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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

#511

Post by etempleton »

As a teenager growing up I don’t think I really understood what anxiety or depression was or looked like and I sure as hell wouldn’t admit to having either. I understood both academically, but no one wanted to call you anxious or depressed and you didn’t want anyone to call you that either. In retrospection, I was both anxious and depressed for most of high school.

Going to therapy wouldn’t have been an option. Drugs wouldn’t have been an option, because depression and/or anxiety was not something you needed either to treat. It was a temporary state, at best, that you needed to shake yourself from.

Mental illness is no longer stigmatized in the same way it was even a decade ago. It makes sense more kids are self-reporting feeling that way.

I don’t think kids are all that different now. I don’t think things are so much worse for them. I do think school is probably more prison like than ever, but beyond that it is all the same stuff in a slightly different context.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#513

Post by chamwislothe2nd »

People often blame phones, but I blame the runaway success of Obamas first campaign. His team ran the most effective targeting campaign online I'd ever seen. People I knew in Canada cared more than about him than local politics. I think it highlighted the potential of online propaganda to such an extent that everyone started targeting online people. Good an bad.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#514

Post by com2kid »

kazinator wrote: post #473
com2kid wrote: post #422

Earlier 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.

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

Well at the time 2 different profs taught Scheme, one of the profs thought Scheme was so obvious that it didn't need to be explained in class. There weren't any real lessons on Scheme, the only textbook for the class was a (good) book on discrete mathematics, and we were expected to pick up functional programming on our own.

He honestly did a disservice to my learning of FP and probably set me back a good 4 or 5 years. He did a great job of filtering out students from the department though!

So after I got a horrible grade in his class I retook with the other professor, who taught the class (which was labeled as discrete math / logic class) as an extension of the textbook, and accordingly I did pretty good, but I didn't really learn anything about functional programming!

As an aside, that series of 2 classes had some amazing proofs. Proving addition on integers was an absolutely wonderful experience.

The data structures class was hard, we had a ton of material thrown at us really rapidly. I was taking the other fail out class mentioned above at the same time. When the quarter ended the department advisor asked me why I did that (because no one advised me not to...)

The C programming course, I think that hurt a lot of students. I had a good time with it, but we had to implement a shell and for many students, I think that would've been their 5th programming class ever.

Oh also that is when we had to start using source control.

One cool thing about Western is that quite a few of the professors came in from industry, so practices like "source control is part of your grade" were around really early on (again, this was 2004 or so I think).

Also tiny class sizes, and regular office hours. Professors would regularly be online chatting with students late at night the day before assignments were due. When I was at Western, only the first 2 intro courses had TAs doing any teaching, everything after that was a class of 20-30 and a professor up front.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#515

Post by com2kid »

intelVISA wrote: post #450
com2kid wrote: post #422

Earlier 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 was. After that series of courses most classes had students complete assignments in any language of their choosing, with the exception of obvious ones like the Java OO class or the C based networking class which was a direct successor to the initial C based class on *nix programming.

Related: Implementing networking stuff using raw sockets is fun!

I ended up with C, Ada, C++, Scheme, Java, C#, and PHP on my resume by the time I graduated.

Started my career on a compiler team! (see https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/how-microsoft-tested... for more info on my first job out of college!)

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#516

Post by com2kid »

htag wrote: post #488
com2kid wrote: post #422

Earlier 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.

1. It can look like a cash grab to take a semester or two of tuition from traditionally middle performing students before failing them out. 2. College admission and graduation rates are important and watched.

> 1. It can look like a cash grab to take a semester or two of tuition from traditionally middle performing students before failing them out.

Plenty of students who failed out of CS moved over to Management Information Science, the building was right next door so it was a short walk.

But seriously, everyone should be allowed to try. Western giving me a chance dramatically changed my life for the better, and based on emails I've gotten from customers for products I've worked on, its helped me change other people's lives for the better as well.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#517

Post by atq2119 »

andai wrote: post #210
gnramires wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Growing up in the 2000s I remember there was much more excitement and optimism for the future. Now it seems to range from cynicism to dread to abject paranoia. Or perhaps my liberal use of cannabis in my younger years shifted me into a more paranoid timeline... alas! Re: books being less stressful, I think e-ink is a great example. It feels more solid, more permanent, even though the text changes when you swipe the p…

Just as another point of anecdata, I feel the same way in terms of optimism that has shifted more towards dread. It's definitely not cannabis use. It may be a general en fecha of getting older, though.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#518

Post by atlgator »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #463
atlgator wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who got started as a bag handler at Winn Dixie, I can tell you I'm a lot more stressed out now managing a career than I ever was working a "job."

Winn Dixie cashier here - my first job. I’ve never counted the clock so hard, but I’m pretty sure I forgot the content of my shift the moment I walked out.

Ditto. When I left work, I really left work. Didn't think about it at all. Even the 15 minute breaks were enjoyable. I'd buy a package of Little Debbie pinwheels and flip through the damaged magazines in the breakroom. Didn't own a phone then.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012

#519

Post by andai »

atq2119 wrote: post #517
andai wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing up in the 2000s I remember there was much more excitement and optimism for the future. Now it seems to range from cynicism to dread to abject paranoia. Or perhaps my liberal use of cannabis in my younger years shifted me into a more paranoid timeline... alas! Re: books being less stressful, I think e-ink is a great example. It feels more solid, more permanent, even though the text changes when you swipe the p…

Just as another point of anecdata, I feel the same way in terms of optimism that has shifted more towards dread. It's definitely not cannabis use. It may be a general en fecha of getting older, though.

Yeah that's a limitation of my memory, my brain was completely different than it is now! It might be that 8 year olds today feel the same excitement for the future that me and my friends did back then.

I sure hope so, but I find it hard to imagine. Most of my excitement came from the constant positive science news at the time. Seems all I hear now is bad news.

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