Don't need to be a data scientist to posit that this aligns with the timing of social media/smart phones hitting critical mass.
The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
451–460 of 565 posts
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#452Is it just teens? It seems like everyone is less happy and more anxious these days. I wonder what the stats look like for adults.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#453Earlier 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…
Having a diagnosis also gives you a set of tools to actively deal with your issues. Personally I have trouble with avoidant personality disorder, and I really wish I had gotten diagnosed earlier. Maybe school and my early career would not have been such a dumpster fire if I understood how to properly deal with myself back then.
So I think there's lots of examples of diagnosis's helping individuals, my specific concern is why it is if all this diagnosis is apparently just helping everybody, why is the general population getting more mentally sick over time? I can think of only two reasons -
1: That the mental health system is actively harmful at the population level.
or
2: That the mental health system is impotent to address mental health issues (more keen on this idea honestly, but I can't even rule out 1)
The latter case means that the mental health system could be helping, but at the very least, the mental health system is a distraction from the bigger issue of mental health. I believe declines in mental health are driven by things like increasing inequality, scarcity, competitiveness, loneliness, and so on which we can't nessecarily solve by telling people you are disordered with such and such so live in such and such a way and you can maybe be better adapted to a society which has their collective mental health in freefall which I dunno is something but it's pretty depressing.
P.S. I specifically resent the label of "disorder" in general and think that label is part of the problem, because no matter how you spin it, somebody saying you are "disordered" is an insult, and as we call more and more of the population disordered I think the adjective will become untenable to keep using. I'm more keen on the concept of neurotypes, because neurotypes CAN be negative, and CAN require accommodation, and CAN require treatment, but none of those things are NECESSARILY true becuase "neurotype" isn't loaded in the same way "disorder" is. If you discover your "neurotype" you can try tools and techniques that helped others with that same neurotype. Whereas the word "disorder" sort of has an intrinsically negative connotation, and I don't think it's medically necessary for psychiatrists to regularly insult their patients.
The mental health system is so condescending and some of the shitty things they do don't really get examined or critically looked at that much. Like why don't we ask, is telling millions of people they are "disordered" likely to improve their mental health and confidence and self-esteem? Probably not and it's totally viable to avoid doing this.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#454Earlier 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?
I think his point was that free health care would've prevented his daughter's health issues.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#455While 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).…
> break under this kind of pressure They aren't being drafted to go fight in Vietnam. The Russians aren't bombing our cities. The main health problem is eating too much food, not too little. Teens aren't even expected to have jobs anymore. (In my day, teens got jobs at 16.) My dad volunteered in WW2. He expected to die in combat, as his cohort had an 80% casualty rate. 4 out of 5. Every mission meant holes in the air…
My grandfather survived Pearl Harbor and became a B-25 pilot in one of those cohorts with an 80%+ casualty rate. As a kid, I enjoyed reading and hearing about his experiences. It made me proud of his service. But I'm not sure it lessened the stresses and anxieties I felt during my own adolescence. Years later when a close family member had a near death/should have died experience, that meaningfully altered my perspective on life - because I experienced it first hand.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you honestly see value in comparing scars? Does that matter in any meaningful way? The worst stress of someone's life is the worst stress of their life. It's unproductive and petty to bicker about who has it worse. If life is stressful for anyone, regardless of status, title, age, etc. there's a good chance it's undeserved. The takeaway is to treat people better, not dismiss their stressors as less significant.
Our new cultural leaders have convinced everyone to out-victim everyone else. The more of a victim you are the better.
Plot twist: our culture is defined by our collective values, not by our leaders. Leaders who tap into narratives of victimhood are only enabled to rise because enough of us like to see themselves as an aggrieved victim of oppression. Including those who see culture as something imposed on them by leaders and see themselves as a victim of cultural wars.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#457Mind you, the kids aren't all right was recorder in 1998 actually. Great songs age well of course. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_Aren%27t_Alright https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7iNbnineUCI
Just in case: “The kids are alright” is a The Who song from way before when.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
n of 2, this has been my experience as well. I was almost killed in a shooting in 2021, and in 2022 I started seeing a therapist. Going into therapy made me relate to my trauma more, think about my trauma more often, and self identify as a "traumatized individual". I don't think any of that helped. The only thing that really helped was daily meditation/mindfulness, which does the opposite - it teaches you that the th…
Relating this back to social media, I've noticed that at times younger people almost exert a social pressure to link all behavior to anything remotely traumatic. I've had some shitty stuff happen to me, life has had it's rough points, but I've always felt pretty lucky overall. I've noticed in arguments with roommates/friends/etc who are younger by a few years, there is significantly more forgiveness towards anything…
I have a lot of thoughts on this as well and I'm not sure. I definitely felt like my mental health got worse when I started therapy, but was it because my mental health was already doing worse?
The times in my life when I've been the most anxious or unwell have been when I'm questioning my mental health. And I think that the society we live in does encourage people to open up more. But if you have ADHD / obsessive compulsive tendencies, and your brain works like mine, that opening up can just look like obsessing over why you aren't feeling 100%. Then it's a self fulfilling prophecy.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Between Ada, Scheme, C, and C++, class sizes shrunk fast. Sounds legitimately fun. I wish more CS depts kept a tasteful blend of Haskell/C/Lisp instead of forcefeeding you a vile mix of "using std; C++03" and overly-OOP Java.
It is! We did Scheme (the media scheme distribution), C, Java, Python and then implemented Scheme in Scheme. The theory was that students need to learn the science of algorithmic thinking before worrying about dirty machine representation and limited resource engineering problems. The downside was listening to the incessant complaints from the other sciences students "I just want to take an intro CS class that can teach me what I need to know to succeed at being a script kiddy". Well sorry, our department teaches computer science, not how to script R and how to read DNA sequencer strings in Python.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
#460Welcome to Universe 25
- Housing deficit
- Overpopulation
- Excess food