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Suicide Rates Are Up for Gen Z Across the Anglosphere, Especially for Girls
- spdgg 3y ago[flagged]
- cf1241290841 3y agohttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4c801ca8-7b77-4a94-b840-301a5f4e495f_1600x542.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... >Figure 5. England and Wales suicide rates (Ages 15-64), graph in question edit: Sorry wrong title, see below from defrost its > Figure 2. U.S. Adolescent and Adult Suicide Rates (Ages 10-59), 1981-2021 Thanks for the correction!
- defrost 3y agoAs your comment stands now the linked graph is: Figure 2. U.S. Adolescent and Adult Suicide Rates (Ages 10-59), 1981-2021 not Figure 5: England and Wales ...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- khzw8yyy 3y agoNo kidding. "Significantly" is 3x. But I'm sure they'll find a way it's either irrelevant, or the boys' own fault. The researchers likely would not get funding any other way. The comments under the article are amazingly toxic too (though it's nothing unexpected).
- gwervc 3y ago> something bad happens to boy Why don't you? You should have... Make more efforts. You are doing it wrong. In your shoes we would have... It wasn't easier in the past. Stop making excuses. Get your shit together. Don't you want...? > something bad happens to girl It's not your fault. You're not wrong. You have been wronged. It's society. Patriarchy bad. Life nowadays got more complicated. We're here for you.
- abathur 3y ago> Figure 3 shows four facts that are important for understanding adolescent suicide: (1) Boys have higher rates of suicide than girls, (2) since 2010, boys have had greater absolute increases in suicide (the total number of additional suicides per year), while girls have had higher relative increases (the percentage increase over time), (3) girls have now reached higher suicide rates than any period previously recorded, and (4) boys have followed a “roller-coaster” pattern of suicide with a rise beginning in the 60s, a fall beginning in 90s, and a rise in the late 2000s and 2010s. (Fact #4 will be the focus of a future post on this Substack.)
- nosefurhairdo 3y agoIt's hardly sycophantic to state the fact that suicide rates among adolescent girls have had a larger relative increase compared to boys. Trends are worth examining. This does not diminish the suffering of adolescent boys.
- jimbob45 3y agoAnglosphere (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) That’s too arbitrary of a grouping for me to care about these results.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoEnglish speaking anglosphere.
- dannyw 3y agoThat’s five eyes, a common grouping even outside of intelligence. Many businesses use it because it accounts for a dominant share of revenue & profits. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
- jessriedel 3y agoYea it's 1/3 of world GDP.
- vavooom 3y agoThe author's rationale: Countries with higher levels of individualism (where young people are less rooted in binding communities) appear to have been more affected compared to less individualistic nations (which is why I began my posts by examining the Anglosphere and Nordic nations)
- nyokodo 3y ago> arbitrary of a grouping Arbitrary? It’s the UK, and former UK colonies with historically majority UK settlers where English is the most common language spoken, their legal and political systems share a considerable amount in common, and who have one of the strongest cultural, political, and military relationships in history. This is perhaps the least arbitrary grouping on the planet.
- ffhhj 3y agoWhat about South Africa?
- vavooom 3y agoThe author proposes the following theory to explain the rate increases: "Since the early 2010s, stable in-person communities and relationships have rapidly disintegrated, as transient networks of low-investment relationships took their place." This is a well worded way of saying the deep networks as opposed to shallow ones are the most vital for mental health it would seem.
- ZoomerCretin 3y agoWhat caused this? Or does anyone know?
- sanderjd 3y agoIncreasingly engrossing but alienating forms of digital interconnection: first the internet in general, then facebook, then instagram, now tiktok.
- evolve2k 3y agoWhile there’s likely more than one cause. There’s a bunch of research that shows rising smart phone adoption from roughly 2010 onwards correlates to rising levels of anxiety and depression in teenage girls especially. This roughly aligns with when first and second gen iPhone owners started to upgrade and pass their older phones to their children, creating the first generation of smart phone owning teens.
- mercer 3y agoiirc the 3GS was when I bought an iphone and shortly after they exploded in popularity in amsterdam. So that would also roughly line up (4 was 2010?)
- p-e-w 3y agoThe standard "explanation" is some hand-waving about social media, but I suspect that the root causes are to be found in the profound cultural disintegration that started long before the Internet became a thing, and whose ultimate effects are only now beginning to manifest.
- p-e-w 3y agoMeanwhile, male suicides still outnumber female suicides by 3:1 for every age group. What a fantastic demonstration of the fact that a statement doesn't have to be false in order to be highly misleading. "Fake" (i.e. blatantly incorrect) news isn't the main problem in out media landscape. Headlines like this one are, which are technically correct, yet are (usually intentionally) crafted to lead the average reader to a conclusion that can be the exact opposite of what is really happening.
- scarmig 3y ago1. I have plenty of bones to pick with Haidt, but he's not one to deemphasize male suffering for the purposes of politically correct rhetoric. He explicitly points out in the article that even now, teen male suicide far outpaces teen female suicide. 2. It is genuinely interesting if we're moving from a 4:1 to 2:1 M:F suicide rate, and I think that can be placed on social media. And if there is a single concrete cause of the change in ratio, that increase in female suicide rates can be reversed. That would be a good thing, even if it only improves young women's lives. 3. As unfair as it is, people don't give a shit about male suicide rates; the general response is "they deserve it," and no argumentation is going to change their minds. If people start seeing suicide as an issue that affects both sexes, perhaps that can provide the basis for some policy that will have the unintended effect of helping male suicide rates.
- p-e-w 3y ago> He explicitly points out in the article that even now, teen male suicide far outpaces teen female suicide. Which makes the headline, which is the only thing the vast majority of people will look at (something the author is well aware of), even more disingenuous bordering on dishonest.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- scarmig 3y agoThere have been literally thousands of articles and blog posts that point out in the headline that men kill themselves far more than women do. People don't care. Maybe there's an advantage to identifying a primarily male-affecting issue with a group deemed socially more worthy of sympathy? I'm not saying I like it, but there's a massive crisis, and it's better to pose the crisis in a way that garners sympathy, even if that means working with unjust public biases instead of working against them.
- petermcneeley 3y agoQuite some magical statistical sorcery to turn an obvious increase only in USA youth suicide into something for the Anglosphere. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd381e9e3-3339-4485-bf42-183c5d92fb96_1066x1292.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
- TaurenHunter 3y agoThere is another article where he references data from each country showing the increase is not just in USA: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-part-one https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa... In Nordic countries too: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-part-two https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa...
- 23B1 3y agoIt's the phones. This is one of those things that should be so obvious - but because of the overwhelming use of that thing, nobody will admit it. We spent decades listening to big tobacco insisting that cigarettes were healthy and cool despite the fact that the science was clear and it should have been obvious that inhaling burning shit into your lungs was bad. Having unceasing ubiquitous access to all the toxic shit that the internet serves up via a phone should be obvious.
- gretch 3y agoThis article is an about female suicides. How does your theory of it being “the phones” make sense when boys and girls pretty much have equal access to phone? If it’s phones, you would expect male suicides to be up as well. And if it’s how girls react to phones, then isn’t the cause that more specific thing than just “phones”.
- afrazkhan 3y agoThe headline makes it seem like that, but here’s a taste from the article itself: > Since 2010, rates of self-harm episodes have increased for adolescents in the Anglosphere countries, especially for girls Also, I would not expect male and female rates to be the same if it were to do with phones. The two sexes have very different experiences online, just as they do in real life.
- gustavus 3y agoI see people claim this all the time but don't often see any real solutions just general grousing. What would you do? Get rid of mobile computing altogether by government fiat? Ban providing a smart phone to someone under the age of 18? What about tablets and computers, how would one even enforce that? Would you force kids together to socialize for a period of time which is just as likely to develop trauma as relationships? The only reasonable solution I've heard to the phone problem is individual parents getting involved and active in monitoring and limiting their children screen time, and unfortunately, involved parenting is not something that can be legislated into existence.
- photochemsyn 3y agoGood article and the author's effort to get the data is commendable (although it would be interesting to look at Japan, China, India, Brazil, etc.). As far as the causes for the trends, that's anyone's guess (such as social media). It's not hard to find correlations with all kinds of events, e.g. the 2008 economic collapse had many knock-on effects and mental health doesn't benefit from families losing homes, jobs, stable community relationships, etc. This has even been studied: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4844458/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4844458/ > "All studies showed that the economic crisis was an important stressor that had a negative impact on workers’ mental health. Most of the studies documented that a rise in unemployment, increased workload, staff reduction, and wages reduction were linked to an increased rate of mood disorders, anxiety, depression, dysthymia, and suicide." Is that the reason for the increase in suicide attempts and rates among adolescents since 2010? Who knows - but clearly, rising suicide rates are a sign of societal malaise, indeed this was leveraged as a criticism of communist East Germany, which reportedly had an overall suicide rate twice that of the USA today.
- cf1241290841 3y agoShout out to Benatars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Never_to_Have_Been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Never_to_Have_Been Its always easy to feel bad about kids who need to grow up in todays world. I would recommend considering this before you misplace your birth control. People already do it with species appropriate living conditions for pets. Edit: Pls dont take this as encouragement for suicide. Read the book, you already have sunken cost, you might as well stick around and enjoy it. Doesnt make procreating any less egoistic though.
- definitelyreal 3y agoNo matter how you look at it these trend lines aren’t great, and I hope by studying these patterns we can ultimately come up with more solutions for young people coming up in a chaotic world. I’d guess I’m not the only person who clicked on this particular post because of personal struggles with suicidal ideation, and reading through some of the other comments I just wanted to say that people Do care about suicide and mental health. It’s easy to make generalizations about “society”, but we can be the change we want to see in the world - yeah maybe there’s some assholes on Mastodon or whatever, but there’s no reason to elevate or legitimize toxic opinions like that across the internet. From one vulnerable meat sack to another: your life matters, and so do other people’s lives, no matter what their age or gender. Be kind, y’all.
- vpastore 3y ago[dead]