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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

#361

Post by rpjt »

muffinman26 wrote: post #315
YellOh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Not sure if this aligns with what the GP was trying to say, but this is also one of the groups I would expect to be the most depressed, although I would expect white, middle-aged, middle-classed women to be an even larger demographic. Chemicals/genetics have a lot to do with depression, but for other cases I think depression comes from a feeling of uselessness/lack of purpose. White liberal women have a lot of incomp…

I tend to agree with. A lack of purpose is a big deal for lots of depressed people. Humans need a purpose or they can go down a dark path quite quickly.

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

#362

Post by FormerBandmate »

amilios wrote: post #207

(Seemingly) Inevitable climate change and ecological destruction, growing income inequality and falling standards of living, a deathly pandemic that's still killing people while we pretend everything is back to normal (+ long covid probably bringing about a disability crisis in 3-5 years), increasing tensions between various nuclear-capable states (Russia, China) and the West, changes in the age distribution in most…

If long covid was real it would have happened already. I had covid a year and a half ago, and am fine as is everyone I know (who have almost all had it at some point). At some point it's the flip side of the vaccine side effects that antivaxxers keep insisting will emerge at some point

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

#363

Post by adhesive_wombat »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #339
lsllc wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you can blame problems such as climate change, economic issues -- every generation had its own existential crisis: WW2, Korea, Vietnam, numerous recessions and until 1990, recent generations lived under the specter of the atom bomb. I think it's social media, that's what's really changed: Every single teenager is now comparing themselves against every other kid in the world instead of just their local pe…

I think social media - which is not so much about media but about performative competition - is just part of the problem. Reality for kids seems so much more competitive and ruthless in every way. And there are so few resources available to them to help them deal with it. At the same time opportunities are shrinking and pressure to perform is increasing. It's not enough to be adequate, you have to be outstanding in l…

> you're competing with the entire online world.

It's actually even worse than that: you're competing separately in each field, in parallel. But you only see the others in the context of that which they are good at, which is why you see them in that space in the first place.

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

#364

Post by revelio »

stuaxo wrote: post #106
carimura wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

now imagine spamming their phones with tik tok videos about the end of the world due to ____________. In your example, it's climate change. Maybe it's that, but it could also be that we can now mainline hours and hours of highly provocative content directly into a growing brain.

We grew up with the threat of nuclear destruction, as well as global warming, in the 1980s.

Nuclear destruction wasn't the same in key ways:

- It was only a possibility. You also knew the nukes might not launch, the world might not end.

- If the nukes did launch, it wouldn't be due to a moral failure of your own.

- Although you may sometimes have felt scared or depressed about the USSR and MAD, you weren't being constantly told by your society that optimism was illegitimate thoughtcrime.

Climate doomerism is pretty much ideal for creating mental health issues. It tells adherents that they have no future outside of some hellscape, that it's all their own fault or maybe their parents fault, the root cause is moral failure, that maybe it can be stopped except SURPRISE no it can't really, and that any deviation from any of these beliefs makes you utterly evil and depraved, absolutely worth of immediate and total ex-communication from your friendship groups.

Personally I think it's more likely to be the phones, but there are enough anecdotes about real young people whose thought processes around the future have been totally broken by climate propaganda, that it's worth taking seriously.

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

#365

Post by dang »

luckylion wrote: post #306
dang wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you about ad hominems but unfortunately your account has been using HN primarily for political/ideological battle, and also is arguably breaking the rule against trollish usernames here ( https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... ). I've therefore banned it. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow th…

This is pretty lame, given that there's a good amount of users who are basically only commenting to say "capitalism bad, mhkay", yet for some reason that's not "primarily for political/ideological battle". Applying rules evenly makes the rules seem better.

We've been applying the rules evenly for years, or at least have put in years' worth of effort to do so. The problem is that no matter how evenly one applies the rules, people with strong ideological passions still feel that we are biased against their side and secretly favor the other side. I think this is because everyone is more likely to notice and place greater weight on the cases that they happen to dislike.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870

If you're aware of accounts using HN primarily for ideological battle who we haven't asked to stop, the likeliest explanation is that we haven't seen them. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. You can help by flagging such posts or, in egregious cases, emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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

#366

Post by vore »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #169
grammers wrote: post #80

The article has a point, but there's no proof for cause & effect. A completely different explanation could be that our societies are so advanced by now that we can finally listen to mental illnesses and take them seriously - while in the past people just had to 'function', no matter what.

Maybe we should look at ways to get back to 'just functioning'.

It's easy to say this when you're not on the wrong end.

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

#367

Post by chasd00 »

Flatcircle wrote: post #2

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.

therapy got really trendy with that group and a therapist labeling you depressed ensures more visits.

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

#368

Post by FormerBandmate »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #339
lsllc wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you can blame problems such as climate change, economic issues -- every generation had its own existential crisis: WW2, Korea, Vietnam, numerous recessions and until 1990, recent generations lived under the specter of the atom bomb. I think it's social media, that's what's really changed: Every single teenager is now comparing themselves against every other kid in the world instead of just their local pe…

I think social media - which is not so much about media but about performative competition - is just part of the problem. Reality for kids seems so much more competitive and ruthless in every way. And there are so few resources available to them to help them deal with it. At the same time opportunities are shrinking and pressure to perform is increasing. It's not enough to be adequate, you have to be outstanding in l…

Ngl I think that's basically it. There's insane competition at basically all swathes of life to become elite at a young age, look at how far elite college acceptance rates have dropped. This has created generations of depressive workaholics and burnouts. It's a lot worse in Asian countries where these cultural forces are stronger.

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

#369

Post by revelio »

BryantD wrote: post #182
stri8ed wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The authors address that by looking at hospitalizations for self harm.

That’s a powerful part of the narrative for sure. But … ugh, I need to be less lazy and dig into the supporting material, actually, some of my questions may be answered there. The big one is “does that mean there’s more self-harm, or does that mean parents are more willing to ask for emergency help?”

If the latter then it'd affect boys and girls equally. The simplest explanation here is likely the right one i.e. the increase in mental disorders is real.

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

#370

Post by dang »

FuckYouDan wrote: post #317
dang wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you about ad hominems but unfortunately your account has been using HN primarily for political/ideological battle, and also is arguably breaking the rule against trollish usernames here ( https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... ). I've therefore banned it. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow th…

[flagged]

First of all, I'm sorry I didn't know my meme!

Second, you've linked to a photo that says something about Netflix, Twitter, Airbnb, Apple, Stripe, Lyft, Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Tesla, eBay, PayPal, and Microsoft. It's not clear to me what that's supposed to have to do with Hacker News moderation.

It's not at all true that ideological battles are fine here for one side but not the other, as anyone can see for themselves if they want to look back through the thousands of moderation comments I've posted. You feel that way, not because you're perceiving moderation accurately, but for the same reason that led https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238927 to say "Literally anything left-of-right-of-centre immediately gets flagged (if not outright banned by the mods)".

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