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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

#151

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.

That wouldn't explain such a drastic rise in one demographic (teenagers)

Explains it rather well: older people dismiss their symptoms as “not real illness” because that’s what society taught them when they were kids.

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

#152
Note that this isn't an unbiased source. This is working with Jon, the co-writer of The Coddling Of The American Mind, which uhhh is not without its critics for inaccuracies and stretching of truth. Check it out:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-coddling-of-the-am...

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

#153

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.

That wouldn't explain such a drastic rise in one demographic (teenagers)

Teenagers are yet to be broken in adults who accept things aren't going to change.

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

#154

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…

But is schooling from 7am-4pm sitting a classroom trying to memorize information essential? There are probably much more enjoyable and engaging ways to teach children what they need to know to live in a society.

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

#155

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.

That wouldn't explain such a drastic rise in one demographic (teenagers)

Everything has changed. You can’t look at one thing in isolation. Todays teens are not the teens of the Boomer generation. Was t that long enough that many were married by the time they hit 20.

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

#156

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.

Just like divorce rates in some ways. It’s because it wasn’t really an option for many (typically women) until recently. The social and financial repercussions were too severe.

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

#157
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the article, the author makes a point to include objective metrics like rate of hospitalizations, and the data is quite conclusive in showing an actual increase. So these issues definitely did not exist before, at the same scale.

How does the rate of hospitalizations prove anything? Perhaps a growing awareness of mental health made people who were eligibile for hospitalization seek medical care, whereas before they would not be hospitalized for lack of a diagnosis? Or perhaps the same awareness made teens enact the pathological behavior they learned about online, complete with self-harm and suicide atemtps? Any measure you can think to track…

This unassailable conviction that everything can always be chalked up to "more diagnosis" for every mental health trend is a thought terminating cliche. What can't be explained away by "oh, it's because diagnosis is easier and/or people are more open about their problems", regardless of whether that's the primary cause?

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

#158
Did anyone look at the case histories? Was there a second opinion on the diagnosis? Maybe big pharma trying to push even more medication may be part of the problem. Interesting that the no one is mentioning this possibility...

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

#159
post #72

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…

Psychology is fundamentally not science. I don't mean to devalue it as a discipline, but it is incorrect to call it science for a pretty simple epistemological reason. Science depends upon the reproducibility of experiments. This means if I perform an experiment twice, then the second experiment (up to relativity) is done in the context of the experiment having already been done once, so the outcome of these experime…

I'm straying a bit off topic, but while agree on some of the premises, I reach a different conclusion.

I agree with you, and probably more broadly that studying systems which aren't fully isolatable is particularly challenging, but I think there is more than a single simple explanation for this. One we need to get out of the way is that there are things under the psychology umbrella that are science and ones that aren't and what is and isn't science isn't simply topic-based, it's approach-based.

For example, reaction-time is a psychological measurement. Is reaction time scientific? I think that's an ill-posed question. It's, like you mentioned, an epistomological question: specifically an ontological question[1]. In the sense that reaction-time is measurable and largely repeatable with respect to specific stimulus, yes, measuring it and analyzing the results can be a step in the scientific path toward knowledge. I'd find it surprising if most people disagreed with this.

Let's take a more difficult example, is behavioral psychology science? Again, an ill-posed question. Can we ask scientific question of behavioral psychology? Sure; Does the intervention of CBT in anxiety-diagnosed subjects (as opposed to a non-intervention control) result in lower post-treatment hospital admittance? That's a valid scientific question. Does it say anything about how CBT works? No. It relates a treatment to a result, and if we want to be more specific, a treatment at a point in time, for a specific group.

Anticipating the test-retest issue you mentioned above, it's being loose with assumptions and isolation. These things can either be controlled for, or assumed. We should be honest with ourselves that far too many times, they haven't been in practice, but let's not conclude from that that psychology has an essential characteristic of not being scientific. It has a social problem instead.

I think we can all be more transparent about assumptions, conditions, and generalization, but I think that's a benefit, not a disadvantage. It enables us to be more precise in our ideas, concepts, and language and that's a good thing.

Specifically regarding the fixed-point framing. It's an assumption of time-invariance. I'm not exactly an expert on the philosophy of science, but I'd be surprised not to find stronger and weaker versions of that assumption and that's a reasonable thing to be transparent about when communicating validity.

1. As an aside, it's funny that "Is reaction time scientific?" is itself not a scientific question.

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

#160

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.

While I agree there is no statistical proof in the article, it's a very strong hypothesis: we somehow only 'listen' to the mental problems of female teens, who see geometric increases in self harm, suicide and various disorders, twice or three times the pre-social media levels. Yet other categories see linear or token increases.

Could it be just a coincidence that young females are exactly the demographic that is constrained by a gender role where aesthetic appeal and social interactions are the most valuable assets? And those are exactly the type of things that social networks exploited, monetized and massively gamified in the last decade?

What's more likely: a rapid change of the cultural norms and roles associated with growing up as a woman or of those related to recognizing and treating mental health issues (all in a single decade!); OR: a purely technical revolution that put interactive screens in the hands of each kid and made the former much more effective in harming their development and leading to the latter?

At least for the young female demographic, I think there is a massive burden of proof for anyone claiming the epidemics is not social-media induced.

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