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

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

281–290 of 514 posts

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

#281

I'm a father of teen kids, teacher and educator. I don't think that there is a single reason here. All mentioned things contribute – social media pressure, climate problems, economical crisis etc. But I'd like to add another one – declining quality of education. I see increasing number of teens depressed because they don't have teachers and their education isn't good enough for jobs they'd like to get in future. And…

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

#282
Besides the hypothesis in the essay, an undetermined link to smartphone use, proposed causes from the comments include:

-declining quality of education

-poor sleep from late-evening screen use

-social media use

-influencer culture makes ones own situation look dull

-overmedication

-state of world (wars, ecological risks etc)

-measurement artifact

-electromagnetic fields

-health issues that cause inflammation

-junk food/poor nutrition

Did I miss any others?

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"that is constrained by a gender role where aesthetic appeal and social interactions are the most valuable assets?" In theory we should have seen a spike and then slow decline as gender norms and roles continue to become less segregating. "Yet other categories see linear or token increases." Yeah, because other categories may manifest their problems differently. Such as young men turning to violence and drugs more th…

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> Beauvoir

It's funny when they bring up that Simone de Beauvoir quote "one is not born a woman, but becomes one", as the rest of the passage it is from completely undermines what they assume it's about - Beauvoir talks about "the figure that the human female presents in society" and then goes on to critique this:

« On ne naît pas femme : on le devient. Aucun destin biologique, psychique, économique ne définit la figure que revêt au sein de la société la femelle humaine ; c'est l'ensemble de la civilisation qui élabore ce produit intermédiaire entre le mâle et le castrat qu'on qualifie de féminin. Seule la médiation d'autrui peut constituer un individu comme un Autre. En tant qu'il existe pour soi, l'enfant ne saurait se saisir comme sexuellement différencié. »

To Beauvoir, "woman" is a harmful social construct that is forced upon all females, so this doesn't apply to males who call themselves women, because firstly, they are not female, and secondly, they are not forced into womanhood. It's comical how so fundamentally they've misunderstood her point.

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

#284

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.

I would think this would equally affect both boys and girls.

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

#285
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I would much rather be a (white liberal) teen girl today than in ~2012, but I can see how insofar as Dobbs is only a manifestation of existing trends, I might be in the minority. It's just hard to wrap my head around what this trend would be, or why teens started picking up on it in 2012. I am not conscious of any major modern debates around women's rights except abortion/birth control, and I see no part…

> It's just hard to wrap my head around what this trend would be, or why teens started picking up on it in 2012. One reason could be they started talking to each other more. Women and girls who had similar life experience shared them on the internet. This is how the whole Me Too movement started; the experiences shared during the Me Too movement were old, but it was the internet and social media which acted as a cata…

I could definitely see something like MeToo being a cause, but I still would put that as a "social media" effect and not a "women's/girl's irl day-to-day lives get worse" effect.

Most of my family voted for Trump, but mostly for immigration & military reasons. I don't remember anyone I knew in real life saying anything negative about Hillary on the basis of her gender -- though, as always, there was plenty of it online. Pretty much all of the negative talk I heard about her (irl) was about her emails, her policies, or her party.

(My mother is still angry about Hillary's "there's a cold place in hell for women who don't vote for a woman" thing, but that wasn't the main reason for her vote.)

The presidents bracketing Trump (Obama & Biden) seem generally feminist, so I'd be surprised that the trend started during Obama and continued to accelerate during Biden if something like Trump / related to Trumpism was a big cause. Maybe the SCOTUS justices he left behind could be pointed to as a continuing political pain point now?

I agree that our abortion statistics will become less indicative of the actual rate now that we're post-Dobbs; this'll be a very interesting time to look back on.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine that: a culture that promotes individualism and the pursuit of profit over all else leads to a generation of people with few close friends and lots of loneliness and stress.

Yes, switching to capitalism in 2012 was clearly a mistake.

The increasing lonliness trend has been going on much longer than that, things are just coming to a head as it becomes more and more obvious that kids were sold a future that isn't going to happen. Real wages continue to fall while corporations make record profits and get bailed out when they fuck up, a college education just saddles you with debt and a job as a barista, housing prices are completely insane, and the consistent messaging is that this is all your fault for not working hard enough somehow.

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> And it's no coincidence young female teens are by far the most susceptible to transition to the opposite role: social media tells them "they were born in the wrong bodies". Um, statistically, trans women are more common than trans men.

In the old days trans people weren't shooting up christian schools out of frustration. I wonder if perhaps society made a mistake by so many members giving them the false impression that society should accept them for who they identify as. In the old days they pretty much had to learn to accept themselves for who they were and not worry about what other people thought, both because no one was encouraging them they deserved acceptance and because few would have budged.

Young white progressive teens in general seem to be following a path that advances the idea society should be progressing towards acceptance, inclusion and mutual progress. Sadly lip service doesn't overturn human nature. Boomers for better or worse seem to take an attitude of "fuck you, on your own" and at some point perhaps it's lower stress just to not be thinking at all times you can control the thoughts of others.

re: minortom

Not an advocate against those able to consent doing whatever want with their bodies. Don't think my argument works against that. Although it would be a fallacy to suggest anything other than the current medical standard results in more deaths and thus advocating otherwise is advocation for suffering; the medical studies never claim it's impossible to achieve less suffering some other way.

I'm hopefully wrong but it seems like you may have made some assumptions that I want to control treatment options for trans people. It feels like I've wrongly been presumed as wanting suffering for trans people; in fact my whole premise was to find out why they are frustrated this way indeed with the hopes they can find new coping strategies.

To note, I don't see why justification is even needed for transition surgery. The (hopefully) wrong assumption I made here is that you stated it like it was relevant in the decision as to whether I should be in favor of it being an option. Even if it made them worse off, they shouldn't be stopped. It's a bit terrifying one even has to include efficacy to justify whether a consenting adult is allowed to modify their body, and worrying comment you've made IMO that presents exactly the kind of problems we have with hyper concern over the opinion of others on what we do with our bodies.

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

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's also known for hinging a lot of what he says on the concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria (the idea that kids are spontaneously turning trans with no previous indicators due to a "social contagion"). The original study for it is a survey of posts from parents who don't want their kids to be trans. It shouldn't surprise anyone that those parents weren't in the best position to catch any hints when their kids mi…

You are way overstating this. Haidt might have been one of the early ones raising alarm bells, but it's well established now that the cohort of people declaring themselves to be trans has shifted dramatically to young girls only very recently [1]. [1] https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p382

Your article doesn't seem to be quite authoritative: It shows there's actually a lot of debate about this subject. There's even a responses section that shows there's some significant issues with the article and claiming it's not neutral, leaving out significant statistics like a less than 1% regret rate of trans affirming procedures (less than a knee surgery). I think it's still up in the air, frankly.

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

#289
post #230

(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…

Or the world has always had issues and the lense through which we now view the world is an everpresent fear coaster. Step away from the news & social media for a few months. You can't effect the outcome anyway and you might find you're happier.

This is really easy to say for someone who doesn't experience these issues firsthand. Not reading the news isn't going to make your existential anxiety go away if you or your parents give it to you, either by helicoptering or living paycheck to paycheck.

Also, you really don't think that, in between building aqueducts and nuclear missiles, nothing has changed? You really think we have the same problems today as we did N years ago?

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily; teenagers are 1) still under parental health insurance and therefore can get medical care, 2) broadly have adults looking out for them in a way adults don't look out for other adults, 3) are capable of self-introspection and increased communication capacity as well as self-identification in a way children are not, 4) have the agency to advocate for their mental health needs in a way children cannot..…

I guess it makes sense… the difference in how much other people are affected however is so stark that this does suggest a generational thing. And then there are the hospitalisation rates. Did we lower the seriousness threshold to get our kids to the hospital? Unless they were talking about psychiatry hospitals that doesn't seem likely.

Frankly it might just be that children's desire to kill themselves wasn't considered something to hospitalize for in the past. I knew when I was a teenager I participated in all sorts of nonsense and said all sorts of shit to adults around me, and most of the adults just told me to man up and stop being a pussy about it. Now that I'm an adult, I can see times where I definitely should've been considered to evaluation as a suicide risk.
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