Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had high schoolers in a fund I worked at. Helps that her dad knew the boss. No real use of course, but she could put it on her CV.
That’s clearly far outside the norm though. Normal high school kids aren’t aspiring to (or would even be allowed to) be interns at places like that outside of really unique situations.
The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
501–510 of 514 posts
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
When people don't even realize it exists, that's the mark of truly successful propaganda! "8 consecutive heat waves that shattered all known records in the area" Yeah, where is this? I doubt it's actually true. For sure it was reported as true, but one of the many reasons to call it climate propaganda is that that reporting of "records" doesn't mean what you think it means. Government agencies and other parts of the…
You have absolutely no idea about climatology and are just parroting garbage. You're not a climate scientist, you have no idea how scientists reach the conclusions they have, you don't understand the evidentiary lineages that have brought us to the current understanding of the climate. You cite a single paper yet conveniently ignore the entirety of the research being carried out throughout the globe, by agencies and…
It's not a paper, so this makes me think you didn't read the cited document.
"by agencies and institutions with no relationship to each other"
They're all closely related to each other and tend to rely on the same small number of data sources to draw conclusions, which is why the fact that these data sources are subject to continuous retroactive editing is a problem.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. A lot of depression about the world is driven by left wing views. Women are more left wing than men, liberals are obviously more left wing than conservatives, and young people are more left wing than older people. So being young liberal and female is the intersection of all those categories. I don't know how important being white is there, but I also don't see much discussion of race in this line of articles, on…
[citation needed] Especially because left/right dichotomy smells particularly anecdotal here.
Now correlation isn't causation, but in this case the causal path is pretty clear. If you believe that the world is systemically racist, sexist, unjust, doomed to extinction and that half your friends/family are secretly evil fascists/Nazis, then we'd expect you to feel depressed. When people with those beliefs turn up more frequently in ER for self harm and suicide attempts, we have both a correlation and a plausible cause.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would love to explore Reddit's influence on this phenomenon. The timelines seem to sync somewhat and it seems like a perfect vehicle for adversarial nation states to use to influence public opinion.
I highly doubt that Reddit per se has any significant effect whatsoever—which is not to say that it can't be an instance of the overarching platforms that cause the phenomenon. The reason I'm disregarding Reddit as a significant cause is threefold: a) Reddit is overwhelmingly male, and the most affected group are teenage girls b) Reddit is not that big of a platform in the teenage demographic c) Even if it were, its…
What isn't?
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience is the same, back in the 1990s. There was a ton of depression and even suicides when I was growing up. I felt like 50% of teens at my large HS were suffering from some kind of mental issue. And then you had major events like Columbine. The US school system has always managed to produce a lot of very miserable people, and no one seemed to care or do anything about it. And now we have these studies all bl…
According to the article linked below teen suicide rates declined from 2000 to 2007 and then increased 56% in the following decade. It seems to me the teen suicide rate would serve as a useful heuristic argument in favor of thinking something is amiss. If there is greater mental health awareness today and greater acceptance of getting treatment then this rise is particularly alarming. I think it is undeniable that th…
I think it's more like social media is weaponised by bullies rather than it being inherently bad.
I was assaulted in public at high school multiple times. Today, that kind of thing can be posted and recorded on social media to make your humiliation be permanent.
Banning social media makes this "less bad", but it doesn't solve the actual problem. It just drives that problem back underground so adults don't have to be held accountable.
The problem, in my view, is that the way we do schooling is itself inherently broken. It enables and even encourages bullying, by both adults and teenagers alike.
Social media is kind of like a weapon of mass destruction in this environment. But why does this environment exist in the first place, and why don't we do something about it as as society?
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may be old fashioned, but learning to "just function" instead of constantly crying and expecting the world to listen to me and be the way I want it to be is just called growing up.
My life would be so much easier if someone I know would just grow up.
Alternatively, sometimes one has to cut people out of their life because one is insufficiently advanced to accomodate the others' deficiencies.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
My life would be so much easier if someone I know would just grow up.
You could try taking as much responsibility for this person as you can instead of casting yourself as a victim of them. Alternatively, sometimes one has to cut people out of their life because one is insufficiently advanced to accomodate the others' deficiencies.
Taking that extra responsibility is what makes life difficult.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument appears to be "wanting to change your gender posits that gender is part of objective reality and not a social construct, which is sexist", which is analogous to "trying to create racial equality implies the races are unequal now which is racist". If you ignore realities of present society and pretend that things like gender roles and racial discrimination don't exist today, you can make it look like peop…
The analogy is deeply flawed since nobody is changing their race to fight racist social roles. Just imagine going to a classroom and telling the audience that some children are born in the wrong body that does not align to their real, deep race. Rather, we fight racism by rejecting racialized social roles. There is nothing racist in acknowledging current racial inequality, but it's deeply racist to suggest there exis…
Trans people don't be trans in order to fight sexist gender roles. They're trans, and (often) fight sexist gender roles.
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Some pedantic notes that may or may not be relevant:
• The two different domains you list are influenced by different dimensions of biological sex, which can vary independently.
• A social gender, while culturally-influenced, seems to represent something fundamental about human experience.² Many societies' social gender categories do not align 1-to-1 with biological sex classifications, but 'most all of them have them. Meanwhile, race isn't seen outside racists and those influenced by racism: it is a recent³ invention.
• Some people's brains, for whatever reason, do care about the sexual characteristics of the rest of the body. This isn't much of a problem if that "preference" matches what the body is, but it can cause people significant distress when they don't.⁴ ⁵
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¹: Though transmeds would dispute the (perfectly valid) implication in your second sentence. "Born in the wrong body" isn't an entirely accurate explanation: it's more of a lie-to-adults, only required if you've got a stodgy old binarist model in your head that can just about conceptualise the existence of gay people. It's up there with "lesbian relationships are butch/femme": not something we need to be teaching children, though probably better than acting like LGBT people don't exist.
Brandon Ambrosino wrote a good article about the "born this way" argument: it goes into more detail, with anecdotal examples. https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20160627-i-am-gay-but-i...
²: Disclaimer: I'm not speaking from experience. My intuition is that gendering is bad. From observing other people actually liking, and gaining value from, gendering themselves, I suspect there might be value in keeping gender around, for their sakes; however I have not really taken the time to square this with the clear and obvious harm caused by our society's obsessive gender-all-the-things-and-people tendencies.
³: Dating back at most 1400 years, with its European-coloniser incarnation probably not much more than 400 years old, and the modern eugenicist version less than 200 years old.
⁴: This doesn't necessarily even line up with gender! I know a cis guy who went on feminising HRT, and he says it made him a lot happier. (I don't have access to the inside of his head, but I'd be inclined to believe him.)
⁵: Personally, I don't see why someone should need to have a medical condition to get to choose what their body is like. I get the rationale, seeing as these are semi-permanent choices that one's future self might disagree with – but we could apply the same logic to tattoos, nose rings, or earlobe stretching. (Perhaps we should!)
Regardless, the fact remains that many people do have such a medical condition.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe we should look at ways to get back to 'just functioning'.
It's easy to say this when you're not on the wrong end.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "both extremes are mad at me so I must be doing something right" I haven't said that and try to be careful never to imply it. Rather, my point is that these complaints about moderation bias (which come in from all political angles) are so isomorphic that there must be a common mechanism underlying them. (People sometimes interpret this as an argument in favor of centrist politics but that's a misunderstanding. It's…
I'm sure you've banned others, too. I read with showdead on, and I'm seeing a pretty clear bias in who's banned and who's not. Sure, it may be that right-wingers just can't behave, and I certainly see some of those. But others are perfectly fine comments, and checking their comment list, they write plenty of those, yet they still got banned. The communists don't get banned, and I can't recall seeing an obviously left…