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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

#241

Post by Khelavaster »

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.

Many badly-envisioned schools restrict access to AP classes or even AP tests, instead of letting kids follow their passions and meeting demand.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#242

Post by candrewlee14 »

I can’t help but feel like our brains didn’t evolve to understand the scale of competing against thousands of others to get admitted to college slots and get jobs. Once the internet opened the world to make comparisons against the hierarchy of everyone online, compared to a once much smaller local community, lots of mental issues have shot up. Things like body dysmorphia, imposter syndrome, etc…it just doesn’t seem like our brains can handle the scale of the hierarchy now. That’s just a personal theory of course

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#244

Post by yamtaddle »

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).…

You're in a bubble. It's nowhere near that hard to get into non-elite universities, which the vast majority of college-bound students attend. Just keeping your grades up and doing well on a standardized test will get you into a good (well-regarded in at least some fields, very well-known at least regionally) state school—and the ones in the next couple tiers under that are even more lax. Then there are community colleges—ask nicely and they'll probably let you in at least on a probational basis, even if your grades were incredibly bad in high school and you don't have much else going for you.

And that's for the students that go at all.

[EDIT] Incidentally, from tales told by my various teacher friends, the students who genuinely have crazy-busy schedules are almost always the ones who are extremely into playing two or more sports. Even half-serious participation (so, maaaaybe gunning to play college ball, plus the mostly-delusional but fairly-common parental aspirations of having a pro-league kid) means being in a league that makes you travel a lot, and lots and lots of practice, for each sport, plus extra training camps and shit like that. I believe tales of some schools where the students are stressed over academics and non-sports extracurriculars (plus the single requisite sport to keep Harvard from binning your application) but out in the vast reaches of non-elite America, only a few students have very-high schedule pressure, and most (not all, but most) of those are because of a strong focus on sports.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#245

Post by loeg »

carabiner wrote: post #90
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).…

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.

> Among adult Americans, only a third have bachelors degrees

Sure, but this is very skewed by older Americans having low rates of degrees. A lot more than 33% of current American 24 year-olds have Bachelors degrees. And that more accurately reflects the expectations on teenagers than low rates of degrees among Boomers.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#246

Post by [deleted] »

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).…

[deleted]

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#247

Post by iueotnmunto »

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).…

> Things only started getting better when I started seeing a therapist and worked on my issues over the second half of my high school experience.

I'm curious, would you mind sharing how a therapist helped you? I'm in a similar (but not the same) space mentally, and put everything down to environmental issues (high pressure job, etc) and disregard the thought that a therapist could help with this (unless they had a time machine, etc).

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#248

Post by WalterBright »

mouse_ wrote: post #196
jahsome wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you honestly not see how your own narrative could be seen as dismissive to the vast majority of the world? And yes, I do see value in comparing scars, as do most people who do not reside in the high tower. I understand the social rift between you and I is comparable to living on a different planet, and I forgive you for not getting that, but others may not. Please just understand that our current situation is part…

> our current situation is particularly perilous

How so?

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#249

Post by hcurtiss »

AlexandrB wrote: post #131
drivebyhooting wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sperm counts and testosterone is down (for better or worse) Sorry to nitpick but why did you qualify it “for better or worse”? It struck me as misandry. The implication being that masculine traits are bad and perhaps low sperm and testosterone is a good thing!

I think you're reading too much into that statement. The connection between masculine traits and t/sperm count is not 1:1. I think the obsession over testosterone levels and the implicit association between t levels and masculinity is far more damaging to men than the low t itself. See also: https://youtu.be/C8dfiDeJeDU?t=729

The role of testosterone in the behavior of cattle or monkeys is obvious to any casual observer. I don't know why we try so hard to overlook it in humans. Like the GP, I don't view it as an objective negative, but there's definitely a reason 90+% of the humans in prison are males. And that's true in every culture across the entire planet.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#250

Post by marginalia_nu »

Looking at the graphs in the article, they just sort of have a line drawn at 2012, but I don't think there's an obvious change in trend in almost any of them, not that sticks out from the rest of the noise-level in the data at least.

If anything, judging from the graphs (all of which have been cropped very close to the beginning of the span so as to not give much of a baseline), the change, if there is such a thing, seems to have happened at about 2006-2009?

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