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The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

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Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#381

Post by shard »

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #182
romeoblade wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not yet 40 but I am a male single parent. With the closest family being 1300 miles away. Last year between March-May my health deteriorated so bad that I went from being fine to walking with a cane in less than 2 months. Once finally diagnosed, I went from diagnoses to major surgery in less than 12 days. My daughter (just turned 16), picked up the slack as I become pretty much bed ridden. I can attest that this h…

I am sorry that you (and your daughter) went through that. Would socialized medicine in the US have prevented your health issue?

That is a good question, although it is tangential as even with socialized medicine, these kind of issues happen. People get seriously ill and die every day, regardless of the amount of care they receive.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#382

Post by zeroonetwothree »

yamtaddle wrote: post #282
mabbo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do schools in other countries let kids—elementary school and up—take smartphones to school and (due to inability to harshly police it because of reluctance to take phones, since it pisses off parents) use them quite a bit in class? I was shocked to find out that's a widespread policy/practice in the US, these days, and I'd be surprised if other countries are following us off that particular very-stupid cliff. What's…

I just randomly picked France, and it looks like their age of first smartphone is around 11-12[1] (as of 2018 study, so maybe even lower now). In the US it's 11.6 years[2]. So seems about the same. I don't feel like checking every other country but hopefully this disputes the claim that the US is somehow completely abnormal.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1076293/age-obtaining-fi...

[2] https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/11/children-mobi...

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#383

Post by taurath »

ethanbond wrote: post #306
nabakin wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. If this was true, you'd expect there to be a similar trend between Major Depression and college admissions. The data doesn't seem to show that[1][2] [1] https://educationdata.org/wp-content/uploads/74/Historical-C... [2] http://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/a6... Most teenagers…

Presuming people who aren’t stressed about college admissions aren’t instead stressed about not going to college and having extremely stunted career prospects.

I remember being a teenager. I was stressed all the time because EVERY decision I made had a consequence and I wouldn't feel that consequence sometimes for a very long time and had no scope or scale of how much any mistake would fuck me over.

Be with the right friends, get good enough grades, express myself my personality in the right way, every single thing I did affected my "future life". Every single adult was telling me this every moment of my life.

Get the grade or become a ditch digger. Pursue the right interests or be poor all of your life.

There is NO CHILL. College is, for most people, a ONE TIME opportunity - the default track is you go to college after high school, and there are ways to do it after but most people don't end up doing it. Degree programs mostly assume you're coming out of high school. Getting a degree while paying for living expenses is practically impossible without going into massive debt, which you may or may not be tolerant of the risk to take on. You can't work min wage and make rent in most places, let alone go to a community college. Young people's economics already is horrific.

I say this as someone who didn't have the opportunity to get a degree and who managed to scrape my way into a software engineering career - something that I don't recommend anyone do as its nearly impossible without connections and mentorship. Structurally we are making kids make decisions that will effect their entire lives and giving almost no recourse to anyone who can't make it happen right at 18. If you have a shitty home life, you're fucked. If you have health problems, you're fucked. There's very few second chances for college in this society.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#384

Post by zeroonetwothree »

password11 wrote: post #323

girls 15-19 that self harmed: 0.45% -> 0.7%. A 47% increase! boys 15-19 that died by suicide: 0.01% -> 0.016%. A 34% increase! Relative increase percentages (i.e. exponentials) are misleading when they are measuring linear phenomena like suicide rate. You could just as easily say there was a 0.1% decrease in the percent of boys who didn't die by suicide. It's misleading because the new 0.006% of male suicides are unr…

It's similar to how studies report that food X is bad and increases your risk of by 30%. Which in absolute terms is 0.01% -> 0.013%.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#385

Post by Apocryphon »

wara23arish wrote: post #279
tanseydavid wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Some people just need to harden the f** up and quit catastrophizing every little thing. 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."

Im not trying to be argumentative, but at that point is this behavior worth encouraging? I guess whose fault is it but their own? We can all blame our upbringing and it definitely does affect us, but how else can you change the cycle without telling someone to snap out of it ?

Sometimes it takes tough love, sometimes it takes nurturing and understanding, sometimes it takes a blend of the two, sometimes it takes an entirely different track.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#386

Post by zeroonetwothree »

strawpeople wrote: post #259
faeriechangling wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a contradiction, I'm saying that an underlying increase in mental illness plausibly explains some of the effect, but I'm unconvinced it explains the entire effect.

What could explain the increase in suicides if not mental illness?

It seems like only around 10% of suicides are not associated with mental illness. So I agree it seems implausible that this 10% would account for the entire increase, but it could be some of it.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#387

Post by zeroonetwothree »

lostlogin wrote: post #48
banannaise wrote: post #23

All the things he cites are lagging indicators. Self-harm and suicide typically follow long, long battles with mental health issues; they're not the first thing that happens, or even close. Diagnoses are also typically far from immediate; having depression and being diagnosed with depression are two very different things. (And without increased awareness, many people never get care and are never diagnosed.) As such,…

How does that apply to children though? They haven’t got a lot of time that’s earlier as they would be too young. Additionally, a key part of a child’s behaviour is that it’s impulsive.

The 15+ bucket has the largest increase in this study, so they could have certainly been having issues for at least 5 years.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#388

Post by Aeolun »

nluken wrote: post #79

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).…

This is such a weird experience. I’ve heard this more often, and it’s just so foreign to me.

I thought there was so much academics in my life at every age from 7 till 17, but basically I got to play as soon as school was out, with no other responsibilities.

The same was true for all of my friends, and everyone surrounding me.

It doesn’t hit me until today what an enormous privilege this solid educational system was, that would allow everyone to get (nearly) free schooling up to whatever level they wanted, with a quality high enough to require no further out-of-school lessons. No entrance examinations for university (bar a few extremely in demand or difficult courses), and roughly equivalent universities all over the country.

This was in the Netherlands btw.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#389

Post by zeroonetwothree »

justsocrateasin wrote: post #12

I agree with the authors premise and argument but the data visualizations are not well done, and I'm confused about the conclusions he draws from them. For starters, it's unclear why he draws a line at 2012, when in many of the graphs the slope gets steeper at 2010 instead, and in fact that's where the percentage increase calculations start from as well. That vertical line at 2012 is misleading and confusing. Also, i…

For boys suicides 10-14 it sure looks like it started in 2007, yeah. For girls the 1 year increase from 2012 to 2013 is kind of suspicious, so I could see an argument for 2007 as well. That does seem to decrease the strength of the argument for social media specifically since I don't believe it was all that widespread until the 2010s.

I think the point is that you can't just draw a single year as the change, which obviously makes sense with any social trends. It's not like people wake up Jan 1 and suddenly they have depression.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#390

Post by zeroonetwothree »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #250

Looking at the graphs in the article, they just sort of have a line drawn at 2012, but I don't think there's an obvious change in trend in almost any of them, not that sticks out from the rest of the noise-level in the data at least. If anything, judging from the graphs (all of which have been cropped very close to the beginning of the span so as to not give much of a baseline), the change, if there is such a thing,…

Yeah I'd like to see the charts starting at, say, 1990 instead so we can see a longer term picture.
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