Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nymag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 137 posts

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

#91

Post by seanmcdirmid »

silvanus wrote: post #67
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

9% of the American population served in WWII, and I'm assuming less than that took advantage of the GI Bill. So this was not universal by any means.

Those that did basically exploded the number of people attending college. So even if it wasn't universal, it was a contributing factor to education accessibility.

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

#92

Post by jrussino »

kube-system wrote: post #76
gretch wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 to this How many teens had to watch their parent come home and announce that they got laid off from their job and that this year there wasn't going to be a yearly family trip?

Yearly vacations are a fairly modern thing. My older relatives have stories about not being able to afford food, either due to the depression, or rationing during the war. Car ownership in the US broke 50% mid-century. The majority of my silent-generation relatives never, in their entire lives, traveled more than 100 miles from their birthplace. Poverty and unemployment continue to exist in other places around the gl…

I wonder if it's the change in the trend rather than the change in the state. My great grandparents came to the US as immigrants with zero wealth in the early 1900's. My grandparents were children during the depression, lived their formative years during WWII and raised "baby boomer" children, and had a modest but comfortable retirement. My dad was the first person in his family to go to college and had a relatively prosperous professional career and a nice big house in the suburbs and we got to experience ~yearly vacations.

I realize that there are many life stories here and this may not be reflective of everybody's expectations, but when I was young (pre-9/11) it felt like part of the zeitgeist that "every generation has it a little better than the last" (at least, in the material sense). Now there seems to be a prevailing sentiment that for the first time in living memory people's conditions in the aggregate are trending downward rather than upwards.

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

#93

Post by anonymouskimmer »

david38 wrote: post #85
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…

Suicide is not necessarily a sign life is worse. It can also be a sign suicide is perceived as “normal”. Look at the occurrences of suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge. When newspapers talked about it, it spiked. They made a pact not to talk about it, it tanked.

You're right, but that example is a method of suicide, not suicide rates.

https://www.hhs.gov/answers/mental-health-and-substance-abus...

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

#94

Post by anonymouskimmer »

mountainb wrote: post #21
nhchris wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There were no federal student loans. [..] Almost nobody went to college. How much did college cost? How necessary was a college degree for success?

There was the GI bill, which both of my grandfathers used to get professional degrees essentially for "free" (one accountant and one doctor). I guess it wasn't really "free" because one of them had to fight through North Africa and Italy to get it, and the other one had to drop a few bombs on Germany before spending the rest of the war in a POW camp.

Only about 9% of the US population was in the military during WW2. The percentage dropped with future wars.

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

#95

Post by jimbokun »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #22
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…

What has changed since the 1970s is a greater proportion of productivity improvement has gone to capital vs labour. This means working people have to work much harder for comparatively less. Ascribing the resulting unhappiness to departing from some sort of communal idyll where young people 'knew their place' is rather regressive I'd suggest.

Yes, but the big increase in reported mental health issues started around 2007 or so.

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

#96

Post by quantified »

Adolescence is where the kid-friendly world created by parents, educators and others begins to really give way to the reality of the adult world, and how f'd up it can be and is. Adults have put the transition behind them for the most part and assimilated.

Life may not have gotten much worse. The expectations of what the world is like may have been dumbed down during prior childhood.

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

#97

Post by rayiner »

hot_gril wrote: post #28
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…

> In many cases we have replaced those personal obligations (e.g. to take care of elders) with abstract government funded systems. I can almost guarantee that young people don't have social security on the top of their minds. It's school school school internship work, that's it. Those bars are raised each year. Leisure time is social media and video games. All that got amplified in 2020. Not hard to see why they're d…

> I can almost guarantee that young people don't have social security on the top of their minds. It's school school school internship work, that's it. Those bars are raised each year. Leisure time is social media and video games. All that got amplified in 2020. Not hard to see why they're depressed.

You’re assuming a level of insight into people’s meta-knowledge of their own mental state that I don’t think is warranted. Maybe they’re not thinking of social security, but maybe there’s mental health benefits to caring for elderly grandparents at home that people don’t appreciate.

As to leisure—in the 1950s, half of 16-19 year olds had jobs. Today it’s around 30%. Maybe having a real, if menial job is more fulfilling than playing video games or doing bullshit box checking exercises for college applications? That’s a cultural change too.

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

#98

Post by hot_gril »

rayiner wrote: post #97
hot_gril wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In many cases we have replaced those personal obligations (e.g. to take care of elders) with abstract government funded systems. I can almost guarantee that young people don't have social security on the top of their minds. It's school school school internship work, that's it. Those bars are raised each year. Leisure time is social media and video games. All that got amplified in 2020. Not hard to see why they're d…

> I can almost guarantee that young people don't have social security on the top of their minds. It's school school school internship work, that's it. Those bars are raised each year. Leisure time is social media and video games. All that got amplified in 2020. Not hard to see why they're depressed. You’re assuming a level of insight into people’s meta-knowledge of their own mental state that I don’t think is warrant…

Taking care of elderly family members at home went away well before the recent dip in mental health and falls in line with the decline of family values. I'm personally saddened by the change, but I don't think it explains much here.

I'm guessing fewer 16-19yo have jobs mainly because school is more important now. College attendance is way up. But more importantly, the whole phone / social media thing is life-sucking even for kids who don't actively engage in it.

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

#99

Post by anonymouskimmer »

haswell wrote: post #49

> The logic here is absolutely astounding. People _killing themselves_ is not an indicator that life is worse? This is not the claim. The word “objective” does a lot of important heavy lifting here, and there are strong arguments to be made that subjective experience has gotten significantly worse, while most “objective” factors have continued to improve as the world modernizes. The trouble is that evolutionary psych…

If it can be measured it is objective.

And I find it odd that the objective criteria the author chooses ("it was not an objective collapse in living standards, employment prospects, or opportunities for material security.") are mostly not applicable to teens, but to adults.

And to the extent they are applicable to teens, well teen employment has dropped quite a bit since the Great Recession, and is just now returning to what is was in 2007: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/21/after-dropp...

The percent of children living in "poverty" also increased by a few percentage points (about 1/4 to 1/3 in relative percent) after the Great Recession, and didn't fall back to trend until around 2017. This would have affected today's teens during formative times in their childhood: https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/line/43-children-in-po...

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

#100

Post by jimbokun »

braingenious wrote: post #15

From the article: >Lorenz isn’t wrong to suggest that economic conditions can influence the prevalence of mental distress. Unemployment and poverty are both major risk factors for depression. Recessions are associated with elevated rates of suicide. And there is some evidence that robust social-welfare states improve mental health by reducing material insecurity. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that America’s r…

The whole point of the article is that, although in general economic conditions can negatively impact mental health, in this case the increase in mental health problems does not coincide with a deterioration in overall economic conditions.
Post reply on HN