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The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

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Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere

#5

Saw a post on Paul Graham's twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that's a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho.

This sounds EXACTLY the group to have an outsized representation.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere

#7
post #4

Saw a post on Paul Graham's twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that's a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho.

Why strange?

Do you think it's normal or expected? If so, why?

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere

#8

Saw a post on Paul Graham's twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that's a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho.

These statistics are almost useless for determining rates of mental health issues. They measure mental health as reported by mental health professionals. Of course groups which are antagonistic or dismissive of mental health will be underrepresented. Folks who receive counseling for mental health issues at their Church will also not be represented in these numbers. That doesn't mean these other groups don't have mental health issues. It means they don't seek help for it or get help via resources that don't report these stats. All this tells me is that young liberal women are the most likely to seek help for themselves from professionals.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere

#9
It's funny. Somehow I don't think the standard of evidence[RCTs] we get calls for in nutrition studies(for example), will be applied equally here. It's an epistemological double-standard that's rarely given serious consideration.

I wouldn't give correlative studies much thought. It could be just as likely that people who were more anxious or depressed were found to be mobile phone users or any number of other things causing both anxiety and depression and increased mobile phone use. Critique of causal errors should be no different here than any other conclusion made from correlations.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere

#10

Saw a post on Paul Graham's twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that's a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho.

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