231–240 of 565 posts
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very well said, although allow me to make a minor correction. Where you wrote “Today's society demands so much from adolescents for so little in return. “ I would simply generalize to “Today's society demands so much from anyone for so little in return.” There, perfect
Society doesn't demand anything. You're free to drop out and live in a van down by the river if you want.
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40% of high school students don't go to college (of any type). Of those, only a tiny portion are focused on elite universities. Many are just going to Long Beach State, University of Redlands and other 4 year schools that you've never heard of. They have lax admissions. Among adult Americans, only a third have bachelors degrees. Certainly the high pressure scholastic environment of certain high schools is not common.
You’re going to get a bias in here because a lot of folks are STEM focused / high achieving high anxiety types :)
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Do you honestly see value in comparing scars? Does that matter in any meaningful way? The worst stress of someone's life is the worst stress of their life. It's unproductive and petty to bicker about who has it worse. If life is stressful for anyone, regardless of status, title, age, etc. there's a good chance it's undeserved. The takeaway is to treat people better, not dismiss their stressors as less significant.
I honestly see value in having scars, both the physical and mental varieties. Scars create resilience. We saw this during the recent pandemic. The upper-middle class "high achieving, high anxiety" types who had never faced any real danger or hardship were the most likely to panic and demand all sorts of ridiculous lockdowns and mandates, even though the vast majority of them were never at any significant risk. Wherea…
While I don't doubt that social media can drive some of these mental health issues, I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular).…
For about 2.5 years starting in 2015 I was a high school teacher at a Title I (low income area) school. There was a lot of anxiety and depression -- obviously not far outside trends around that. Very, very few kids were doing extracurriculars beyond maybe one sport, or a part-time job for a minority of the juniors and seniors. The (very) few kids who were oversubscribed the way you were didn't seem to have a rate of…
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Do you honestly see value in comparing scars? Does that matter in any meaningful way? The worst stress of someone's life is the worst stress of their life. It's unproductive and petty to bicker about who has it worse. If life is stressful for anyone, regardless of status, title, age, etc. there's a good chance it's undeserved. The takeaway is to treat people better, not dismiss their stressors as less significant.
I honestly see value in having scars, both the physical and mental varieties. Scars create resilience. We saw this during the recent pandemic. The upper-middle class "high achieving, high anxiety" types who had never faced any real danger or hardship were the most likely to panic and demand all sorts of ridiculous lockdowns and mandates, even though the vast majority of them were never at any significant risk. Wherea…
You assume that this is simply a matter a making a decision and acting on it -- which for you may be true.
There are others that will find this difficult-to-impossible to achieve regardless of their intellectual desire to change. Their experience of anxiety may not be a result of "catastrophizing" or "being soft."
Another possible explanation is that we are simply diagnosing these kind of mental health issues better – due to decrease in stigmatization and/or more attention to it – but that our treatment is worse than doing nothing, and is leading to higher rates of self-harm and suicide. I have no idea if that's the case – and if it is a factor at all it probably doesn't account for all of it – but it seems something worth exp…
Why is more diagnosis better diagnosis? I hear this constantly, literally every time people point out we might be calling people mentally ill now that we wouldn't have called mentally ill 20 years ago people go "wow we must be diagnosing people better". To me better diagnosis would be reflected in things like the suicide rate dropping, drug abuse falling, general health metrics improving, and so on, not in simply inc…
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So many people here want to say, "That's not it, it's {something else}." Might be more fruitful to argue about a stack-rank of the things. But, as the father of a son who is a freshman in college at a Research 1 university, I'll say that his college experience so closely mirrors my enterprise organization work bullshit experience it's shocking. And he doesn't have a social media account or a mobile phone. So, my humb…
You have an 18 year old son without a mobile phone? I would think it is at least needed for all the logins requiring SMS 2FA.
They gave him an iPad, but none of their systems use SSO of any kind.
He doesn't really care for the iPad, doesn't have a mobile phone, and doesn't do social.
He does do Minecraft, KSP, and Davinci Resolve.
While I don't doubt that social media can drive some of these mental health issues, I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular).…
40% of high school students don't go to college (of any type). Of those, only a tiny portion are focused on elite universities. Many are just going to Long Beach State, University of Redlands and other 4 year schools that you've never heard of. They have lax admissions. Among adult Americans, only a third have bachelors degrees. Certainly the high pressure scholastic environment of certain high schools is not common.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly see value in having scars, both the physical and mental varieties. Scars create resilience. We saw this during the recent pandemic. The upper-middle class "high achieving, high anxiety" types who had never faced any real danger or hardship were the most likely to panic and demand all sorts of ridiculous lockdowns and mandates, even though the vast majority of them were never at any significant risk. Wherea…
I don't think that's why the upper middle class demanded lock downs and blue collar didn't. I think the driver was financial stability. Upper middle class likely has a nice emergency fund and could do their job from home. Essentially a nice vacation. Blue collar workers got to choose between welfare and starving.
Social media is global, so any effects it has should be visible globally. > Teenage suicides rates have, on average, declined slightly over the past two decades or so. While in 1990 there were, on average across the OECD, 8.5 suicides per 100 000 teenagers (15-19), by 2015 this rate had fallen to 7.4. Much of this decline occurred during the 2000s. Between 1990 and 1999 the OECD average teenage suicide remained fairl…
> Social media is global, so any effects it has should be visible globally. That isn't true at all. There may be a hundred factors at play, which are all different in different cultures, regions, countries, etc. The cultural context of an individual can dramatically change how they react to situations, pressures, and mental illness.