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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

#491

Post by at-w »

softsound wrote: post #475

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.

Is there strong evidence that widespread adversity like a recession increases mental illness? I would guess that those kinds of factors that affect everyone in your social group have a less negative effect mental health wise, as everyone around you is going through the same thing.

At least with measurable indicators of mental health crises like suicide rates, groups that are worst off by most socioeconomic measures tend to have lower suicide rates. For example, the black suicide rate in the US is less than half the white suicide rate and have been through Jim Crow laws and generally much lower SES. From what I've seen, the same is true when comparing across countries, with suicide rates being positively correlated with GDP and income.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#492

Post by ethanbond »

nradov wrote: post #483
taurath wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being a teenager. I was stressed all the time because EVERY decision I made had a consequence and I wouldn't feel that consequence sometimes for a very long time and had no scope or scale of how much any mistake would fuck me over. Be with the right friends, get good enough grades, express myself my personality in the right way, every single thing I did affected my "future life". Every single adult was tel…

Military service gives many young people a second chance at college. They can earn some college credits while they're in, and then take advantage of the GI Bill after discharge.

Ah yes, all the stress relieved. If you miss your first shot you can just sign up to get shot at* and then you might get another shot!

* yes, I know very very very few service members ever get shot at

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#493

Post by crazygringo »

cycomanic wrote: post #411

Looking at the graphs on the article, what sticks out immediately is two things. Why did the data only start in 2004, that's not a very long range, and where are the error bars. We are reporting statistics here, so we should see some sort of measure of the statistical accuracy shouldn't we?

Error bars are for sampling. If they're using the full statistics of all suicides nationwide, for example, there's no error bar. The number is just the number.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#494

Post by password11 »

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…

I wrote a long post but deleted it.

> Help me out. I don't see the problem.

This is the problem: https://xkcd.com/1102/

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#495

Post by ndriscoll »

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…

That doesn't really contradict what I said; having a family is a risky endeavor that requires a lot of trust. For some people, that's their life's ambition. If someone wants to have a large family (e.g. 5-6 kids), they're going to need to get started in their early 20s, and they're going to have to find someone they can trust because they're pretty much going to need to devote themselves to that. Or if they hope to see their grandkids' college graduation, assuming their kids have kids at the same age, the chances of that happening start dropping pretty quickly after your mid 20s. It sounds like that person is ambitious and intelligent so presumably she found someone compatible with her goals, and hopefully that will work out. I'm any case, having family be your top priority doesn't mean you're short-sighted. She's just willing to take a risk for the life she wants.

Fertility stats are easy enough to look up, and like actuarial stats, they're always unfortunate to look at. IVF can help, but it's expensive and also not a very high success rate by late 30s.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#497

Post by datavirtue »

magicalist wrote: post #190
LarryMullins wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to college is not the same as graduating with a degree. A ton of people go to college for a time and leave with little more than a mountain of debt. Also, a bachelors degree is not even the least degree you can get from a university.

Fair point, but that's not an argument that things aren't changing, just that they might not be. From a quick search: Between 2011 and 2021, the percentage of people age 25 and older who had completed a bachelor's degree or higher increased by 7.5 percentage points from 30.4% to 37.9%[1]. It would be helpful to get an attainment by age by year breakdown. And this still doesn't address the OP's hypothesis that part of…

That was because of the great recession. Those numbers are petering out and will soon drop off a cliff.

There is a bitch slap of boomers and beleaguered birth rate around the corner.

The meager birth rate and dying boomers are real world paychecks and tax revenue drying up. Society is going to change drastically, and it will seem all at once.

All the corps are going to have to pull back when those boomers stop spending and there aren't enough feeders to replace them.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#498

Post by brailsafe »

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.

> Among adult Americans, only a third have bachelors degrees.

I don't really see how this services the argument very well. Adult Americans seems like a set of people that wouldn't be relevant for measuring anything.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#499

Post by sandworm101 »

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…

Such high acceptance rates are a red flag. What are the first and second year failure rates? Taking in everyone means nothing if you then kick half out, essentially turning first year into an extended application process.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#500

Post by caddemon »

datavirtue wrote: post #487
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An equivalent high stress environment can occur whether working in an executive office, working in a call center or selling bracelets on the street. This doesn't necessarily mean an equivalent high-stress life. The call center employee has fewer or worse options for dealing with stressors outside their job which they share with the executive. > I need to eat. > I need to travel. > I need somewhere to live. By and l…

...period. Just because you are overly stressed out about your BMW/Tesla repair saga doesn't mean it is equivalent to someone who NEVER has enough money for basic nessesities. Your luxury car repair drama is fleeting. Being wracked with stress about your entire life 24/7 only lets up when your mind finds a way to squirm out of it for a minute by watching a show or powering through a package of cookies on your couch.…

I don't think "BMW repairs" is the main source of stress for high income people lol. I don't know whether it is fair to compare stressors across such different groups, but regardless I don't think it's fair to caricature what high income workers might be stressed about. One of my friends that happens to drive a BMW is a cardiac surgeon, and when he gets stressed over work I can guarantee you it is not about financial implications.

In general, management level decisions can affect entire teams of workers and have downstream impacts on products used by millions of people. That is a form of pressure. So is the way pro athletes can be put on the spot, and it's not like their output has huge "real world" impact.

Yeah, obviously we'd all rather have pro athlete stress than single working mom stress. But there's 0 reason to strawman what that stress is.

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