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> That’s profoundly unsettling, particularly in light of data released by the CDC in April showing that 44 percent of high schoolers said they’d had “persistent

> That’s profoundly unsettling, particularly in light of data released by the CDC in April showing that 44 percent of high schoolers said they’d had “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” during the past year, and 20 percent had seriously contemplated suicide. One second-order effect of Covid is that it completely confounds the statistics collection for a wide swathe of issues. With a huge one-off exogenous shock in emotional and physical well-being, it’s basically impossible to make inferences using these statistics from the last couple years. Maybe we can compute the “Covid baseline impact” but because of the very regional response, it will be extremely hard to control for this factor.

dbavaria 4y ago
The CDC also has numbers from 2009-2019, the following report shows similiarly shocking numbers pre-covid: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/index.htm#:~:text=More%20than%201%20in%203,a%2044%25%20increase%20since%202009 https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/index.htm#:~:....
barry-cotter 4y ago
This is ridiculous. The CDC doesn’t care about teenagers’ mental health. They’re using this specific effect as an argument for something they actually care about. School is itself deleterious to teenagers’ mental health. School causes suicide. This is as you would expect from an institution that constrains them from doing what they want and following their interests, that is hostile to their autonomy as such. > What sticks out is a large decrease in teen suicide rates during the summer vacation months of June/July/August. In contrast, the somewhat older group sees, if anything, an increase in suicide rates in the summer. There’s also a drop in high school suicides in December, around winter vacation. https://www.basilhalperin.com/essays/school-and-teen-suicide.html https://www.basilhalperin.com/essays/school-and-teen-suicide...

dbavaria 4y ago

The CDC also has numbers from 2009-2019, the following report shows similiarly shocking numbers pre-covid: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/index.htm#:~:text=More%20than%201%20in%203,a%2044%25%20increase%20since%202009 https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/index.htm#:~:....

barry-cotter 4y ago

This is ridiculous. The CDC doesn’t care about teenagers’ mental health. They’re using this specific effect as an argument for something they actually care about. School is itself deleterious to teenagers’ mental health. School causes suicide. This is as you would expect from an institution that constrains them from doing what they want and following their interests, that is hostile to their autonomy as such. > What sticks out is a large decrease in teen suicide rates during the summer vacation months of June/July/August. In contrast, the somewhat older group sees, if anything, an increase in suicide rates in the summer. There’s also a drop in high school suicides in December, around winter vacation. https://www.basilhalperin.com/essays/school-and-teen-suicide.html https://www.basilhalperin.com/essays/school-and-teen-suicide...