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> Haidt's claims about a teen mental health epidemic have been pretty convincingly debunked [...] It's quite probable that there is no teen mental health crisis

> Haidt's claims about a teen mental health epidemic have been pretty convincingly debunked [...] It's quite probable that there is no teen mental health crisis. I don't see how you can reach this conclusion when it's very clear in the data that hospitalizations for teens due to self-harm has gone up significantly. Are you suggesting that hospitals are not now or were not previously correctly reporting this data?

crimsoneer 3y ago
Yeah, I'm sceptical but this convinced me. I'm not sure how you get around the hospital data.
mike_hearn 3y ago
The question is what counts as a crisis. Haidt presents datasets that are very short. The graphs begin in 2004. Teens have been depressed for a lot longer than 20 years. It's hard to know what the natural variance of this statistic is given just his articles. If you look at longer term US suicide stats (stratified by gender but not age) there's quite a bit of variation over time. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-suicide-in-the-us-by-gender-since-1950/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-s... The 1970s were really rough for women, but not men. 1990 was rough for men but not women. These graphs show that variance can be pretty high when taking the long view. Current overall suicide levels aren't anything special, even though they've been going up for decades (watch out for the non-linear X axis). If we look at the 10-14 girls dataset that Haidt picks where the change seems most dramatic, it goes from 1 per 100,000 to 2 per 100,000. Very few people commit suicide at that age, fortunately. We're talking on the order of 100-200 girls in that age range per year in the entire USA. At these low initial levels, even very small changes will look big on a graph. Every death is tragic, but if "crisis" now means something that affects such an truly tiny percentage of the population then almost anything can be a crisis. The other unrelated issue is that if you look at his graphs, self harm and suicides started going up in 2007, not 2012 as he claims. I don't see how you'd pick 2012 as the inflection point if not trying to force the smartphone narrative.
- naasking 3y ago
  > Haidt presents datasets that are very short. The graphs begin in 2004. Teens have been depressed for a lot longer than 20 years. It's hard to know what the natural variance of this statistic is given just his article I'm not talking about depression, but self-harm. Yes the graph starts in 2004, and then we see a 188% increase in self-harm among girls, after being basically stable for at least 6 years. That's pretty dramatic. > Current overall suicide levels aren't anything special, even though they've been going up for decades (watch out for the non-linear X axis). Even supposing I accept that suicide rate hasn't changed much, a stable suicide rate with increasing self-harm rate still qualifies as a mental health crisis. You keep focusing on suicide when the self-harm rate among girls was 20 times higher than their suicide rate when it was stable 2004-2010, but is now 72 times higher. That's clearly a problem. > The other unrelated issue is that if you look at his graphs, self harm and suicides started going up in 2007, not 2012 as he claims. That is not correct. The graph clearly shows that 2007 was at or slightly below 2004 levels. You can also see a slight increase from 2006 to 2007, and then a ~25% decline in 2008, then another ~10% decline in 2009, then a return to the 2007 levels in 2010. After 2010, you can see increases past historic levels, and 2012 you see a very sharp increase. (edit: I'm talking about Figure 2 at the link, just so we're on the same page) That might be a coincidence, but it's not completely arbitrary as you're implying.
jdietrich 3y ago
Self harm is a behaviour, not a disorder. There isn't a predictable relationship between the rate of self harm and the rate of underlying psychiatric pathology. We have reasonable evidence to suggest that self harm tends to be socially contagious, occurring in socially-connected clusters rather than consistently across the population; young people whose friends engage in self-harm are dramatically more likely to engage in self-harm. It might seem contradictory, but it is entirely plausible to argue that the internet is causing a self-harm epidemic rather than a mental illness epidemic. Obviously that would still be a serious problem, but it would lead us to very different conclusions and interventions. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.691438/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6914...
- naasking 3y ago
  A fair counterargument, but I think that the line delineating "psychiatric pathology" is not as clear as you imply. Many such pathologies are arguably socially constructed and sometimes even contagious in similar ways (see the book "Crazy Like Us"). I think "being vulnerable to social contagion to an extent that leads you to literally inflict harm on yourself" is definitely within the scope of being classified as a psychiatric pathology, even if it hasn't been yet. It seems like there's little difference between this and, say, anorexia.

crimsoneer 3y ago

Yeah, I'm sceptical but this convinced me. I'm not sure how you get around the hospital data.

mike_hearn 3y ago

The question is what counts as a crisis. Haidt presents datasets that are very short. The graphs begin in 2004. Teens have been depressed for a lot longer than 20 years. It's hard to know what the natural variance of this statistic is given just his articles. If you look at longer term US suicide stats (stratified by gender but not age) there's quite a bit of variation over time. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-suicide-in-the-us-by-gender-since-1950/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-s... The 1970s were really rough for women, but not men. 1990 was rough for men but not women. These graphs show that variance can be pretty high when taking the long view. Current overall suicide levels aren't anything special, even though they've been going up for decades (watch out for the non-linear X axis). If we look at the 10-14 girls dataset that Haidt picks where the change seems most dramatic, it goes from 1 per 100,000 to 2 per 100,000. Very few people commit suicide at that age, fortunately. We're talking on the order of 100-200 girls in that age range per year in the entire USA. At these low initial levels, even very small changes will look big on a graph. Every death is tragic, but if "crisis" now means something that affects such an truly tiny percentage of the population then almost anything can be a crisis. The other unrelated issue is that if you look at his graphs, self harm and suicides started going up in 2007, not 2012 as he claims. I don't see how you'd pick 2012 as the inflection point if not trying to force the smartphone narrative.

naasking 3y ago
> Haidt presents datasets that are very short. The graphs begin in 2004. Teens have been depressed for a lot longer than 20 years. It's hard to know what the natural variance of this statistic is given just his article I'm not talking about depression, but self-harm. Yes the graph starts in 2004, and then we see a 188% increase in self-harm among girls, after being basically stable for at least 6 years. That's pretty dramatic. > Current overall suicide levels aren't anything special, even though they've been going up for decades (watch out for the non-linear X axis). Even supposing I accept that suicide rate hasn't changed much, a stable suicide rate with increasing self-harm rate still qualifies as a mental health crisis. You keep focusing on suicide when the self-harm rate among girls was 20 times higher than their suicide rate when it was stable 2004-2010, but is now 72 times higher. That's clearly a problem. > The other unrelated issue is that if you look at his graphs, self harm and suicides started going up in 2007, not 2012 as he claims. That is not correct. The graph clearly shows that 2007 was at or slightly below 2004 levels. You can also see a slight increase from 2006 to 2007, and then a ~25% decline in 2008, then another ~10% decline in 2009, then a return to the 2007 levels in 2010. After 2010, you can see increases past historic levels, and 2012 you see a very sharp increase. (edit: I'm talking about Figure 2 at the link, just so we're on the same page) That might be a coincidence, but it's not completely arbitrary as you're implying.

jdietrich 3y ago

Self harm is a behaviour, not a disorder. There isn't a predictable relationship between the rate of self harm and the rate of underlying psychiatric pathology. We have reasonable evidence to suggest that self harm tends to be socially contagious, occurring in socially-connected clusters rather than consistently across the population; young people whose friends engage in self-harm are dramatically more likely to engage in self-harm. It might seem contradictory, but it is entirely plausible to argue that the internet is causing a self-harm epidemic rather than a mental illness epidemic. Obviously that would still be a serious problem, but it would lead us to very different conclusions and interventions. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.691438/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6914...

naasking 3y ago
A fair counterargument, but I think that the line delineating "psychiatric pathology" is not as clear as you imply. Many such pathologies are arguably socially constructed and sometimes even contagious in similar ways (see the book "Crazy Like Us"). I think "being vulnerable to social contagion to an extent that leads you to literally inflict harm on yourself" is definitely within the scope of being classified as a psychiatric pathology, even if it hasn't been yet. It seems like there's little difference between this and, say, anorexia.