15 ms·

Record levels of sadness in teen girls, CDC reports

120 points by EGreg 4y ago

EGreg 4y ago
I was glad to see this article actually mention societal and tech factors that could be behind this rise. It is rare to see the mainstream discuss the upstream factors for ADHD, Depression, Gender Dysphoria, Diabetes, and much more. Especially in kids and teens. “Kids are now vulnerable to cyberbullying and critical comments, like ‘I hate you’, ‘Nobody likes you,’” he said. “It’s like harpoons to their heart every time.”
- canadianfella 4y ago
  [dead]
- mattpallissard 4y ago
  From an evolutionary standpoint, I sincerely believe that people aren't mentally equipped to deal with society as presented by the internet/media. I make my living due to technology, but if there was a big switch to throw that would turn off television/internet I'd do it without hesitation. I think the long term benefits would outweigh the short term chaos.
  - swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
    No I think the internet is unequipped for what we need from it. It runs off ads and shovels enraging content at people. It allows hostile behavior to have no consequences. It’s anonymous except nothing you do is private. There is no dispute resolution, mods have absolute power, and you can’t ever talk to customer support because you aren’t the customer, the advertisers are.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > I make my living due to technology, but if there was a big switch to throw that would turn off television/internet I'd do it without hesitation. I've had similar thoughts, in similar terms. Put that switch in front of me and I'd toggle it with glee in my heart and a smile on my face. A couple decades ago I was so optimistic about this stuff. In the big picture, it's done little but disappoint, since then. Same as many a great, grand idea—ruined by contact with economics and human "games".
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    Well if you start feeling an urge to mail bombs to people, you might want to tell someone.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Even civilization as a whole has not been around nearly long enough for our species to be very well adapted to it. The species we cite as well adapted for civilized life were really adapted for other traits that just happenstance were relevant in an urban environment; like a pigeon's propensity to nest in a building ledge coming from its propensity to nest on a rocky cliff, or how if you kill off all bad for human predators like wolves, you'd be left with urban coyotes to fill the niche and this doesn't mean anything really about the coyote vs the wolf's ability to survive in the city (independent of humans killing them of course). Of course we are all suffering from mental illness and poor physical health and this that and the other thing all the time. All we do is stress out about what others think about ourselves and sit around lethargic. We didn't spend millions of years of mutation and selection to be the most optimal couch potato. We spent it to be a master forager of the environment, setting out on foot by morning for resources when the weather and light is good, and spending the day and evening in engineering or creative pursuits. I'm convinced even language had a role to play in changing our behavior dramatically in this way, since often what we do in life is limited to what we are able to communicate with words or thoughts in our language with its finite set of descriptors.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    I couldn't agree more. Life has become too large, unstable, complex and confusing for people to make sense of. It creates an endless amount of stress.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Behavior, including anything bullying-like, seems much more heavily policed among younger kids than ever (nobody thought a thing of the odd "I'll kill you!" or "I hate you!" in elementary school in the 80s or 90s, and I'm told we were far more "coddled" then than in the 70s or earlier—now, even a one-off of that kind of thing gets a call to parents) but much nastier stuff is more prevalent than ever in middle school and up, thanks to social media and smartphones (the Internet being everywhere, all the time, is what made social media take off in the mainstream, and why it's so heavily used).
  - asdff 4y ago
    Even just 15 years ago it was a totally different beast online. Future politicians are lucky no one was recording their banter in the halo 3 lobby. You were expected to be thick skinned and not take anything seriously. Maybe it helped that an fps actually gave you a way to dish it back though if you had the skill to back up your talk. It seemed like after halo 3, no one bothered turning on a mic and that culture was over before long.
heymaybeitsthis 4y ago
[flagged]
throwawayacc6 4y ago
https://archive.is/HyqTa https://archive.is/HyqTa
ericmcer 4y ago
Maybe it's time to shine some light on inequality in the realm of attractiveness??? As kids increasingly interact via social media, being funny, intelligent, or creative is less important than looking good in pictures. I can't imagine how shitty this is for teenagers. We used to lament the "unattainable beauty standards" of magazines and on TV, but this seems even more harmful. I dunno how you do this though, as even just admitting something like: "I am handicapped in the looks department" is pretty depressing. At the same time it seems messed up that someone who is attractive doesn't just get preferential treatment in their daily interactions, but can now monetize their looks easily via social media (or onlyfans lol).
- parpfish 4y ago
  wouldn't social media be a boon for the funny and creative as well?
  - throwaheyy 4y ago
    No. The average social media consumer isn’t that deep.
    - fknorangesite 4y ago
      Surely, though, the average HN user is the pinnacle of thoughtfulness.
  - elil17 4y ago
    Perhaps the issue is that whatever you're good at, you'll be shown along side the best of the best. Your friend's joke is funny when you hear it at a party. But is it as funny on Twitter, where it's shown alongside jokes from professional comedians?
    - godelski 4y ago
      Not to mention that the audience is very different between friends at a party and on Twitter. Twitter, and social media, is far more reaching and lots of context and intent may be lost as we cross many different cultural lines and play the game of telephone. Your friends are far more likely to be good faith actors, but even there we can see how a singular bad actor can quickly ruin a situation. I'd argue that there's parallels to not just jokes but any types of communication (science, tech, political, etc) and attraction. (Though people are also able to successfully carve out bubbles and find a very specific audience but at the same time very large. Both can be true. Sometimes the hate can amplify these bubbles. Not so simple)
algem 4y ago
Isn’t depression period at an all time high? When ever depression is explored or written about it’s always in the context of females and not males. At least from what I see. Everyone knows boys and men have a really hard time with mental health but nothing is really done about it. Man up as they say. I wish the conversation was evenly distributed.
- fulafel 4y ago
  The first sentence: > Nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys
  - algem 4y ago
    Yes the article mentioned boys a few times but doesn't go into any depth. And its not so much this article its really the overall quantity of these types of articles that focus on female over male. Of course an article can focus on one or the other and that is fine but I find it just tends to be lopsided towards females.
    - foogazi 4y ago
      Doesn’t seem like this is a girls only article - it covers adolescent mental health issues sourced from survey data What specific points seem lopsided here?
    - prawn 4y ago
      In recent years it’s felt like there are always more stories about mental health in males. Job market, etc. Not sure how you’re missing them?
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        I can't find major newspaper articles specifically focused on suicide among teenage boys, even though the rate of it is 400% higher than for teenage girls, and getting worse faster.
dadthrwy 4y ago
"long-brewing national tragedy only made worse by the isolation and stress of the pandemic" As a parent, it seems strange to me to blame this situation on the pandemic when it's been, for all purposes, over in most parts of the country for more than a year. My kids have been back in school, sports, and being IRL with their friends for going on two years now. The inability of mental health professionals to clearly separate temporary factors like pandemic isolation from the pervasive root causes that remain unaddressed is pretty frustrating. The science, if you can even call it that, is distressingly thin here and it makes me angry.
- twelve40 4y ago
  it was a huge hit to the gut. the kids were sitting at home for like a year+. crappy zoom non-classes where everyone falls asleep. at my local high school even the newly built sports field was shut down and fenced off for the whole year. why??? sure, the pandemic, whatever, but it was brutal for the little people.
  - NDizzle 4y ago
    It didn't have to be that way. I moved my family out of California in May 2020 to get away from the terrible decisions that were already happening. They were playing sports and doing normal stuff by June, 2020. Went to school in person that fall. All of the data was there. It's been there the whole time.
- e12e 4y ago
  The pandemic (isolation etc) might have formative/lasting effects though, similar to trauma? Perhaps especially for kids/youth who were a certain age/stage of growing up at the time? Ed: apparently the study uses data from 2021
- EGreg 4y ago
  Well, it is red meat thrown to the activists to avoid talking about issues that would make them shout down the article and its publisher. For example, if we talk about racial issues in this country, we don’t usually focus on the capitalist music industry using gangsta rap to export role models spewing misogynistic lyrics to Black kids many of whom identify with them, we don’t talk much about the breakdown in the nuclear family, the rise of divorces or out-of-wedlock births. (People used to — see the Moynihan report for instance.) We hardly talk about welfare traps or minimum wage laws (Milton Friedman used to etc.) We don’t talk about academic performance of Black kids being affected by stuff like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white Whenever Bill Cosby or Stephen A Smith or Deloris Tucker someone like that goes on a rant, they are shouted down. That is why it is far safer to attribute it all to slavery 150 years ago, and Jim Crow laws, even though the previous generations who had marriage and school uniforms and higher church attendance etc. are horrified at what many in the current generations have been doing, and the lyrics in Drill music or Gangsta Rap etc. People are starting to wake up — I have been in a clubhouse room with 2000 people about whether a lot of rap is leading to violence, and almost everyone on stage was Black and most were saying absolutely. Some people said it creates jobs in the music industry, others pointed out how many jobs are destroyed overall because the kids can’t pass an interview. And so on. It was really nice to see but only possible because Black people got together to honestly discuss what has been going on. Now we need to turn it into action, in our own lives, with our own kids, and what they are exposed to. Most parents work so much or are divorced and the kids are raised by the street or by the government!
badRNG 4y ago
This is based on data from 2021. Since even then, there have been several significant regressions for women and LGBT rights, most notably the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Women of the next generation are growing up in the difficult position where they have less rights and bodily autonomy than their grandmothers grew up with.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Do rights and autonomy make people happy? Lots of research shows that the happiest people in the country are conservative women: https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-are-liberals-less-happy-than-conservatives https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-are-liberals-less-happy-than-... Indeed, the past 30 years has seen a consistent expansion of rights and autonomy and relaxation of social rules, and happiness has been declining pretty consistently the whole time: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/22/americans-are-getting-more-miserable-theres-data-prove-it/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/22/americans... It's also the case that happiness among women has been declining since 1970: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14969/w14969.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14969/w149.....
  - tptacek 4y ago
    The data in that survey comes from the American Family Survey, which seems to be taken pretty seriously, but the commentary is from the Institute for Family Studies, which is taken... less seriously. Caveat lector. Maybe the underlying data supports the point you (and IFS, for its own reasons) are making, but it's worth digging in, I guess. One supposes it's easier to be happy as a conservative woman in 2022 given that identifying as such likely means you're sanguine about Roe --- which is a point even the IFS article makes.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      I don't think IFS is any less objective than social science academia, which is dominated by people who take "rights" and "autonomy" as essential ends in themselves. Indeed, I'm not sure it's even possible to be objective in this space. The underlying phenomenal are complex and multi-faceted, while the broader principles are quasi religious in nature. That said, the underlying survey is from Yougov/Deseret, and it says what it says. Also, it's not an isolated finding. The finding that conservatives are happier is consistently replicated (and long before 2022).
rayiner 4y ago
It’s clear that there’s been a long term decline in mental well-being over the past few decades. In another example, men have far fewer friends today than even 30 years ago: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/why-mens-social-circles-are-shrinking/ https://www.americansurveycenter.org/why-mens-social-circles... You can blame technology to a degree, but even then technology probably just serves to amplify existing negative trends. Kids today are far more likely than in the past to move around and have divorced parents. They’re less likely to live in inter-generational households. They’re less likely to have a job or go to church or interact with society at large in meaningful ways. Meanwhile what fills that vacuum of civil society is other children, through age-segregated schooling and, these days, social media. That strikes me as a huge problem, because children are antisocial semi-humans without fully developed brains. Having children spend most of their time around other children, without strong socializing forces, is a perverse arrangement.
- rektide 4y ago
  Being with mostly the same 20-750 kids (depending on school size) in your grade for most of your growing up seems cruel. You're going to change a lot, but the social dynamics can only evolve so much. The lack of ability to reinvent yourself, to re-find place is starkly different than the rest of the world, where that activity & the newness of other people is perpetual. I've been so thankful that at my high school there was a great open lunch, & quite a few areas where different school grades mixed together. I got access to a diverse range of smart & creative folk.
  - lastofus 4y ago
    I don't think it was that long ago that communities of humans were quite small, and the number of peers your age around you would easily fall into the 20-750 range.
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      Those communities did still suffer from the social ills being described. Personally I agree, having the freedom to 'reset' my group of peers every 3-4 years through to uni ended up being pretty valuable in making me a better, more open minded and more creative person than I might've been otherwise.
photochemsyn 4y ago
I'm currently suffering from a serious case of distrust and cynicism over anything related to medical health news, I wonder if this is widespread? The very first thing that popped into my head reading this was, "Probably just a another coordinated marketing campaign by pharmaceutical interests aimed at increasing the prescription of anti-depressants to teenagers", and the data from the CDC also made me uneasy: > "The Youth Risk Behavior Survey was given to 17,000 adolescents at high schools across the United States in the fall of 2021. The survey is conducted every two years, and the rates of mental health problems have gone up with every report since 2011, Dr. Ethier said." Is this really enough data to come to any solid conclusions? What's the seasonal spread, for example, do you get big differences if you run the survey in June or July? What's the socioeconomic spread on the data? Are there major differences in reporting between boys and girls? Can this be accepted as a real trend with any confidence? I just don't know about this stuff anymore.
- dandanua 4y ago
  We just slowly moving to the Brave New World, where drugs for "happiness" will be mandatory.
- EGreg 4y ago
  I wouldn’t be surprised if that is ultimately the outcome, REGARDLESS of whether this is a coordinated effort, or not. Decision makers and employees need to cover their behind, and kicking the can down to the doctors and pharma is the safest bet for the school admins etc. I mean, the laws and morés have become such that they ignore the parents’ wishes now, regarding gender transition, or even taking away their kids if they allow them to roam freely outside. It’s a completely different society, and everyone would rather medicate the problems away than confront our economic systems and social norms to solve problems upstream — by, say, giving everyone a UBI so they can spend more time with their own kids.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Is this really enough data to come to any solid conclusions? Tech companies with market caps that dwarf the largest pharma companies would like you to think "no." IIRC, these mental health trend-lines started to rapidly get worse at almost exactly the same time that smartphones and social media started to take off.
giantg2 4y ago
"More than one in five of these students reported attempting suicide in the year before the survey, the agency found." Wow. Is this out of the study, females, or LGBTQ? “We need to talk about what’s happening with teenage boys that might be leading them to perpetrate sexual violence.” Are they all teen boys, or could it be that there older predators at play here? Edit: why disagree without any response? These are legitimate questions. Are we not curious hackers here?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > Edit: why disagree without any response? These are legitimate questions. Are we not curious hackers here? Because in the full paragraph, it's very clear what was intended: > The findings, based on surveys given to teenagers across the country, also showed high levels of violence, depression and suicidal thoughts among lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. More than one in five of these students reported attempting suicide in the year before the survey, the agency found. On the other hand: > > “We need to talk about what’s happening with teenage boys that might be leading them to perpetrate sexual violence.” > Are they all teen boys, or could it be that there older predators at play here? I actually think that's a valid question that's left unaddressed by the article, especially given that as I usually see the data presented, threats of this kind of thing, for kids and adolescents, overwhelmingly comes from relatives or trusted adults—if that's becoming less-true even as rates rise, that's a pretty big deal. Buuuuut I can see why readers would just DV your whole post, given the two things you chose to call out and that one of them is already answered by the article, such that it looks like you're trying to cherry-pick with a bit of an edgy slant.
  - giantg2 4y ago
    What was confusing for me was that they mentioned the nationwide survey in the first sentence of the paragraph. I can now see they were focusing on gay, lesbian, and bi. Thanks.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Sure—FWIW I'm pretty sure you asked in good faith (hell, everyone misreads sometimes) I just think that's why you were drawing downvotes.
ChewFarceSkunk 4y ago
[dead]
Eumenes 4y ago
Social media and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
GalenErso 4y ago
"A new report finds an "overwhelming wave of violence and trauma" and never-before-seen levels of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts among high school students in the U.S."
- version_five 4y ago
  My guess is that a lot of this is due to redefining "violence and trauma" and emphasizing victimhood. If you're constantly told you're oppressed and being subjected to "violence" then you're more likely to react accordingly. A lot of reality is subjective, especially as it relates to happiness or sadness.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    This isn’t really a conclusion backed by what we know. You don’t traumatize people by telling them they have been traumatized. That’s just not how trauma works. Trauma happens to people regardless of whether or not they believe they’re traumatized: this is how we can study that beating your kids results in statistically worse outcomes even though I’m sure the parents told the kids multiple times that their beatings were justified and not traumatic. If anything maybe these statistics are so alarming is because we as a society didn’t categorize abuse as abuse until recently. Consider that raping one’s wife was legal until recently. Beating children was considered normal until a generation or so ago. Trying to force gay people to convert to straight was the medically condoned treatment. All sorts of abhorrent behaviors were normalized and people simply denied the harm it was causing.
    - lostmsu 4y ago
      > Trauma happens to people regardless of whether or not they believe they’re traumatized I suppose the question is should we call any painful learning experience 'a trauma'?
      - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        No, we have a definition of psychological trauma. Psychological trauma describes a complex set of degenerated capacities after experiencing a shock or perceived threat particularly to one’s or loved one’s life. You can actually measure trauma by the degeneration of cognitive skills, adaptability, etc. I know we’re so blasé about trauma these days, so it sounds easy to dismiss it as woo. But consider again that maybe it’s only now that society is good enough that we can even conceive of measuring psychological damage like it isn’t normal. (It used to be normal for women to die of infection post childbirth… until it turns out this one weird guy with some germ theory woo washed his hands! And he was seeing this germ woo everywhere!)
imcdona 4y ago
[flagged]
Someone1234 4y ago
Here is the original source: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/yrbs_data_summary_and_trends.htm https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/yrbs_data_summary... Click "Download Report." This specific article is about Page 59 to 61 (both PDF pages and embedded page numbers) for "Feelings of Sadness or Hopelessness" and pages 63 to 66 for "Seriously Considered Attempting Suicide." TL;DR: Between 2011 and 2021 -- "Feelings of Sadness or Hopelessness" has increased for males 8%, and 21% for females. The "Seriously Considered Attempting Suicide" has increased 1% for males and 11% for females. "Make a suicide plan" has increased 1% for males, and 9% for females. PS - The CDC uses the terms "males" and "females" in the linked report, which is what I am reproducing here rather than altering the language which could add confusion or inaccuracy.
tboyd47 4y ago
Did anyone ask them why they were feeling this way? No. > The survey did not ask students about reasons for their feelings of sadness or thoughts of harming themselves.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  The question has been, and presumably still is being asked, it just wasn't asked in this survey. https://health.usnews.com/health-care/patient-advice/articles/2017-08-22/why-teen-girls-are-at-such-a-high-risk-for-depression https://health.usnews.com/health-care/patient-advice/article... https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/girls-women-and-wellness/201804/13-and-depressed-why-young-teen-girls-are-risk https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/girls-women-and-well...
- hammock 4y ago
  The survey shows that 57% of teen girls feel "persistently sad or hopeless." Persistent sadness and hopelessness is not the kind of thing that you'll get a useful answer for when you directly ask why they feel that way. That said, the article mentions several factors that are contributing to the increase in sadness and violence among teenage girls in the United States. Some of the root causes mentioned in the article include traumatic experiences, including sexual violence; interpersonal stress from school, peers and home; a rise in violent behavior, particularly targeting girls; and stigma and violence toward LGBTQ+ teenagers
  - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
    Could be nutrition and allergies.
    - meowtimemania 4y ago
      Social media has to play a big role as well
- cypherpunks01 4y ago
  Potential opportunity for future research study??
recursivedoubts 4y ago
very cool, social media, thank you
- password54321 4y ago
  Jumping to conclusions isn't helpful.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    https://crooked.com/podcast/the-inside-story-of-how-silicon-valley-rewired-our-brains/ https://crooked.com/podcast/the-inside-story-of-how-silicon-... have a listen.
bjt2n3904 4y ago
[flagged]
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  The CDC has investigated psychological illnesses (such as depression, addiction) for decades. Depression can lead to addiction which can directly impact communicable diseases (a subset of disease in general), or hereditary disease onset (another subset of diseases in general). Edit to add the CDC mission statement: CDC works 24/7 to protect America from health, safety and security threats, both foreign and in the U.S. Whether diseases start at home or abroad, are chronic or acute, curable or preventable, human error or deliberate attack, CDC fights disease and supports communities and citizens to do the same. CDC increases the health security of our nation. As the nation’s health protection agency, CDC saves lives and protects people from health threats. To accomplish our mission, CDC conducts critical science and provides health information that protects our nation against expensive and dangerous health threats, and responds when these arise. Edit again to add: I think 10,600 employees can keep a few balls in the air. You don't need many to undertake one survey. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/02/29/10600-cdc-employees-earn-11-billion-annually/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/02/29/106...
  - echelon 4y ago
    > CDC works 24/7 to protect America from health, safety and security threats When I drive by Buford Highway at 3 AM, the CDC is a total ghost town. I'm sure they have on-call personnel for infrequent, high-priority events and a skeleton crew for passaging cells on schedule. It's not like they're all hanging out down the block at the Pho 24 or Waffle House thinking about diseases during their midnight break, though. These are cushy office jobs. That said, one of the directors lives in my building. Total night owl. So maybe the 24/7 part is true in spirit.
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      I just checked out their career section and the first posting I clicked on was for an epidemiologist in Angola[1]. It appears the sun never sets on the CDC empire. [1] - At least part of the duties involve the embassy. So presumably watching out for US citizens in Angola.
dschuetz 4y ago
I'm sorry, but that has been a problem for decades now and has been made worse by social media and the covid pandemic. Yes. Has there been any noticeable development in better counselling and/or higher availability of any mental health professionals over those same decades?
- officeplant 4y ago
  The only change I've noticed as an adult trying to find affordable therapy is the rise of every podcast on earth advertising for Better Help. Which I trust about as much as any other product I've been asked to buy during a podcast. Local therapy offerings are a joke with most of my local options being religious driven programs/therapists. Insurance coverage of mental health issues even on my work based insurance is non-existent. I don't see this problem going away any time soon.
  - asdff 4y ago
    What sort of plan do you have? All ACA compliant plans should cover mental health at this point. A lot of people are getting therapy for $10 a session copay these days.
    - officeplant 4y ago
      Work pays $400, I pay $50 monthly for Medical/Dental/Vision insurance. Nothing seems to be covered outside of that. (BCBS/Aflac mixed plan)
- arp242 4y ago
  That a small army of counsellors and mental health professionals are needed at all is worrying. It seems like a bad fix for deeper systemic issues.
Animats 4y ago
Yet suicides declined during the pandemic years.[1] "But about 57 percent of girls and 69 percent of gay, lesbian or bisexual teenagers reported feeling sadness every day for at least two weeks during the previous year." At least two weeks of sadness per year? That's a very low threshold. The long term teen suicide trend is up, since the early 2000s.[2] The last two years don't show a huge variation from the trend. [1] https://archive.is/u2wuF https://archive.is/u2wuF [2] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/teen-suicide-rate-spikes-56-in-9-years https://www.healthline.com/health-news/teen-suicide-rate-spi...
- mym1990 4y ago
  Is that every day for a consecutive period that totals to 2 weeks at a time maybe?
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  > Yet suicides declined during the pandemic years Likely because the ability to do so had gone down (can't go somewhere, parents are home), not because they're any less depressed.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    Long shot but this could also be reflective of not being in hostile environments as often or being less prone to in person bullying. Of course this could be offset by social media bullying and negativity.
  - veec_cas_tant 4y ago
    Just a random guess - is it possible that kids most at risk of suicide benefited from reduced interaction with their peers?
    - kevinventullo 4y ago
      Also, FOMO was greatly reduced. You can’t lament not being invited to a party when there are no parties.
- 4y ago
glomgril 4y ago
Limitations and methodological questions about OP aside, I really question whether our modern lifestyle and all the technologies that enable it have led to increased human thriving. Medical advances have obviously been huge in making life longer and less painful for the (lucky subsets of the) masses. But setting that aside, is life today (in a rich western country) more "enjoyable" or "fulfilling" now than it was, say, 500 years ago? What about 200 or 100? Or 5000? IDK, but increasingly it feels like a simple life in a small insular community with limited access to information is a better setup for "human thriving" than what we're living in today. Obviously life is much "easier" today from the perspective of material conditions, but why assume that this is a "good" thing? Or maybe I'm just a delusional Teddy K fanboy who's sick of typing on a computer all day, day after day, year after year.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > But setting that aside, is life today (in a rich western country) more "enjoyable" or "fulfilling" now than it was, say, 500 years ago? Wander a graveyard from the 1800s and see how many very young children are listed on the headstones below their parents. How do we account for "a bunch of your kids are likely to die" in this metric? It's easy to look with rose-hued glasses at the past and imagine an idylic pastoral lifestyle. The reality was quite a bit more complicated.
  - glomgril 4y ago
    Right -- medical advances are the major exception to this line of thinking, as I noted.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      There are a lot of exceptions. Strawberries in winter. Ice cream in summer. Contact with relatives on the other side of the world in an instant. Travel to Europe in hours. Unlimited fresh water. Indoor plumbing. Universal access to education. YouTube videos to learn how to use and fix a tool. etc. etc. etc.
miguelazo 4y ago
Between social media, climate destabilization/inaction, and rampant gun violence in the US, I am not surprised.
- hummus_bae 4y ago
  > rampant gun violence in the US There is no gun violence in the US. There is violent crime. There is murder. They are different things.
  - officeplant 4y ago
    And yet there are charts of just how much of either were done via gun courtesy of the FBI and other crime statistics logging entities in the US. It's pretty clear we have a gun problem and for a long time.
- nradov 4y ago
  Gun violence is hardly rampant in the US. The violence is heavily concentrated in a few neighborhood of a few cities. We should absolutely do more to reduce violence in those areas, but the vast majority of teen girls have never seen a gun fired outside of a shooting range or hunting preserve. My city has zero shootings most years. https://www.brookings.edu/2022/04/21/mapping-gun-violence-a-closer-look-at-the-intersection-between-place-and-gun-homicides-in-four-cities/ https://www.brookings.edu/2022/04/21/mapping-gun-violence-a-...
  - spogbiper 4y ago
    last I looked into this, over 50% of gun related deaths in the US are suicides
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - miguelazo 4y ago
    To pretend that young girls aren't affected by hearing about the frequent school/mass shootings in the US is pretty ridiculous. That affects them far more than gang violence in "a few neighborhoods of a few cities"-- it's something that they relate to directly, whether someone they know has been shot at in an educational setting or not. Spare us the firearm fundamentalist talking points. Edit: Also, gun violence isn't rampant in the US? Compared to what? Certainly rampant compared to any peer society.
foxbarrington 4y ago
Jonathan Haidt has a recent essay that argues the teen mental illness epidemic started in 2012: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Haven't read enough of his essay to form an opinion yet, but I very much appreciate the following from the intro. Engaging with reasonable skepticism is important. > In sum, it’s reasonable to start with skepticism of my claim (with Jean Twenge) that there is an epidemic of mental illness that began around 2012, and that is related in large part to the transition to phone-based childhoods, with a special emphasis on social media. It makes sense to embrace as a null hypothesis the skeptics’ view that there is nothing to see here, just another moral panic, and the kids are fine. I am in full agreement that the burden of proof falls on me.
- arp242 4y ago
  Discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707734
- fsociety 4y ago
  The DSM-5 was released in 2013 with some extensive changes - but this is not mentioned in Jonathan Haidt’s essay. The DSM-5 had several changes in diagnosis that could explain the sharp rise in his graphs. That we simply got a view of how bad our society’s mental health is, rather than it increasing at a dramatically higher rate than pre-2012. Diagnosis around women’s mental health has also become much better in recent years. The amount of gaslighting around disorders and “hysteria” in women historically is troubling and completely unethical. I find Gabor Mate’s work much more enlightening in understanding why mental health is such an issue in the modern world. I highly recommend his books if you are curious. Gabor’s definition of addiction is that it is a coping mechanism to seek relief from pain, often with negative consequences. Therefore social media does not explain the pain. It’s an effect not a cause, despite how it can contribute to feelings of loneliness and inadequacy. Instead it is worth understanding how our youth are raised, and the trauma their parents carry onto them despite their best intentions and effort.
nashashmi 4y ago
Sadness and anger are twin feelings. I have been oscillating between them a lot more recently. Anger is an irritation of diverting from expectations.
100011_100001 4y ago
I know that people mentioned you can't jump to the conclusion that it's social media, but on a personal level with two teen girls I have noticed something interesting. Taking into account my friends/acquaintances that I'm familiar with their kids, so a sample of probably about 25ish teen girls. There is a big correlation of social media/cell phone access and issues. Bullying, exposed to adult content, comparing yourself to others, drama, all have one consistent source, social media and cell phone apps. Personally, I don't allow social media, and my kids don't have cell phone access. They're in a very tiny minority compared to their peers. To me the benefits of this far outweigh any drawbacks. I'm not saying that bullying doesn't happen outside social media, or anything like that, however, there definitely seems to be a heavy correlation between cell phone use and general teen angst. My girls, a small sample of two, seem to not have the same issues their peers have. I strongly recommend evaluating the use of cell phones with your children for their own mental and emotional well-being. It has actually made me use social media a lot less because of it.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  I wonder which way the causality runs. Does using too much social media make your life suck, or do you run to using social media when you have a rough life?
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Even if the causality runs "life sucks" -> "social media", the effects of turning to social media to deal with stress are different than those of turning to alcohol or comics or D&D or whatever else kids had access to in the past. It's probably worth exploring the effects either way.
    - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
      You can just get Neverwinter Nights from 2002, that's D&D for you.
    - 100011_100001 4y ago
      For me there is things you do that give you long term satisfaction and things you do that give you short term satisfaction. I think both have a purpose and a place. However it's inherently obvious that things that are only short term satisfaction and the most dangerous, because you keep repeating the cycle. For example liking memes is a short burst, a second later they are no longer relevant. For others it's shopping. You get a mini-high, but a few moments later that's gone. A lot of people seem to just keep pressing the button, get a droplet of happiness and press the button more time. That becomes a vicious cycle. Essentially if your actions today are identical to tomorrow and nothing has changed, you are stuck in a loop. I'm not trying to argue that everyone needs to be hyper-productive all the time. What I'm talking about is if all your hobbies are consumption, you might be stuck. D&D, which I play is different because you are doing it in a social setting. It's more like socializing with an excuse and a purpose, you get to exercise your creativity, imagination, you are actively using your mind. Passing things like watching youtube all day or drinking don't do that.
WFHRenaissance 4y ago
1. Stop telling kids that the world is ending. 2. Stop allowing people below age 18 un-regulated access to the Internet. 3. Stop prescribing amphetamines to children. 4. Stop letting single mothers raise children. 5. Stop raising low-income kids with high-income kids. 6. Stop making recognition a social priority (thymotic impulse). 7. Make the world smaller. 8. Stop letting your kids have unrealistic dreams. I don't agree with most of these tenants. Frankly, I don't think most of the above is possible, but if you want kids to be happier you need to stop exposing them to the chaotic, violent, and frankly depressing adult world before they fully develop their neocortex. They're being forced to maladaptively virtualize neocortical function before the maturation of their physiological neocortex. The world seems a lot worse before your brain has developed enough to cope/deal with reality. This is the truth, or at least part of it.
- wittenbunk 4y ago
  Wow really jumped the shark after point 3. Amazing how ideas that are explicitly fascist can seep into otherwise thoughtful discourse.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    With point 7, I'm picturing a giant potato peeler
    - WFHRenaissance 4y ago
      Laughed at this
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    I would also say, 4,5,6,and 8 aswell.
  - galbar 4y ago
    I don't think calling ideas "fascist" is productive to the discussion. Maybe you could argue why you think those ideas are bad ideas?
korroziya 4y ago
[flagged]
- CuriousCosmic 4y ago
  If you actually took the time to read the report, it covered more than just teen girls. It's just that teen boys tend to have much lower reported rates of mental health issues or self harm. This could be because they are actually lower or it could be because they either don't realise they "qualify as depressed" or they won't admit it. I've linked the report which was included in the very first paragraph of the article. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Summary-Trends_Report2023_508.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Sum...
  - ecf 4y ago
    > It's just that teen boys tend to have much lower reported rates of mental health issues or self harm. Boys quickly realized nobody gives a shit.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    The suicide rate for teen boys is roughly 3x the rate for teen girls. [1] The attempt rate is higher for girls, but boys are more 'effective'. 1: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
    - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
      I'm not necessarily disagreeing with what you are saying but it's worth bringing up some more recent data for the attempt rate. The rates of suicide attempts among teen girls was already twice the rate of teen boys (as you already mentioned) however despite that it has increased another 50% despite not seeing a significant uptick in teen boy suicide attempts. 1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
netmonk 4y ago
[flagged]
- fredoliveira 4y ago
  Oh, spare us. This isn't the place for your type of discourse.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  There's a stereotype of vegans being annoying because they will randomly start telling you about their lifestyle and the reasons behind it. Lately it seems like the trend has reversed though and every discussion of physical/mental health has someone popping up insisting that everyone should eat more meat and avoid "seed oils"/gluten/sugar/HFCS/etc.
- dang 4y ago
  We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
ConanRus 4y ago
[dead]
jacooper 4y ago
[flagged]
- rabuse 4y ago
  Controversial take, but the truth...
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  Alternative take - experiencing bigotry and people rejecting you because of who you are probably isn't great for one's mental health.
sacrosancty 4y ago
[dead]

120 points by EGreg 4y ago

I was glad to see this article actually mention societal and tech factors that could be behind this rise. It is rare to see the mainstream discuss the upstream factors for ADHD, Depression, Gender Dysphoria, Diabetes, and much more. Especially in kids and teens. “Kids are now vulnerable to cyberbullying and critical comments, like ‘I hate you’, ‘Nobody likes you,’” he said. “It’s like harpoons to their heart every time.”

canadianfella 4y ago
[dead]
mattpallissard 4y ago
From an evolutionary standpoint, I sincerely believe that people aren't mentally equipped to deal with society as presented by the internet/media. I make my living due to technology, but if there was a big switch to throw that would turn off television/internet I'd do it without hesitation. I think the long term benefits would outweigh the short term chaos.
- swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
  No I think the internet is unequipped for what we need from it. It runs off ads and shovels enraging content at people. It allows hostile behavior to have no consequences. It’s anonymous except nothing you do is private. There is no dispute resolution, mods have absolute power, and you can’t ever talk to customer support because you aren’t the customer, the advertisers are.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > I make my living due to technology, but if there was a big switch to throw that would turn off television/internet I'd do it without hesitation. I've had similar thoughts, in similar terms. Put that switch in front of me and I'd toggle it with glee in my heart and a smile on my face. A couple decades ago I was so optimistic about this stuff. In the big picture, it's done little but disappoint, since then. Same as many a great, grand idea—ruined by contact with economics and human "games".
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Well if you start feeling an urge to mail bombs to people, you might want to tell someone.
- asdff 4y ago
  Even civilization as a whole has not been around nearly long enough for our species to be very well adapted to it. The species we cite as well adapted for civilized life were really adapted for other traits that just happenstance were relevant in an urban environment; like a pigeon's propensity to nest in a building ledge coming from its propensity to nest on a rocky cliff, or how if you kill off all bad for human predators like wolves, you'd be left with urban coyotes to fill the niche and this doesn't mean anything really about the coyote vs the wolf's ability to survive in the city (independent of humans killing them of course). Of course we are all suffering from mental illness and poor physical health and this that and the other thing all the time. All we do is stress out about what others think about ourselves and sit around lethargic. We didn't spend millions of years of mutation and selection to be the most optimal couch potato. We spent it to be a master forager of the environment, setting out on foot by morning for resources when the weather and light is good, and spending the day and evening in engineering or creative pursuits. I'm convinced even language had a role to play in changing our behavior dramatically in this way, since often what we do in life is limited to what we are able to communicate with words or thoughts in our language with its finite set of descriptors.
- fleddr 4y ago
  I couldn't agree more. Life has become too large, unstable, complex and confusing for people to make sense of. It creates an endless amount of stress.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Behavior, including anything bullying-like, seems much more heavily policed among younger kids than ever (nobody thought a thing of the odd "I'll kill you!" or "I hate you!" in elementary school in the 80s or 90s, and I'm told we were far more "coddled" then than in the 70s or earlier—now, even a one-off of that kind of thing gets a call to parents) but much nastier stuff is more prevalent than ever in middle school and up, thanks to social media and smartphones (the Internet being everywhere, all the time, is what made social media take off in the mainstream, and why it's so heavily used).
- asdff 4y ago
  Even just 15 years ago it was a totally different beast online. Future politicians are lucky no one was recording their banter in the halo 3 lobby. You were expected to be thick skinned and not take anything seriously. Maybe it helped that an fps actually gave you a way to dish it back though if you had the skill to back up your talk. It seemed like after halo 3, no one bothered turning on a mic and that culture was over before long.

heymaybeitsthis 4y ago

[flagged]

throwawayacc6 4y ago

https://archive.is/HyqTa https://archive.is/HyqTa

ericmcer 4y ago

Maybe it's time to shine some light on inequality in the realm of attractiveness??? As kids increasingly interact via social media, being funny, intelligent, or creative is less important than looking good in pictures. I can't imagine how shitty this is for teenagers. We used to lament the "unattainable beauty standards" of magazines and on TV, but this seems even more harmful. I dunno how you do this though, as even just admitting something like: "I am handicapped in the looks department" is pretty depressing. At the same time it seems messed up that someone who is attractive doesn't just get preferential treatment in their daily interactions, but can now monetize their looks easily via social media (or onlyfans lol).

parpfish 4y ago
wouldn't social media be a boon for the funny and creative as well?
- throwaheyy 4y ago
  No. The average social media consumer isn’t that deep.
  - fknorangesite 4y ago
    Surely, though, the average HN user is the pinnacle of thoughtfulness.
- elil17 4y ago
  Perhaps the issue is that whatever you're good at, you'll be shown along side the best of the best. Your friend's joke is funny when you hear it at a party. But is it as funny on Twitter, where it's shown alongside jokes from professional comedians?
  - godelski 4y ago
    Not to mention that the audience is very different between friends at a party and on Twitter. Twitter, and social media, is far more reaching and lots of context and intent may be lost as we cross many different cultural lines and play the game of telephone. Your friends are far more likely to be good faith actors, but even there we can see how a singular bad actor can quickly ruin a situation. I'd argue that there's parallels to not just jokes but any types of communication (science, tech, political, etc) and attraction. (Though people are also able to successfully carve out bubbles and find a very specific audience but at the same time very large. Both can be true. Sometimes the hate can amplify these bubbles. Not so simple)

algem 4y ago

Isn’t depression period at an all time high? When ever depression is explored or written about it’s always in the context of females and not males. At least from what I see. Everyone knows boys and men have a really hard time with mental health but nothing is really done about it. Man up as they say. I wish the conversation was evenly distributed.

fulafel 4y ago
The first sentence: > Nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys
- algem 4y ago
  Yes the article mentioned boys a few times but doesn't go into any depth. And its not so much this article its really the overall quantity of these types of articles that focus on female over male. Of course an article can focus on one or the other and that is fine but I find it just tends to be lopsided towards females.
  - foogazi 4y ago
    Doesn’t seem like this is a girls only article - it covers adolescent mental health issues sourced from survey data What specific points seem lopsided here?
  - prawn 4y ago
    In recent years it’s felt like there are always more stories about mental health in males. Job market, etc. Not sure how you’re missing them?
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      I can't find major newspaper articles specifically focused on suicide among teenage boys, even though the rate of it is 400% higher than for teenage girls, and getting worse faster.

dadthrwy 4y ago

"long-brewing national tragedy only made worse by the isolation and stress of the pandemic" As a parent, it seems strange to me to blame this situation on the pandemic when it's been, for all purposes, over in most parts of the country for more than a year. My kids have been back in school, sports, and being IRL with their friends for going on two years now. The inability of mental health professionals to clearly separate temporary factors like pandemic isolation from the pervasive root causes that remain unaddressed is pretty frustrating. The science, if you can even call it that, is distressingly thin here and it makes me angry.

twelve40 4y ago
it was a huge hit to the gut. the kids were sitting at home for like a year+. crappy zoom non-classes where everyone falls asleep. at my local high school even the newly built sports field was shut down and fenced off for the whole year. why??? sure, the pandemic, whatever, but it was brutal for the little people.
- NDizzle 4y ago
  It didn't have to be that way. I moved my family out of California in May 2020 to get away from the terrible decisions that were already happening. They were playing sports and doing normal stuff by June, 2020. Went to school in person that fall. All of the data was there. It's been there the whole time.
e12e 4y ago
The pandemic (isolation etc) might have formative/lasting effects though, similar to trauma? Perhaps especially for kids/youth who were a certain age/stage of growing up at the time? Ed: apparently the study uses data from 2021
EGreg 4y ago
Well, it is red meat thrown to the activists to avoid talking about issues that would make them shout down the article and its publisher. For example, if we talk about racial issues in this country, we don’t usually focus on the capitalist music industry using gangsta rap to export role models spewing misogynistic lyrics to Black kids many of whom identify with them, we don’t talk much about the breakdown in the nuclear family, the rise of divorces or out-of-wedlock births. (People used to — see the Moynihan report for instance.) We hardly talk about welfare traps or minimum wage laws (Milton Friedman used to etc.) We don’t talk about academic performance of Black kids being affected by stuff like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white Whenever Bill Cosby or Stephen A Smith or Deloris Tucker someone like that goes on a rant, they are shouted down. That is why it is far safer to attribute it all to slavery 150 years ago, and Jim Crow laws, even though the previous generations who had marriage and school uniforms and higher church attendance etc. are horrified at what many in the current generations have been doing, and the lyrics in Drill music or Gangsta Rap etc. People are starting to wake up — I have been in a clubhouse room with 2000 people about whether a lot of rap is leading to violence, and almost everyone on stage was Black and most were saying absolutely. Some people said it creates jobs in the music industry, others pointed out how many jobs are destroyed overall because the kids can’t pass an interview. And so on. It was really nice to see but only possible because Black people got together to honestly discuss what has been going on. Now we need to turn it into action, in our own lives, with our own kids, and what they are exposed to. Most parents work so much or are divorced and the kids are raised by the street or by the government!

badRNG 4y ago

This is based on data from 2021. Since even then, there have been several significant regressions for women and LGBT rights, most notably the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Women of the next generation are growing up in the difficult position where they have less rights and bodily autonomy than their grandmothers grew up with.

rayiner 4y ago
Do rights and autonomy make people happy? Lots of research shows that the happiest people in the country are conservative women: https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-are-liberals-less-happy-than-conservatives https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-are-liberals-less-happy-than-... Indeed, the past 30 years has seen a consistent expansion of rights and autonomy and relaxation of social rules, and happiness has been declining pretty consistently the whole time: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/22/americans-are-getting-more-miserable-theres-data-prove-it/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/22/americans... It's also the case that happiness among women has been declining since 1970: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14969/w14969.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14969/w149.....
- tptacek 4y ago
  The data in that survey comes from the American Family Survey, which seems to be taken pretty seriously, but the commentary is from the Institute for Family Studies, which is taken... less seriously. Caveat lector. Maybe the underlying data supports the point you (and IFS, for its own reasons) are making, but it's worth digging in, I guess. One supposes it's easier to be happy as a conservative woman in 2022 given that identifying as such likely means you're sanguine about Roe --- which is a point even the IFS article makes.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    I don't think IFS is any less objective than social science academia, which is dominated by people who take "rights" and "autonomy" as essential ends in themselves. Indeed, I'm not sure it's even possible to be objective in this space. The underlying phenomenal are complex and multi-faceted, while the broader principles are quasi religious in nature. That said, the underlying survey is from Yougov/Deseret, and it says what it says. Also, it's not an isolated finding. The finding that conservatives are happier is consistently replicated (and long before 2022).

rayiner 4y ago

It’s clear that there’s been a long term decline in mental well-being over the past few decades. In another example, men have far fewer friends today than even 30 years ago: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/why-mens-social-circles-are-shrinking/ https://www.americansurveycenter.org/why-mens-social-circles... You can blame technology to a degree, but even then technology probably just serves to amplify existing negative trends. Kids today are far more likely than in the past to move around and have divorced parents. They’re less likely to live in inter-generational households. They’re less likely to have a job or go to church or interact with society at large in meaningful ways. Meanwhile what fills that vacuum of civil society is other children, through age-segregated schooling and, these days, social media. That strikes me as a huge problem, because children are antisocial semi-humans without fully developed brains. Having children spend most of their time around other children, without strong socializing forces, is a perverse arrangement.

rektide 4y ago
Being with mostly the same 20-750 kids (depending on school size) in your grade for most of your growing up seems cruel. You're going to change a lot, but the social dynamics can only evolve so much. The lack of ability to reinvent yourself, to re-find place is starkly different than the rest of the world, where that activity & the newness of other people is perpetual. I've been so thankful that at my high school there was a great open lunch, & quite a few areas where different school grades mixed together. I got access to a diverse range of smart & creative folk.
- lastofus 4y ago
  I don't think it was that long ago that communities of humans were quite small, and the number of peers your age around you would easily fall into the 20-750 range.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    Those communities did still suffer from the social ills being described. Personally I agree, having the freedom to 'reset' my group of peers every 3-4 years through to uni ended up being pretty valuable in making me a better, more open minded and more creative person than I might've been otherwise.

photochemsyn 4y ago

I'm currently suffering from a serious case of distrust and cynicism over anything related to medical health news, I wonder if this is widespread? The very first thing that popped into my head reading this was, "Probably just a another coordinated marketing campaign by pharmaceutical interests aimed at increasing the prescription of anti-depressants to teenagers", and the data from the CDC also made me uneasy: > "The Youth Risk Behavior Survey was given to 17,000 adolescents at high schools across the United States in the fall of 2021. The survey is conducted every two years, and the rates of mental health problems have gone up with every report since 2011, Dr. Ethier said." Is this really enough data to come to any solid conclusions? What's the seasonal spread, for example, do you get big differences if you run the survey in June or July? What's the socioeconomic spread on the data? Are there major differences in reporting between boys and girls? Can this be accepted as a real trend with any confidence? I just don't know about this stuff anymore.

dandanua 4y ago
We just slowly moving to the Brave New World, where drugs for "happiness" will be mandatory.
EGreg 4y ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if that is ultimately the outcome, REGARDLESS of whether this is a coordinated effort, or not. Decision makers and employees need to cover their behind, and kicking the can down to the doctors and pharma is the safest bet for the school admins etc. I mean, the laws and morés have become such that they ignore the parents’ wishes now, regarding gender transition, or even taking away their kids if they allow them to roam freely outside. It’s a completely different society, and everyone would rather medicate the problems away than confront our economic systems and social norms to solve problems upstream — by, say, giving everyone a UBI so they can spend more time with their own kids.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tablespoon 4y ago
> Is this really enough data to come to any solid conclusions? Tech companies with market caps that dwarf the largest pharma companies would like you to think "no." IIRC, these mental health trend-lines started to rapidly get worse at almost exactly the same time that smartphones and social media started to take off.

giantg2 4y ago

"More than one in five of these students reported attempting suicide in the year before the survey, the agency found." Wow. Is this out of the study, females, or LGBTQ? “We need to talk about what’s happening with teenage boys that might be leading them to perpetrate sexual violence.” Are they all teen boys, or could it be that there older predators at play here? Edit: why disagree without any response? These are legitimate questions. Are we not curious hackers here?

yamtaddle 4y ago
> Edit: why disagree without any response? These are legitimate questions. Are we not curious hackers here? Because in the full paragraph, it's very clear what was intended: > The findings, based on surveys given to teenagers across the country, also showed high levels of violence, depression and suicidal thoughts among lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. More than one in five of these students reported attempting suicide in the year before the survey, the agency found. On the other hand: > > “We need to talk about what’s happening with teenage boys that might be leading them to perpetrate sexual violence.” > Are they all teen boys, or could it be that there older predators at play here? I actually think that's a valid question that's left unaddressed by the article, especially given that as I usually see the data presented, threats of this kind of thing, for kids and adolescents, overwhelmingly comes from relatives or trusted adults—if that's becoming less-true even as rates rise, that's a pretty big deal. Buuuuut I can see why readers would just DV your whole post, given the two things you chose to call out and that one of them is already answered by the article, such that it looks like you're trying to cherry-pick with a bit of an edgy slant.
- giantg2 4y ago
  What was confusing for me was that they mentioned the nationwide survey in the first sentence of the paragraph. I can now see they were focusing on gay, lesbian, and bi. Thanks.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Sure—FWIW I'm pretty sure you asked in good faith (hell, everyone misreads sometimes) I just think that's why you were drawing downvotes.

ChewFarceSkunk 4y ago

[dead]

Eumenes 4y ago

Social media and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

GalenErso 4y ago

"A new report finds an "overwhelming wave of violence and trauma" and never-before-seen levels of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts among high school students in the U.S."

version_five 4y ago
My guess is that a lot of this is due to redefining "violence and trauma" and emphasizing victimhood. If you're constantly told you're oppressed and being subjected to "violence" then you're more likely to react accordingly. A lot of reality is subjective, especially as it relates to happiness or sadness.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  This isn’t really a conclusion backed by what we know. You don’t traumatize people by telling them they have been traumatized. That’s just not how trauma works. Trauma happens to people regardless of whether or not they believe they’re traumatized: this is how we can study that beating your kids results in statistically worse outcomes even though I’m sure the parents told the kids multiple times that their beatings were justified and not traumatic. If anything maybe these statistics are so alarming is because we as a society didn’t categorize abuse as abuse until recently. Consider that raping one’s wife was legal until recently. Beating children was considered normal until a generation or so ago. Trying to force gay people to convert to straight was the medically condoned treatment. All sorts of abhorrent behaviors were normalized and people simply denied the harm it was causing.
  - lostmsu 4y ago
    > Trauma happens to people regardless of whether or not they believe they’re traumatized I suppose the question is should we call any painful learning experience 'a trauma'?
    - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      No, we have a definition of psychological trauma. Psychological trauma describes a complex set of degenerated capacities after experiencing a shock or perceived threat particularly to one’s or loved one’s life. You can actually measure trauma by the degeneration of cognitive skills, adaptability, etc. I know we’re so blasé about trauma these days, so it sounds easy to dismiss it as woo. But consider again that maybe it’s only now that society is good enough that we can even conceive of measuring psychological damage like it isn’t normal. (It used to be normal for women to die of infection post childbirth… until it turns out this one weird guy with some germ theory woo washed his hands! And he was seeing this germ woo everywhere!)

imcdona 4y ago

[flagged]

Someone1234 4y ago

Here is the original source: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/yrbs_data_summary_and_trends.htm https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/yrbs_data_summary... Click "Download Report." This specific article is about Page 59 to 61 (both PDF pages and embedded page numbers) for "Feelings of Sadness or Hopelessness" and pages 63 to 66 for "Seriously Considered Attempting Suicide." TL;DR: Between 2011 and 2021 -- "Feelings of Sadness or Hopelessness" has increased for males 8%, and 21% for females. The "Seriously Considered Attempting Suicide" has increased 1% for males and 11% for females. "Make a suicide plan" has increased 1% for males, and 9% for females. PS - The CDC uses the terms "males" and "females" in the linked report, which is what I am reproducing here rather than altering the language which could add confusion or inaccuracy.

tboyd47 4y ago

Did anyone ask them why they were feeling this way? No. > The survey did not ask students about reasons for their feelings of sadness or thoughts of harming themselves.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
The question has been, and presumably still is being asked, it just wasn't asked in this survey. https://health.usnews.com/health-care/patient-advice/articles/2017-08-22/why-teen-girls-are-at-such-a-high-risk-for-depression https://health.usnews.com/health-care/patient-advice/article... https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/girls-women-and-wellness/201804/13-and-depressed-why-young-teen-girls-are-risk https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/girls-women-and-well...
hammock 4y ago
The survey shows that 57% of teen girls feel "persistently sad or hopeless." Persistent sadness and hopelessness is not the kind of thing that you'll get a useful answer for when you directly ask why they feel that way. That said, the article mentions several factors that are contributing to the increase in sadness and violence among teenage girls in the United States. Some of the root causes mentioned in the article include traumatic experiences, including sexual violence; interpersonal stress from school, peers and home; a rise in violent behavior, particularly targeting girls; and stigma and violence toward LGBTQ+ teenagers
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  Could be nutrition and allergies.
  - meowtimemania 4y ago
    Social media has to play a big role as well
cypherpunks01 4y ago
Potential opportunity for future research study??

recursivedoubts 4y ago

very cool, social media, thank you

password54321 4y ago
Jumping to conclusions isn't helpful.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gonzo41 4y ago
  https://crooked.com/podcast/the-inside-story-of-how-silicon-valley-rewired-our-brains/ https://crooked.com/podcast/the-inside-story-of-how-silicon-... have a listen.

bjt2n3904 4y ago

[flagged]

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
The CDC has investigated psychological illnesses (such as depression, addiction) for decades. Depression can lead to addiction which can directly impact communicable diseases (a subset of disease in general), or hereditary disease onset (another subset of diseases in general). Edit to add the CDC mission statement: CDC works 24/7 to protect America from health, safety and security threats, both foreign and in the U.S. Whether diseases start at home or abroad, are chronic or acute, curable or preventable, human error or deliberate attack, CDC fights disease and supports communities and citizens to do the same. CDC increases the health security of our nation. As the nation’s health protection agency, CDC saves lives and protects people from health threats. To accomplish our mission, CDC conducts critical science and provides health information that protects our nation against expensive and dangerous health threats, and responds when these arise. Edit again to add: I think 10,600 employees can keep a few balls in the air. You don't need many to undertake one survey. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/02/29/10600-cdc-employees-earn-11-billion-annually/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/02/29/106...
- echelon 4y ago
  > CDC works 24/7 to protect America from health, safety and security threats When I drive by Buford Highway at 3 AM, the CDC is a total ghost town. I'm sure they have on-call personnel for infrequent, high-priority events and a skeleton crew for passaging cells on schedule. It's not like they're all hanging out down the block at the Pho 24 or Waffle House thinking about diseases during their midnight break, though. These are cushy office jobs. That said, one of the directors lives in my building. Total night owl. So maybe the 24/7 part is true in spirit.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    I just checked out their career section and the first posting I clicked on was for an epidemiologist in Angola[1]. It appears the sun never sets on the CDC empire. [1] - At least part of the duties involve the embassy. So presumably watching out for US citizens in Angola.

dschuetz 4y ago

I'm sorry, but that has been a problem for decades now and has been made worse by social media and the covid pandemic. Yes. Has there been any noticeable development in better counselling and/or higher availability of any mental health professionals over those same decades?

officeplant 4y ago
The only change I've noticed as an adult trying to find affordable therapy is the rise of every podcast on earth advertising for Better Help. Which I trust about as much as any other product I've been asked to buy during a podcast. Local therapy offerings are a joke with most of my local options being religious driven programs/therapists. Insurance coverage of mental health issues even on my work based insurance is non-existent. I don't see this problem going away any time soon.
- asdff 4y ago
  What sort of plan do you have? All ACA compliant plans should cover mental health at this point. A lot of people are getting therapy for $10 a session copay these days.
  - officeplant 4y ago
    Work pays $400, I pay $50 monthly for Medical/Dental/Vision insurance. Nothing seems to be covered outside of that. (BCBS/Aflac mixed plan)
arp242 4y ago
That a small army of counsellors and mental health professionals are needed at all is worrying. It seems like a bad fix for deeper systemic issues.

Animats 4y ago

Yet suicides declined during the pandemic years.[1] "But about 57 percent of girls and 69 percent of gay, lesbian or bisexual teenagers reported feeling sadness every day for at least two weeks during the previous year." At least two weeks of sadness per year? That's a very low threshold. The long term teen suicide trend is up, since the early 2000s.[2] The last two years don't show a huge variation from the trend. [1] https://archive.is/u2wuF https://archive.is/u2wuF [2] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/teen-suicide-rate-spikes-56-in-9-years https://www.healthline.com/health-news/teen-suicide-rate-spi...

mym1990 4y ago
Is that every day for a consecutive period that totals to 2 weeks at a time maybe?
satvikpendem 4y ago
> Yet suicides declined during the pandemic years Likely because the ability to do so had gone down (can't go somewhere, parents are home), not because they're any less depressed.
- mym1990 4y ago
  Long shot but this could also be reflective of not being in hostile environments as often or being less prone to in person bullying. Of course this could be offset by social media bullying and negativity.
- veec_cas_tant 4y ago
  Just a random guess - is it possible that kids most at risk of suicide benefited from reduced interaction with their peers?
  - kevinventullo 4y ago
    Also, FOMO was greatly reduced. You can’t lament not being invited to a party when there are no parties.
4y ago

glomgril 4y ago

Limitations and methodological questions about OP aside, I really question whether our modern lifestyle and all the technologies that enable it have led to increased human thriving. Medical advances have obviously been huge in making life longer and less painful for the (lucky subsets of the) masses. But setting that aside, is life today (in a rich western country) more "enjoyable" or "fulfilling" now than it was, say, 500 years ago? What about 200 or 100? Or 5000? IDK, but increasingly it feels like a simple life in a small insular community with limited access to information is a better setup for "human thriving" than what we're living in today. Obviously life is much "easier" today from the perspective of material conditions, but why assume that this is a "good" thing? Or maybe I'm just a delusional Teddy K fanboy who's sick of typing on a computer all day, day after day, year after year.

ceejayoz 4y ago
> But setting that aside, is life today (in a rich western country) more "enjoyable" or "fulfilling" now than it was, say, 500 years ago? Wander a graveyard from the 1800s and see how many very young children are listed on the headstones below their parents. How do we account for "a bunch of your kids are likely to die" in this metric? It's easy to look with rose-hued glasses at the past and imagine an idylic pastoral lifestyle. The reality was quite a bit more complicated.
- glomgril 4y ago
  Right -- medical advances are the major exception to this line of thinking, as I noted.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    There are a lot of exceptions. Strawberries in winter. Ice cream in summer. Contact with relatives on the other side of the world in an instant. Travel to Europe in hours. Unlimited fresh water. Indoor plumbing. Universal access to education. YouTube videos to learn how to use and fix a tool. etc. etc. etc.

miguelazo 4y ago

Between social media, climate destabilization/inaction, and rampant gun violence in the US, I am not surprised.

hummus_bae 4y ago
> rampant gun violence in the US There is no gun violence in the US. There is violent crime. There is murder. They are different things.
- officeplant 4y ago
  And yet there are charts of just how much of either were done via gun courtesy of the FBI and other crime statistics logging entities in the US. It's pretty clear we have a gun problem and for a long time.
nradov 4y ago
Gun violence is hardly rampant in the US. The violence is heavily concentrated in a few neighborhood of a few cities. We should absolutely do more to reduce violence in those areas, but the vast majority of teen girls have never seen a gun fired outside of a shooting range or hunting preserve. My city has zero shootings most years. https://www.brookings.edu/2022/04/21/mapping-gun-violence-a-closer-look-at-the-intersection-between-place-and-gun-homicides-in-four-cities/ https://www.brookings.edu/2022/04/21/mapping-gun-violence-a-...
- spogbiper 4y ago
  last I looked into this, over 50% of gun related deaths in the US are suicides
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- miguelazo 4y ago
  To pretend that young girls aren't affected by hearing about the frequent school/mass shootings in the US is pretty ridiculous. That affects them far more than gang violence in "a few neighborhoods of a few cities"-- it's something that they relate to directly, whether someone they know has been shot at in an educational setting or not. Spare us the firearm fundamentalist talking points. Edit: Also, gun violence isn't rampant in the US? Compared to what? Certainly rampant compared to any peer society.

foxbarrington 4y ago

Jonathan Haidt has a recent essay that argues the teen mental illness epidemic started in 2012: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...

KerrAvon 4y ago
Haven't read enough of his essay to form an opinion yet, but I very much appreciate the following from the intro. Engaging with reasonable skepticism is important. > In sum, it’s reasonable to start with skepticism of my claim (with Jean Twenge) that there is an epidemic of mental illness that began around 2012, and that is related in large part to the transition to phone-based childhoods, with a special emphasis on social media. It makes sense to embrace as a null hypothesis the skeptics’ view that there is nothing to see here, just another moral panic, and the kids are fine. I am in full agreement that the burden of proof falls on me.
arp242 4y ago
Discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707734
fsociety 4y ago
The DSM-5 was released in 2013 with some extensive changes - but this is not mentioned in Jonathan Haidt’s essay. The DSM-5 had several changes in diagnosis that could explain the sharp rise in his graphs. That we simply got a view of how bad our society’s mental health is, rather than it increasing at a dramatically higher rate than pre-2012. Diagnosis around women’s mental health has also become much better in recent years. The amount of gaslighting around disorders and “hysteria” in women historically is troubling and completely unethical. I find Gabor Mate’s work much more enlightening in understanding why mental health is such an issue in the modern world. I highly recommend his books if you are curious. Gabor’s definition of addiction is that it is a coping mechanism to seek relief from pain, often with negative consequences. Therefore social media does not explain the pain. It’s an effect not a cause, despite how it can contribute to feelings of loneliness and inadequacy. Instead it is worth understanding how our youth are raised, and the trauma their parents carry onto them despite their best intentions and effort.

nashashmi 4y ago

Sadness and anger are twin feelings. I have been oscillating between them a lot more recently. Anger is an irritation of diverting from expectations.

100011_100001 4y ago

I know that people mentioned you can't jump to the conclusion that it's social media, but on a personal level with two teen girls I have noticed something interesting. Taking into account my friends/acquaintances that I'm familiar with their kids, so a sample of probably about 25ish teen girls. There is a big correlation of social media/cell phone access and issues. Bullying, exposed to adult content, comparing yourself to others, drama, all have one consistent source, social media and cell phone apps. Personally, I don't allow social media, and my kids don't have cell phone access. They're in a very tiny minority compared to their peers. To me the benefits of this far outweigh any drawbacks. I'm not saying that bullying doesn't happen outside social media, or anything like that, however, there definitely seems to be a heavy correlation between cell phone use and general teen angst. My girls, a small sample of two, seem to not have the same issues their peers have. I strongly recommend evaluating the use of cell phones with your children for their own mental and emotional well-being. It has actually made me use social media a lot less because of it.

JamesBarney 4y ago
I wonder which way the causality runs. Does using too much social media make your life suck, or do you run to using social media when you have a rough life?
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Even if the causality runs "life sucks" -> "social media", the effects of turning to social media to deal with stress are different than those of turning to alcohol or comics or D&D or whatever else kids had access to in the past. It's probably worth exploring the effects either way.
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    You can just get Neverwinter Nights from 2002, that's D&D for you.
  - 100011_100001 4y ago
    For me there is things you do that give you long term satisfaction and things you do that give you short term satisfaction. I think both have a purpose and a place. However it's inherently obvious that things that are only short term satisfaction and the most dangerous, because you keep repeating the cycle. For example liking memes is a short burst, a second later they are no longer relevant. For others it's shopping. You get a mini-high, but a few moments later that's gone. A lot of people seem to just keep pressing the button, get a droplet of happiness and press the button more time. That becomes a vicious cycle. Essentially if your actions today are identical to tomorrow and nothing has changed, you are stuck in a loop. I'm not trying to argue that everyone needs to be hyper-productive all the time. What I'm talking about is if all your hobbies are consumption, you might be stuck. D&D, which I play is different because you are doing it in a social setting. It's more like socializing with an excuse and a purpose, you get to exercise your creativity, imagination, you are actively using your mind. Passing things like watching youtube all day or drinking don't do that.

WFHRenaissance 4y ago

1. Stop telling kids that the world is ending. 2. Stop allowing people below age 18 un-regulated access to the Internet. 3. Stop prescribing amphetamines to children. 4. Stop letting single mothers raise children. 5. Stop raising low-income kids with high-income kids. 6. Stop making recognition a social priority (thymotic impulse). 7. Make the world smaller. 8. Stop letting your kids have unrealistic dreams. I don't agree with most of these tenants. Frankly, I don't think most of the above is possible, but if you want kids to be happier you need to stop exposing them to the chaotic, violent, and frankly depressing adult world before they fully develop their neocortex. They're being forced to maladaptively virtualize neocortical function before the maturation of their physiological neocortex. The world seems a lot worse before your brain has developed enough to cope/deal with reality. This is the truth, or at least part of it.

wittenbunk 4y ago
Wow really jumped the shark after point 3. Amazing how ideas that are explicitly fascist can seep into otherwise thoughtful discourse.
- klyrs 4y ago
  With point 7, I'm picturing a giant potato peeler
  - WFHRenaissance 4y ago
    Laughed at this
- gonzo41 4y ago
  I would also say, 4,5,6,and 8 aswell.
- galbar 4y ago
  I don't think calling ideas "fascist" is productive to the discussion. Maybe you could argue why you think those ideas are bad ideas?

korroziya 4y ago

[flagged]

CuriousCosmic 4y ago
If you actually took the time to read the report, it covered more than just teen girls. It's just that teen boys tend to have much lower reported rates of mental health issues or self harm. This could be because they are actually lower or it could be because they either don't realise they "qualify as depressed" or they won't admit it. I've linked the report which was included in the very first paragraph of the article. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Summary-Trends_Report2023_508.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBS_Data-Sum...
- ecf 4y ago
  > It's just that teen boys tend to have much lower reported rates of mental health issues or self harm. Boys quickly realized nobody gives a shit.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  The suicide rate for teen boys is roughly 3x the rate for teen girls. [1] The attempt rate is higher for girls, but boys are more 'effective'. 1: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
  - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
    I'm not necessarily disagreeing with what you are saying but it's worth bringing up some more recent data for the attempt rate. The rates of suicide attempts among teen girls was already twice the rate of teen boys (as you already mentioned) however despite that it has increased another 50% despite not seeing a significant uptick in teen boy suicide attempts. 1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm
- throwawaylinux 4y ago

netmonk 4y ago

[flagged]

fredoliveira 4y ago
Oh, spare us. This isn't the place for your type of discourse.
AlexandrB 4y ago
There's a stereotype of vegans being annoying because they will randomly start telling you about their lifestyle and the reasons behind it. Lately it seems like the trend has reversed though and every discussion of physical/mental health has someone popping up insisting that everyone should eat more meat and avoid "seed oils"/gluten/sugar/HFCS/etc.
dang 4y ago
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

ConanRus 4y ago

[dead]

jacooper 4y ago

[flagged]

rabuse 4y ago
Controversial take, but the truth...
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
Alternative take - experiencing bigotry and people rejecting you because of who you are probably isn't great for one's mental health.

sacrosancty 4y ago

[dead]