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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

#421

Post by prawn »

codeslave13 wrote: post #337

My daughter hit her teens in2012. It was a horrible couple of years not just for her but from about 8th grade up. Our HS had a suicide wave. Many attepts (my daughter being one) and quite a few of those attempts were successful later. Thankfully my child responded well to therapy. This was in a high competitive HS IN NORTHERN VA. My thoughts on factors: Crazy parents pushing kids to try and get in TJ who had no busin…

Does all of this stem from parents worrying about their children being set up for their future? Or trying to develop well-rounded people? Or trying to socialise their children?

I'm mid-forties in Australia. In my early twenties, it was pretty viable to save a deposit in a year or so, get a loan and buy a house. Now, you'd want 5-10x the deposit and I doubt early-twenties types here would have a chance of buying a house now. Maybe if they were a couple, both in very good jobs, saving aggressively, and even then they'd have a fat mortgage. It will be harder again in 15-20 years when my children would be doing this.

I figure extra-curricular activities for kids that involve loads of travel are a risky burden on a family. I'd rather travel and camp where I want to go, not just where the sports tournament happens to be, or give up every weeknight shuttling children. One of our kids has done dance because the lessons are 3 mins walk away. Or two have done tennis because their lessons are together and the third kid can play at the adjacent playground. Or music lessons during school time or immediately after. Not sure if it's parental laziness or reasonable!

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#422

Post by com2kid »

carabiner wrote: post #310
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re going to get a bias in here because a lot of folks are STEM focused / high achieving high anxiety types :)

Yeah, exactly. There are tons of schools outside of this that still shape kids into productive members of society, even if non-elite. Places like University of New Haven (acceptance rate 94%, founded 1920), Central Washington University (88%, 1891), Western Washington University (96%, 1886), Stetson University in Florida... The list goes on. The vast of US college students attend these decent and non-selective school…

When I went to Western in early 00s, the CS department's theory seemed to be to allow anyone to attempt to join, and then just ruthlessly fail people in the first year.

Between Ada, Scheme, C, and C++, class sizes shrunk fast.

IMHO this is more fair than making the department hard to get into. Let everyone have a go at it.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#423

Post by remarkEon »

anigbrowl wrote: post #151
paulmd wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm honestly appalled by the pervasive tendency to rely on repetition of cliches in favor of original communication, for example. Shaka, when the walls fell ;) honestly there's an interesting argument to be made there that memes and cliches provide a higher symbol density to our communications via shared context/subtext. A meme has additional layers of context and nuance that are implicitly carried along with the a…

Temba; his arms wide. I agree with all of this, and I'm fond of memes myself. They are definitely an important sense-making tool. But there's a distinction that I can't quite articulate, between memes as shared shorthand, and cliches that are actually reflexes or performative gestures, but are meant to be processed by the recipient as original communication. As an extreme example, I used to know someone who was quite…

Mirab, with sails unfurled.

The other thing that this meme-language does is signal some sort of unity of understanding. The memes with deeper meaning tend to have much further longevity and come back time and again, in many different contexts. The father the meme travels, the more likely it is to absorb additional contextual significance.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#424

Post by prawn »

codeslave13 wrote: post #419
prawn wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother recently retired after a career (~18-38ish) as a professional basketball player. It worked for him and there were opportunities to leverage contacts for employment after sport. But that was a 15+ year career. Anything too far short of that is a risk, IMO. Watching many of his peers defer tertiary study, or forgo jobs for training roles, or be out of the league after a few underpaid years while contemporari…

Awesome for him. Parents dont want to hear what .000001 % actually have a chance to go pro? Every year after the season we always asked if they were still having fun. To us it was good skill building. Social,fitness, how to lose etc.

That sounds like the right attitude to me. Less of a "future Olympian" gamble and more of a method to achieve other things.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#425

Post by kenjackson »

Andrex wrote: post #379
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one measure whether it's a net positive (for those who are laughing/dancing with their friends at the park) or a net negative (for those like you described) without being biased/projecting? It feels a little "anarchist" to say "down with all social media! it's most likely a total net negative! nobody should be allowed to enjoy it because it isn't inclusive of those who might be left out!"

> It feels a little "anarchist" to say "down with all social media! it's most likely a total net negative! nobody should be allowed to enjoy it because it isn't inclusive of those who might be left out!" The middle ground I've settled on is regulating it like alcohol. Children should not be hanging out in bars and they should not be on social networking sites, period. COPPA should be vastly expanded. Social media is…

I think with social media, the problem can't be put back in the box. With mass communication mechanisms, kids will still replicate many behaviors over group chats, discord, Teams, etc... And realistically how are you going to keep apps out of the hands of kids, when we can't even do it with nicotine and alcohol?

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#426

Post by mrosett »

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).…

Everything you said about your experience could have been written in 2002. So it can't explain why there's an uptick in 2012.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#427

Post by kenjackson »

gnramires wrote: post #118
vkk8 wrote: post #51

Anecdotally, I was (as probably many here were) ahead of the curve in digital devices usage when I started hanging out in IRC and various web forums as a teenager in early 2000s. At some point I noticed that just using computers induced some amount of anxiety compared to "old tech"; whenever there was some period of time when I used my computer less (like christmas, vacations, etc.) and joined back to the "world of t…

> Can you think of other activities that require this? Well, reading books (and other documents). I also am suspicious of screens (and specially spending too much time on them... I'm certainly guilty), but the existence of books is somewhat confusing in this regard. However, I really don't think the population as a whole was reading quite as many books/documents as we today use digital devices or social media. That c…

> Some things are bleak (like climate change, uncertainty with technologies, etc.), but there's a sense of little hope that definitely should have an impact on the youth. I remember the 90s as a quite hopeful time and that definitely had an impact on my mood. My personal contribution would be spreading more hope about life.

I was a child in the 70s/80s and I was in constant fear of Nuclear War/Winter. The level of fear in kids of that generation I suspect is as bad as any generation after.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#428

Post by codeslave13 »

prawn wrote: post #421
codeslave13 wrote: post #337

My daughter hit her teens in2012. It was a horrible couple of years not just for her but from about 8th grade up. Our HS had a suicide wave. Many attepts (my daughter being one) and quite a few of those attempts were successful later. Thankfully my child responded well to therapy. This was in a high competitive HS IN NORTHERN VA. My thoughts on factors: Crazy parents pushing kids to try and get in TJ who had no busin…

Does all of this stem from parents worrying about their children being set up for their future? Or trying to develop well-rounded people? Or trying to socialise their children? I'm mid-forties in Australia. In my early twenties, it was pretty viable to save a deposit in a year or so, get a loan and buy a house. Now, you'd want 5-10x the deposit and I doubt early-twenties types here would have a chance of buying a hou…

I think parents use “preparing them for the future” as an excuse tbh. Part of it is they are trying to relive their childhood through the kids (seen this ALOT). I coached rec league basketball and soccer for 20 years and it was very prevalent.

It was funny/sad as every once in a while i would have the kids bring a book or a boardgame to practice and parents would loose their shit. Kids loved it but a lot of i was hampering their childs development type talk. Give me a break. Its rec league. Made for learning the game and having a blast doing it

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#429

Post by remarkEon »

solarmist wrote: post #412
faeriechangling wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is more diagnosis better diagnosis? I hear this constantly, literally every time people point out we might be calling people mentally ill now that we wouldn't have called mentally ill 20 years ago people go "wow we must be diagnosing people better". To me better diagnosis would be reflected in things like the suicide rate dropping, drug abuse falling, general health metrics improving, and so on, not in simply inc…

The best description I've heard of why more diagnosis is better is that as a society we're moving up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs from level 2 "Safety Needs" to level 3 "Love and Belonging". For the first time in history there is psychological space to care about mental health and social issues en mass. So, of course, there's going to be an explosion of diagnosis.

That doesn’t strike me as a good thing.

Maintenance of “safety needs” is part and parcel of finding love and belonging in the first place. If we’re offloading that all together, then yeah I can see how more and more get depressed and suicidal. They don’t have anything to live for when you get down to it.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#430

Post by NoPicklez »

nabakin wrote: post #209
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).…

> 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…

Speaking as an Australian here.

I don't think you're quite right, as that might not account for those that are missing out on an admission.

Not everyone is stressed ONLY about admissions to college or University, many kids are stressed because of the pressure to be something. You might find higher rates of depression in those that don't get an admission because of the pressure to make something of themselves.

When I was in my final year (2011) I remember feeling like I was under so much pressure to know what I wanted to do and have something lined up. Each decision felt like it had significant consequences.

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