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The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
401–410 of 514 posts
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#402That’s interesting data. I wonder: is there any possibility that part of the change is because we’re telling kids that it’s okay to admit to depression? I.e., are we just reporting more accurately now?
That also raises the question of whether increased focus on these issues can negatively affect at least a subset of people.
We know that severe mental (and even physical) symptoms can "spread" in social groups (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness), particularly among young women who are now experiencing the sharpest rises in mental illness. There is also strong evidence that affective states (e.g. happiness or depression) spread socially, with even next-door neighbors of depressed people being significantly more likely to be depressed than those on the same block but not next-door (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830455/).
While the TikTok Tourette's phenomenon is clearly an extreme example, it seems possible that something similar could be happening to kids constantly hearing about anxiety and depressive disorders as an immutable trait that everyone around them seems to have.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#403Is it possibly because they're not sleeping with each other? Seems to be all over the news lately, the decline of young people having sex. The older I get, the less I see sex as optional for human health and well-being. There's no time you crave it more than adolescence, so going without it then could be even more damaging. Sex is not just a fun experience, it's a basic psychological need. Both the left and right in the US are way too puritanical and I really hope there's a big shift in popular culture to stop censoring sex and maybe think about toning down the violence.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#404I'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…
> ...declining quality of education.
I'd like to add some nuance to this. While student performance seems to be clearly declining (at least at the college level, which I'm familiar with), I don't know how well we can distinguish the contributions of poor teaching and poor student preparedness.
I'll give a concrete example from South Korea. For several years, the English proficiency of incoming university students was so high, there was serious talk of closing English language programs as no longer needed. Within the last few years though, student ability levels have plummeted, requiring drastic dumbing-down of the curriculum at the school where I work. I know many Korean primary, secondary, and college teachers, and I don't think the decline in student achievement is due to their slacking off. It seems to be due to something going on in society outside the schools.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure you can blame problems such as climate change, economic issues -- every generation had its own existential crisis: WW2, Korea, Vietnam, numerous recessions and until 1990, recent generations lived under the specter of the atom bomb. I think it's social media, that's what's really changed: Every single teenager is now comparing themselves against every other kid in the world instead of just their local pe…
> Every single teenager is now comparing themselves against every other kid in the world instead of just their local peers This is so out of touch. You might as well be using the "It's the video games!" excuse of yore. Teenagers and those in their 20s see what their parents were able to do. They hear what their parents bought their house for, they know about their pensions, they see that their parents could afford ra…
Huge productivity growth doesn't seem to have translated into commensurate wage growth. Meanwhile housing, higher education, and health care are increasingly unaffordable, as you note, and credentialism makes higher education a requirement for more jobs.
I think you're on target about the discouraging aspects of being visibly worse off than your parents' generation, and I think that millennials have that problem as well.
The situation is likely to get worse as AI-fueled productivity increases are unlikely to improve wages either.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another hypothesis is electromagnetic fields. There are more now than ever. Cell phones, 5G, Wifi Sounds stupid right? There's a plausibility scale, and despite various hypotheses being possible, it's reasonable to rank them by what fits best with out prior knowledge, and social media is way more plausible than some post 2010 rise in inflammation, even if that could causally lead to depression in the first place.
> post 2010 rise in inflammation You're assuming that depression and other mental illnesses only started in 2010, which is theoretically possible, but not an established fact. We've actually seen a drastic rise in most mental illnesses diagnosed going back at least 50 years. There is a hypothesis that it's diagnosis, but again, merely a hypothesis. Some of the cases which clearly aren't "diagnosis" (e.g. nearsightedn…
Speaking from my family history, bipolar just wasn’t diagnosed or treated unless it was quite severe. It’s unlikely I’d have been diagnosed 50 years ago.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#407I'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.
I wonder about the timing of these social changes. My impression was that the tradition of high school students having jobs started to fade away in the 1990s.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#408I'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…
As a longtime educator, I see a lot of experienced teachers leaving. In fact, I'm leaving this year, though I'm unsure if it's permanent.
It's a mixture of reasons, from low pay to high demands, but I think a large part is a lack of respect from students, parents and admin. Teachers have been stripped of most of their power to do anything about it. The last year I taught public school a student was verbally abusing others and threatening them in class and I couldn't get him removed. It ruined the class and scared other students, but because he had documented issues they said they couldn't do anything.
I teach in overseas private schools now, and the kids are fantastic and the pay is decent, but the job has an increasing amount of non-teaching related stuff which detracts from the what matters, the kids. Also, the syllabus for CS is so outdated, and I find myself apologizing to the kids since I need to to teach it to them for their exams. I teach around the syllabus as best I can, but you still need to get results.
TLDR: Experienced teachers leaving, lack of autonomy, curriculum suck
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#409(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…
> the world is just getting depressing as hell for young people who see less and less of a future for themselves I heard exactly the same thing in the 1970s.
Compare housing costs in the 1970s vs now.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#410I'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…
I'm not sure you can blame problems such as climate change, economic issues -- every generation had its own existential crisis: WW2, Korea, Vietnam, numerous recessions and until 1990, recent generations lived under the specter of the atom bomb. I think it's social media, that's what's really changed: Every single teenager is now comparing themselves against every other kid in the world instead of just their local pe…
Totally agree. Social media built on top of collecting Likes and Followers, causes brain damage not just in kids but in adults too. That architecture has to be dismantled.
But parent comment abv has a point teaching is a big factor here. And teaching in the current environment has become much more complex.
There is endless over stimulation and distraction which ruins environments where learning is possible. And secondly information has exploding. Kids can easily get overwhelmed just looking at a Wikipedia article. Teachers have a very hard job keeping things on track.