The very first thing that comes to mind is this is the first year after the '08 housing collapse where all students in the school had experienced it before entering high school. I wonder if the massive housing instability had an oversized impact on mental health which just... never recovered?
The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
211–220 of 565 posts
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#212While 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).…
So many people here want to say, "That's not it, it's {something else}." Might be more fruitful to argue about a stack-rank of the things. But, as the father of a son who is a freshman in college at a Research 1 university, I'll say that his college experience so closely mirrors my enterprise organization work bullshit experience it's shocking. And he doesn't have a social media account or a mobile phone. So, my humb…
You have an 18 year old son without a mobile phone?
I would think it is at least needed for all the logins requiring SMS 2FA.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#213Having seen our kids pass through this timeframe into adulthood, experiencing various forms of "mental illness" along the way, the main "obvious" factors that were different from our childhoods were ...
a) social media, and
b) schools pressuring them to commit to major life decisions before they were even allowed to drive a car, and never letting up, and
c) the magnitude of student loans necessary to comply with that pressure.
This was all hammering them long before any sort of college admissions process came into play.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#214It is remarkably easy to expose yourself to truly horrifying things on the Internet. Stories, images, and videos of deaths of all kinds, from videos of terrorists cutting off people's heads to people live streaming their suicides to Reddit stories about motorcyclists having limbs ripped off in traffic accidents. News sites, forums, and social feeds are a parade of horrors. You cannot get away from the Internet, even…
Nah, gore is gore, death exists, farm kids have been doing this for years. Kids deal very well with death as long as they understand the concept from an early age.
Yeah, I see no reason to think it is the gore. There are so many other things, including social media, which are much more likely candidates.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#215While 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).…
For about 2.5 years starting in 2015 I was a high school teacher at a Title I (low income area) school. There was a lot of anxiety and depression -- obviously not far outside trends around that. Very, very few kids were doing extracurriculars beyond maybe one sport, or a part-time job for a minority of the juniors and seniors. The (very) few kids who were oversubscribed the way you were didn't seem to have a rate of anxiety or depression greater than their peers, and the greatest incidence seemed to be in the lowest-achieving students.
Obviously this is anecdotal, and there can be multiple causes, but teaching gives you a lot of anecdotes and they don't seem to fit this narrative.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#216Another 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…
Another 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 think this explains a lot of it, in particular in regard to rising rates of autism. Doctors are looking for symptoms, hence more people will be diagnosed.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
At your school, sure. Not at the one I taught at in the 10s. And from knowing other teachers then, I'd guess the pressure was high at only one, maybe two, of the six high schools in the area.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guarantee most of these "high achieving high anxiety types" live with significantly less anxiety than customer service reps/bag handlers/food service workers.
Do you honestly see value in comparing scars? Does that matter in any meaningful way? The worst stress of someone's life is the worst stress of their life. It's unproductive and petty to bicker about who has it worse. If life is stressful for anyone, regardless of status, title, age, etc. there's a good chance it's undeserved. The takeaway is to treat people better, not dismiss their stressors as less significant.
I honestly see value in having scars, both the physical and mental varieties. Scars create resilience. We saw this during the recent pandemic. The upper-middle class "high achieving, high anxiety" types who had never faced any real danger or hardship were the most likely to panic and demand all sorts of ridiculous lockdowns and mandates, even though the vast majority of them were never at any significant risk. Whereas blue-collar workers and those accustomed to engaging in physically dangerous activities were generally much more sanguine and level-headed about the whole thing.
Some people just need to harden the f*** up and quit catastrophizing every little thing.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#219While 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 have a son who’s a sophomore (15 yo, second year in HS) and this comment absolutely rings true. He fences competitively (2 HR training four times a week plus a few hrs with physical therapist) and his life pretty much consists of school, homework and sports. He has to be at school at 7:45am so gets up around 6am, goes to bed around 11am usually, so much for the 8 hrs of sleep per night! And he hasn’t even started t…
11 pm to 7 am (say) looks like 8 hours sleep to me.
why does he _have_ to do anything you say he _has_ to do?
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#220While 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).…
So many people here want to say, "That's not it, it's {something else}." Might be more fruitful to argue about a stack-rank of the things. But, as the father of a son who is a freshman in college at a Research 1 university, I'll say that his college experience so closely mirrors my enterprise organization work bullshit experience it's shocking. And he doesn't have a social media account or a mobile phone. So, my humb…
IMHO peak BS is yet to come. Humans want to believe there is only one problem responsible for complex outcomes. Life seems simpler and understandable. Solutions consist of doing this or stopping that. The reality is much more complex and potential solutions always have consequences in addition to the ones desired. For me it always comes back to population. The population of the US (and planet) have more than doubled during my life time. Out psychological and social infrastructure that worked well for smaller groups of people has not scaled well.