10 ms·

Saw a post on Paul Graham's twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that's a strange specific gr

Saw a post on Paul Graham's twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that's a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho.

Juliate 4y ago
Why strange?
- ericmay 4y ago
  Do you think it's normal or expected? If so, why?
  - Juliate 4y ago
    Precisely, I don't know. I would not expect such a specific group, or any other, to significantly differ (might be a sampling issue, or something with a reason). Hence my question, but that may also be a translation issue. One could form hypotheses of course, but they won't be much of relevance here I think :)
    - ericmay 4y ago
      > Precisely, I don't know. I would not expect such a specific group, or any other, to significantly differ Do you mean for this specific item or in general? The former makes sense, but the latter I'd find a little weird given how publically well-known it is that there are group differences (take educational attainment in the United States for example).
  - revelio 4y ago
    Yes. A lot of depression about the world is driven by left wing views. Women are more left wing than men, liberals are obviously more left wing than conservatives, and young people are more left wing than older people. So being young liberal and female is the intersection of all those categories. I don't know how important being white is there, but I also don't see much discussion of race in this line of articles, only gender geography age and politics.
    - Juliate 4y ago
      [citation needed] Especially because left/right dichotomy smells particularly anecdotal here.
      - revelio 4y ago
        The article and related articles in the series are a pretty good place to start! They're laying down a lot of rigorous evidence that depression is strongly clustered in the most left wing segments of the population. Now correlation isn't causation, but in this case the causal path is pretty clear. If you believe that the world is systemically racist, sexist, unjust, doomed to extinction and that half your friends/family are secretly evil fascists/Nazis, then we'd expect you to feel depressed. When people with those beliefs turn up more frequently in ER for self harm and suicide attempts, we have both a correlation and a plausible cause.
tekla 4y ago
This sounds EXACTLY the group to have an outsized representation.
bradDonniger 4y ago
[flagged]
tstrimple 4y ago
These statistics are almost useless for determining rates of mental health issues. They measure mental health as reported by mental health professionals. Of course groups which are antagonistic or dismissive of mental health will be underrepresented. Folks who receive counseling for mental health issues at their Church will also not be represented in these numbers. That doesn't mean these other groups don't have mental health issues. It means they don't seek help for it or get help via resources that don't report these stats. All this tells me is that young liberal women are the most likely to seek help for themselves from professionals.
- daltont 4y ago
  The subpopulation that uses alcohol to deal with life stress likely skews male and more conservative. I recently had a conversation with late '20s guy from a small town in Illinois who said guys in his town at any point in time were either working, hunting or drunk. He felt the need to get out of there.
  - incone123 4y ago
    Guys in his town were either working, pursuing a hobby, or socialising?
    - ssully 4y ago
      Being drunk during all of your free time is socializing?
      - stametseater 4y ago
        That account is only the perspective of somebody who obviously didn't feel included and left the town. I bet people who like living in that town would describe it differently. What else do we really know? For all we know, the guy who left was a teetotaler and would characterize any social gathering with a few beers present as "everybody getting drunk."
DontchaKnowit 4y ago
[flagged]
- TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  We have no longer any "great struggle" to concern ourselves with. Recommended film: Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation.
  - DontchaKnowit 4y ago
    Not sure I understand you. Nor do I understand why I've been downvoted into oblivion. Also - I have watched Hypernormalization. Found the facts that it presented to be highly interesting. Worth watching just for that. But the overall narrative I found to be pretty unconvincing.
    - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
      I wanted to say that, basically, life is so easy now compared to previous generations. In the West, we have mostly all that we need. As a result of human psychology, our brains seem to create "non-problems" in order to occupy themselves, or at least the mass media are exceedingly good at this...
      - DontchaKnowit 4y ago
        Ah yes I agree. And I think that this kind of phenomenon creates more suffering than the natural struggle to survive.
IKLOL 4y ago
Huge overlap of social media use in that demographic I'm sure
ChickenNugger 4y ago
White liberals are the only demographic with an out-group bias, and women rate higher in negative emotion, so this makes perfect sense to me. out-group bias: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1074524252638982144.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1074524252638982144.html
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    Not all leftists, though, based on the link.
  - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
    but it seems that only happens at the cost of shitting on people who are like them. Who would have expected this could lead to depression?
  - ChickenNugger 4y ago
    I don't know how you leapt from the only group with a negative in-group bias to wanting to expand the in-group. Hating yourself isn't intrinsically inclusivity.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
mxkopy 4y ago
Those are the demographic criteria that I'd expect to maximize time spent on social media. White + liberal => probably middle class & have some time for leisure; girls => see the number of likes as a measure of their worth, i.e. "girls are pretty" ideology
bakugo 4y ago
[flagged]
- w3454 4y ago
  [flagged]
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  One of the odder changes in the behavior of people on the left in recent times is going from "I'm a person, not a label" to "Look at all the labels I have!"
  - colpabar 4y ago
    "My disability doesn't define me, but I'm still going to put it as the first thing in my twitter bio." We had a real chance to get something going with occupy and now we aren't allowed to clap at events because clapping is too violent.
    - kevviiinn 4y ago
      >aren't allowed to clap at events because clapping is too violent This is the first I'm hearing about this, where did you see it?
      - ssully 4y ago
        They made it up.
        ChickenNugger 4y ago
        It's hardly widespread, but it's absolutely happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moWe3rk7LzQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moWe3rk7LzQ
        ssully 4y ago
sdwr 4y ago
Gotta look at which way the cookie crumbles or the beam shears - how stress is distributed in a system. If you take for granted that there is a large amount of emotional strain floating around, where are the outlets? Men bottle it up and retake control (school shootings, as an extreme). People with precarious lives can express the stress as worry and fear (mostly women). Depression is a luxury version of stress - not happy, but also physically safe and not worried for your well-being. "White liberal female teens" = privilege.
- w3454 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
    What are you talking about? The person you're replying to didn't mention any of those things
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    > How did you become so misinformed? Personal attacks are against the site rules. Don't post like this here.
    - w3454 4y ago
      [flagged]
- incone123 4y ago
  Depression is a spectrum of presentations, and severe cases render you entirely unable to work. In turn that means your physical well being is at risk if you depend on salary to keep yourself housed and fed.
- Arrath 4y ago
  > Depression is a luxury version of stress - not happy, but also physically safe and not worried for your well-being. That certainly is A Take on Depression.
kerpotgh 4y ago
[dead]
shapefrog 4y ago
Give me an angenda you want to promote and a segment of the population you want to propagandize to and I can intersect the population by age/race/wealth in such a way that the statistics work and it helps you signal all the virtues at once.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Saw a post on Paul Graham’s twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that’s a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho. That’s…honestly, exactly the combination of race and gender I would expect to be most depressed right now, even thinking only about expectations people have been raised with about the direction of progress for their own conditions and how the reality currently manifesting clashes with it, and that’s without considering how concerns for conditions other than their own might play into it.
- YellOh 4y ago
  Can you expand on your thoughts here? This is not a group whose lives I generally expect to be getting worse (in day-to-day life, barring social media effects).
  - travisjungroth 4y ago
    Huge expectations around women “having it all” clashing into economic uncertainty and the revocation of rights.
    - YellOh 4y ago
      I'm not trying to be annoying, but I genuinely don't understand what you mean by huge expectations of "having it all" for women (at least insofar as it relates to any trend starting ~2012, when the large growth in depression and self-harm among teen girls seems to have started). The only "revocation of rights" I can think of would be Dobbs - which also does not fit the trend (see my response to the other comment). If (white liberal) teen girls are supposed to actually see their real lives getting worse, I still don't see any reason for this to have become a problem in the early 2010s.
      - travisjungroth 4y ago
        It does fit the trend. These issues are stacking. You can fool yourself into dismissing it if you split it into pieces. In 2012 you can write it off as fear mongering the media. In 2018 you can write it off as “how does this affect your day to day life?”. In 2022 you can say that Dobbs “doesn’t fit the trend” since it started in 2012. I’m not saying this is the whole story, but it’s possibly part. “Having it all” is a blessing and curse. The choice to do more, the burden to do more. Now you need a career, family, insta following. And it’s quite likely you’re going to have a hard time finding that perfect husband since men 18-30 as a demographic are doing horribly. What would normally be the backbone of a society is just not functioning well right now.
alexfromapex 4y ago
I would love to explore Reddit's influence on this phenomenon. The timelines seem to sync somewhat and it seems like a perfect vehicle for adversarial nation states to use to influence public opinion.
- tenpies 4y ago
  Also falls perfectly within what Yuri Bezmenov (the KGB defector who explained the Soviet's plan to take down the West through ideological subversion) laid out. At around that time, you would have the first batch of fully indoctrinated (trained by Socialists from childhood to adulthood, with no oversight or counterbalance) graduating. That is also the group that sets the stage for the demoralisation phase of the plan and allows for the next phase: destabilisation. Good summary here: https://www.oaoa.com/opinion/columnists/hart-kgb-defector-reveals-russian-game-plan-against-us/ https://www.oaoa.com/opinion/columnists/hart-kgb-defector-re... And the original interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA I don't think this is purely a Soviet ploy working out, but you can't help but look at the Western education system and realise that's a big part of the problem.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    In that interview he also talked about how the USSR was imminently going to take over the West because everyone had been indoctrinated to communism, so he's not exactly batting 1000. It seems to me he lays out a culture bleakness Rorschach test about "kids these days" that's easy to see ourselves in, and will be able to any point.
  - Daishiman 4y ago
    You haven't even a shred of understanding of social radicalism in the 60s and 70s.
- Mordisquitos 4y ago
  I highly doubt that Reddit per se has any significant effect whatsoever—which is not to say that it can't be an instance of the overarching platforms that cause the phenomenon. The reason I'm disregarding Reddit as a significant cause is threefold: a) Reddit is overwhelmingly male, and the most affected group are teenage girls b) Reddit is not that big of a platform in the teenage demographic c) Even if it were, its popularity is not in any way homogeneous across countries. If Reddit itself had an effect, the USA would be much more affected by the phenomenon than the UK, for instance.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 4y ago
That’s not surprising at all. Each of those groups (white, liberal, female) is individually correlated with being more depressed. It’s not surprising at the intersection of those groups is the least depressed: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand-the-well-being-gap-between-liberals-and-conservatives/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand...
steele 4y ago
Ah yes, his very area of expertise and authority. Did commentary include "interesting" and/or "looking into it"?
nradov 4y ago
We discussed that issue here a few weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35005368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35005368
chasd00 4y ago
therapy got really trendy with that group and a therapist labeling you depressed ensures more visits.
auganov 4y ago
Mainstream psychology is basically a more popular version of scientology with "therapy" instead of "auditing". Can you guess what my politics are more likely to be based off that sentiment? If so, then that tells you all you need to know.
- TomK32 4y ago
  Comparing a science with a cult is quite a far fetch. Pyschology comes without the secrecy, the Xenu bullshit, Führerkult, body thetons, exploiting clients for all their money and quite often the disconnect from members who leave, even close family members.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
horns4lyfe 4y ago
Because being a teenage girl was already hard, and now to be a good liberal teenage white girl you are supposed be some kind of self-loathing culture warrior as well. As opposed to, you know, enjoying life and being kind to the people you interact with.

Saw a post on Paul Graham's twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that's a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho.

Juliate 4y ago

Why strange?

ericmay 4y ago
Do you think it's normal or expected? If so, why?
- Juliate 4y ago
  Precisely, I don't know. I would not expect such a specific group, or any other, to significantly differ (might be a sampling issue, or something with a reason). Hence my question, but that may also be a translation issue. One could form hypotheses of course, but they won't be much of relevance here I think :)
  - ericmay 4y ago
    > Precisely, I don't know. I would not expect such a specific group, or any other, to significantly differ Do you mean for this specific item or in general? The former makes sense, but the latter I'd find a little weird given how publically well-known it is that there are group differences (take educational attainment in the United States for example).
- revelio 4y ago
  Yes. A lot of depression about the world is driven by left wing views. Women are more left wing than men, liberals are obviously more left wing than conservatives, and young people are more left wing than older people. So being young liberal and female is the intersection of all those categories. I don't know how important being white is there, but I also don't see much discussion of race in this line of articles, only gender geography age and politics.
  - Juliate 4y ago
    [citation needed] Especially because left/right dichotomy smells particularly anecdotal here.
    - revelio 4y ago
      The article and related articles in the series are a pretty good place to start! They're laying down a lot of rigorous evidence that depression is strongly clustered in the most left wing segments of the population. Now correlation isn't causation, but in this case the causal path is pretty clear. If you believe that the world is systemically racist, sexist, unjust, doomed to extinction and that half your friends/family are secretly evil fascists/Nazis, then we'd expect you to feel depressed. When people with those beliefs turn up more frequently in ER for self harm and suicide attempts, we have both a correlation and a plausible cause.

tekla 4y ago

This sounds EXACTLY the group to have an outsized representation.

bradDonniger 4y ago

[flagged]

tstrimple 4y ago

These statistics are almost useless for determining rates of mental health issues. They measure mental health as reported by mental health professionals. Of course groups which are antagonistic or dismissive of mental health will be underrepresented. Folks who receive counseling for mental health issues at their Church will also not be represented in these numbers. That doesn't mean these other groups don't have mental health issues. It means they don't seek help for it or get help via resources that don't report these stats. All this tells me is that young liberal women are the most likely to seek help for themselves from professionals.

daltont 4y ago
The subpopulation that uses alcohol to deal with life stress likely skews male and more conservative. I recently had a conversation with late '20s guy from a small town in Illinois who said guys in his town at any point in time were either working, hunting or drunk. He felt the need to get out of there.
- incone123 4y ago
  Guys in his town were either working, pursuing a hobby, or socialising?
  - ssully 4y ago
    Being drunk during all of your free time is socializing?
    - stametseater 4y ago
      That account is only the perspective of somebody who obviously didn't feel included and left the town. I bet people who like living in that town would describe it differently. What else do we really know? For all we know, the guy who left was a teetotaler and would characterize any social gathering with a few beers present as "everybody getting drunk."

DontchaKnowit 4y ago

[flagged]

TurkishPoptart 4y ago
We have no longer any "great struggle" to concern ourselves with. Recommended film: Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation.
- DontchaKnowit 4y ago
  Not sure I understand you. Nor do I understand why I've been downvoted into oblivion. Also - I have watched Hypernormalization. Found the facts that it presented to be highly interesting. Worth watching just for that. But the overall narrative I found to be pretty unconvincing.
  - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
    I wanted to say that, basically, life is so easy now compared to previous generations. In the West, we have mostly all that we need. As a result of human psychology, our brains seem to create "non-problems" in order to occupy themselves, or at least the mass media are exceedingly good at this...
    - DontchaKnowit 4y ago
      Ah yes I agree. And I think that this kind of phenomenon creates more suffering than the natural struggle to survive.

IKLOL 4y ago

Huge overlap of social media use in that demographic I'm sure

ChickenNugger 4y ago

White liberals are the only demographic with an out-group bias, and women rate higher in negative emotion, so this makes perfect sense to me. out-group bias: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1074524252638982144.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1074524252638982144.html

kevviiinn 4y ago
[flagged]
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  Not all leftists, though, based on the link.
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  but it seems that only happens at the cost of shitting on people who are like them. Who would have expected this could lead to depression?
- ChickenNugger 4y ago
  I don't know how you leapt from the only group with a negative in-group bias to wanting to expand the in-group. Hating yourself isn't intrinsically inclusivity.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

mxkopy 4y ago

Those are the demographic criteria that I'd expect to maximize time spent on social media. White + liberal => probably middle class & have some time for leisure; girls => see the number of likes as a measure of their worth, i.e. "girls are pretty" ideology

bakugo 4y ago

[flagged]

w3454 4y ago
[flagged]
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
One of the odder changes in the behavior of people on the left in recent times is going from "I'm a person, not a label" to "Look at all the labels I have!"
- colpabar 4y ago
  "My disability doesn't define me, but I'm still going to put it as the first thing in my twitter bio." We had a real chance to get something going with occupy and now we aren't allowed to clap at events because clapping is too violent.
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
    >aren't allowed to clap at events because clapping is too violent This is the first I'm hearing about this, where did you see it?
    - ssully 4y ago
      They made it up.
      - ChickenNugger 4y ago
        It's hardly widespread, but it's absolutely happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moWe3rk7LzQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moWe3rk7LzQ
        ssully 4y ago

sdwr 4y ago

Gotta look at which way the cookie crumbles or the beam shears - how stress is distributed in a system. If you take for granted that there is a large amount of emotional strain floating around, where are the outlets? Men bottle it up and retake control (school shootings, as an extreme). People with precarious lives can express the stress as worry and fear (mostly women). Depression is a luxury version of stress - not happy, but also physically safe and not worried for your well-being. "White liberal female teens" = privilege.

w3454 4y ago
[flagged]
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  What are you talking about? The person you're replying to didn't mention any of those things
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > How did you become so misinformed? Personal attacks are against the site rules. Don't post like this here.
  - w3454 4y ago
    [flagged]
incone123 4y ago
Depression is a spectrum of presentations, and severe cases render you entirely unable to work. In turn that means your physical well being is at risk if you depend on salary to keep yourself housed and fed.
Arrath 4y ago
> Depression is a luxury version of stress - not happy, but also physically safe and not worried for your well-being. That certainly is A Take on Depression.

kerpotgh 4y ago

[dead]

shapefrog 4y ago

Give me an angenda you want to promote and a segment of the population you want to propagandize to and I can intersect the population by age/race/wealth in such a way that the statistics work and it helps you signal all the virtues at once.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> Saw a post on Paul Graham’s twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that’s a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho. That’s…honestly, exactly the combination of race and gender I would expect to be most depressed right now, even thinking only about expectations people have been raised with about the direction of progress for their own conditions and how the reality currently manifesting clashes with it, and that’s without considering how concerns for conditions other than their own might play into it.

YellOh 4y ago
Can you expand on your thoughts here? This is not a group whose lives I generally expect to be getting worse (in day-to-day life, barring social media effects).
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  Huge expectations around women “having it all” clashing into economic uncertainty and the revocation of rights.
  - YellOh 4y ago
    I'm not trying to be annoying, but I genuinely don't understand what you mean by huge expectations of "having it all" for women (at least insofar as it relates to any trend starting ~2012, when the large growth in depression and self-harm among teen girls seems to have started). The only "revocation of rights" I can think of would be Dobbs - which also does not fit the trend (see my response to the other comment). If (white liberal) teen girls are supposed to actually see their real lives getting worse, I still don't see any reason for this to have become a problem in the early 2010s.
    - travisjungroth 4y ago
      It does fit the trend. These issues are stacking. You can fool yourself into dismissing it if you split it into pieces. In 2012 you can write it off as fear mongering the media. In 2018 you can write it off as “how does this affect your day to day life?”. In 2022 you can say that Dobbs “doesn’t fit the trend” since it started in 2012. I’m not saying this is the whole story, but it’s possibly part. “Having it all” is a blessing and curse. The choice to do more, the burden to do more. Now you need a career, family, insta following. And it’s quite likely you’re going to have a hard time finding that perfect husband since men 18-30 as a demographic are doing horribly. What would normally be the backbone of a society is just not functioning well right now.

alexfromapex 4y ago

I would love to explore Reddit's influence on this phenomenon. The timelines seem to sync somewhat and it seems like a perfect vehicle for adversarial nation states to use to influence public opinion.

tenpies 4y ago
Also falls perfectly within what Yuri Bezmenov (the KGB defector who explained the Soviet's plan to take down the West through ideological subversion) laid out. At around that time, you would have the first batch of fully indoctrinated (trained by Socialists from childhood to adulthood, with no oversight or counterbalance) graduating. That is also the group that sets the stage for the demoralisation phase of the plan and allows for the next phase: destabilisation. Good summary here: https://www.oaoa.com/opinion/columnists/hart-kgb-defector-reveals-russian-game-plan-against-us/ https://www.oaoa.com/opinion/columnists/hart-kgb-defector-re... And the original interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA I don't think this is purely a Soviet ploy working out, but you can't help but look at the Western education system and realise that's a big part of the problem.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  In that interview he also talked about how the USSR was imminently going to take over the West because everyone had been indoctrinated to communism, so he's not exactly batting 1000. It seems to me he lays out a culture bleakness Rorschach test about "kids these days" that's easy to see ourselves in, and will be able to any point.
- Daishiman 4y ago
  You haven't even a shred of understanding of social radicalism in the 60s and 70s.
Mordisquitos 4y ago
I highly doubt that Reddit per se has any significant effect whatsoever—which is not to say that it can't be an instance of the overarching platforms that cause the phenomenon. The reason I'm disregarding Reddit as a significant cause is threefold: a) Reddit is overwhelmingly male, and the most affected group are teenage girls b) Reddit is not that big of a platform in the teenage demographic c) Even if it were, its popularity is not in any way homogeneous across countries. If Reddit itself had an effect, the USA would be much more affected by the phenomenon than the UK, for instance.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 4y ago

That’s not surprising at all. Each of those groups (white, liberal, female) is individually correlated with being more depressed. It’s not surprising at the intersection of those groups is the least depressed: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand-the-well-being-gap-between-liberals-and-conservatives/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand...

steele 4y ago

Ah yes, his very area of expertise and authority. Did commentary include "interesting" and/or "looking into it"?

nradov 4y ago

We discussed that issue here a few weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35005368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35005368

chasd00 4y ago

therapy got really trendy with that group and a therapist labeling you depressed ensures more visits.

auganov 4y ago

Mainstream psychology is basically a more popular version of scientology with "therapy" instead of "auditing". Can you guess what my politics are more likely to be based off that sentiment? If so, then that tells you all you need to know.

TomK32 4y ago
Comparing a science with a cult is quite a far fetch. Pyschology comes without the secrecy, the Xenu bullshit, Führerkult, body thetons, exploiting clients for all their money and quite often the disconnect from members who leave, even close family members.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

horns4lyfe 4y ago

Because being a teenage girl was already hard, and now to be a good liberal teenage white girl you are supposed be some kind of self-loathing culture warrior as well. As opposed to, you know, enjoying life and being kind to the people you interact with.