61–70 of 514 posts
These always come up and there's always this internet-commenter tendency to be like "I KNEW IT: SMARTPHONES/INTERNET/LACK-OF-RELIGION/ABCDEFG ANYTHING OF THE LAST 20 YEARS I HATE", which is fine for a hypothesis and worth somebody saying once. But it's really just a hypothesis. Another hypothesis is that it's environmental. There's a lot of research showing depression and stress are correlated with inflammation. Ther…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. That’s…honestly, exactly the combination of race and gender I would expect to be most depressed right now, even thinking only about expectations people have been raised with about the direction of progress for their own co…
Can you expand on your thoughts here? This is not a group whose lives I generally expect to be getting worse (in day-to-day life, barring social media effects).
In terms of cultural expectations of progress and very visceral potential personal impact and perceived position in society, this is a radical reverse for that group (on the second point probably less than for non-whites, but the first and third points probably bite white liberals harder.)
These always come up and there's always this internet-commenter tendency to be like "I KNEW IT: SMARTPHONES/INTERNET/LACK-OF-RELIGION/ABCDEFG ANYTHING OF THE LAST 20 YEARS I HATE", which is fine for a hypothesis and worth somebody saying once. But it's really just a hypothesis. Another hypothesis is that it's environmental. There's a lot of research showing depression and stress are correlated with inflammation. Ther…
Solitary entertainment has grown drastically more engaging in the last few decades, and it seems reasonable to think that it has contributed to increased isolation and sedentary behavior.
Even though it's not absolutely certainly the cause of all ills in the world, I think it's worthwhile to be cautious about digital entertainment.
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…
How do you propose to use RCTs to test the claim? As an aside, do you think that the data, not the hypothesis, is accurate (i.e., that mental health has declined in teens)?
I'm not proposing to use RCTs to test the claim. I'm proposing that the conclusions be scrutinized to the same degree we scruitinize other claims made without RCTs. Nutrition studies are a great example that get routinely criticized here because they also rarely backed by RCTs. I'm proposing the same standard of critique.
> As an aside, do you think that the data, not the hypothesis, is accurate (i.e., that mental health has declined in teens)?
I haven't seen the data nor the data collection methodology. Even so, there are basic concerns that relate to health and specifically mental health that we can ask.
Did reporting standards remain consistent throughout the study period? If we assume they did, this assumption becomes "baked" into the conclusions. Assumptions don't merely vanish once we reach a conclusion.
Secondly, mental health(/illness) is both an umbrella term and one subject to operationalization errors more than say(extending the analogy) weight is. We would be suspicious if a nutritional study measuring health outcomes relied on self-reported bodyweight. We should be equally suspicious when mental health studies rely on self-reporting. I'm not arguing here that we should instead fMRI subjects, just that having an appropriate level of self-reporting suspicion is healthy, rational, skepticism.
Finally, unlike weight, measuring mental health has unique and different operationalization characteristics. The connection between weight and physical health, as far as we can both agree, has a different associative-conceptual connection than self-harm admittance and mental health. We should reasonably rule out basic alternative hypotheses. Were there factors (economic, social, institutional) that could explain(even partially) the change in admittance rates? Did admittance standards change during the timeframe? Even a beneficial change, like awareness-raising campaigns could result in increased admittence. See Logic's song “1-800-273-8255”[1] as a good reason hotline calls increased after it's release that is arguably a good thing rather than indicative of a negative effect.
At the end of the day, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit left to explore. Coupled with the previously mentioned skepticism, I wouldn't exactly put my faith in this. Let's be mature and say that's different from saying it's wrong. We're all invested in finding out the exact nature of this phenomenon.
1. https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/mental-healt...
I graduated high school around 2010, before all of these dramatic declines in mental health seem to take place, and even back then I remember there being a lot of unhappy people in my peer group. Maybe a certain % of miserable teenagers is guaranteed due to the nature of puberty (and humans). I hope we find a way to mitigate or reverse the trend these studies are highlighting. Schooling is essential and we can't allo…
My experience is the same, back in the 1990s. There was a ton of depression and even suicides when I was growing up. I felt like 50% of teens at my large HS were suffering from some kind of mental issue. And then you had major events like Columbine. The US school system has always managed to produce a lot of very miserable people, and no one seemed to care or do anything about it. And now we have these studies all bl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
We have no longer any "great struggle" to concern ourselves with. Recommended film: Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation.
Also - I have watched Hypernormalization. Found the facts that it presented to be highly interesting. Worth watching just for that. But the overall narrative I found to be pretty unconvincing.
These always come up and there's always this internet-commenter tendency to be like "I KNEW IT: SMARTPHONES/INTERNET/LACK-OF-RELIGION/ABCDEFG ANYTHING OF THE LAST 20 YEARS I HATE", which is fine for a hypothesis and worth somebody saying once. But it's really just a hypothesis. Another hypothesis is that it's environmental. There's a lot of research showing depression and stress are correlated with inflammation. Ther…
I wouldn't discount social media and related issues out of hand, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's a contributing factor. I understand there was a similar sentiment in the 70s and 80s where there was a certainty that nuclear war was going to happen.