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The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

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Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#151

Post by anigbrowl »

paulmd wrote: post #72
anigbrowl wrote: post #17

This is a good piece, with the author consciously examining their own biases and assumptions. I do think underdiagnosis is an issue; when I sought mental health treatment in an earlier period, there was a veritable line of people telling me I couldn't be mentally ill because my clothes were clean and my sentences coherent. I think the author errs in not projecting his data far back enough into the past and looking fo…

> I'm honestly appalled by the pervasive tendency to rely on repetition of cliches in favor of original communication, for example. Shaka, when the walls fell ;) honestly there's an interesting argument to be made there that memes and cliches provide a higher symbol density to our communications via shared context/subtext. A meme has additional layers of context and nuance that are implicitly carried along with the a…

Temba; his arms wide.

I agree with all of this, and I'm fond of memes myself. They are definitely an important sense-making tool. But there's a distinction that I can't quite articulate, between memes as shared shorthand, and cliches that are actually reflexes or performative gestures, but are meant to be processed by the recipient as original communication.

As an extreme example, I used to know someone who was quite brilliant and would regularly make profound statements on a wide variety of topics, which he could explain in depth if needed. Some years after getting to be friends with this person, I wound up living with him for a few months and had access to his extensive library. I was surprised to discover how many of his profundities were actually quotations from books, but were uttered without any attribution or reference to the book. It would be like a HN commenter systematically lifting vc quotes but never mentioning their originators by name.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#152

Post by woah »

nluken wrote: post #79

While 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).…

Did you get into a good college or whatever?

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#153

Post by deafpolygon »

bluescrn wrote: post #55
deafpolygon wrote: post #19

Smartphones + Social Media

This should be incredibly obvious, especially to adults who've realised (particularly during the pandemic) the effect that social media use can have on themselves. Smartphones should be banned from schools entirely, and parents should be much more careful about keeping track of what their kids are up to online. (But it's probably too late, we've got a generation of young teachers who've grown up hooked on this techno…

Yep but the canary was how all of the big IT CEOs didn’t let their kids even have a phone.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#154

Post by asdffdsa »

imbnwa wrote: post #141
nluken wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good point that exposes some major bias behind my anecdote. With that said, if these expectations start at elite schools and slowly trickle down, would that not cause a rise in the aggregate across all teenagers over time?

> and slowly trickle down Seems like a strong assumption that it necessarily does splash damage beyond a certain cohort. I went to a public HS of 4K in the 00s only AP Juniors/Seniors were concerned with this kind of thing and AP kids were only friends with other AP kids (for obvious reasons); I'd doubt that've changed by 2012.

I think this is mistaken; there was a lot of pressure in the 10s for AP classes

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#155

Post by lazyasciiart »

willcipriano wrote: post #6
brodouevencode wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The increase in suicide rates for both genders (but especially females) are astounding. I really don't believe that any changes in treatment have been so radical as to cause this to manifest the way it has.

Tell someone with an issue with their physical condition that it is because of diet and lack of exercise and many would change habits, tell them it's due to a incurable but perhaps treatable cancer and some will chose suicide. Tell kids that they are unhappy due to choices made in day to day life and they might change those choices, tell them it's due to a incurable but maybe treatable issue with their brain and some…

I think your take is totally ignorant, and your problem is that you imagine people are being diagnosed with mental illness and/or committing suicide because of “typical human misery”.

Physical condition is an excellent analogy. Many obese people are told that any physical complaint is caused by their weight and told to go exercise. This includes people who are later correctly diagnosed with asthma, broken bones, hormone deficiencies and appendicitis. How do you think they feel to be told that they are causing their own problems and should stop doing that?

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#156

Post by romeoblade »

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #121
ok_dad wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we want a healthier society, we need to take a step back and give teenagers a chance to actually live life. We (American here) need to take a step back and let everyone enjoy life. That means providing healthcare, food, and shelter to every single person so that they can live their life and work in a non-anxiety-inducing way. Every therapist I've talked to in the past few years has told me that they think the nu…

right, teen kids are so worried about healthcare costs! Gimmie a break, your comment has nothing to do with the article, it's low effort and a better fit for reddit

I'm not yet 40 but I am a male single parent. With the closest family being 1300 miles away. Last year between March-May my health deteriorated so bad that I went from being fine to walking with a cane in less than 2 months. Once finally diagnosed, I went from diagnoses to major surgery in less than 12 days.

My daughter (just turned 16), picked up the slack as I become pretty much bed ridden.

I can attest that this had a very destermental effect on her health. Not only having to manage the house, school, etc but also without any support from anyone. At the same time watching me go from someone who use to be able to squat 500lbs to someone who couldn't be trusted to wash dishes without breaking a few because I had lost all feeling, balance, and depth perception.

Go one night, hearing your daughter sob in her room because she doesn't want you to see she's hurting and scared from what YOU are going through and then come back and comment because right now you are a very ignorant human to think it doesn't. Especially since see already lost one parent.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#157

Post by beamgirl »

justsocrateasin wrote: post #15
arp242 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean changes in treatment, but rather that some people previously went undiagnosed and "just got over it" on their own. As I said, in my own case treatment didn't help and actually made matters worse as I saw myself more as a victim who "couldn't help myself". n=1 of course. And many people of course do benefit from treatment. As I mentioned: even if this turns out to be factor – and I'm not sure it even is –…

n of 2, this has been my experience as well. I was almost killed in a shooting in 2021, and in 2022 I started seeing a therapist. Going into therapy made me relate to my trauma more, think about my trauma more often, and self identify as a "traumatized individual". I don't think any of that helped. The only thing that really helped was daily meditation/mindfulness, which does the opposite - it teaches you that the th…

Relating this back to social media, I've noticed that at times younger people almost exert a social pressure to link all behavior to anything remotely traumatic. I've had some shitty stuff happen to me, life has had it's rough points, but I've always felt pretty lucky overall. I've noticed in arguments with roommates/friends/etc who are younger by a few years, there is significantly more forgiveness towards anything that can even be tangentially linked to something that can be identified as a trauma. I noticed it because over time it led me to start slowly reframing experiences and actually focusing more on the damage they'd done. And its funny, the most traumatizing experience of my life has probably been the push to open up and focus on my traumas. My mental health has improved a lot since distancing myself from people who are too eager to focus on trauma. I wonder how that plays into the whole social mental health conversation. Like when does starting a conversation and destigmatizing a topic turn into feeding it and enabling it? Not to say by any means mental health was handled well before, but I think we might have made something of a deal with the devil in how we frame mental health on social media.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#158

Post by karaterobot »

The dismissive statement "people have made similar claims before, therefore this claim isn't true" is one of my pet peeves. You see it a lot around issues like this as a way to not engage with an argument.

It's an obvious fallacy: it doesn't matter if something was said in the past, or whether or not it was true when said before. The only thing that matters is whether it is true in this case.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#159

Post by nicoburns »

nluken wrote: post #79

While 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).…

That only works in the US though. Colleges outside the US don't tend to care about extra-curriculars, etc.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#160

Post by tdesilva »

mouse_ wrote: post #148
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re going to get a bias in here because a lot of folks are STEM focused / high achieving high anxiety types :)

I guarantee most of these "high achieving high anxiety types" live with significantly less anxiety than customer service reps/bag handlers/food service workers.

Why do you think that?
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