The author proposes the following theory to explain the rate increases:
"Since the early 2010s, stable in-person communities and relationships have rapidly disintegrated, as transient networks of low-investment relationships took their place."
This is a well worded way of saying the deep networks as opposed to shallow ones are the most vital for mental health it would seem.
> This is a well worded way of saying the deep networks as opposed to shallow ones are the most vital for mental health it would seem.
I remember seeing a comment in here quite a while ago, and saving it. I haven’t bothered to see if it could be verified but this reminded me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31458101
> Reminds me of some story I heard (would be great if someone has a source) that you can spot who has more chance of dying of suicide in social graphs, because they are connected to (perhaps many) people but are not part of a single clique (group)
While there’s likely more than one cause. There’s a bunch of research that shows rising smart phone adoption from roughly 2010 onwards correlates to rising levels of anxiety and depression in teenage girls especially.
This roughly aligns with when first and second gen iPhone owners started to upgrade and pass their older phones to their children, creating the first generation of smart phone owning teens.
The standard "explanation" is some hand-waving about social media, but I suspect that the root causes are to be found in the profound cultural disintegration that started long before the Internet became a thing, and whose ultimate effects are only now beginning to manifest.
Further atomisation of society, ongoing since the 80s and the digitalisation of the world only deepened it. Lack/disintegration of local communities into the digital world seems to be a common factor (even more given the timeline).
Might be completely anecdotal but in my lifetime I've experienced the transformation from local communities to online ones and how unhappy and unsatisfied it makes me in 2024. It was exciting in 2005 but I'm slowly clawing back a much more offline existence for the past 5 years and am much happier, even more after finding communities that are shielded away from internet dramas, the world is much nicer outside of it.
The internet nowadays is amazing for knowledge and learning, and terrible for social experiences, I made many more online friends (whom I met offline and I'm friends to this day) on BBSs and internet forums from the 90s-2000s than on anything branded "social" from the 2010s onwards.
Meanwhile, male suicides still outnumber female suicides by 3:1 for every age group.
What a fantastic demonstration of the fact that a statement doesn't have to be false in order to be highly misleading.
"Fake" (i.e. blatantly incorrect) news isn't the main problem in out media landscape. Headlines like this one are, which are technically correct, yet are (usually intentionally) crafted to lead the average reader to a conclusion that can be the exact opposite of what is really happening.
1. I have plenty of bones to pick with Haidt, but he's not one to deemphasize male suffering for the purposes of politically correct rhetoric. He explicitly points out in the article that even now, teen male suicide far outpaces teen female suicide.
2. It is genuinely interesting if we're moving from a 4:1 to 2:1 M:F suicide rate, and I think that can be placed on social media. And if there is a single concrete cause of the change in ratio, that increase in female suicide rates can be reversed. That would be a good thing, even if it only improves young women's lives.
3. As unfair as it is, people don't give a shit about male suicide rates; the general response is "they deserve it," and no argumentation is going to change their minds. If people start seeing suicide as an issue that affects both sexes, perhaps that can provide the basis for some policy that will have the unintended effect of helping male suicide rates.
> 3. ... people don't give a shit about male suicide rates; the general response is "they deserve it,"
Yes, for decades this attitude has been caricatured by the fake-but-entirely-too-plausible news headline "Male suicide rate increasing; women most affected". Something I would expect to see in the Guardian if not elsewhere.
#3 is an absurd statement, as a society we do not say that men deserve it. Are there individuals that do say that? If they do they are not good humans and as such their point of view doesn’t really matter.
There is a broader point that is being missed and that is, in the Anglo-sphere people don’t care much about mental health at all, we stigmatize mental health as a weakness (thanks puritans!), so yes men don’t seek access to mental healthcare as openly as women and that drives other outcomes like higher suicide rates, higher levels of stress related medical issues and in the extremes mass-shootings.
> He explicitly points out in the article that even now, teen male suicide far outpaces teen female suicide.
Which makes the headline, which is the only thing the vast majority of people will look at (something the author is well aware of), even more disingenuous bordering on dishonest.
I'm confused about how the article minimizes the suicide rate in boys. It even has multiple paragraphs analyzing why this gap exists.
It seems like you're framing gender dynamics as a zero-sum game, where improving the situation of one results in stepbacks the other. I agree that men do face significant struggles in today's society [1], but there are ways to move forward in ways that benefit everyone [2].
[1] Perry, Grayson. The Descent of Man. United Kingdom: Penguin Publishing Group, 2017.
[2] hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2000.
Because men already have a hell of a time getting support, sympathy or understanding without the issue being reframed as "well it is toxic masculinity's fault", "you should have seen a psychiatrist" or "yeah but women try more and that's totally not a sign of attention seeking behavior as opposed to genuine fatigue/despair with life".
So yeah people represented by the more afflicted group will find it particularly offensive that it's being reframed in yet another female-centric manner.
As the article points out, female suicide attempts far outnumber male suicide attempts. That male suicide succeeds more often is due to the methods used. If you are using suicide as a proxy for mental health, then suicide attempts seem as valid a proxy as suicides.
But even if that wasn't the case, there is a measurable difference in the rate of change. The number of female suicides is increasing at a far faster rate than male suicides.
1. Male and female suicide attempts are fundamentally different qualitatively, as evidenced by the fact that men succeed at approximately 10x the rate of women (and, to preempt the usual response, this extends to places where guns are illegal and account for a small minority of suicide methods). This is due to a difference in intent: women attempt suicide as a cry for help; men attempt suicide to end their suffering. Both are bad situations, but it's wrong to equate them, and the latter is clearly worse, because men don't have help available as even an option.
2. Suppose men succeed at suicide 30% of the time, and women succeed at suicide 3% of the time. The greatest risk factor for suicide attempts is having previously attempted suicide. A useful exercise: calculate the gender ratio of suicide attempts, assuming equal likelihood of a first attempt and repeating attempts until success.
I read the article, and the title seems to me as accurate and the most significant outcome. Suicide rates going up is a major cause for concern. They are up across the board and significantly up for women. If you think there's some agenda here, I suspect that it's actually your own confirmation bias that's popping up.
> I believe Zach has made some real discoveries here. He demonstrates a pattern in girls’ suicide rates that has not been noticed or much discussed, as far as we can tell.
The article headline mentions girls, not in an attempt to downplay boys' suicides, but rather to emphasize a discovery that they believe that others haven't yet made.
For the same reason, a headline, "Suicide Rates Are high for Gen Z Across the Anglosphere, Especially for Boys" (note high; not up), doesn't discount that girls are also committing suicide. This headline would be apt for an article which highlights the gendered discrepancy in raw rates, rather than the gendered discrepancy in rates of increase.
Ok, I'll bite: The conclusion implied by the headline ("Especially for Girls") is that female suicides are a larger problem than male suicides, while the numbers say the exact opposite, by a huge margin.
Daniel Schmachtenberger uses the categories of truthful, not true and missing context. Truthful means the person communicating thinks it to be true (misinformation), not true being disinformation and missing context while true, misleading without context.
Its the landscape of framing. By now people should be familiar with the works of Edward Bernays.
This is a great example of a statement whose emotional valence is dramatically wrong compared to the literal meaning: a world where girls kill themselves at the same near-zero rate as boys is _exactly_ what a healthy world should be.
I don't really have an opinion, but people at large usually perceive a world where gender differences are negligible to be a healthier one. Why do you think it's the opposite in this case?
Such a skewed ratio of suicide among males and females point more to a problem with social order than to an innate susceptibility of males to suicide. That means that the current situation is certainly unhealthy, compared to if male suicide rates can be lowered to match female suicide rate.
Assuming a world in which the rate of girls killing themselves is ~0% and boys is ~5%, I imagine most would think the world would be healthier if the numbers were more similar at ~0%.
Phrasing it as “at the same rate” makes me think... yeah, should they be different? I do see the point that the rate going up is bad and it’s currently trending closer in the wrong direction but I can also see how one might read the comment as suggesting that the rates specifically should not be the same.
This is one of those things that should be so obvious - but because of the overwhelming use of that thing, nobody will admit it. We spent decades listening to big tobacco insisting that cigarettes were healthy and cool despite the fact that the science was clear and it should have been obvious that inhaling burning shit into your lungs was bad.
Having unceasing ubiquitous access to all the toxic shit that the internet serves up via a phone should be obvious.
I see people claim this all the time but don't often see any real solutions just general grousing.
What would you do? Get rid of mobile computing altogether by government fiat? Ban providing a smart phone to someone under the age of 18? What about tablets and computers, how would one even enforce that? Would you force kids together to socialize for a period of time which is just as likely to develop trauma as relationships?
The only reasonable solution I've heard to the phone problem is individual parents getting involved and active in monitoring and limiting their children screen time, and unfortunately, involved parenting is not something that can be legislated into existence.
I understand where you're coming from, and there might not be a lot of great answers, but off the top of my head let's say we have a high degree of confidence it is the phones. A couple immediate next steps we could take:
1. Encourage education. Explain to young people early and often through a number of avenues that phone use can cause anxiety, depression, etc. Knowledge is power and all that. Will it solve the problem? No. But it might move the needle and save some lives.
2. Fund further and more detailed studies. Are there critical periods of child development where phone use is more likely to lead to suicide? Are there particular patterns of usage? Narrowing down the hypothesis space makes it much easier to develop more nuanced studies and more targeted interventions.
> The only reasonable solution I've heard to the phone problem is individual parents getting involved and active in monitoring and limiting their children screen time, and unfortunately, involved parenting is not something that can be legislated into existence.
This! You don’t need laws for this, the solution starts with you. Then more people like you, then you’re the majority and the schools ban phones just like they did in that one school in Ireland recently.
Parenting is hard, and just like in the 90s, it’s easier to blame the technology than assume responsibility.
This is exactly the same arguments the tobacco lobby made when faced with regulation and taxation. EXACTLY the same.
"It's not our fault that people became addicted to our product via darkpatterns, addictive chemicals, misleading marketing, corruption, and suppression."
I'm all for individual responsibility but like cigarettes on the plane, this product creates irreparable harm to children.
The headline makes it seem like that, but here’s a taste from the article itself:
> Since 2010, rates of self-harm episodes have increased for adolescents in the Anglosphere countries, especially for girls
Also, I would not expect male and female rates to be the same if it were to do with phones. The two sexes have very different experiences online, just as they do in real life.
No matter how you look at it these trend lines aren’t great, and I hope by studying these patterns we can ultimately come up with more solutions for young people coming up in a chaotic world.
I’d guess I’m not the only person who clicked on this particular post because of personal struggles with suicidal ideation, and reading through some of the other comments I just wanted to say that people Do care about suicide and mental health. It’s easy to make generalizations about “society”, but we can be the change we want to see in the world - yeah maybe there’s some assholes on Mastodon or whatever, but there’s no reason to elevate or legitimize toxic opinions like that across the internet. From one vulnerable meat sack to another: your life matters, and so do other people’s lives, no matter what their age or gender. Be kind, y’all.
Good article and the author's effort to get the data is commendable (although it would be interesting to look at Japan, China, India, Brazil, etc.). As far as the causes for the trends, that's anyone's guess (such as social media).
It's not hard to find correlations with all kinds of events, e.g. the 2008 economic collapse had many knock-on effects and mental health doesn't benefit from families losing homes, jobs, stable community relationships, etc. This has even been studied:
> "All studies showed that the economic crisis was an important stressor that had a negative impact on workers’ mental health. Most of the studies documented that a rise in unemployment, increased workload, staff reduction, and wages reduction were linked to an increased rate of mood disorders, anxiety, depression, dysthymia, and suicide."
Is that the reason for the increase in suicide attempts and rates among adolescents since 2010? Who knows - but clearly, rising suicide rates are a sign of societal malaise, indeed this was leveraged as a criticism of communist East Germany, which reportedly had an overall suicide rate twice that of the USA today.
Its always easy to feel bad about kids who need to grow up in todays world. I would recommend considering this before you misplace your birth control. People already do it with species appropriate living conditions for pets.
Edit: Pls dont take this as encouragement for suicide. Read the book, you already have sunken cost, you might as well stick around and enjoy it. Doesnt make procreating any less egoistic though.
Readit News
"Since the early 2010s, stable in-person communities and relationships have rapidly disintegrated, as transient networks of low-investment relationships took their place."
This is a well worded way of saying the deep networks as opposed to shallow ones are the most vital for mental health it would seem.
I remember seeing a comment in here quite a while ago, and saving it. I haven’t bothered to see if it could be verified but this reminded me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31458101
> Reminds me of some story I heard (would be great if someone has a source) that you can spot who has more chance of dying of suicide in social graphs, because they are connected to (perhaps many) people but are not part of a single clique (group)
This roughly aligns with when first and second gen iPhone owners started to upgrade and pass their older phones to their children, creating the first generation of smart phone owning teens.
Might be completely anecdotal but in my lifetime I've experienced the transformation from local communities to online ones and how unhappy and unsatisfied it makes me in 2024. It was exciting in 2005 but I'm slowly clawing back a much more offline existence for the past 5 years and am much happier, even more after finding communities that are shielded away from internet dramas, the world is much nicer outside of it.
The internet nowadays is amazing for knowledge and learning, and terrible for social experiences, I made many more online friends (whom I met offline and I'm friends to this day) on BBSs and internet forums from the 90s-2000s than on anything branded "social" from the 2010s onwards.
What a fantastic demonstration of the fact that a statement doesn't have to be false in order to be highly misleading.
"Fake" (i.e. blatantly incorrect) news isn't the main problem in out media landscape. Headlines like this one are, which are technically correct, yet are (usually intentionally) crafted to lead the average reader to a conclusion that can be the exact opposite of what is really happening.
2. It is genuinely interesting if we're moving from a 4:1 to 2:1 M:F suicide rate, and I think that can be placed on social media. And if there is a single concrete cause of the change in ratio, that increase in female suicide rates can be reversed. That would be a good thing, even if it only improves young women's lives.
3. As unfair as it is, people don't give a shit about male suicide rates; the general response is "they deserve it," and no argumentation is going to change their minds. If people start seeing suicide as an issue that affects both sexes, perhaps that can provide the basis for some policy that will have the unintended effect of helping male suicide rates.
Yes, for decades this attitude has been caricatured by the fake-but-entirely-too-plausible news headline "Male suicide rate increasing; women most affected". Something I would expect to see in the Guardian if not elsewhere.
There is a broader point that is being missed and that is, in the Anglo-sphere people don’t care much about mental health at all, we stigmatize mental health as a weakness (thanks puritans!), so yes men don’t seek access to mental healthcare as openly as women and that drives other outcomes like higher suicide rates, higher levels of stress related medical issues and in the extremes mass-shootings.
Which makes the headline, which is the only thing the vast majority of people will look at (something the author is well aware of), even more disingenuous bordering on dishonest.
It seems like you're framing gender dynamics as a zero-sum game, where improving the situation of one results in stepbacks the other. I agree that men do face significant struggles in today's society [1], but there are ways to move forward in ways that benefit everyone [2].
[1] Perry, Grayson. The Descent of Man. United Kingdom: Penguin Publishing Group, 2017.
[2] hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2000.
So yeah people represented by the more afflicted group will find it particularly offensive that it's being reframed in yet another female-centric manner.
But even if that wasn't the case, there is a measurable difference in the rate of change. The number of female suicides is increasing at a far faster rate than male suicides.
2. Suppose men succeed at suicide 30% of the time, and women succeed at suicide 3% of the time. The greatest risk factor for suicide attempts is having previously attempted suicide. A useful exercise: calculate the gender ratio of suicide attempts, assuming equal likelihood of a first attempt and repeating attempts until success.
In a sense they're inversely correlated, since if at first you succeed, you'll never attempt again.
Unless you're specifically controlling for that by not counting subsequent attempts by the same person.
That's exactly my point. The title is accurate. In the sense that its factual claims are correct.
But the same headline also implies conclusions that are not correct at all. And, knowing how the social "sciences" operate, this is not an accident.
> I believe Zach has made some real discoveries here. He demonstrates a pattern in girls’ suicide rates that has not been noticed or much discussed, as far as we can tell.
The article headline mentions girls, not in an attempt to downplay boys' suicides, but rather to emphasize a discovery that they believe that others haven't yet made.
For the same reason, a headline, "Suicide Rates Are high for Gen Z Across the Anglosphere, Especially for Boys" (note high; not up), doesn't discount that girls are also committing suicide. This headline would be apt for an article which highlights the gendered discrepancy in raw rates, rather than the gendered discrepancy in rates of increase.
> What a fantastic demonstration of the fact that a statement doesn't have to be false in order to be highly misleading.
Suicide rates can be rising but especially for girls, all the while keeping the ratio valid. One fact does not make the other invalid.
Its the landscape of framing. By now people should be familiar with the works of Edward Bernays.
Phrasing it as “at the same rate” makes me think... yeah, should they be different? I do see the point that the rate going up is bad and it’s currently trending closer in the wrong direction but I can also see how one might read the comment as suggesting that the rates specifically should not be the same.
Deleted Comment
This is one of those things that should be so obvious - but because of the overwhelming use of that thing, nobody will admit it. We spent decades listening to big tobacco insisting that cigarettes were healthy and cool despite the fact that the science was clear and it should have been obvious that inhaling burning shit into your lungs was bad.
Having unceasing ubiquitous access to all the toxic shit that the internet serves up via a phone should be obvious.
What would you do? Get rid of mobile computing altogether by government fiat? Ban providing a smart phone to someone under the age of 18? What about tablets and computers, how would one even enforce that? Would you force kids together to socialize for a period of time which is just as likely to develop trauma as relationships?
The only reasonable solution I've heard to the phone problem is individual parents getting involved and active in monitoring and limiting their children screen time, and unfortunately, involved parenting is not something that can be legislated into existence.
1. Encourage education. Explain to young people early and often through a number of avenues that phone use can cause anxiety, depression, etc. Knowledge is power and all that. Will it solve the problem? No. But it might move the needle and save some lives.
2. Fund further and more detailed studies. Are there critical periods of child development where phone use is more likely to lead to suicide? Are there particular patterns of usage? Narrowing down the hypothesis space makes it much easier to develop more nuanced studies and more targeted interventions.
This! You don’t need laws for this, the solution starts with you. Then more people like you, then you’re the majority and the schools ban phones just like they did in that one school in Ireland recently.
Parenting is hard, and just like in the 90s, it’s easier to blame the technology than assume responsibility.
"It's not our fault that people became addicted to our product via darkpatterns, addictive chemicals, misleading marketing, corruption, and suppression."
I'm all for individual responsibility but like cigarettes on the plane, this product creates irreparable harm to children.
How does your theory of it being “the phones” make sense when boys and girls pretty much have equal access to phone?
If it’s phones, you would expect male suicides to be up as well.
And if it’s how girls react to phones, then isn’t the cause that more specific thing than just “phones”.
> Since 2010, rates of self-harm episodes have increased for adolescents in the Anglosphere countries, especially for girls
Also, I would not expect male and female rates to be the same if it were to do with phones. The two sexes have very different experiences online, just as they do in real life.
I’d guess I’m not the only person who clicked on this particular post because of personal struggles with suicidal ideation, and reading through some of the other comments I just wanted to say that people Do care about suicide and mental health. It’s easy to make generalizations about “society”, but we can be the change we want to see in the world - yeah maybe there’s some assholes on Mastodon or whatever, but there’s no reason to elevate or legitimize toxic opinions like that across the internet. From one vulnerable meat sack to another: your life matters, and so do other people’s lives, no matter what their age or gender. Be kind, y’all.
It's not hard to find correlations with all kinds of events, e.g. the 2008 economic collapse had many knock-on effects and mental health doesn't benefit from families losing homes, jobs, stable community relationships, etc. This has even been studied:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4844458/
> "All studies showed that the economic crisis was an important stressor that had a negative impact on workers’ mental health. Most of the studies documented that a rise in unemployment, increased workload, staff reduction, and wages reduction were linked to an increased rate of mood disorders, anxiety, depression, dysthymia, and suicide."
Is that the reason for the increase in suicide attempts and rates among adolescents since 2010? Who knows - but clearly, rising suicide rates are a sign of societal malaise, indeed this was leveraged as a criticism of communist East Germany, which reportedly had an overall suicide rate twice that of the USA today.
Its always easy to feel bad about kids who need to grow up in todays world. I would recommend considering this before you misplace your birth control. People already do it with species appropriate living conditions for pets.
Edit: Pls dont take this as encouragement for suicide. Read the book, you already have sunken cost, you might as well stick around and enjoy it. Doesnt make procreating any less egoistic though.
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