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

The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

afterbabel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

801–810 of 937 posts

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

#801

Post by pixl97 »

tomp wrote: post #798
Aeolun wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I wouldn't use the word just.

Instead think of social contagion as an additive/multiplicative factor that we don't know the value of.

So imagine a world where we're not allowed to talk about or problems. In that world you'll have your base measured rate X. Then you add a new stressor and get your increase over X.

In a model with social contagion you still have X, you still have your increase in your stressors, then you have the confounding factor of the social contagion.

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

#802

Post by pixl97 »

SkyBelow wrote: post #770
Aeolun wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

One group is claiming that X is occurring more and another group is saying that X is occurring just as often as in the past, but awareness of X means we identify more cases. The argument that X is increasing because of awareness of X has increased is still, at its core, an argument that X has increased, and is a subset of the first group's argument. The poster you replied to seemed to be looking for evidence that sho…

Of course when measuring X now, you have to ensure that methodology for measuring X has not changed.

For example, are medical examiners back then, or even now, more apt to rule a suicide an accidental death? Wide social trends can affect how these individual decisions are marked at population scales.

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

#803

Post by anon373839 »

chasd00 wrote: post #658
anon-3988 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally. From my experience, phone is an extremely common factor. If you randomly take a peek at any person in the 1st and 2nd world during their "downtime", I bet that you will 99% of the time see them on their phone. Phone have absolutely consumed everything we used to do. I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly, they almost always…

> I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly heh, i have to ask, what is so great/healthy/engaging/enlightening about staring blankly? I think anything, reading a book/newspaper, talking to a stranger, petting a dog, would have been better than "staring blankly".

I wouldn’t argue that staring blankly is helpful in itself. But having time with nothing to engage your attention almost forces you to face your own thoughts and feelings, which many people prefer to avoid. That type of avoidance is at the root of a lot of mental health problems, and people go to therapy to learn how to face their thoughts and feelings head-on.

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

#804

Post by AndrewKemendo »

HideousKojima wrote: post #794
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Do you realize you responded precisely in the way I described a response to this would be?

This is how perfectly predictable this argument is.

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

#805

Post by prossercj »

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…

> And perhaps most importantly, we got rid of the absurd mentality that what happens in other families is none of our business

I agree with your general sentiment (more recognition and treatment of mental illness is a good thing), but this line troubles me. Most of what happens in my family should stay in my family. Our business is our business. It's no one else's business. There's nothing absurd about this. There may be exceptions (and a child with severe, untreated mental illness may be an exception), but like all exceptions, they are special cases, not the norm. Let's not do away with all privacy in a rush to "turn the tide"...

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

#806

Post by pixl97 »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #783

A spiritual void, a loss of social cohesion, isolation, alienation, a loss of a culture that reinforces ways of life that enable flourishing, radical individualism. The decline of traditional religious faith in the West. The sexual revolution and its dreadful distortion of human sexuality. The culture of consumerism and the worship of desire and appetite divorced from reason and one's objective good. So what's a smel…

So, to piss off as many religious people as possible....

A couple of goat herder psychologist a couple of millennia ago figured out if you told people they had a purpose things in general worked better. The particular problem is they made up a whole bunch of shit and when the sciences in general came around, people when "wow, religion is a bunch of controlling bullshit".

Now, I will say that religion is only mostly a bunch of controlling bullshit, but they did understand people and that is why these religions had staying power that lasted thousands of years in some cases. As we came into the modern age we cast the religion away, but we did forget many of the important lessons on society building it had taught us. In the meantime psychology rapidly expanded, and it was used by both governments and corporations to control individuals with very little of that knowledge being broadly taught to society at large so they could inoculate themselves to it.

Add in global internet allowing instant communication anywhere and the consolidation and formation of massive corporate entities able to shape the communication of our modern lives. That communication tells us to continually consume more of their product, and if you can't you've failed. So yea, that will lead to some problems for sure.

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

#807

Post by beaeglebeached »

paulmd wrote: post #792
beaeglebeached wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

That's certainly part of it. In my state ratio change by 3x from infant to 5 yet tuition only changes about 30% despite similar employee pay across ages.

It's quite consistent, and the explanation is largely regulatory and compliance overhead (especially required liability insurance).

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

#808

Post by standardUser »

tomp wrote: post #797
standardUser wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't think many people are still calling therapists "quacks" and extreme things like that. Though I'm sure there's some Boomer men keeping that tradition alive.

Some of these issues are solved! People seek help, or are referred to help, and they get help. The article is showing in part that more people are seeking help, not that they're not getting help.

Though with minimal mental health funding, any kind of sustained help is out of reach for most people.

And speaking of men, it doesn't surprise me that the data is showing a larger increase among women. Men really seem to fetishize "handling things themself" and that kind of nonsense.

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

#809

Post by pixl97 »

bluescrn wrote: post #311
drfuchs wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Folks in the 60’s thru 80’s expected global nuclear annihilation with some probability.

There was also concern over population explosion back then ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb ). But talking about population has become quite the taboo. Utterly unacceptable to restrict reproduction, but it's cool to take people's transport/heating/protein away to save the planet?

Because the book was wrong for the most part. We really didn't do anything to restrict population in the US, and without immigration our population would collapse.

China is in far worse shape, they restricted number of children for decades, and now they are presented with a demographics crisis that could halve their population in 60 years.

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

#810

Post by chmod775 »

standardUser wrote: post #759
FabHK wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the destigmatisation happened in 2012? I think it happened much earlier than that.

I think it is an ongoing process that accelerated over the past 10 or so years. There are still many people who stigmatize mental health issues and view mental health services skeptically at best.

We've over-corrected so far now, people make up and put mental illnesses in their twitter bio to be part of some in-group. Mental illness has become a fashionable affectation. There's probably now people out there who keep theirs quiet because they don't want to get lumped with those groups.

The last thing most people want is turning their very real mental illness into an identity, but we've somehow made that the de-facto default.

Post reply on HN