2012 was a major shift in culture. Major hacks, social media, phone culture, the beginning of the 'scandals', globalisation was on full tilt, people had never really moved along from occupy movement, and this was when corporations decided to just feign support to avoid getting targetted. I think this was the wokening across the culture which came hand in hand with mental health crisis.
The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
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Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#82Having exited my teen years just before the smartphones became ubiquitous in the US, I got the opportunity to watch externally how social media and other similar systems effected the day-to-day of my younger siblings through their teen years. It was not positive. Maybe someone younger can attest to my observations: - more localized isolation as kids spent a higher % of their attention in internet communities - less c…
> less cultural cohesion due to hyper diversity in memes resulting in fewer shared experiences People being different is bad?
People do need common culture. I have a friend in his mid-20s and he is always "Do you know [YouTube personality]?" or showing me memes that require extensive explanations. And we're actually very similar people in many ways.
Some of this is just me not being hip with the next generation's culture. But he also has not seen almost any of what I would call the American film canon. So we can't even discuss cheesy 80s action films. Eventually we figured out he had seen Stargate. He was surprised I had seen it.
He can't tell what's mainstream and what's highly esoteric. I do think that's a problem. I know no one will have any idea what I'm talking about if I bring up my favourite synthwave artists in conversation.
It occurs to me that the form of media often informed my awareness about that. Was it on TV? Popular book at the library? Or did I find it in the back of some weird 'zine?
It's all the same on YouTube. Though there is the view count. It's often watched alone, so no social feedback. When it comes to movie nights, for example, finding something that's acceptable to most, not just hyper-tailored to yourself and full of in-references, is an important social skill.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#83Poverty is correlated with suicide rates, for obvious reasons:
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/poverty-may-have-a-greate...
There was a notable increase in poverty rates after the 2008 economic collapse, along with a decrease in home ownership and increased unemployment.
https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...
The fact that this article doesn't even mention this obvious contributing factor certainly undermines its thesis.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#84Another possible explanation is that we are simply diagnosing these kind of mental health issues better – due to decrease in stigmatization and/or more attention to it – but that our treatment is worse than doing nothing, and is leading to higher rates of self-harm and suicide. I have no idea if that's the case – and if it is a factor at all it probably doesn't account for all of it – but it seems something worth exp…
If it's less stigmatized you'd expect fewer suicides right? More people getting help. Perhaps it's less stigmatized because a larger part of society has real mental health issues.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#85Anecdotally, I was (as probably many here were) ahead of the curve in digital devices usage when I started hanging out in IRC and various web forums as a teenager in early 2000s. At some point I noticed that just using computers induced some amount of anxiety compared to "old tech"; whenever there was some period of time when I used my computer less (like christmas, vacations, etc.) and joined back to the "world of t…
I think it's the connectivity of the digital devices that is specifically at fault, and that offline-only digital devices wouldn't cause this. At any moment, my phone or computer may deliver unwelcome news to me. My boss asking me about some work shit, my family with some sort of unwelcome sad news, or whatever. In the past these would have been relatively mundane stresses, but now there is a social expectation that everybody be attentive to incoming communications at all times. You get at most a few hours a night where people don't expect you to respond, but even then sometimes they forget about timezones and freak out when they don't get a prompt response. There is never any real reprieve and it's starting to seem like this represents a permanent cultural shift.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#86A lot of the stats cited are ultimately subjective assessments of things like mental health. Calling more people "bipolar" or "depressed" or "anxious" can just as easily be a change in language as to what those words mean, as easily as they can reflect a change in the underlying language and how people express things. Notably the definition of most mental illnesses in the country Haidt is pulling his data from changed in 2013 due to the release of the DSM-V, so I don't really think pre-2013 data is comparable to post-2013 data at all, as these words in question are not medically or socially defined in the same way that they were before. In fact one of the most common criticisms of the DSM-V when it was being drafted to the present day is the allegation that it leads to more mental illness diagnosis's.
Attempted suicide is one of the few stats I treat as grounded relatively firmly in reality because it's not nearly as subjective, but this measure seems to have started skyrocketing in the mid 2000's not in 2012.
If the conclusion is that the rise of the internet has caused more and more teens to label themselves as mentally ill, I would say that's a conclusion I'm firmly convinced of. The conclusion that mental illness is actually increasing population wide, I'm very very sceptical of. I could imagine that it's happening to an extent due to things like economic pressures and increased inequality, we are seeing things like declines in lifespans and increases in suicide, but I don't think mental illness is increasingly nearly as much as the stats would lead you to believe at face value.
Plus quite simply, using time series data about when mental illness increased in society doesn't really shed much light on WHAT caused the mental illness to rise even if you can establish such a rise was happening, but I'm not even convinced by the date "2012".
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#87Social media is global, so any effects it has should be visible globally. > Teenage suicides rates have, on average, declined slightly over the past two decades or so. While in 1990 there were, on average across the OECD, 8.5 suicides per 100 000 teenagers (15-19), by 2015 this rate had fallen to 7.4. Much of this decline occurred during the 2000s. Between 1990 and 1999 the OECD average teenage suicide remained fairl…
Comparing against 1990 is wrong though, as we should compare against the start of widespread social media use (2010 at least), and it's also pretty likely that other OECD countries are lagging behind with widespread adoption by a few years.
If we don't see an increase from 2015 to 2022 THAT would be counterevidence.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting take. I guess your and my high school experiences were very different.
I was in hs from 2009 to 13 and it was a lonely, niche road filled with watching youtube rants lol. This comes from my experience thinking I didn't need to fit in for a very long time.
I graduated in the time before YouTube. I read books alone and left my small town when I could. Sometimes the solution to a better life is changing the people around you and not settling.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#89While I don't doubt that social media can drive some of these mental health issues, I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular).…
> I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process.
I have absolutely no data to back this up but a difficult college admission process isn't novel to 2012+. This is also ignores the plenty of kids/young adults that never went to college and still suffer from whatever this epidemic is.
We'd need to review data for people who didn't go to undergrad/grad to see if your idea still holds truth.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#90While I don't doubt that social media can drive some of these mental health issues, I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular).…
40% of high school students don't go to college (of any type). Of those, only a tiny portion are focused on elite universities. Many are just going to Long Beach State, University of Redlands and other 4 year schools that you've never heard of. They have lax admissions. Among adult Americans, only a third have bachelors degrees. Certainly the high pressure scholastic environment of certain high schools is not common.