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The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

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Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#791

Post by wvenable »

inglor_cz wrote: post #790
wvenable wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it's merely intolerance of intolerance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Quite a lot of aggressors consider themselves to be righteous ad good when they attack some unpopular person/people. The paradox of intolerance stems from the 1930s. When we stay there for a bit longer - do you think that the participants of the Kristallnacht considered themselves evil? No, they were brainwashed into thinking that they were righteous , fighting to save their country from corruption and evil brought u…

[flagged]

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#792

Post by paulmd »

beaeglebeached wrote: post #789
bobthepanda wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing costs have increased, daycare is shooting through the roof, and everyone seems to be working harder to scrape by, at least in the US. Daycare in particular is quite painful; there are high standards, but government subsidy is so low that simultaneously parents cannot afford it and programs cannot afford to staff adequately.

The unspoken truth is daycare is highly regulated and that regulation compliance is much of the contributing factor. Either compensate constituents for the externalities of your protective legislation or go back to letting any jill turn her house into a an unlicensed daycare center which is the dirty truth of how people got by for an affordable price before.

The scientific name for this is “baumols cost disease”, namely the proposition that as productivity increases over time, the only things that will stay expensive (and even become relatively more expensive) are the things that consist primarily of labor and can’t be automated away. And childcare is the textbook example of that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

As you mention, regulations say you can’t have more than 6 children per caretaker, and tbh that’s probably not too far off the practical maximum either. Once they’re in school you can increase the ratio (a bit, ideally not to 30 either) but having a dozen infants or toddlers per caretaker means they’re getting neglected.

That’s the bind - it’s not even that it’s regulations, it’s that one person can’t keep track of a dozen mini-humans with no programming burned in yet. If you want child-rearing in a society there has to be a fairly significant fraction of the labor devoted to that, regardless of whether it’s a stay-at-home partner or grandma or a daycare center.

In turn, unless they’re slaves or massively underpaid (au pairs lol), that person needs to eat and pay for their kids’ care too. So, naively, you would expect the cost to trend towards roughly 1/6th of a typical household income (2.5 kids for 2 partners etc). Right on target.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#793

Post by wvenable »

smcin wrote: post #787
wvenable wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the overprotection of children, the rise of “safetyism,” and the shouting down of speakers on university campuses when students deemed the speaker to be “harmful.” The emphasis is mine. What does that to do with any of this? University students aren't children and, agree or disagree with the result, they are the ones with agency there.

Haidt is referring to the heckling and deplatforming of speakers on (US) university campuses because some group disagrees with their message. And one aspect of "safetyism" invoked to that end is claiming that to allowing said (lawful, non-inciting) speech itself per se makes students "feel unsafe", aka the "words are violence" trope Haidt mentions frequently. See e.g. 2016 NYU The Forum: "Right to Say: Freedom, Respe…

It's ironic to me that "safetyism" is mixed in with screen time because it's never been easier for children to have access to ideas. For example, every middle school teacher in the country knows about Andrew Tate through their students.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#794

Post by HideousKojima »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #712
chasd00 wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anti-capitalism ideas, so great they're mandatory and a wall built around you so you can't flee to somewhere else - everywhere it's been tried

I’m sorry that you’re ignorant of every single indigenous culture but that’s really not my problem No matter, you’ll simply make the following argument: that might makes right because those indigenous cultures couldn’t stand up to the genocidal domination tactics of property based thought right?

I know this may come as a shock, so you may want to sit down for this one: those indigenous tribes and cultures were genociding each other for millennia before Adam Smith ever wrote The Wealth of Nations.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#795

Post by worldsayshi »

candiodari wrote: post #284
worldsayshi wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We went rather quickly from a situation where it was quite easy to explain to kids what is expected of them - you hunt, survive or maintain a farm to survive - to a situation where the value of an action depends on a million things. And, just to add yet another layer of complexity, there are few certain things about the future regarding what you need to know or do to thrive in it. Most jobs today might be obsolete by…

THIS. But add the things you're not supposed to say: 1) a LOT/most people don't care about their own kids. This has not changed from history, of course. A lot of people have kids for a hundred different reasons, not to have kids. You're supposed to, to keep a marriage together, to get attention, to feel superior to others, ... 2) hence, they neither explain to kids what is expected of them, don't help. Kids grow up i…

You have some interesting points but a lot of them which makes them a bit hard to address as a whole but;

My impression of failings of parenthood is quite a lot about (resignation in face of) partial cluelessness and the complexity of guiding your children. Every parent has aspects of personality where they find themselves clueless about how to guide the child. That can probably tie in to a lot of what you write. Focusing on the negative as you describe regarding psychology seems to be one important common theme.

P(aren't): Don't do this, don't do that.

C(hild): But why?

P thinking: I don't really understand why. I have learned this by trial and error over a very long time. You will have to do the same. There is probably better ways to do this but I wouldn't know. And you wouldn't really understand or be able to do anything with this information anyways because you're a child so I won't even say it.

P: Because I say so. Now tie your shoes. We're going to school (for some reason).

(Disclaimer: I'm 37 and not a parent but I observe friends and family who are parents of young children. I kind of expect I wouldn't have the energy left for any observations if I was a parent myself.)

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#796

Post by tomp »

mschuster91 wrote: post #625
kbos87 wrote: post #2

I’m not a parent nor am I a teen so take my comments with a grain of salt. The one thing that has consistently jumped out to me on this topic is how quickly people seem to jump to convenient answers. Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? That gets no atten…

> Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? Add on top the permacrises/polycrisis time we're in. My generation, we entered the workforce right during the 2008ff financial crisis. The Europeans got further fucked by the Euro crisis 2010, which crippled our care…

> Right in the midst of that, the US elected the 45th and we all know how that one went.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past 7 years (through Trump, Brexit and Covid) it’s that propaganda works.

See how you listed concrete issues for most of your complaints, but nothing specific for Trump? Just “we all know”. But if you actually think about his presidency, and ignore the fear mongering and propaganda, nothing bad actually happened! (Covid is, of course, another example, but whereas the virus itself wasn’t that bad, the governments’ reactions to it, was.)

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#797

Post by tomp »

standardUser wrote: post #740
scarmig wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree reporting bias could be a thing, but there are statistics like completed suicide which are less susceptible to it (though still present; you can imagine a suicide being declared an accidental death to help a family "avoid embarrassment"). And those statistics have also been steadily creeping up for decades.

I think reporting bias should be the starting point and the primary area of inquiry when looking at this topic. Unless I'm imagining the recent past where mental illness was literally verboten to speak about and mental health services were widely derided as scams. The change in discourse has been as rapid and dramatic as any social change I can think of, yet the authors seem to think it's enough to simply acknowledge…

> mental health services were widely derided as scams.

Doesn’t this data indicate (or even confirm) that that’s still the case?

If mental health services worked, at least some of these issues would be solved, right, not trending upwards?

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#798

Post by tomp »

Aeolun wrote: post #412
ascorbic wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's addressed in the post. There is some of that, but there are similar increases in hospitalisation for self-harm, which wouldn't be affected by an increase in awareness of mental illness.

That assumes people aren’t induced towards self harm due to an increased awareness? If you believe suicide or self harm are common (and valid/acceptable) solutions to your issue, would you not be more likely to do so?

Isn’t this just the argument that it’s a social contagion?

And indeed, if you can be convinced those are the solutions to your problems, surely you can be convinced you have problems in the first place as well?

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#799

Post by pixl97 »

fasterik wrote: post #287
usr1106 wrote: post #8

Few deny that a drinking age is necessary. We also need a smart phone age. It's quite obvious that many teens are addicted to their phones and the mostly useless content they consume there.

Previous generations had the same problem with television. We also have this problem with video games, gambling, junk food, pornography, etc. Behavioral addictions are usually a coping mechanism for underlying problems. I don't think we should have the state banning all of these things. It's the responsibility of individuals to engage in self-reflection, moderate their own behavior, and if they're under a certain age…

Eh, so there are a number of oddities with your statements here that don't reflect the reality of what actually happened.

> I don't think we should have the state banning all of these things.

The issue here on your part is one of understanding hard power versus soft power. Looking at TV from a holistic perspective, the state has banned a lot of what we'd consider harmful behavior. Over the air programming is relatively tame, and content we consider harmful is more gated and behind paywalls.

For the average video game the condition is the same. You have Sony and Microsoft gating the consoles. You have steam gating much of the PC world, and outside of that you have the credit card companies gating making money of more controversial items.

An area we have the opposite problem is the one of junk food. This entire just self regulate while companies reap record profits selling you purposefully addictive food is working out "fucking great"... for the companies that is, of course for the ever increasing burden of obesity on the country, things aren't going so well.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#800

Post by pixl97 »

scarmig wrote: post #730
standardUser wrote: post #727

All other issues aside, it would be shocking if reported rates of teen mental illness did not increase as long-standing stigmas gradually wane and these topic become more acceptable to speak about. If your kid cut themself in 1975, what were you going to do? Ask you husband to spend money to "shrink their head"? More likely you'd hide it, like past generations hid most of their traumas. Now, there are many outlets fo…

I agree reporting bias could be a thing, but there are statistics like completed suicide which are less susceptible to it (though still present; you can imagine a suicide being declared an accidental death to help a family "avoid embarrassment"). And those statistics have also been steadily creeping up for decades.

Interestingly enough misreporting suicide as accidental death may have helped keep the base suicide rate down.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262

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