl wrote:
| This is just complete speculation, but to me, the timing and
| difference in ratio between male and female seems to correlate
| extremely well with a hypothesis that much of this is driven by
| the "sexting age" brought about with the advent of snapchat and
| similar apps. These apps have the dangerous duality that they are
| viewed very naively by less tech literate who see as something
| that facilitates sending nude pictures by only letting your
| recipient see them and deleting them after a fixed period. Of
| cause to anyone slightly more tech literate apps like that are a
| bombshell waiting to happen anytime anything remotely
| compromising is sent. This fits well with a lot of the cases you
| hear about where what would have just been hallway gossip of "did
| you hear that XX and XY broke up and are fighting?" which now is
| a viral package of pictures typically of XX being sent around to
| everyone on campus.
|
| This hypothesis also helps to explain why European countries
| where snapchat and similar apps never gained huge popularity
| before there where already campaigns warning young people never
| to trust that something sent through them would not end up on the
| internet forever.
|
| But that's all just random speculation on my part, and I have no
| real evidence to make the connection. All I can say is that the
| timing and ratio makes me thing that it's worth looking into just
| how many major depressed teenagers have had some sort of personal
| material leak outside of the intended recipients.
| d_sem wrote:
| Having exited my teen years just before the smartphones became
| ubiquitous in the US, I got the opportunity to watch externally
| how social media and other similar systems effected the day-to-
| day of my younger siblings through their teen years. It was not
| positive. Maybe someone younger can attest to my observations:
|
| - more localized isolation as kids spent a higher % of their
| attention in internet communities - less cultural cohesion due to
| hyper diversity in memes resulting in fewer shared experiences. -
| a shift in perceived life value/success based on internet
| influencers and incentive to emulate their lifestyles. - always
| online presence increasing the stakes making embarrassing or
| uncool mistakes permanent and detrimental to one's image.
| [deleted]
| tarkin2 wrote:
| Shared experiences. These help you learn to socialise: you can
| talk about what you watched and heard last night on television
| with a wide and local social group. You feel closer to your
| community through having shared things to discuss and learn the
| skills to operate within a social group. Without this you feel
| isolated which leads to depression.
|
| It seems to me, with modern technology, things are shared
| amongst people to create shared experiences and discussions but
| these are not people within your local physical community--
| leading, again, to isolation and the dangers therein.
| sct202 wrote:
| The always online I think is a big issue, because now if you're
| not invited to things or not popular it's very in your face
| with livestreams that your friends or schoolmates are all
| having fun together at that exact moment without you.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| I think it's also that you and all your friends are invited
| to completely different livestreams. No one feels left out
| even though they physically are.
|
| Like it or not, you're supposed to fit in with people around
| you. If you can't do that then there's something either wrong
| with you or them.
|
| That inherent urge to fit in is being digitally compensated,
| and I don't think it's healthy to avoid being challenged by
| all these factors we take for granted, from something as
| simple as eye contact to behavioral consequences.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Interesting take. I guess your and my high school
| experiences were very different.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| I was in hs from 2009 to 13 and it was a lonely, niche
| road filled with watching youtube rants lol.
|
| This comes from my experience thinking I didn't need to
| fit in for a very long time.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I graduated in the time before YouTube. I read books
| alone and left my small town when I could. Sometimes the
| solution to a better life is changing the people around
| you and not settling.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| An additional one I noticed with my female cousins was that a
| lot of fun was sucked out of high school girls' social
| expression/reconnaissance.
|
| On the recon side, gossiping is a fun bonding activity, but
| scrolling through snaps/reels is relative drudgery.
|
| On the performance side, "be pretty and vivacious at fun social
| events" is no longer sufficient without obsessively managing
| your profile's brand. This doesn't only include posing for,
| curating, and editing photos, but a bunch of arcane rules about
| tagging etiquette, who's included in your photos, etc.
|
| This is all from the horse's mouth, with a little bit of
| editorializing. The social environment of an in-crowd high
| school girl has always been extremely intense, but these tools
| hage made the process simultaneously more work and less fun, to
| hear my cousins tell it.
| danenania wrote:
| On that note, I wonder how much of these results are due to
| social media specifically and how much is caused by addiction
| to screens more generally, and the resulting insomnia, lack
| of exercise/time outside, and lack of human connection.
|
| I know that in some respects, social media is uniquely bad,
| but perhaps the bulk of the problem is just being hooked on
| _anything_ that makes you look at a phone or a screen all the
| time and neglect other aspects of life. Social media just
| happens to be the most popular thing currently to be hooked
| on.
| shaunxcode wrote:
| We have distributed the spectacle. Now each of us is
| responsible for projecting our chosen subliminal intent.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > It was not positive.
|
| Can you elaborate? I only ever see children like 9-14 happy
| doing the latest Instagram or TikTok dance craze in the park/at
| the mall/with groups of their friends.
| function_seven wrote:
| What you don't see are the kids that weren't invited to the
| park or mall. The ones those kids are possibly making fun of.
| Or those same kids you _did_ see, but later at night as they
| stress about what to wear tomorrow, why Jake didn 't like
| their post earlier today even though he liked Jasmine's post
| and Mia's post.
|
| Many characters in "Nosedive" ( _Black Mirror_ episode)
| looked really happy as well.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| How does one measure whether it's a net positive (for those
| who are laughing/dancing with their friends at the park) or
| a net negative (for those like you described) without being
| biased/projecting?
|
| It feels a little "anarchist" to say "down with all social
| media! it's most likely a total net negative! nobody should
| be allowed to enjoy it because it isn't inclusive of those
| who might be left out!"
| function_seven wrote:
| I can't answer your question, but do note that there are
| many who are studying this and coming to some similar
| conclusions. (But of course it's really hard to separate
| the moral panic from the real trends!)
|
| I agree that we shouldn't just ban anything that exclude
| some users. I'm not as shrill as some people are about
| the dangers, but I do have a generally negative opinion
| of childhoods that are spent so online.
|
| I have several young relatives--ages 9-22--that are
| heavily online. For the most part, they're the popular
| kids in their schools. Yet I see and hear constantly how
| they would never dare do things because of the pile-on
| potentials. Things _I_ (a nerd who desperately wanted to
| be cool) would still have done.
|
| When I was in elementary and middle school, I was
| definitely in the lower quartile of popularity. I was
| bullied occasionally, and I would sometimes dread going
| to school because of my social standing. BUT, I had
| friends at home! I had a life outside of school that I
| could return to after a short day of that stress. Even in
| school, the social pressures abated during class. If
| Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok existed during my school
| years, I would have found no refuge from the hierarchies
| and drama of school. The game I was "losing" between
| first bell and final bell would have gone 24/7.
|
| My only saving grace would have been parents that refused
| to let me play the game in the first place. I think
| parents and schools should lean harder in this direction.
| Kids need to learn their social skills in small settings
| first, before they're exposed to literally the whole
| world. An awkward 11-year-old can only do so much
| "damage" to themselves in the limited setting of IRL.
| Let's get the mistakes out of the way before they're
| broadcast across space and time.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| > less cultural cohesion due to hyper diversity in memes
| resulting in fewer shared experiences
|
| People being different is bad?
| retrac wrote:
| People do need common culture. I have a friend in his mid-20s
| and he is always "Do you know [YouTube personality]?" or
| showing me memes that require extensive explanations. And
| we're actually very similar people in many ways.
|
| Some of this is just me not being hip with the next
| generation's culture. But he also has not seen almost any of
| what I would call the American film canon. So we can't even
| discuss cheesy 80s action films. Eventually we figured out he
| had seen Stargate. He was surprised I had seen it.
|
| He can't tell what's mainstream and what's highly esoteric. I
| do think that's a problem. I know no one will have any idea
| what I'm talking about if I bring up my favourite synthwave
| artists in conversation.
|
| It occurs to me that the form of media often informed my
| awareness about that. Was it on TV? Popular book at the
| library? Or did I find it in the back of some weird 'zine?
|
| It's all the same on YouTube. Though there is the view count.
| It's often watched alone, so no social feedback. When it
| comes to movie nights, for example, finding something that's
| acceptable to most, not just hyper-tailored to yourself and
| full of in-references, is an important social skill.
| hosh wrote:
| It's not. But people also need some kind of shared meaning
| and a sense of belonging as well.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| And how did memes make that harder
| hosh wrote:
| Memes don't necessarily make it harder. However, memes
| can be used to simultaneously include and exclude -- as
| references to something the "tribe" gets, but others
| outside the tribe do not. Inside jokes are an example of
| such references.
|
| When you make hyperspecialized memes, and you have many
| of them, you're basically fragmenting a larger pool of
| shared meaning into many smaller ones.
|
| Diversity, and of itself, is not inherently a virtue --
| although lots of people would like it to be. Rather,
| diversity in the ecological sense, leads to more
| resiliency. There's still have to be some kind of
| unifying aspect (such as, unifying on humanity as a
| whole, or better yet, the whole earth as a whole) within
| which there is diversity. There's a sense of belonging to
| something greater than you while simultaneously
| participating and relating from the uniqueness of an
| individual.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Teenagers having the idea reinforced through social media
| that being different is bad, is bad. Left to their own
| devices, that is the default social order that children
| create.
| caeril wrote:
| What?
|
| Merely _existing_ on the playground, on the field, or in
| the cafeteria in the 80s and 90s reinforced the idea that
| being different was bad.
|
| How is this unique to post-2012? At least Instagram doesn't
| hold you up against a chain-link fence while TikTok punches
| you in the gut for being different.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| But come on. Diversity is not actually bad. People being
| diverse even if they think it's bad is not bad. And memes
| are not a meaningful driver of diversity.
| mech987 wrote:
| I don't think any of the people you are having a
| discussion with are making the claims you think they are
| making.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Intent does not an outcome make.
|
| "Social media" accelerates unmoderated interaction with
| other irresponsible people, which, generally speaking, is
| not healthy for teenagers.
| paperwasp42 wrote:
| OP hit on a really interesting point, and if he's referring
| to the same thing I've seen, the issue isn't "difference." I
| think the issue is the _degree_ of difference.
|
| The place I volunteer at has quite a few teen volunteers, and
| I've noticed I can immediately spot the chronically-online
| teens (and there's a lot of them), because it's like they're
| from a different planet. They use language I don't
| understand, their humor revolves around memes I don't
| understand, they constantly reference people/events from
| their favored internet niche, and then completely lose
| interest in talking with people who don't understand their
| niche.
|
| I think this ends up _decreasing_ the amount of difference
| and diversity teens are exposed to, because when there are a
| million [insert niche here] fans online who "totally get
| you", there is far less incentive to make friends in the real
| world. And if you do make real-world friends, they likely are
| going to be part of that same niche, and have the exact same
| language/interests/etc that has been crafted by the online
| community. (It's honestly a bit eerie how good these niches
| are at creating cookie-cutter teens. I've had bizarrely
| similar conversations with kids who have never met each
| other, but are into the same niche. And it's not just their
| interests that are similar, it's their
| attitudes/outlooks/political views/etc.)
|
| I find this really concerning, because it's important for
| teens to be exposed to a wide variety of people/experiences
| and be encouraged to respect them all. And that's hard to do
| when you're in a bubble of people who are identical to you,
| and have very little incentive to branch outside of that
| bubble.
|
| I think back to my teen friend group, and it was a hodge-
| podge of computer geeks, theatre kids, journalism nerds, etc.
| I got so much benefit from having such a diverse friend
| group, and it's concerning to see those types of friend
| groups becoming rarer.
| banannaise wrote:
| Okay, data is great, but the conclusions at the end have almost
| nothing to do with the data. They're a bunch of unsupported
| assumptions about what we've changed that must have caused all of
| this. It includes two separate links to his article about how
| we're ruining the children by coddling them with woke bullshit.
| Here's the tagline: "In the name of emotional well-being, college
| students are increasingly demanding protection from words and
| ideas they don't like. Here's why that's disastrous for education
| --and mental health."
| hobom wrote:
| This is not an accurate reading of the Conclusion section. He
| just sums up what has been observed and does not mention any
| causal factors. Earlier, he explicitly says that causal factos
| will be covered by other posts. While he indeed links to
| another article, he claims at no point in this article that
| coddling is a factor here.
| cholantesh wrote:
| Haidt has been flogging that particular horse since about 2012;
| maybe there's a correlation there.
| hinkley wrote:
| Boomers are full of men white knuckling their way through lives
| of quiet desperation (is the English way. The time is gone, the
| song is over. Thought I'd something more to say). Their
| children were brought up that way, and maybe only started to
| question it in adulthood, with their own children, or before
| grandchildren came. As long as the kids don't get parenting
| advice from grandma and grandpa, there's more permission to ask
| for help.
|
| I'm surprised the numbers for girls are still so high relative
| to boys, but not surprised that the rate for boys is catching
| up.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I don't know if it is much of a generational, ignore your
| feelings bit. We're all so busy, never seem to find the time.
| Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled
| lines. If anything, I think time pressure has increased,
| we're all more "available" now. Increasing pressure to get
| into a good (and hopelessly expensive) college, too, may be a
| factor. I know seventeen year olds who think they've missed
| the starting gun.
| mattficke wrote:
| This is a complex issue, but one factor not addressed in the
| piece is the Affordable Care Act, which went into effect shortly
| before the rise in depression diagnosis rates. Before the ACA the
| uninsured rate among young people was dramatically higher than it
| is today, and mental health coverage (which is an essential
| health benefit under the ACA, and included in all health plans
| now) was not always included in the health insurance people did
| have. I'm not saying there hasn't been any actual change, but a
| substantial portion of prior cohorts were likely undiagnosed
| because they couldn't afford mental health treatment.
| throwaway8582 wrote:
| Did you actually read the article? If this was just due to
| increased diagnosis, one would expect rates of self-harm and
| suicide to stay the same or fall as kids are able to get better
| treatment for mental health issues. Instead, we see the
| opposite happening, self-harm is going up in lockstep with
| diagnosis, which suggests that the increase in diagnosis
| corresponds to a real increase in mental health problems among
| teens.
| justsocrateasin wrote:
| I agree with the authors premise and argument but the data
| visualizations are not well done, and I'm confused about the
| conclusions he draws from them.
|
| For starters, it's unclear why he draws a line at 2012, when in
| many of the graphs the slope gets steeper at 2010 instead, and in
| fact that's where the percentage increase calculations start from
| as well. That vertical line at 2012 is misleading and confusing.
|
| Also, in the US Teens, Suicides (Ages 10-14), the uptick clearly
| started in 2007. I don't disagree that social media is bad and
| I've seen firsthand people who become mentally ill because of the
| standards and expectations supplied by a constant stream of
| highlight rules that make you question your own worth. But I
| think that the data provided here is not strong enough to come to
| that conclusion.
| williamcotton wrote:
| I think if you do a moving average that the trend would adhere
| more to 2012 being the inflection point. I'm basing that on
| just noticing that in _US Teens, Suicides (Ages 10-14)_ chart
| the there was a decent amount of fluctuation in the leading
| years.
|
| As for why these trends exist, one of the interesting things is
| that these are present in all of the anglosphere. Can we think
| of another explanation? What else has changed on a global scale
| in the last couple of decades?
| ergonaught wrote:
| Having seen our kids pass through this timeframe into adulthood,
| experiencing various forms of "mental illness" along the way, the
| main "obvious" factors that were different from our childhoods
| were ...
|
| a) social media, and
|
| b) schools pressuring them to commit to major life decisions
| before they were even allowed to drive a car, and never letting
| up, and
|
| c) the magnitude of student loans necessary to comply with that
| pressure.
|
| This was all hammering them long before any sort of college
| admissions process came into play.
| thinking4real wrote:
| [dead]
| sammalloy wrote:
| I think this idea that the teen mental illness epidemic began in
| 2012 is probably wrong. What is far more likely is that society
| began to open up more to these ideas, more people got diagnosed
| than before, and more young people identified with these
| struggles and felt more comfortable talking about them.
|
| Susanna Kaysen's 1993 mental health memoir "Girl, Interrupted",
| which recounts her experience as a young female adolescent
| struggling with mental health in the late 1960s, for example,
| received an enormous amount of renewed attention and interest
| when it was adapted into a film in 1999.
|
| The popularity of that film really opened up the conversation for
| a lot of young people in the 2000s, but even before that, similar
| struggles by teens were covered in the 1967 novel "The
| Outsiders", which also was adapted into a film in 1983, and if
| memory serves, there was also a similar rise in reports of an
| epidemic in the 1980s.
|
| I'm not saying that any of these books or movies led to a mental
| health contagion, I'm saying that the struggles that today's
| teens are going through have always been there, but in the past,
| they were either ignored or hidden away. Today, everything is
| shared far more widely and freely, which is why it looks like
| teens are suffering more than the past.
|
| I also think if you go back into the literature of the past,
| you'll find these same mental health concerns expressed just
| about everywhere. It's just that instead of talking about them,
| they did everything possible to hide them away. Let's not forget
| Bertha Mason, the character in the 1847 novel Jane Eyre, who was
| locked away in a room in a house. We are no longer doing that to
| people so it seems like there is a new epidemic at work, when
| it's always been with us.
| officeplant wrote:
| >society began to open up more to these ideas
|
| I'm a late 80s Gulf Coast America kid and any talk about
| therapy of depression growing up in the 90s/2000s was met with
| disbelief or family being upset that I'm not praying enough to
| Jesus. Those same people are now gladly taking anti-anxiety
| meds and dabbling in therapy.
|
| It was obvious to me as a kid that plenty of people need some
| form of help or therapy even if it's just being open and honest
| about issues and feelings to those around them.
| sammalloy wrote:
| Well said. Do you follow Kitty Tait and the Orange Bakery? I
| just bought her book "Breadsong" as a gift. Her story about
| dealing with mental illness is incredibly inspiring. Check it
| out.
| officeplant wrote:
| No but I'll check it out/add it to the list.
| Maursault wrote:
| I think this is only perceived because it is of recent focus and
| more openness about feelings, as US population suicide rates are
| within a small margin from 1950s to present.[1] I suspect close
| to the same rate of depression in teens in the 1960's, 1970's,
| 1980's, etc.
|
| But you know what else happened in 2012? Linux took over the
| datacenter. Probably just a coincidence.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187465/death-rate-
| from-s...
| 6_6_6 wrote:
| good times (pax americana) create weak people (fat, depressed,
| entilted, egomaniacs, etc)
|
| we need a 'war' to prune the tree of life yet again
|
| human is not above the nature
|
| winter is comming
| [deleted]
| FrankyHollywood wrote:
| I much agree (not with literary having a war of course...)
|
| Burnout rates are higher than ever, many people use painkillers
| daily, 10% of today's children are diagnosed with adhd and are
| often drugged [1]. Like drugs are a solution to everything. In
| the old days kids spend a lot of time outdoors, nowadays
| average screen time is around 7.5 hours [2]. That must have a
| tremendous impact on body and mind.
|
| Drug drugs drugs, to quiet the kids, to solve your headaches,
| to feel better, to lose weight.
|
| Like common sense has left us.
|
| Self-help books sky rocket in number of sales, everyone has a
| coach and/or therapist. I would argue if everyone needs a
| therapist, people just forgot how to live. A lot can be done by
| start living more offline again and use your body. [3]
|
| Let's have more common sense! (and no war please :)
|
| [1] https://www.self.com/story/adhd-diagnosis-rates-children-
| inc...
|
| [2] https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/exercise-is-
| an-...
|
| [3] https://headphonesaddict.com/teen-kids-screen-time-
| statistic...
| sophacles wrote:
| Are you seriously suggesting it's a good idea to kill off a
| bunch of folks? Let me guess, you are in the group that gets to
| survive, and you just want to provide a "solution" to all the
| people that you dislike.
|
| I have a better idea: lead by example. Why don't you
| demonstrate the effectiveness of removing a bad branch on
| yourself first?
| favaq wrote:
| >folks
|
| You illustrated his point.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Nobody needs to actually die, things just need to be hard to
| remind us what being human is about.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Coincidentally (or not), the same year Facebook launched the Feed
| as the default UI and opened it up to advertisers.
|
| I've been screaming this since the moment it was introduced, but
| I don't think people will ever realize it until years from now in
| retrospect, that the concept of the "Feed", an endless scrolling
| ad monetized horse trough of clickbait, was one of the single
| most destructive ideas in the history of human civilization.
| dkn775 wrote:
| Damn when you say feed in that context it really does make it
| sound animalistic and reflexive
| scotty79 wrote:
| I wonder what other social trends started in 2012.
| al2o3cr wrote:
| Anybody else remember the whole "RAWK MUSIC IS CAUSING A TEEN
| SUICIDE EPIDEMIC" panic in the late 80s?
|
| Can really be summed up in one word: ESKIMO
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-02-08 23:00 UTC)