68 ms·

The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

• fsociety 4y ago
  Let us note that the sharp uptick in Haidt's graphs occurred the year that the DSM-5 was released, 2013, which had several major changes around depressive and anxiety disorders and removed multi-axial assessment. I was disappointed to not see any mention of this. I find Dr. Gabor Maté's work much more interesting in explaining the decrease of mental health in society and understanding where that comes from.
• codingisfunner 4y ago
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• FrontierPsych 4y ago
  My expertise and academic background on this is zero. But I'll add my own uninformed opinion just like everyone else. I think it is because we live such an unhealthy indoor life. Nobody goes out to play anymore. When I was a kid, there were other children swarming all over the streets. No longer. Instead, everyone is inside, glued to the tv or mobile apps. Losing touch with the dirt, with the grass, playing, hiking - we lose touch with "mother earth." Maybe that means that as animals, we have been directly on the ground for all existence until now. It means that the negative ion charge from the ground was part of all of our existence. you get negative electrons when you put your bare foot or body on the ground. Now, we are inundated with positive ions - cell phones, tvs, pollution, wifi. So our bodies collect positive ions and they stay in our bodies. Postive ions are removed when we step on the ground with our bare feet. Or during recess when we used to sit on the ground or fall on the ground doing various activities. We also ground a gas tank to keep it from exploding... Negative ions: Reduce inflammation, which contributes to chronic disease Improved sleep Reduced cortisol levels Relieve pain Faster healing Calms the sympathetic nervous system The Earth’s surface is “the ‘battery’ for all planetary life.” Shoes are insulators from the ground. Feet are major portals to the natural world - our whole evolution we had mostly bare feet, or at least a lot of it. Farming also connected us to the earth, even if wearing shoes, you get down into the dirt. Most of the population in even as soon as 120 years ago or so, 80 or 90% of people were involved in agriculture. In addition to grounding, we also have removed much of sunshine, clean air and water, nutritious food, and physical activity. Physical activity is also extraordinarily important. About 70% of the entire population in the USA is overweight or obese. We have been growing slowly fatter but this has really escalated starting in the 1980s. I myself have noticed this. https://i1.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/obesity1.png https://i1.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/... This chart is so accurate and I personally noticed the EXACT same thing during this time period. Also, this graph is only for the obese and morbidly obese. Overweight is not included, but I'm sure that will be the same, if not more of a accelleration. I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and nobody was fat then. I remember the fattest person I ever saw, he was monsterous then. Now he would be on the slim side of fat. We were not made to be this fat. It is so incredibly unhealthy on so many fronts, and there are SO many terrible side effects from being overweight or obese. It's not just one or two things. There are multitudes of being fat. It messes up all the hormones, creates all kinds of mental issues. Shoot, I bet if we all got to our correct body fat percentages, the mental health epidemic would drop like a rock. Put the phone down, get outside and walk for 2 hours per day. Exercise 2 hours a day. And finally, food. Food is garbage today. Ice cream, cookies, candy, white flour, salt, white rice, potato chips, soda. You know what the unhealthy foods are. You should only shop on the "outside" aisle of the grocery store and not go up and down each aisle. Just the outside aisle - that is where they keep the veggies, fruits, dairy, meat - all the healthy stuff. The sole exception being if they have a bakery/donuts/etc on the outside wall. I guarantee you that 2 hours outdoors, every day, will immediately dispell anxiety, depression, and the rest of the stuff by a great deal. Maybe not 100%, but maybe you will have only 10% of your stress and depression left in your body instead of 100%. Of course, not saying it will cure clinical depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, or any of that knind of mental illness. Conceptually, it is the simplest, easiest fix in the world. But it is the most difficult to do. Because nobody wants to get out into the world and walk or hike. Nobody wants to put the donuts down.
• arp242 4y ago
  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.
  • brodouevencode 4y ago
    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.
    • arp242 4y ago
      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).
• zug_zug 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      Rather misanthropy?
      • QuercusMax 4y ago
        Misandry - from andro, meaning man (male) Misanthropy - from anthropos, meaning human
        • frozenport 4y ago
          Indeed, claim is that op hates the idea of population growth, rather than a specific gender.
    • AlexandrB 4y ago
      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 https://youtu.be/C8dfiDeJeDU?t=729
• d_sem 4y ago
  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 4y ago
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  • sct202 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Interesting take. I guess your and my high school experiences were very different.
• justsocrateasin 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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?
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    For boys suicides 10-14 it sure looks like it started in 2007, yeah. For girls the 1 year increase from 2012 to 2013 is kind of suspicious, so I could see an argument for 2007 as well. That does seem to decrease the strength of the argument for social media specifically since I don't believe it was all that widespread until the 2010s. I think the point is that you can't just draw a single year as the change, which obviously makes sense with any social trends. It's not like people wake up Jan 1 and suddenly they have depression.
• anigbrowl 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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.
• MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  So 2 years after Instagram was created, and a few years after touchscreen cell phones became commodity devices.
  • ch4s3 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
• deafpolygon 4y ago
  Smartphones + Social Media
  • bluescrn 4y ago
    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)
    • deafpolygon 4y ago
      Yep but the canary was how all of the big IT CEOs didn’t let their kids even have a phone.
    • brg 4y ago
      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.
• banannaise 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
    • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
      The 15+ bucket has the largest increase in this study, so they could have certainly been having issues for at least 5 years.
• banannaise 4y ago
  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."
  • cholantesh 4y ago
    Haidt has been flogging that particular horse since about 2012; maybe there's a correlation there.
  • hobom 4y ago
    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.
  • hinkley 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
• nimbius 4y ago
  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_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present) 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 4y ago
    Not likely. The pattern holds for suicide rates, which are not very affected by ACA "more cogent detection systems."
• briantakita 4y ago
  I wonder what the trend is since the concept of "teenager" was coined, which I believe J Edgar Hoover used & Edward Bernays encouraged...
• somecompanyguy 4y ago
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  • deleted 4y ago
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  • somecompanyguy 4y ago
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    • maxbond 4y ago
      Saying a bunch of conspiratorial nonsense and then predicting downvotes doesn't prove you right, it proves you ought to know better.
      • deleted 4y ago
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    • briantakita 4y ago
      [flagged]
• benrhodesuk 4y ago
  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.
  • righttoolforjob 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
• amadeuspagel 4y ago
  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 https://www.oecd.org/els/family/CO_4_4_Teenage-Suicide.pdf
  • ketzo 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        [dead]
  • jjulius 4y ago
    >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.
  • mabbo 4y ago
    > 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.
• Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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?
• vkk8 4y ago
  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.
  • LarryMullins 4y ago
    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.
  • thatfrenchguy 4y ago
    > 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.
• macspoofing 4y ago
  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.
• notacoward 4y ago
  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.
• 6_6_6 4y ago
  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
  • tomlockwood 4y ago
    First it'll come for the people that can't spell "coming".
  • sophacles 4y ago
    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?
    • rpmisms 4y ago
      Nobody needs to actually die, things just need to be hard to remind us what being human is about.
    • favaq 4y ago
      >folks You illustrated his point.
      • sophacles 4y ago
        What do you mean?
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • FrankyHollywood 4y ago
    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-increase https://www.self.com/story/adhd-diagnosis-rates-children-inc... [2] https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/exercise-is-an-all-natural-treatment-to-fight-depression https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/exercise-is-an-... [3] https://headphonesaddict.com/teen-kids-screen-time-statistics/ https://headphonesaddict.com/teen-kids-screen-time-statistic...
• nluken 4y ago
  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.
  • FrontierPsych 4y ago
    I think it dependson one's personality type. All those things didn't affect me because I didn't care about any of it. I made barely enough grades to barely squeeze into university. I just didn't care, not too much. I would think that college admissions is too narrow of a reason as to why. Only about 35% of high school graduates go on to university. I'm sure a significant number of university attendees don't have these issues to the extent that they have to go to a therapist. It's great that you went, wonderful that you did, but I am not convinced that anywhere near the majority of university students had that much pressure - to the extent of having their life break down. I do agree that everyone needs a healthier lifestyle.
  • xeromal 4y ago
    > 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.
• kderbyma 4y ago
  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.
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  • kneebonian 4y ago
    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/ca8d4b10f55ed244e8b4b8951bf6a01ebfd3304b-2358x1048.png https://tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net/production/ca8d4b10f55ed...
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  Poverty is correlated with suicide rates, for obvious reasons: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/poverty-may-have-a-greater-effect-on-suicide-rates-than-do-unemployment-or-foreclosures 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-united-states 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 4y ago
    Child poverty has declined significantly since both 2007 and 2012 (although they did rise momentarily after 2008).
  • scythe 4y ago
    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.
  • marcusverus 4y ago
    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/visualizations/2022/demo/p60-277/figure1.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
• faeriechangling 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      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.
• Melatonic 4y ago
  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.
• ramesh31 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Damn when you say feed in that context it really does make it sound animalistic and reflexive
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• mattficke 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• scotty79 4y ago
  I wonder what other social trends started in 2012.
• kpennell 4y ago
  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=elo89pPREYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGTS9vZFV2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGTS9vZFV2o
  • tschumacher 4y ago
    I watched both interviews. Thanks for sharing.
• munificent 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Sure, fair point.
• slackfan 4y ago
  The Mayan end of the world actually happened, but this was actually the result.
• chasd00 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Yet suicide numbers keep skyrocketing, so much much is that actually helping?
    • juve1996 4y ago
      It might be, since the actual rate decreased as recently as 2018-2020. Obviously this may increase due to the ramifications of covid - but that would certainly be a special circumstance. "The total age-adjusted suicide rate increased from 10.4 per 100,000 in 2000 to a peak of 14.2 in 2018, followed by a 5% decline between 2018 and 2020 to 13.5."
• karaterobot 4y ago
  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.
• basicallybones 4y ago
  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
  • rpmisms 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
  • DoItToMe81 4y ago
    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.
• zahrc 4y ago
  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.
• pmontra 4y ago
  > 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.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8JtnUpkP0s
• golemiprague 4y ago
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• kulahan 4y ago
  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?
• ergonaught 4y ago
  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 4y ago
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• Maursault 4y ago
  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-suicide-in-the-us-since-1950/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/187465/death-rate-from-s...
• candrewlee14 4y ago
  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
• sportstuff 4y ago
  Cerebral was pushing pills using ticktock. Interesting Softbank is an investor in Bytedance and Cerebral.
• marginalia_nu 4y ago
  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?
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    Yeah I'd like to see the charts starting at, say, 1990 instead so we can see a longer term picture.
• Justsignedup 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
• psychoslave 4y ago
  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://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_Aren%27t_Alright https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7iNbnineUCI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7iNbnineUCI
  • syntaxfree 4y ago
    Just in case: “The kids are alright” is a The Who song from way before when.
• expazl 4y ago
  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.
• sammalloy 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    >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 4y ago
      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.
• HL33tibCe7 4y ago
  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.
• leashless 4y ago
  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)
• jasmer 4y ago
  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.
• password11 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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?
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    • password11 4y ago
      I wrote a long post but deleted it. > Help me out. I don't see the problem. This is the problem: https://xkcd.com/1102/ https://xkcd.com/1102/
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    It's similar to how studies report that food X is bad and increases your risk of <rare disease> by 30%. Which in absolute terms is 0.01% -> 0.013%.
• NeverAnonymous 4y ago
  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.
• codeslave13 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    • prawn 4y ago
      My brother recently retired after a career (~18-38ish) as a professional basketball player. It worked for him and there were opportunities to leverage contacts for employment after sport. But that was a 15+ year career. Anything too far short of that is a risk, IMO. Watching many of his peers defer tertiary study, or forgo jobs for training roles, or be out of the league after a few underpaid years while contemporaries were getting promoted with years of study or work under their belt - I figured you want your children to be very good or hobbyists playing social sport or to keep fit. Anything in the middle might just be distraction or disappointment.
      • codeslave13 4y ago
• jhoechtl 4y ago
  I think it begun with teletubbies
• password54321 4y ago
  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-beliefs-among-american-adolescents/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/09/10/religious-be...
  • DubiousPusher 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
• ever1337 4y ago
  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%20Testimony.pdf 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 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 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.
• al2o3cr 4y ago
  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
• vatotemking 4y ago
  We didnt know when it happened, but we are now at the mercy of AI. Scary times. Everything we do is controlled by algorithms.
• EGreg 4y ago
  Kids overdiagnoses, while both parents work in corporations and stick them in a school to sit down and shut up for 10 hours a day: ADHD - prescribe amphetamines (Ritalin, Adderall) Gender Dysphoria - prescribe hormone blockers Autism spectrum - Abilify and Risperdal https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-there-really-an-autism-epidemic/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-there-really-a... https://www.psychiatryadvisor.com/home/topics/adhd/a-true-adhd-epidemic-or-an-epidemic-of-overdiagnosis/ https://www.psychiatryadvisor.com/home/topics/adhd/a-true-ad... Teenager and College Student overdiagnoses: Depression - prescribe SSRIs Diabetes - prescribe Meglitinides Obesity - prescribe diets https://www.turnbridge.com/news-events/latest-articles/rise-in-teenage-mental-health-problems/ https://www.turnbridge.com/news-events/latest-articles/rise-... https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/population-care/loss-connection-fuels-more-teen-mental-health-problems https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/population-care/los... https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0824-youth-diabetes.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0824-youth-diabetes... https://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-childhood-obesity-rates-are-rising-and-what-we-can-do https://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-childhood-obesity... Adults: Men - Opioid epidemic since 2008 Women - One in four on antidepressants in middle age Internet Addiction - companies need to boost "engagement" ADD - notifications and multitasking 24/7 is normal now https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/ https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/ Elderly in nursing homes: Too many to list We need to realize that these "epidemics" and "rises in incidence" have more to do with the capitalist industry and government working together, than individual incidence. They have women vs men, black vs white, so people are distracted from the real causes: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362 Big Tech is a big part of the problem, and much of the unhealthy habits and emergent depression come from the influencer industry. In other demographics, unhealthy influences were specifically pushed and promoted until they became normalized. It takes hold easier when you are young and impressionable: Gangsta rap, Drill music - music industry, corrupts Black youth Instagram and TikTok - influencer industry, corrupts adolescent girls Most of the cartoons you watched, down to the "programming", was based around merchandising opportunities and ways to sell stuff: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/ https://www.cbr.com/cartoon-television-commercials-products/#the-care-bears-started-out-as-plush-dolls https://www.cbr.com/cartoon-television-commercials-products/... But it's not just the young. Many adults are at each other's throats with Democrat vs Republican, Shiite vs Sunni, wars between countries, etc. because the media tells them to. Their brains have developed beyond the youth, but the masses can be manipulated by a top-down media machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s Most of the mainstream songs you listen to sound the same because the studios use algorithms to select songs that will they will promote: https://soundcloud.com/discover/sets/track-stations:220914663 https://soundcloud.com/discover/sets/track-stations:22091466... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-music/pop-music-too-loud-and-all-sounds-the-same-official-idUSBRE86P0R820120726 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-music/pop-music-t... The American community collapsed around 2000 and social media has grown up to dominate it, instead. Our public forums are privately owned and controlled by Zuck and Elon, and in China - WeChat and TikTok work even closer with the Chinese government than here. Governments are very much involved in all this, of course. https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046 https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Commu... Both parents work for corporations, and are told to "lean in", corporations co-opt women's lib movements to promote climbing the corporate ladder as a way to find meaning in life: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286 But meanwhile, the kids are left to be raised by public schools (or the street). Divorces are up. No one's really happy. Young people who move to the cities work like dogs to afford the rent and live alone and no one knows their own neighbors. They cope with cellphones in their hand. Before medicating society, consider building better tools than Big Tech has, and exit the system dominated by profit motive and exploitation of others. Open Source, Science, Wikipedia, Creative Commons and more, can be made possible with safety nets like 30 hour work week overtime protection, Universal Basic Income and Universal Health Insurance. If you want a healthier society, start by opting out of the current system, and invite others in your life to opt out also. In many cases of overdiagnosis, medication is a lazy bandaid for society's problems. They want you to stay medicated and think you can individually recycle your way out of the metric tons of plastic they produce, diet and exercise your way out of the High Fructose Corn Syrup they put into everything, and so on. The more you believe this, the less political will you have to demand politicians and corporations change. But we do need to hold their feet to the fire. They've failed us. 1/3 of arable land has undergone desertification around the world. Insects are dying. Species are going extinct. Overfishing. Garbage piling up. Coral reefs dying. Kelp forests destroyed. Rainforests being cut down. THe biodiversity of the world is repidly being turned into monocultures and farms. And the only thing people seem to care about is "climate change" from fossil fuels. These things are far more pressing.
• zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  If you look at longer-term data there doesn't appear to be any recent trend at all. For example look at https://www.childtrends.org/publications/teen-suicide-databank-indicator https://www.childtrends.org/publications/teen-suicide-databa... Looking at the "suicide attempts requiring medical attention" we see a low of 1.7% in 1991, then a peak of 2.8% in 1995, and another low in 1.9%, and then now another peak (but less than 1995). For actual suicides I found this chart https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm which shows we are well below baseline trends for males. For females we do seem to have an increase lately, so that part seems like the main thing to be concerned about. Although it seems to have started more around 2007 than 2012 which seems a bit early to be blaming social media (almost no one really had smartphones in 2007, let alone teens). So I do think it's worth looking into this but it's easy to try to find data to fit our preconceived notions rather than the truth.
  • yurishimo 4y ago
    We didn't have smartphones, but we did have cell phones. I was in 7/8th grade at that time and had a cell phone as a lower middle class kid. I mainly used it to call my parents or text with friends. That time was shortly after providers moved to unlimited calls/texts in the US because kids would steamroll through a billion sms messages anyway.
• hpen 4y ago
  Was 18 in twenty twelve and obviously social media was a huge thing but we grew up without it. Teens in 2012 had seen it most their lives. That has to fuck a person over.
• cycomanic 4y ago
  Looking at the graphs on the article, what sticks out immediately is two things. Why did the data only start in 2004, that's not a very long range, and where are the error bars. We are reporting statistics here, so we should see some sort of measure of the statistical accuracy shouldn't we?
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    Error bars are for sampling. If they're using the full statistics of all suicides nationwide, for example, there's no error bar. The number is just the number.
• fleddr 4y ago
  Digital society sucks, and to a degree modern society in general. There used to be religion, which you may dislike, but it offered social bonding at scale. You'd get to known an entire community, neighborhood, might make new friends or even find a spouse. Learn about people hobbies and form sub communities. Or you go to school. Or to work, where before globalization you'd have a stable local team that you'd get to know very deeply. Or you may go to a bar, a hobby club, and attend public places for shopping, entertainment, whichever. Now you wake up and the first thing you do is check your phone. Next, you may learn or work remotely, sitting alone, watching a screen breathing low quality air. You don't go to a store, you use delivery. You use your little work breaks to watch another screen, the smartphone. After dinner, there's more screen time. Passive entertainment, doomscrolling or interacting with a "community", weird little avatars on a screen. You don't even have a relation with objects either. In the digital world, you don't really own anything. There's no stability. It's all fleeting, flexible, disrupted, empty. That's increasingly the dominant lifestyle: void. The world is entirely financialized, hence you don't really live in a society, it's performance culture. You're expected to juggle 10 balls from an early age, which are life's "expectations". It offers no time for discovery, play or recovery. You need to check the damn boxes. The reward of mastering the boxes is that well actually...you still can't afford a basic middle class existence. The financial system constantly rug-pulls you whilst technology constantly disrupts your relevance. Am I dramatizing? Yes, somewhat. But I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better. We lost a lot.
  • sammalloy 4y ago
    > I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better. If there is anything I’ve learned in my old age, it’s that things were not better in the past. And while I don’t accept Steven Pinker’s optimistic claims about the fruits of progress as much as other people do, I think he makes a good baseline argument regarding how much progress we have made over the last century. It’s just that we have so much farther to go and that seems overwhelming at times, at least to me. There’s a common cognitive bias known as nostalgia or rosy retrospection that makes people think the past was better, as well as any number of psych studies showing how this works and why people do it. The most common example is of a parent who only remembers the good times while their children remember the bad. I won’t bore you with the details, but you can look into this phenomenon for yourself. With that said, you have listed some legitimate complaints about negative societal changes that have occurred over the last thirty years. That doesn’t mean or imply that everything was better in the past, but it would be accurate to say that some things have gotten worse while other things have gotten better, but mostly, humanity has achieved some measure of progress that makes even the most recent past look barbaric, IMO. We have this idea in our head that progress and advancement and the uplifting of humanity (and its relationship with nature) should be neat and orderly, when in reality it’s extremely messy, gruesome, and violent, much like the labor pains of a woman giving birth. If you were an alien and had never seen a human giving birth, you might think the mother to be was being attacked or suffering from a disease. I think progress is a little bit like that. Its appearance looks like chaos and suffering and pain, but the end result is a new form of life, a new form of living. That’s what we are experiencing. I personally believe it is a dangerous error to believe the past was better, because it prevents people from looking towards a better future, as they seek to repeat the same mistakes from the past, over and over again, endlessly seeking a Golden Age that never was. The other problem with looking in the rear view mirror, is that you neglect working to improve the present, which inevitably informs all future progress. If we are looking backwards, then we are neglecting the present and its subsequent future, so we have to be wary and cautious about people who tell us that things were better in the past, as it tends to impose a false historical mythology on the past, present, and future, disrupting the timeline of progress in all directions.
• solarmist 4y ago
  I suspect this trend will continue for at least another generation. And I don't believe it's restricted to teens; they're merely the most prominent examples. The explanation I heard that strongly resonated with me was that, as a society, we're moving up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs from level 2, "Safety Needs," to level 3, "Love and Belonging." When I read descriptions of life in the early 20th century, it's nearly impossible for me to connect with it because even the poorest people I've met have a standard of living that's nearly unimaginable to someone from 1910. People who grew up in the 1950-1970s saw this change happening, but going from neglecting a thing to caring about it is almost certainly a lagging indicator. For the first time in history, there is psychological space to care about mental health and social issues en mass. So, of course, there's going to be an explosion of diagnoses and an apparent epidemic. Couple this with the dawn of social media, and you've accelerated the trend 10x as we figure out how the hell to handle it responsibly.
• adHoax 4y ago
  2012 was Sandy Hook; teens today and since have been watching the inaction of experts and leadership tackle security problems in deference to appeals to authority to dead people's political documents. They're watching experts and leaders to nothing to stem environmental mess they get to clean up. They watch the adults complain kids are coddled, then flip a switch and complain social media is exposing them to the world. They're sick of the cognitive dissonance of the elders who prefer the clean room, fake figurative world of fiat economics they live in while fucking over the real world teens will inherit. Similar to increased cancer rates being linked to better measurement, it's not social media, it's that social media is allowing teens to see how shitty their society is.
• intelVISA 4y ago
  Don't need to be a data scientist to posit that this aligns with the timing of social media/smart phones hitting critical mass.
• GatorD42 4y ago
  Is it just teens? It seems like everyone is less happy and more anxious these days. I wonder what the stats look like for adults.
• theonething 4y ago
  I want to raise my children in a very rural place where they can run and play outside in the woods. Where they and other kids don't care about phones, social media, etc. Sounds like a pipe dream, but for the sake of my kids, I'm going to try to find this place that's right for us. Until then, we've created a microcosm of it by implementing a strict no screen policy. It hasn't been that hard to implement so far because our child is only three and it's been great but we realize it get will harder as they get older, thus the plans to move to the aforementioned place. To me, social media has so much downside compared to its upsides, trying my best to help my family escape it makes sense to me.
• 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Welcome to Universe 25 - Housing deficit - Overpopulation - Excess food
• mbrochh 4y ago
  For the sake of thinking outside of the box, I would want someone to comb through all data and evidence and try to find out if MAYBE the teen mental illness epidemic could be correlated to the other gigantic epidemic that is currently bringing down western civilisation: Insulin Resistance.
• softsound 4y ago
  I'm honestly a little surprised it didn't start before then. With the 2008 "Great Recession" I remember quite a few people and teenagers struggling back in my high school. I knew a lot of teens/families who lost their homes, or had to get jobs to support their families etc and drop out of school. I remember that having a big impact in my life, so I get I would have expected that to have had a greater influence.
  • at-w 4y ago
    Is there strong evidence that widespread adversity like a recession increases mental illness? I would guess that those kinds of factors that affect everyone in your social group have a less negative effect mental health wise, as everyone around you is going through the same thing. At least with measurable indicators of mental health crises like suicide rates, groups that are worst off by most socioeconomic measures tend to have lower suicide rates. For example, the black suicide rate in the US is less than half the white suicide rate and have been through Jim Crow laws and generally much lower SES. From what I've seen, the same is true when comparing across countries, with suicide rates being positively correlated with GDP and income.
• musictubes 4y ago
  I’m blaming the parents. I’m a single gen-xer so I admit to not having skin in the game but it seems like my generation has managed to raise incredibly neurotic kids. I don’t think it is the fault of the kids. The parents have not allowed their children to develop any resiliency. It doesn’t seem to me that whatever stresses that the current generation of American kids are facing are any worse than what previous generations have had to deal with. As a Cold War kid I was terrified of nuclear apocalypse. It was a big deal. Remember the “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech? It began with, “The Soviet Union has nuclear missiles pointed at the capitals of Europe…” Was that a greater or lessor stressor than climate change? Every generation faces stress, it’s how they deal with it that is important. The question is why is the current generation having so much trouble coping?
• kazinator 4y ago
  This roughly coincides with age of the smartphone. I mean "everyone" starting to have usable smartphone with a big touch screen, on a decent network.
• kgc 4y ago
  The charts suggest 2009 as the inflection point not 2012.
• TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  Pretty sure it was 2016 with the murder of Harambe. He should have kept quiet about his political knowledge. R.I.P.
• etempleton 4y ago
  As a teenager growing up I don’t think I really understood what anxiety or depression was or looked like and I sure as hell wouldn’t admit to having either. I understood both academically, but no one wanted to call you anxious or depressed and you didn’t want anyone to call you that either. In retrospection, I was both anxious and depressed for most of high school. Going to therapy wouldn’t have been an option. Drugs wouldn’t have been an option, because depression and/or anxiety was not something you needed either to treat. It was a temporary state, at best, that you needed to shake yourself from. Mental illness is no longer stigmatized in the same way it was even a decade ago. It makes sense more kids are self-reporting feeling that way. I don’t think kids are all that different now. I don’t think things are so much worse for them. I do think school is probably more prison like than ever, but beyond that it is all the same stuff in a slightly different context.
• steve76 4y ago
  [dead]
• chamwislothe2nd 4y ago
  People often blame phones, but I blame the runaway success of Obamas first campaign. His team ran the most effective targeting campaign online I'd ever seen. People I knew in Canada cared more than about him than local politics. I think it highlighted the potential of online propaganda to such an extent that everyone started targeting online people. Good an bad.
• lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  Universal access to information causes depression if the information about the state of the world is depressing. Might not be social media that is the issue. No evidence for that tho, just playing devils advocate.
• projektfu 4y ago
  I think in 2012 you couldn't look back and say that things had changed because these findings were still near their historical averages. But looking back from now it appears the upward trend started in 2010, which tracks with the effects of the Global Financial Crisis. It is possibly leveling out now, and who knows the directionality in the future. Are these findings substantially different from other groups? Do 30-35 and 40-45 experience a different trend? Is there any cohort data?
• Utkarsh_Mood 4y ago
  As a teenager myself, I definitely think that this recent rise in teen mental illness epidemic worldwide is definitely due to the fact that we are globalizing American concepts of mental health. I probably wonder if naming and pointing to a mental health problem is making it worse. There have been similar phenomena worldwide, from the recent anorexia rise in Hong Kong, to depression in Japan.[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like...
• graymatters 4y ago
  It is time for class action law suits against social platforms to stop enabling the abuse of youth.