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No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse

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Re: No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse

#51

Post by MavisBacon »

rayiner wrote: post #5

> [Lorenz] went on to suggest that the young people of the 1950s enjoyed objectively superior material prospects than young people do today This is why I think culture is more important than policy. Lorenz’s point is obviously non-sensical. She mentions the “safety net.” But Medicaid didn’t exist in the 1950s. There were no federal student loans. There were no food stamps. Almost nobody went to college. Etc. But it’s…

> So what has changed since the 1950s?

I think that a major component of the overall mental health crisis for young people is the fact that more and more teens understand mental illness, are able to identify their struggles, and getting a diagnosis for things like anxiety and depression is easy enough- but the situation for treatment, at least in the US, is absolutely abysmal. I was diagnosed with a few learning disabilities at 8, anxiety later on so have been seeing psychologists and psychiatrists for a very long time now. I can afford top-tier care out-of-pocket and am very experienced at navigating this landscape, and at 32, I still struggle to find competent psychiatrists. It's a very complicated field which requires a certain nuance in practice but I usually come across mental health professionals entrenched in pop psychology, not science, so I just have a great therapist and have neurologists handle my meds now. This scenario becomes even more difficult for adolescents because many psychiatrists and psychiatrists do not see adolescents, and even fewer will see children.

tldr; adolescents are more aware of their mental health struggles than they were just 10 years ago but access to proper mental health care has not improved, and finding a psychiatrist or psychologist who is taking new patients is twice as hard as it was before covid

Re: No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse

#52

Post by giraffe_lady »

vaillant wrote: post #39

Surprised nobody is mentioning climate change. Young people are supposed to be contributing and centering their lives around a kind of societal structure which is increasingly seen as doomed. The constant acceleration of capital is bumping up against the material finitude of an increasingly depleted Earth. Conservatives have a vision of the doomed future, built around walls and hoarding resources against impending sc…

Yeah I think this is a big part of the core thing. The author is trying to explain it away because a bunch of quantitative metrics are better or improving. But regardless, it feels more hopeless now. It feels like the world is going to end and we're powerless to affect it, it feels like our lives are grist for engine of wealth accumulation.

Surprise, people's feelings are based on how things feel and regardless of what numbers say the world feels worse than it used to. We've optimized the hopefulness out of our changes.

Re: No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse

#53

Post by giraffe_lady »

Dalewyn wrote: post #43
jackson1442 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> see what the negative externalities are of a system that assumes the driving force between human interactions to be economic (one of which is the commodification of everything including relationships) Absolutely agreed. We've gone from a community-based culture where you took care of your neighbors because it's the right thing to do to "rugged individualism" where things like healthcare are "privileges" you have to…

Being a good neighbor is a fundamental part of being a man of good character and maintaining a working society. Taking care of a neighbor is none of my business because other peoples' lives are none of my business. Being a good neighbor and taking care of a neighbor are two very different things.

What we're saying is that they aren't, though.

Re: No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse

#54

Post by Dalewyn »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #53
Dalewyn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a good neighbor is a fundamental part of being a man of good character and maintaining a working society. Taking care of a neighbor is none of my business because other peoples' lives are none of my business. Being a good neighbor and taking care of a neighbor are two very different things.

What we're saying is that they aren't, though.

Let me put it this way then: Individualism and a community are not mutually exclusive.

Re: No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse

#55

Post by green_man_lives »

Dalewyn wrote: post #43
jackson1442 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> see what the negative externalities are of a system that assumes the driving force between human interactions to be economic (one of which is the commodification of everything including relationships) Absolutely agreed. We've gone from a community-based culture where you took care of your neighbors because it's the right thing to do to "rugged individualism" where things like healthcare are "privileges" you have to…

Being a good neighbor is a fundamental part of being a man of good character and maintaining a working society. Taking care of a neighbor is none of my business because other peoples' lives are none of my business. Being a good neighbor and taking care of a neighbor are two very different things.

> Taking care of a neighbor is none of my business because other peoples' lives are none of my business.

For a lot of human history this was simply not the case. I am not saying that this level of social cohesion is better or worse for mental health, but you can't use your own cultural viewpoints to debunk the previous commenter's claim. You have this view because you have been conditioned to have it in our current society.

Re: No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse

#56

Post by jimbokun »

woolion wrote: post #17

The logic here is absolutely astounding. People _killing themselves_ is not an indicator that life is worse? What is it an indicator of, Mr Levitz? Are they unable to tolerate so much happiness? Are these people dumb? Defective? Arguing that life is objectively better because you are going to make a better salary than in the fifties is plain gaslighting, but I don't believe there are a lot of people who will still fa…

Do you disagree with this statement?

> Whatever caused young people in the U.S. to develop higher rates of mental illness over the past two decades, it was not an objective collapse in living standards, employment prospects, or opportunities for material security.

What numbers or objective data can you put forward to refute it?

Imagine a short story where a man gets a diagnosis of an incurable, terminal disease certain to inflict much suffering before death. He kills himself. And then the doctor discovers there was an error in the test, and the man did not have the disease after all.

It's possible that for young people today, life is not objectively worse than for previous generations. But with catastrophic pronouncements on blast from social media to a greater extent than ever before, lack of in person support and friendships, a general discourse of partisanship and hate and unrelenting negativity, it's plausible more people are killing themselves due to the perception of reality, moreso than reality itself.

In other words, maybe we should stop telling people life is hopeless, the world is doomed, and it's impossible for it to get better.

Re: No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse

#57

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

korroziya wrote: post #7

"Between 2007 and 2018, the suicide rate among Americans ages 10 to 24 increased by nearly 60 percent." Right around the time social media garbage bloomed. Weird coincidence.

Also from the article - "The rate of major depressive episodes among U.S. adolescents increased by more than 52 percent between 2005 and 2017." Unless we're suggesting that Facebook was popular enough right at the start to change teen moods (I think it was still limited to colleges at this time?) I feel like there's more layers to this. I'm not saying social media isn't a problem, but I wonder if it's also just a lot of "growing up post 9/11" baggage?

Re: No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse

#58

Post by majormajor »

green_man_lives wrote: post #35
woolion wrote: post #17

The logic here is absolutely astounding. People _killing themselves_ is not an indicator that life is worse? What is it an indicator of, Mr Levitz? Are they unable to tolerate so much happiness? Are these people dumb? Defective? Arguing that life is objectively better because you are going to make a better salary than in the fifties is plain gaslighting, but I don't believe there are a lot of people who will still fa…

If I was being cynical I'd say that this is just an article designed to get clicks by confirming people's biases. To anyone who disagrees with me, ask yourself. What is the most important thing in your life? I can with certainty say that it doesn't have a "price" associated with it. If you can comprehend that then you can accept the premise that life can get worse as material conditions improve, especially when the m…

> To anyone who disagrees with me, ask yourself. What is the most important thing in your life? I can with certainty say that it doesn't have a "price" associated with it.

This shows one of the wrinkles.

Some people will be able to put a very specific price on that most important thing, straight from their health/insurance bills, because they would be dead without types of care that existed even in the 50s.

We should be happy we've improved potential material conditions for people, but unhappy that it's distributed so poorly and that we've also introduced other technologies that rub those differences in people's faces.

The headline is ludicrous because what the fuck does "objectively worse" even mean about quality of life. Humans have emotions, not just objective material sensor evaluators.

Re: No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse

#59

Post by CatWChainsaw »

anonuser123456 wrote: post #11
green_man_lives wrote: post #6

Article spends entire time "debunking" a political pundit who posts "hot takes" on Twitter, doesn't interview a single teen. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is multi-faceted. Maybe we should take the things kids say at face value if we want to pretend that we are being intellectually honest. Sure, humans are notoriously bad at describing their own qualia and reasons for why they feel the things they do, but listening s…

As a neoliberal/capitalist, I would suggest that capitalism is an incomplete theory and that we are still flushing things out. The huge rise in material standard of living from the 1850s to 1970s in the US made a dramatic improvement in people’s real quality of life. But since the 70s the improvements are very marginal. I speculate that’s because most of the consumer improvements are in the domain of status consumpti…

If it's an incomplete theory, it's been incomplete for the 400-500 years or so it's existed. No more excuses then, the "theory" needs to be fixed and practiced before the whole planet goes to an early grave.

Re: No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse

#60

Post by seanmcdirmid »

rayiner wrote: post #5

> [Lorenz] went on to suggest that the young people of the 1950s enjoyed objectively superior material prospects than young people do today This is why I think culture is more important than policy. Lorenz’s point is obviously non-sensical. She mentions the “safety net.” But Medicaid didn’t exist in the 1950s. There were no federal student loans. There were no food stamps. Almost nobody went to college. Etc. But it’s…

> There were no federal student loans.

The GI Bill from WW2 and Korea led to an explosion in college students. Before that, college was simply too expensive for anyone but the very rich to attend, and then...you get lots of people going on the military's dime.

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