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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

#351

Post by lordnacho »

WalterBright wrote: post #303
obscurette wrote: post #218

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…

There's also been a corresponding dramatic drop in the number of teens who have had any sort of job. Not many things are as fulfilling as doing a job and getting paid for it. I remember when I realized I was making enough money that I could pay all my bills and no longer needed anything from my dad. It felt really good. For me that was the dividing line between being a child and an adult.

It used to be good, but my guess is a modern kid, particularly a middle class one, doesn't get as much out of it. Minimum wage has stagnated, but also people these days have their eyes on internships that will secure a career. There's simply no point in pursuing burger-flipping if you can't find a way to hang around a law firm or a hedge fund, and those firms won't care at all that you worked hard in a menial job.

When I was a kid there was never a time when I could pay for everything. The first time that happened was an internship I got during college, and then my first job right after.

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

#352

Post by revelio »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #328
amilios wrote: post #207

(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…

How do we fix this complete disconnect from reality? I guess in the same vein how did they get such a incorrect view of the world state in the first place?

Teenagers are impressionable and exist in an environment where they aren't allowed to seriously disagree with their teachers. They're also under huge pressure to conform to what seems popular.

A lot of unrealistic climate doomerism is however created by adults. Even climatologists are now realizing they've badly overdone it, but of course the monster they created just turns on them when they try to restrain it. See the fun Zeke Hausfather has been having lately with being called a climate denier.

For teenagers to get restored perspective and realize the future isn't going to end, and will in fact be pretty awesome, it is required first that their parents give up the doomer beliefs too. And that in turn requires people to get skeptical, to start seriously pushing back on those who tell people to never think for themselves. It's a hard social problem that goes well beyond teenagers.

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

#353

Post by eastof »

FredPret wrote: post #181
censor_me wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linking a podcast isn't very good sourcing. I'm very intrigued to hear how the cuddling that's happening college campuses isn't happening, since anyone can see it in real time.

Cuddling on campus sounds like a good idea and has been par for the course for generations. But coddling is a problem

I know you're jokingly responding to GP, but I seriously wonder if there's a deeper point here.

I feel like casual hookups are replacing cuddling and could be part of the issue but who knows.

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

#354

Post by lordnacho »

gspencley wrote: post #350
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not many things are as fulfilling as doing a job and getting paid for it. Sorry, I don't get fulfillment from a job, nor do I base my personality on it. A job is a thing that I have to do to live and do some stuff I like. That's it, nothing more. I'd never do actual work unless I had to, and I'd never work full time if I didn't have to. I'm never going to be motivated to work harder for a fancy car if I can have a re…

I DESPISED my first job (I delivered newspapers), but the independence it afforded me, the ability to buy clothes I like, to invest in a computer of my own and to take my girlfriend on dates was extremely fulfilling. Productive work, in general, is fulfilling even if you don't happen to like your current "job." It is not the job itself, it is the act of taking action in order to achieve your values. If you value prod…

That's a luxury, isn't it? After all you might find that the only jobs you are able to get actually compromise your values.

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

#355

Post by lordnacho »

gspencley wrote: post #345
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids today can have two or even three jobs and still not earn enough to pay the rent on a place of their own.

That and there are also fewer jobs available to teens / young adults. The types of jobs that we are making obsolete, whether through automation or regulation, are the types of repetitive, "unskilled" jobs that were previously offered to people just starting out. I'll take a chance on my 16 year-old nephew if I can pay him $5 / hour but if I have to pay him $15 / hour by law I'd rather have someone with more reference…

Or you get an unskilled immigrant who has his back against the wall. I read an article claiming this is where teen jobs went, not sure how well supported it is.

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

#356

Post by YellOh »

muffinman26 wrote: post #315
YellOh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on your thoughts here? This is not a group whose lives I generally expect to be getting worse (in day-to-day life, barring social media effects).

Not sure if this aligns with what the GP was trying to say, but this is also one of the groups I would expect to be the most depressed, although I would expect white, middle-aged, middle-classed women to be an even larger demographic. Chemicals/genetics have a lot to do with depression, but for other cases I think depression comes from a feeling of uselessness/lack of purpose. White liberal women have a lot of incomp…

I could see this being a major factor. It reminds me of wealthy white women's "hysteria" / other mental health issues of the past (ex. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/01/16/eternal-hypochondria-o...). Being neither particularly oppressed nor in the most priveleged group is an interesting position, and I could see this being an important mental health factor. I don't have a strong enough sociological background to connect any shift in social position for white women to the correct time frame in the original post, but it's certainly possible.

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

#357

Post by thelopa »

notch898a wrote: post #314
thelopa wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This narrative about trans shooters is disconnected from reality. If you take every trans shooter in the last decade, you get less than 10… out of thousands. For context, last year America has nearly 700 mass shootings. Trans people are actually under represented in mass shootings. Estimates put trans people at up to 1% of the population. We would naively expect 7 shooters last year to be trans, but none were. Saying…

The desperation to argue against a straw man is real. If trans people went from no school shootings to one in 2020 and one in 2023 there may or may not be a "trend" but it's still worth finding out why that is happening. Edit: re pupptailwags: Yes we should be examining whenever people are engaging in violence, factors behind that happening. I'm quite certain, unlike assertion made below, that people indeed have stud…

I’m assuming I’m the “assertion made below”. I made no such claim. Let me rephrase it.

There have been 8 mass shootings in America in the last 7 days. No one was running to twitter to speculate about their causes. No politicians were raising concerns about troubling trends. The shootings were going completely unremarked on in national politics… until a shooter happened to be trans.

If you want to speculate that commentators and politicians are giving the other incidents the same attention, we would literally never hear the end of it. On average, almost 2 mass shootings happen per day. But, for some reason, those incidents weren’t given national attention. Curious.

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

#358

Post by taylodl »

luckylion wrote: post #335
lezojeda wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add increasing concentration of wealth in less and less people, increasing job insecurity due to technological advances rendering many jobs completely useless (and transfers even more wealth to those that are already haves and removes it even more from have-nots), the instant access to compare yourself to millions of others around the world... I seriously can't understand why some people scratch their heads around th…

We've seen much worse wealth inequalities in history, we've seen much worse job markets, we've seen much worse wars and pandemics, history was a lot more violent. Really the only thing different there is that "instant access to compare yourself to millions of others". Which is essentially social media. I'm sure there are other factors and everyone can speculate what they are, but "the world is terrible today" is hard…

Things may have been worse in the past but in the past everybody was in the same boat.

Famine? It affected everybody.

Plague? It affected everybody.

Drought? It affected everybody.

War? It affected everybody.

Nowadays the systemic problems that are an artifact of modern life do not affect everybody. The richer you are, the less your affectation. This a winner-takes-all and loser-gets-nothing is a byproduct of the neocon ideology that has dominated our politics since the 80's. Forty years on and its causing grave psychological trauma.

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

#359

Post by revelio »

ericmay wrote: post #7
Juliate wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why strange?

Do you think it's normal or expected? If so, why?

Yes. A lot of depression about the world is driven by left wing views. Women are more left wing than men, liberals are obviously more left wing than conservatives, and young people are more left wing than older people. So being young liberal and female is the intersection of all those categories.

I don't know how important being white is there, but I also don't see much discussion of race in this line of articles, only gender geography age and politics.

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

#360

Post by graypegg »

ipaddr wrote: post #175
zwieback wrote: post #32

Next step would be to de-correlate smartphone usage, the prime suspect right now, from other trends happening at the same time. I have two daughters in that age range and I don't get the impression that social media is a big stressor for them in particular but I can easily believe that it is one of the primary stress factors for many young women.

Easy to test, take away their phone and see if stress levels raise

I think it’s probably better to just ask them what they think.

If you take away a teenager’s phone in 2023 you’re casting them away to a proverbial deserted island. Also not exactly great for mental health.

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