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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

#391

Post by fumar »

carabiner wrote: post #90
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).…

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.

This is accurate. I barely passed high school with heavy help from the counseling team. Then I went to a community college for a few years with low stress and learned how to study before transferring to a liberal arts college. I count myself lucky that I ended up in tech with an average career given my lack of guidance and motivation in my younger years. I wasn't anxious until more recently when I started building a house.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#392

Post by zeroonetwothree »

If you look at longer-term data there doesn't appear to be any recent trend at all. For example look at https://www.childtrends.org/publications/teen-suicide-databa...

Looking at the "suicide attempts requiring medical attention" we see a low of 1.7% in 1991, then a peak of 2.8% in 1995, and another low in 1.9%, and then now another peak (but less than 1995).

For actual suicides I found this chart https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm which shows we are well below baseline trends for males. For females we do seem to have an increase lately, so that part seems like the main thing to be concerned about. Although it seems to have started more around 2007 than 2012 which seems a bit early to be blaming social media (almost no one really had smartphones in 2007, let alone teens). So I do think it's worth looking into this but it's easy to try to find data to fit our preconceived notions rather than the truth.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#393

Post by rightbyte »

nradov wrote: post #239
wonderwonder wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The blue-collar construction workers and farmers that I know all thought the lockdowns were stupid and ignored the rules. Financial stability or lack thereof was not the reason.

What lockdown rule could farmers possibly be breaking more than programmers did? They live on a farm usually right?

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#394

Post by foobiekr »

e40 wrote: post #256
nradov wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What deteriorating job market? Despite some recent high profile tech industry layoffs, the US unemployment rate is 3.4%. There are jobs available for those who want to work. They may have to move. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/yellen-you-dont-have-rece... A recent survey showed that most college students seriously overestimate their earnings potential. There is a mismatch in expectations. Students graduating wit…

Yeah, that was badly phrased. I was replying too quickly. Yes, the job market has roared back in the last couple of years, but before that it was cooler. But, I should have mentioned other things besides jobs. The world is a pretty bleak place, in a lot of ways. Yeah, the cold war was always hovering about, but it was not really something that my peers really worried about.

The last thirteen years have been a job market going from around 10% unemployment to practically zero to approximately 3% now, a period of continuous growth in employment and the economy, followed by the hottest extended job market in the last 30+ years of US history, consistently at or below the average for the last 40 years. The idea that these people have graduated into a tough market is nonsensical.

Yes, 2009-2010 was cooler, the rest has been average to significantly better than average.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#395

Post by caitbot »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #253
purpleblue wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son is 10 and is naturally accelerated across many subjects (12th grade proficiency in ELA, 9th grade proficiency in Math, talented in music, writing, etc). We have been actively indoctrinating our kids with the idea that college is not the be-all-end-all, that they should NOT apply for Ivy schools, 3rd tier schools are very good and if they want to go abroad or even eschew college altogether, we will support them…

To be a good parent is to sacrifice your child's future like a pawn to save the queen of your own moral grandstanding.

To be a good parent is to remind your child that a life's worth and future does not amount to what school they may get into or what career they may have. There is much more to life.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#396

Post by lovecg »

candiodari wrote: post #365
PantaloonFlames wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad that you depended on your parents for transport to your friends. Ideally a teenager would be able to walk or ride a bicycle to hang out with peers. Or take a bus. Did you live in a place where homes were very far apart?

Societal acceptance of such dangerous activity has been dropping lately: https://reason.com/2023/01/30/dunkin-donuts-parents-arrested...

That’s got to be an outlier? Small remote town + over aggressive cops with nothing better to do. This same exact story comes up in these conversations repeatedly. One would think that if there was an epidemic of parents being arrested we would hear more about it.

Around where I live (suburban though not as remote as the place in the article) I see groups of kids by themselves all the time. Older than age 9, but still.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#397

Post by prawn »

danenania wrote: post #258
wutbrodo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An additional one I noticed with my female cousins was that a lot of fun was sucked out of high school girls' social expression/reconnaissance. On the recon side, gossiping is a fun bonding activity, but scrolling through snaps/reels is relative drudgery. On the performance side, "be pretty and vivacious at fun social events" is no longer sufficient without obsessively managing your profile's brand. This doesn't only…

On that note, I wonder how much of these results are due to social media specifically and how much is caused by addiction to screens more generally, and the resulting insomnia, lack of exercise/time outside, and lack of human connection. I know that in some respects, social media is uniquely bad, but perhaps the bulk of the problem is just being hooked on anything that makes you look at a phone or a screen all the ti…

I think you're on the right track. Personal screens consume so much time. Many of us defend it as just killing time, or researching, or keeping abreast of things but it eats up more than that until the average person feels harried and barely able to keep up. I know that's true for me.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#398

Post by shard »

nineplay wrote: post #363
ndriscoll wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want to look down on women who wish to become SAHMs, but I think it's terribly short-sighted to make that decision at 21 and give up on pursuing a "real" career. Certainly it requires a lot of trust and commitment, but I wouldn't call it short-sighted. It's risky, but if you do find a good spouse, it's not like you're missing out on anything (my wife is a SAHM and has never had nor wanted a career). To me p…

I don't trust a 21 year old to know if they've found a good spouse. I don't trust anyone to know if they've found a good spouse which is why I'd tell everyone, male or female, to have a career they can fall back to if something happens to their marriage. It might not just be a bad spouse, it might be a spouse who dies young and then a woman with multiple kids and a 10 year old vet tech degree has to figure out how on…

>> some of them were 38+ and saying they're thinking about having kids soon; there's like a 25% chance that ship has already sailed,

> 25% is nonsense.

Yes, I think it's worse than that.

"A woman in her early to mid-20s has a 25–30% chance of getting pregnant every month. Fertility generally starts to reduce when a woman is in her early 30s, and more so after the age of 35. By age 40, the chance of getting pregnant in any monthly cycle is around 5%." (https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...)

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#399

Post by motohagiography »

goodpoint wrote: post #26
arp242 wrote: post #2

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…

> I benefited more from the occasional swift kick in the backside and being told to "man up" Practically you are saying that pedagogy and psychology are wrong and harmful on a fundamental level. Either you are in denial or a whole field of science is wrong.

> Either you are in denial or a whole field of science is wrong.

The value of the advice to "man up," is that there exists a good way to be and you have to make some basic effort to help yourself before others will help you.

The field in question is psychology and its appendant body, psychiatry, who you may remember from such treatments as trepanation, lobotomy, chemical castration, solitary confinement, valium, re-parenting, diagnoses like hysteria, and the APA's most recent forfeit of any remaining credibility with "toxic masculinity" - to say nothing of what it is doing to actual children in the last decade.

To be clear, psychology isn't a science, it's a critical theory of mind. It uses drugs, dresses itself up in some limited statistics from "social science" and prances in front of the mirror saying it's doing chemistry and biology. Therapy and drugs help some people by reducing their suffering, but it's a pretext, not an empirical inquiry into the nature of matter.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#400

Post by baremetal »

nradov wrote: post #239
wonderwonder wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The blue-collar construction workers and farmers that I know all thought the lockdowns were stupid and ignored the rules. Financial stability or lack thereof was not the reason.

>The blue-collar construction workers and farmers that I know all thought the lockdowns were stupid and ignored the rules. Financial stability or lack thereof was not the reason.

I really don't want to wade into this tarpit but it was most certainly financial stability for those that I know.

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