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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

#471

Post by oneoff786 »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #228
oneoff786 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But come on. Diversity is not actually bad. People being diverse even if they think it’s bad is not bad. And memes are not a meaningful driver of diversity.

Intent does not an outcome make. "Social media" accelerates unmoderated interaction with other irresponsible people, which, generally speaking, is not healthy for teenagers.

> unmoderated interaction with other irresponsible people

Other irresponsible people means their peers right? Like teens talking to teens without adult supervision?

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#472

Post by solarmist »

remarkEon wrote: post #462
solarmist wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what moving up means; they're cumulative from the bottom up. You can't move up to the next level until all lower levels are consistently met. Moving up means those needs are being met satisfactorily and can be maintained without prolonged attention. And if a lower level stops being met, your level will fall to that level until it is met again. I.e., if you're hungry and don't know when your next meal is, t…

Right, I'm aware of Maslow's work, I just think it's wrong on a number of different dimensions, or at least incomplete.

Sure, I agree, at best it is a gross simplification.

But it’s useful and, in my opinion, captures the most basic relationship which is that some needs have higher priority than others and will drive those other needs to the recesses.

What about that do you disagree with?

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#473

Post by kazinator »

com2kid wrote: post #422
carabiner wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which of those four do you think shrank fastest? :)

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#474

Post by juve1996 »

rabuse wrote: post #202
chasd00 wrote: post #149

Teens are going to therapy a lot more and there are lots of mental illnesses that weren’t defined earlier. Depressed, anxious, and angsty teens isn’t new. All the diagnoses and innovative “billable events” are however.

Yet suicide numbers keep skyrocketing, so much much is that actually helping?

It might be, since the actual rate decreased as recently as 2018-2020. Obviously this may increase due to the ramifications of covid - but that would certainly be a special circumstance.

"The total age-adjusted suicide rate increased from 10.4 per 100,000 in 2000 to a peak of 14.2 in 2018, followed by a 5% decline between 2018 and 2020 to 13.5."

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#475

Post by softsound »

I'm honestly a little surprised it didn't start before then. With the 2008 "Great Recession" I remember quite a few people and teenagers struggling back in my high school. I knew a lot of teens/families who lost their homes, or had to get jobs to support their families etc and drop out of school. I remember that having a big impact in my life, so I get I would have expected that to have had a greater influence.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#476

Post by imbnwa »

Khelavaster wrote: post #241
imbnwa wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and slowly trickle down Seems like a strong assumption that it necessarily does splash damage beyond a certain cohort. I went to a public HS of 4K in the 00s only AP Juniors/Seniors were concerned with this kind of thing and AP kids were only friends with other AP kids (for obvious reasons); I'd doubt that've changed by 2012.

Many badly-envisioned schools restrict access to AP classes or even AP tests, instead of letting kids follow their passions and meeting demand.

Well that's not surprising, urban public schools, at least in the major American city I'm from, are about figuring out who's a good pencil-pusher as early as possible then segregating them from the rest of the riff-raff until they graduate HS. Most of the cohort I'm talking about likely got invited to a 'gifted' elementary school somewhere around 5th or 6th grade or a 7th/8th grade program attached to one of the top HSs.

I only know this cohort well enough because I was on the debate team which most've them used as an extra-curricular for their college application CV but weren't serious about winning.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#477

Post by nradov »

lmm wrote: post #449
nradov wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is less bleak now than it has ever been in human history. If you zoom out and look beyond the news headlines we as a species are doing pretty well. Rates of extreme poverty are down worldwide and relatively few people are starving to death or being killed in wars. The world still has a lot of problems but let's be objective about the data instead of succumbing to defeatist narratives.

Haven't median real wages in developed countries dropped since the 1970s or so (even more so if you include housing costs in your inflation number)? The world as a whole may be better off, but that's cold comfort when your future in your country looks worse than your parents'.

Median real total employee compensation in the US has increased significantly since with 1970s once you account for non-wage benefits like employer-funded health insurance premiums and retirement plans. (I am not familiar with the data for other developed countries.)

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#478

Post by [deleted] »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #360
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…

Help me out. I don't see the problem. If there are 100 suicides per 100,000 people in a year amongst a cohort and the next year there are 134 per 100,000, that's an increase in total suicides of 34%. I don't really see why that's not useful as an indicator of how much worse the problem is getting. To me, it would be nice if they were clearer about what that percentage represents, is it the average from 2000-2010 vs t…

[deleted]

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#479

Post by cheschire »

paulmd wrote: post #441
anigbrowl wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"I made this" dot meme. See? Shaka, when the walls fell. Yeah I mean if he's presenting them as ideas he came up with that's intellectual fraud which it seems like most people are uncomfortable with. To some extent we are all living in a soup of ideas and we're just synthesizing from a lot of the same sources and riffing on a lot of the same inputs. But if it's systematic and specific and presented as ideas he came u…

Tangential, and yet not entirely unrelated observation: it’s becoming more common for me to see someone writing this much and my first thought is “did they get ChatGPT to fluff this up for them?”

Things are going to get worse before they get better, I suspect.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#480

Post by d_sem »

paperwasp42 wrote: post #93
oneoff786 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> less cultural cohesion due to hyper diversity in memes resulting in fewer shared experiences People being different is bad?

OP hit on a really interesting point, and if he's referring to the same thing I've seen, the issue isn't "difference." I think the issue is the degree of difference. The place I volunteer at has quite a few teen volunteers, and I've noticed I can immediately spot the chronically-online teens (and there's a lot of them), because it's like they're from a different planet. They use language I don't understand, their hum…

I appreciate this comment and generally agree. I have observed that teens themselves seem not to understand each other to a greater degree: perhaps the effect is not limited teenagers. Increased inability to relate in ways that allow ideas to be shared, and importantly -- challenged in real settings.
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