All other issues aside, it would be shocking if reported rates of teen mental illness did not increase as long-standing stigmas gradually wane and these topic become more acceptable to speak about. If your kid cut themself in 1975, what were you going to do? Ask you husband to spend money to "shrink their head"? More likely you'd hide it, like past generations hid most of their traumas.
Now, there are many outlets for both that teen and their parents (and their teachers, and their friends, and their friends' parents) to say or do something in response. There are resources online that virtually anyone can access, phone numbers you can call, authority figures better-trained to recognize these problems. And perhaps most importantly, we got rid of the absurd mentality that what happens in other families is none of our business, no matter how many unexplained bruises or cuts we witness.
Only now that we are openly discussing and grappling with these issues do we have ay hope of turning the tide.
I agree reporting bias could be a thing, but there are statistics like completed suicide which are less susceptible to it (though still present; you can imagine a suicide being declared an accidental death to help a family "avoid embarrassment"). And those statistics have also been steadily creeping up for decades.
I think reporting bias should be the starting point and the primary area of inquiry when looking at this topic. Unless I'm imagining the recent past where mental illness was literally verboten to speak about and mental health services were widely derided as scams. The change in discourse has been as rapid and dramatic as any social change I can think of, yet the authors seem to think it's enough to simply acknowledge that and focus instead on their many charts, most of which are about self-reporting or diagnoses.
> And perhaps most importantly, we got rid of the absurd mentality that what happens in other families is none of our business
I agree with your general sentiment (more recognition and treatment of mental illness is a good thing), but this line troubles me. Most of what happens in my family should stay in my family. Our business is our business. It's no one else's business. There's nothing absurd about this. There may be exceptions (and a child with severe, untreated mental illness may be an exception), but like all exceptions, they are special cases, not the norm. Let's not do away with all privacy in a rush to "turn the tide"...
I think it is an ongoing process that accelerated over the past 10 or so years. There are still many people who stigmatize mental health issues and view mental health services skeptically at best.
I suppose it depends on where you are. My work sent me from the US to the UK for six months in 2016. The difference in mental health stigma between these two first world nations was staggering. From what I've heard, it's even worse for eastern Europe.
A spiritual void, a loss of social cohesion, isolation, alienation, a loss of a culture that reinforces ways of life that enable flourishing, radical individualism. The decline of traditional religious faith in the West. The sexual revolution and its dreadful distortion of human sexuality. The culture of consumerism and the worship of desire and appetite divorced from reason and one's objective good.
So what's a smell that suggests this is the case? According to the triple melting pot theory, in countries like the US, ethnic identity, under the tendency toward some kind of assimilation, gives way to religious identity as not only religious identity, but a substitute for ethnic identity.
So what happens with the waning of religious identity? Various dehumanizing ideologies start to look attractive. This explains both the appeal of the sexual, racial, and ecological ideologies that have become popular recently. These ideologies promise identity and social belonging, perhaps even an alleged higher purpose, which is to say they offer false and flimsy identities, ones that have political utility for those who control them. Various subcultures, many created by corporate interest around various products, do the same thing. You have "communities", so-called, that center around owning a particular brand of something. Corporate brand constructed false identities.
People don't know who they are. They've alone. They don't know the address of the destination, or even that there is an address. Their horizon goes only as far as satisfying their base appetites, and they pay lip service to ideologies to avoid being shunned from groups without which they cannot satisfy those appetites. And when they do, they discover that their satisfaction isn't all that it is cracked up to be. Here follows the realization that no hope is to be found in what has been sought. From here: suicide, or some higher realization.
>The sexual revolution and its dreadful distortion of human sexuality.
Please explain what you mean by this.
>So what happens with the waning of religious identity? Various dehumanizing ideologies start to look attractive. This explains both the appeal of the sexual, racial, and ecological ideologies that have become popular recently. These ideologies promise identity and social belonging, perhaps even an alleged higher purpose, which is to say they offer false and flimsy identities, ones that have political utility for those who control them.
Two things--firstly, are you suggesting that religion is not a dehumanizing ideology? Moreover are you also suggesting that it also doesn't have political utility? I think both of these are demonstrably false given a brief look at history.
Secondly, you talk about the "appeal" of sexual and racial identities in recent times, and you seem to refer to these identities as "false and flimsy," can you explain what you mean here? Because it just comes off like you're arguing that anyone who doesn't identify as a cis-white heterosexual has a false sense of self.
Not that account, but its obvious a settler society such as America has little unity compared to other societies such as Mestizo or East Asian Societies. A lack of religion, social harmony and cohesion, as well as a typical "American" upbringing leaves many feeling alone and without purpose or family. Combined with the growth of the internet, and you have many people who take up horrid ideologies typically at the far ends of the spectrum to fill the void of not having a loving family or a stable friend group.
Its even worse now that the Russians have funded both the NRA and the BLM movement to radicalize both ends of the spectrum.
So, to piss off as many religious people as possible....
A couple of goat herder psychologist a couple of millennia ago figured out if you told people they had a purpose things in general worked better. The particular problem is they made up a whole bunch of shit and when the sciences in general came around, people when "wow, religion is a bunch of controlling bullshit".
Now, I will say that religion is only mostly a bunch of controlling bullshit, but they did understand people and that is why these religions had staying power that lasted thousands of years in some cases. As we came into the modern age we cast the religion away, but we did forget many of the important lessons on society building it had taught us. In the meantime psychology rapidly expanded, and it was used by both governments and corporations to control individuals with very little of that knowledge being broadly taught to society at large so they could inoculate themselves to it.
Add in global internet allowing instant communication anywhere and the consolidation and formation of massive corporate entities able to shape the communication of our modern lives. That communication tells us to continually consume more of their product, and if you can't you've failed. So yea, that will lead to some problems for sure.
> The particular problem is they made up a whole bunch of shit and when the sciences in general came around, people when "wow, religion is a bunch of controlling bullshit".
I think you have your history a bit backwards.
Galileo is considered the father of modern science, and he was one of the people that believed those goat herders. He argued that his views were in accordance with the Bible, not that the Bible was a bunch of random shit that was made up. Here’s his words on the matter:
>> Holy Scripture and nature both equally derive from the divine Word, the former as the dictation of the Holy Spirit, the latter as the most obedient executrix of God’s commands.[0]
The reading the rest of that letter also seems to indicate that he was pretty heavily invested in his beliefs of religion and science being supportive of one another. The father of modern science believing and arguing for religion kind of makes your whole argument a moot point.
While the historical and societal critique of religion is a common topic, I believe there's more to be gained from a nuanced and respectful dialogue. People expressing disdain for religious beliefs are quite common, and often, this approach tends to overlook the complex interplay between religion, culture, and human psychology.
It's entirely possible to be an atheist and still acknowledge the role and significance of religion in human history and society. Religion, for many, has been a source of moral guidance, community, and comfort. Dismissing it wholesale as 'controlling bullshit' simplifies a very complex aspect of human existence.
I think that we like to look at social media as a cause for problems rather than an affect that worsens said problem Personally as a young person this is 100% due to the hyper vigilance in the news and the rise of helicopter parents, also due to the fact that we are stunting teenagers development by not letting them be y'know TEENAGERS. The hyper vigilance in the news has lead to children being forced to stay inside, which in turn leads to higher social media use, which can worsen overall mental health if not used properly.
Also, I understand the concerns with self diagnosis and "mental illness is quirky" but I don't think it's just that simple, self diagnosis exists because celebrities and mainstream media has put forth mental illnesses and diagnosis as some kind of solution to sadness and minor anxieties, rather than an actual problem with somebody's mental state. Meanwhile people with actual issues have been sidelined, it's not a badge of honour in the sense but a meaningless title to those who don't actually struggle with such issues.
I feel like people in general more easily diagnose themselves and others with depression or other mental diseases recently. I find it hard to judge whether it’s due to any external factor or some form of zeitgeist.
That's addressed in the post. There is some of that, but there are similar increases in hospitalisation for self-harm, which wouldn't be affected by an increase in awareness of mental illness.
Mental illness has become a badge to wear. "I have depression/ADHD/Autism/Bipo/sch"
Once you think you have it, you notice all the systems.
As a medical owner, I'm not going to deny someone money if they are coming. With grey areas, and the lack of science in medical, it very well could be a tracking thing.
I certainly wouldn't tell anyone I had a mental issue in the 90s or 00s. Today, its almost cool.
I suppose the interesting question is what parents of non-sick teens are doing differently from parents of sick teens. Is it a property that some teens are inherently more resilient or is it a property that some teens have a different home environment? There's many post-hoc explanations possible but the really interesting question to me is how some aren't sick.
Is it just like PTSD where most people who encounter combat trauma just make it back fine and even that one-third of those who encounter extreme combat trauma make it back just fine? Or is it that it's like PTSD where most people never encounter traumatic events of any cause and therefore don't have PTSD.
Identifying what's different about those who are sick and those who aren't will probably yield something interesting.
I have three teenagers and they are all very different from each other in terms of personality, interests, work habits, and phone use among other things.
You could place all of them into three distinct challenging scenarios and a different one of them would excel while the others would flounder. But there isn't that kind of variety in most schools, or if there is students are expected to excel in all three scenarios.
From the inside looking out, I think that home environment is the driving factor as I could easily tiger-mom them into deep depression and anxiety. Are they achieving everything of which they are capable? Probably not, but I do see consistent gains in maturity and personal responsibility each year and that really helps put perspective on some of the struggles.
As a counter-study it would be interesting to track the adoption of PowerSchool software across the US and see if that correlates with teen anxiety.
I think the individual makes a lot of difference. Most people can go to a casino and have fun and be fine, most people can go to a bar and hav fun and be fine. Some people can't do either without destroying their life.
Everyone who is skeptical of the proposed plausible cause of social media in causing depression in this thread should explain why their alternative theory holds up to the evidence that no significant increase happened both pre-2010 and is global
To my knowledge there is currently no other better theory other than the rise of social media use that explains the phenomenon. Other proposed explanations such as Bad economy, capitalist alienation, terrible politics, parenting habits, global warming, atomic individualism, and lack of purpose all either cannot be generalized globally or did not start in 2010.
I'm an early millennial and even I feel that the very capable smartphone totally fried my brain. I tried to postpone having one for a very long time because I knew I was prone to screen addiction since my first 486. Now I'm in a point in my life where it's very easy and socially accepted to stagnate my life, so my fried brain is everything I need to get by. But kids still need to grow, the fried brain must hamper them so much more.
> [...] global warming [...] either cannot be generalized globally or did not start in 2010
I guess global warming _can_ be generalized globally?
It sure didn't started in 2010 but neither did social networks.
Facebook opened public access in 2006 which about the same period when Twitter was launched.
_An Inconvenient Truth_ was released in 2006 and it seemed like the start of a global discussion about global warming.
And behind _global warming_, there's actually the overall destruction of our environment by mankind.
I agree that social media is a cause, but the given arguments cannot exclude _global warming_. Quite the opposite.
1. Both parents working jobs, so childhood is spent with ADHD diagnosis / adderall
2. Dating and gender stuff completely changed, no more "going steady" or waiting until marriage, and not even hooking up anymore, now everything old is cringe, but not sure what is supposed to happen. First generation where females will out-earn males and also no one is really sure what they contribute to society anymore
3. The big one... teens grew up with the Internet, and all the capitalist industries and images promoted on TikTok, Instagram, etc. It's a race to the bottom with exploitation and fake online personas, similarly to how crypto tokens are in a race to the bottom with generating fake volume etc. Now you're competing against the whole world.
4. They see very little to look forward to, because of AI and automation depressing jobs. Their dads are probably on opiates while their moms are on antidepressants. Their parents generation probably has the highest level of divorce of any in thousands of years.
5. AI and automation making jobs pay less, everyone having less to begin with, and AI will probably be funnier, sexier and more interesting than they are, and humans will stop even needing each other for anything anymore. Seems like the best case scenario is living in a zoo with AIs surrounding you and being able to change nothing. Plus with climate change and wars. What's to look forward to?
Just leave the United States, if you can afford it.
There is a massive pool of men and women outside the developed world, with different ideas of dating, as well as a more unified center of family, and friends, though, many are more socially conservative and traditional compared to Americans.
Its up to you I guess, but don't pretend like the developed world is the entire world.
Readit News
Now, there are many outlets for both that teen and their parents (and their teachers, and their friends, and their friends' parents) to say or do something in response. There are resources online that virtually anyone can access, phone numbers you can call, authority figures better-trained to recognize these problems. And perhaps most importantly, we got rid of the absurd mentality that what happens in other families is none of our business, no matter how many unexplained bruises or cuts we witness.
Only now that we are openly discussing and grappling with these issues do we have ay hope of turning the tide.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262
I agree with your general sentiment (more recognition and treatment of mental illness is a good thing), but this line troubles me. Most of what happens in my family should stay in my family. Our business is our business. It's no one else's business. There's nothing absurd about this. There may be exceptions (and a child with severe, untreated mental illness may be an exception), but like all exceptions, they are special cases, not the norm. Let's not do away with all privacy in a rush to "turn the tide"...
So what's a smell that suggests this is the case? According to the triple melting pot theory, in countries like the US, ethnic identity, under the tendency toward some kind of assimilation, gives way to religious identity as not only religious identity, but a substitute for ethnic identity.
So what happens with the waning of religious identity? Various dehumanizing ideologies start to look attractive. This explains both the appeal of the sexual, racial, and ecological ideologies that have become popular recently. These ideologies promise identity and social belonging, perhaps even an alleged higher purpose, which is to say they offer false and flimsy identities, ones that have political utility for those who control them. Various subcultures, many created by corporate interest around various products, do the same thing. You have "communities", so-called, that center around owning a particular brand of something. Corporate brand constructed false identities.
People don't know who they are. They've alone. They don't know the address of the destination, or even that there is an address. Their horizon goes only as far as satisfying their base appetites, and they pay lip service to ideologies to avoid being shunned from groups without which they cannot satisfy those appetites. And when they do, they discover that their satisfaction isn't all that it is cracked up to be. Here follows the realization that no hope is to be found in what has been sought. From here: suicide, or some higher realization.
Please explain what you mean by this.
>So what happens with the waning of religious identity? Various dehumanizing ideologies start to look attractive. This explains both the appeal of the sexual, racial, and ecological ideologies that have become popular recently. These ideologies promise identity and social belonging, perhaps even an alleged higher purpose, which is to say they offer false and flimsy identities, ones that have political utility for those who control them.
Two things--firstly, are you suggesting that religion is not a dehumanizing ideology? Moreover are you also suggesting that it also doesn't have political utility? I think both of these are demonstrably false given a brief look at history.
Secondly, you talk about the "appeal" of sexual and racial identities in recent times, and you seem to refer to these identities as "false and flimsy," can you explain what you mean here? Because it just comes off like you're arguing that anyone who doesn't identify as a cis-white heterosexual has a false sense of self.
Its even worse now that the Russians have funded both the NRA and the BLM movement to radicalize both ends of the spectrum.
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/27/765037952/senate-report-revea...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7144436/
https://www.axios.com/2020/06/10/russian-interference-2020-e...
you fell for the Russian Identity politics campaign
A couple of goat herder psychologist a couple of millennia ago figured out if you told people they had a purpose things in general worked better. The particular problem is they made up a whole bunch of shit and when the sciences in general came around, people when "wow, religion is a bunch of controlling bullshit".
Now, I will say that religion is only mostly a bunch of controlling bullshit, but they did understand people and that is why these religions had staying power that lasted thousands of years in some cases. As we came into the modern age we cast the religion away, but we did forget many of the important lessons on society building it had taught us. In the meantime psychology rapidly expanded, and it was used by both governments and corporations to control individuals with very little of that knowledge being broadly taught to society at large so they could inoculate themselves to it.
Add in global internet allowing instant communication anywhere and the consolidation and formation of massive corporate entities able to shape the communication of our modern lives. That communication tells us to continually consume more of their product, and if you can't you've failed. So yea, that will lead to some problems for sure.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think you have your history a bit backwards.
Galileo is considered the father of modern science, and he was one of the people that believed those goat herders. He argued that his views were in accordance with the Bible, not that the Bible was a bunch of random shit that was made up. Here’s his words on the matter:
>> Holy Scripture and nature both equally derive from the divine Word, the former as the dictation of the Holy Spirit, the latter as the most obedient executrix of God’s commands.[0]
The reading the rest of that letter also seems to indicate that he was pretty heavily invested in his beliefs of religion and science being supportive of one another. The father of modern science believing and arguing for religion kind of makes your whole argument a moot point.
[0]: https://web.stanford.edu/~jsabol/certainty/readings/Galileo-...
It's entirely possible to be an atheist and still acknowledge the role and significance of religion in human history and society. Religion, for many, has been a source of moral guidance, community, and comfort. Dismissing it wholesale as 'controlling bullshit' simplifies a very complex aspect of human existence.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/548381/quality-parent-child-rel...
[2] https://www.carolinajournal.com/report-conservative-parents-...
[3] https://ifstudies.org/blog/parenting-is-the-key-to-adolescen...
Also, I understand the concerns with self diagnosis and "mental illness is quirky" but I don't think it's just that simple, self diagnosis exists because celebrities and mainstream media has put forth mental illnesses and diagnosis as some kind of solution to sadness and minor anxieties, rather than an actual problem with somebody's mental state. Meanwhile people with actual issues have been sidelined, it's not a badge of honour in the sense but a meaningless title to those who don't actually struggle with such issues.
Once you think you have it, you notice all the systems.
As a medical owner, I'm not going to deny someone money if they are coming. With grey areas, and the lack of science in medical, it very well could be a tracking thing.
I certainly wouldn't tell anyone I had a mental issue in the 90s or 00s. Today, its almost cool.
If you believe suicide or self harm are common (and valid/acceptable) solutions to your issue, would you not be more likely to do so?
Is it just like PTSD where most people who encounter combat trauma just make it back fine and even that one-third of those who encounter extreme combat trauma make it back just fine? Or is it that it's like PTSD where most people never encounter traumatic events of any cause and therefore don't have PTSD.
Identifying what's different about those who are sick and those who aren't will probably yield something interesting.
You could place all of them into three distinct challenging scenarios and a different one of them would excel while the others would flounder. But there isn't that kind of variety in most schools, or if there is students are expected to excel in all three scenarios.
From the inside looking out, I think that home environment is the driving factor as I could easily tiger-mom them into deep depression and anxiety. Are they achieving everything of which they are capable? Probably not, but I do see consistent gains in maturity and personal responsibility each year and that really helps put perspective on some of the struggles.
As a counter-study it would be interesting to track the adoption of PowerSchool software across the US and see if that correlates with teen anxiety.
To my knowledge there is currently no other better theory other than the rise of social media use that explains the phenomenon. Other proposed explanations such as Bad economy, capitalist alienation, terrible politics, parenting habits, global warming, atomic individualism, and lack of purpose all either cannot be generalized globally or did not start in 2010.
I guess global warming _can_ be generalized globally?
It sure didn't started in 2010 but neither did social networks.
Facebook opened public access in 2006 which about the same period when Twitter was launched.
_An Inconvenient Truth_ was released in 2006 and it seemed like the start of a global discussion about global warming. And behind _global warming_, there's actually the overall destruction of our environment by mankind.
I agree that social media is a cause, but the given arguments cannot exclude _global warming_. Quite the opposite.
It marks the start of concerted white anting of the message and Koch et al funded think tanks to antiprop the fossil fuels are bad message.
An Inconvenient Truth was more the start of some limited central north american awareness starring some local politician or something.
As another poster pointed out:
>Folks in the 60’s thru 80’s expected global nuclear annihilation with some probability.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38936280
2. Dating and gender stuff completely changed, no more "going steady" or waiting until marriage, and not even hooking up anymore, now everything old is cringe, but not sure what is supposed to happen. First generation where females will out-earn males and also no one is really sure what they contribute to society anymore
3. The big one... teens grew up with the Internet, and all the capitalist industries and images promoted on TikTok, Instagram, etc. It's a race to the bottom with exploitation and fake online personas, similarly to how crypto tokens are in a race to the bottom with generating fake volume etc. Now you're competing against the whole world.
4. They see very little to look forward to, because of AI and automation depressing jobs. Their dads are probably on opiates while their moms are on antidepressants. Their parents generation probably has the highest level of divorce of any in thousands of years.
5. AI and automation making jobs pay less, everyone having less to begin with, and AI will probably be funnier, sexier and more interesting than they are, and humans will stop even needing each other for anything anymore. Seems like the best case scenario is living in a zoo with AIs surrounding you and being able to change nothing. Plus with climate change and wars. What's to look forward to?
Just leave the United States, if you can afford it.
There is a massive pool of men and women outside the developed world, with different ideas of dating, as well as a more unified center of family, and friends, though, many are more socially conservative and traditional compared to Americans.
Its up to you I guess, but don't pretend like the developed world is the entire world.