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). Most of the little extra time I had remaining would go to additional extracurricular activities that had the potential to enhance my college application. I only really got to socialize by talking to my teammates on our runs.
As a result, even when I had extra time I was so burnt out and stressed from everything else that I felt consumed by anxiety. I would sometimes start crying spontaneously after I got home in the evenings. Things only started getting better when I started seeing a therapist and worked on my issues over the second half of my high school experience. Not everyone is so lucky.
If we want a healthier society, we need to take a step back and give teenagers a chance to actually live life. Sure, less social media would help, but it won't solve the root of the problem. Today's society demands so much from adolescents for so little in return. It's very easy to think that you're a failure if you don't know exactly who you are and what you want to be at age 17, and that's not a fair expectation for any 17 year old. We shouldn't be surprised that many break under this kind of pressure.
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.
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 schools.
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.
> 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.
That’s quite typical in other places of the world as well. In Italy is just like that for most stem programs; admission is granted to everybody, but the 1st year is just brutal and boring. A lot of people drop.
The upside is that you don’t have that stress on admission. The downside is that some good people lacking grit just drop after 1-2 years (or just take ages to get their degrees) because such classes look pointless but very hard to them - and they’re mostly right.
Note: we don’t usually grade on a curve in Italy. But 80% of the class failing the first time is not unheard of (you don’t get your failing grades recorded or re-pay for retaking a class, either).
> 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 is! We did Scheme (the media scheme distribution), C, Java, Python and then implemented Scheme in Scheme. The theory was that students need to learn the science of algorithmic thinking before worrying about dirty machine representation and limited resource engineering problems. The downside was listening to the incessant complaints from the other sciences students "I just want to take an intro CS class that can teach me what I need to know to succeed at being a script kiddy". Well sorry, our department teaches computer science, not how to script R and how to read DNA sequencer strings in Python.
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.
"College admission rates are important" is an arbitrary thing society developed, which people are increasingly realizing is largely counterproductive and unrelated to anything meaningful.
Getting into a highly selective school mostly just means the student fit one of a handful of profiles at age 18 which the admissions process looked for, most of which have little to do with the students actual abilities or aptitudes. But thanks to nepotism, network effects and the cultural belief in those schools representing "the elite", there is a significant self-fulfilling prophecy.
Overall, society would probably be better if we all admitted it's a farce, and focused more on what people accomplish in college and after, rather than giving such power to the admissions staff at a handful of universities.
> 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.
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.
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.
I think having an extended application process is the point. It selects for people who are good at university, rather than people who were good at high school.
> You’re going to get a bias in here because a lot of folks are STEM focused / high achieving high anxiety types :)
yeah, but you'd expect STEM types to know how to analyze data and realize they aren't the majority and that these studies are not representative of them. I am disappoint.
This is very a common & a very hard to completely avoid bias your entire life. I had tenured (internationally renowned) math professors at university that would sometimes intuitively react like that to stuff in everyday life. Cut people some slack.
yes, I agree, that's what I was advocating: HNers with a personal anecdotal axe to grind frequently throw away the value of good posts because they have just have to grind their axe axe again.
Whether social media is harming children's development is an interesting and important question and of a scientific nature, so
people here should cut the researchers some slack and at least read the evidence at face value
I guarantee most of these "high achieving high anxiety types" live with significantly less anxiety than customer service reps/bag handlers/food service workers.
The parent comment was asserting that STEM types are “high anxiety” and implicitly dismissing non-STEM people as somehow having less anxiety. I think it is fair and healthy to acknowledge that, as you say, everyone has “the worst stress of their life”, regardless of STEM-ness.
I interpreted the comment differently. I thought it was saying that the pressures and anxieties of 'high anxiety' STEM people are not necessarily representative of the average person's experience. I.e. saying that the readers of hacker news are more likely to feel the stresses of feeling the need to be hyper successful, whereas others migh on average be more well adjusted
I don’t think it dismissed non-stem people, but there is plenty of data supporting anxiety correlates with intelligence. It is not surprising that HN is an anxious group.
Plot twist: our culture is defined by our collective values, not by our leaders. Leaders who tap into narratives of victimhood are only enabled to rise because enough of us like to see themselves as an aggrieved victim of oppression. Including those who see culture as something imposed on them by leaders and see themselves as a victim of cultural wars.
? The most watched news media in America is Fox News. The leading party in Congress is the Republican party. In actual statistical terms and in actual political power terms, that's the definition of mainstream, but somehow those who have the power like to pretend Hollywood has it, so they can sell a narrative of victimhood even as their culture is, just as a matter of fact, the dominant one.
I honestly see value in having scars, both the physical and mental varieties. Scars create resilience. We saw this during the recent pandemic. The upper-middle class "high achieving, high anxiety" types who had never faced any real danger or hardship were the most likely to panic and demand all sorts of ridiculous lockdowns and mandates, even though the vast majority of them were never at any significant risk. Whereas blue-collar workers and those accustomed to engaging in physically dangerous activities were generally much more sanguine and level-headed about the whole thing.
Some people just need to harden the f*** up and quit catastrophizing every little thing.
I don't think that's why the upper middle class demanded lock downs and blue collar didn't. I think the driver was financial stability. Upper middle class likely has a nice emergency fund and could do their job from home. Essentially a nice vacation. Blue collar workers got to choose between welfare and starving.
Oddly, I think the population density will turn out to be a factor. Son was in Laramie for most of it and the early strains of Covid didn't do much there, I suspect because people were farther apart over unit of time.
Rather than being in a cube farm with the A/C recycling the air over and over.
The blue-collar construction workers and farmers that I know all thought the lockdowns were stupid and ignored the rules. Financial stability or lack thereof was not the reason.
The blue collar workers reward for their scar induced mindset was to go back to work. White collar workers in large part were able to parlay the lock down into permanent work from home.
Perhaps it's not scars and just the ability to make lemonade when given lemons?
>The blue-collar construction workers and farmers that I know all thought the lockdowns were stupid and ignored the rules. Financial stability or lack thereof was not the reason.
I really don't want to wade into this tarpit but it was most certainly financial stability for those that I know.
Lol have you ever been to a farm? Farmers go to social events, visit friends, etc just like anyone else. Most of them laughed at lockdown rules and kept living their lives just as before.
Lockdowns or not, nobody could've avoided getting covid in the long term. It's just too contagious. The only way out is letting it run through the population and mutate. Flattening the curve might alleviate strain on the medical system but it also prolongs the time to benign mutations.
Scars innately look different from healthy tissue. The lessons learned in response of trauma can likewise be maladaptive. Certainly people, especially those most self-isolated during the pandemic, could use more contact with the so-called "real world." But not everything formed as part of resilience is as it should be.
There is no evidence that scars are an inherently better tissue than non injured tissue. Torn ligaments, cut tendons, skin marring from burns, etc… these don’t bounce back 110% from their original.
You missed the point there. Going though hardships and injuries (to an extent) builds mental resilience and the ability to accept risks without succumbing to irrational panic.
>> Some people just need to harden the f** up and quit catastrophizing every little thing.
You assume that this is simply a matter a making a decision and acting on it -- which for you may be true.
There are others that will find this difficult-to-impossible to achieve regardless of their intellectual desire to change. Their experience of anxiety may not be a result of "catastrophizing" or "being soft."
Im not trying to be argumentative, but at that point is this behavior worth encouraging?
I guess whose fault is it but their own? We can all blame our upbringing and it definitely does affect us, but how else can you change the cycle without telling someone to snap out of it ?
Sometimes it takes tough love, sometimes it takes nurturing and understanding, sometimes it takes a blend of the two, sometimes it takes an entirely different track.
Do you honestly not see how your own narrative could be seen as dismissive to the vast majority of the world? And yes, I do see value in comparing scars, as do most people who do not reside in the high tower. I understand the social rift between you and I is comparable to living on a different planet, and I forgive you for not getting that, but others may not. Please just understand that our current situation is particularly perilous and likely will not last long. I hope you are prepared and able to cope with greater stressors.
The physical experience and effects of enduring a stressful environment is the same for everyone regardless of who they are, where they're from, or what they are doing.
An equivalent high stress environment can occur whether working in an executive office, working in a call center or selling bracelets on the street.
Learning to overcome high stress experiences is a transferrable skill regardless of the context in which it was learned.
> 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 large these things cost money and the person who doesn't have to worry about having enough money for such things is going to have less stress in their life.
...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.
Stress is not equivalent across all.
Mr BMW has no idea how much his energy bill was last month, smiles every time he pays his mortgage. Single mom carries a past due balance of $800 and barely makes rent each month. Two different, not equivalent, worlds.
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.
How many of the people claiming that it's "all the same" ever actually talk to any of the low-status people? I mean, where does your knowledge come from?
Our leaders are attempting to start a nuclear war, after twenty years of disastrous wars that have enriched armaments manufacturers while murdering millions of innocents.
Working people haven't had a raise since 1971.
We spend twice as much on health care as any other nation, but only Peru, Brazil, and several nations in Eastern Europe had worse results from covid. All of Africa cared for covid cases better than we did.
I've done waiting/service type jobs. For me, the stress during the work period was way higher than anything in my software/business jobs. But, every night when I got off work, the stress was immediately gone. That shift was over, and the tomorrow really was new day. With my office jobs the max stress is lower, but it also never really goes away.
This is it. I never took home stress from any previous job until I got an office job. (AutoCAD Draftsman for Fire/Gas Industrial systems).
My life as a radioshack wage slave began and ended when I clocked in and out. If something was fucked when we left the previous night that was tomorrows problem. It's retail, no one is being paid enough to truly care.
Doing contract work for engineers who are willfully ignorant of fire code causes me lasting stress in my soul.
Either way the biggest stress is still financial and I'll stop stressing about that when I'm dead.
I ran entire kitchens of high volume restaurants...sometimes single handedly. I loved it. I wasn't happy unless I was getting crushed. Some of my best memories are from working mothersday and getting absolutely blitzed. Compared to being a developer, I wish every god damned day I could be back in a kitchen. But the pay is absolute shite.
Taboo the word "anxiety" here — you're using it to mean "environmental stressors" while the GP is using it to mean "a psychological trait of not dealing well with such stressors, due to a higher baseline feeling of stress, and/or a magnified experience of stressors."
Compare/contrast: "living in exurban Detroit is depressing" (= has many environmental depressors) vs "poets are usually depressives" (= depressive disorders being common among people who choose to become poets.)
We use different words (most of the time) for these two things when speaking of depression, but often aren't so careful with anxiety.
Anxiety is an internal response that can be expected to be different for different individuals under the same circumstances.
Trying to judge whether or not another individual "ought to" experience anxiety in a given situation is a matter of opinion and it has no bearing on what the other person is experiencing.
As this sort of argument always boils down to privilege, I'll throw my two cents in and say probably the biggest privilege (for a regular ass middle class person) is having a parent who knows math.
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.
Those browsing HN still have sprint deadlines. Browsing HN creates more stress.
Or keep online 24 hours or spend the night mentally trying to solve an abstract issue. At 5pm they are done.
Different stresses / pressures. How many are learning a new language in their freetime just to keep employed. How many people create side projects to land employment at a coffee shop?
To compare employment how many coffee shops test if an employee can make a cup during the interview? How many people are excluded from an interview because they only made starbucks coffee at a previous position.. no way they can figure out McDonalds coffee machines.. How many are asked to go through a take home coffee making task? None..
Many developers work two jobs. Many jobs prevent employees from doing this. Many employees work on free open source. Many companies try to prevent or control this. Some do it for rent, child payments, mortgage or car payments.
I made minimum wage at my first job. Didn't cross the poverty line until my 3rd or 4th job years later. Things might be different now, I started after the .com crash.
Difference groups in the US face different pressures. Few people have it easy. I think it would be difficult to come to one answers. Some thoughts:
GROUP A - growing population, roughly same number of "top" universities, resulting in ridiculous competition and pressure to succeed. Getting into Harvard 2012 <> Getting into Harvard 1972.
GROUP B - working class. super hard. income barely grows but rents and costs grow faster. You're squeezed between two walls and it gets tighter each year. You work more only to stay afloat. Eventually you can only work 24hrs a day. Feels like my parents' life in 1980.
GROUP C - already doing well because dad is a CEO. But because of income earning potential inequality, the top 0.01% makes 20x as much as 0.1%, hence brutal pressure to make it into upper-upper-echelon. Cry me a river, i get it.
GROUP D - Immigrant. immigration is harder. lines are longer. there is nationalism and racism. You work hard, but feel trapped by the system, even if you're doing OK income-wise.
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 the increase in mental health issues is due to increasing admissions pressure over the years, which many people have brought up anecdotally. Whether or not the majority of high schoolers experience that pressure doesn't imply that it still couldn't be part of the problem (which also, incidentally, isn't experienced by a majority of high schoolers).
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.
Where did this 40% come from and is it lumping in all generations or just Gen-Z?
I found this source that may or many not be authoritative that says 57% of Gen-Z is attending college, furthermore I have heard from the grapevine that Gen Z has been pushed more into STEM than any other generation.
Personally as a developer that is overseeing hiring, I see more and more Gen-Z people coming into the pipeline in greater numbers. Looking at my alma mater(public state level engineering college) the CS dept is exploding. When I attended in 06, it was more of a snoozefest.
But this is one datapoint and probably biased. It just seems like every Gen-Z I encounter(im a millenial) seems very pragmatic and cynical in their choices and that may be leading to more practical career choices like STEM.
Even if someone isn't going to an elite university, they may need to compete for scholarships, admission to selective programs (e.g. nursing), etc.
It is also possible that some people competed for selective programs but failed to get in.
Finally, it's possible that even people who didn't realistically need or want to get into a selective program still feel a social expectation that they keep up with those who do.
You can probably generalize and say that most teens stress about competing or despair about their prospects. I'd nitpick your use of stats, but I don't want to miss the forest for the trees.
I don't know where you got those numbers. For the past 20ish years or so, the rallying cry in American politics is that everyone needs to go to college in order to have a job.
It's only recent that the left is pushing for jobs that don't require college degrees.
I also haven’t heard of a change in the narrative where jobs that don’t require degrees are pushed by the left. If anything I see people calling for higher washes for low end jobs but that’s a separate issue entirely.
This is accurate. I barely passed high school with heavy help from the counseling team. Then I went to a community college for a few years with low stress and learned how to study before transferring to a liberal arts college. I count myself lucky that I ended up in tech with an average career given my lack of guidance and motivation in my younger years. I wasn't anxious until more recently when I started building a house.
A good point that exposes some major bias behind my anecdote. With that said, if these expectations start at elite schools and slowly trickle down, would that not cause a rise in the aggregate across all teenagers over time?
Seems like a strong assumption that it necessarily does splash damage beyond a certain cohort. I went to a public HS of 4K in the 00s only AP Juniors/Seniors were concerned with this kind of thing and AP kids were only friends with other AP kids (for obvious reasons); I'd doubt that've changed by 2012.
Well that's not surprising, urban public schools, at least in the major American city I'm from, are about figuring out who's a good pencil-pusher as early as possible then segregating them from the rest of the riff-raff until they graduate HS. Most of the cohort I'm talking about likely got invited to a 'gifted' elementary school somewhere around 5th or 6th grade or a 7th/8th grade program attached to one of the top HSs.
I only know this cohort well enough because I was on the debate team which most've them used as an extra-curricular for their college application CV but weren't serious about winning.
At your school, sure. Not at the one I taught at in the 10s. And from knowing other teachers then, I'd guess the pressure was high at only one, maybe two, of the six high schools in the area.
“Trickle down” isn’t necessarily a good mental model here. Maybe the high achieving types from across the country and world are increasingly concentrating their attention into admission to a few top universities. So the max effort expended by the top students may be increasing, but the median effort could be unchanged or dropping.
> 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.
You’re right, although I’ll point out that this doesn’t directly contradict what the GP said: it’s possible to both stress over your future and go to a less prominent school (or no school at all).
> Among adult Americans, only a third have bachelors degrees
Sure, but this is very skewed by older Americans having low rates of degrees. A lot more than 33% of current American 24 year-olds have Bachelors degrees. And that more accurately reflects the expectations on teenagers than low rates of degrees among Boomers.
For 4-year college, the enrollment number is 31% for 2020. Total enrollment including 2-year is 40%. The total number of actual graduates is probably slightly less than this.
In the U.S., around 86% of kids graduate high school[1], around 63% of high school graduates go to 4-year colleges[2], and around 64% of them graduate within 6 years[3].
By that logic around 35% of 24-year-old Americans have bachelor degrees. More than a third, but not by much.
You forget the cost of "just" those state universities still requires many students to get scholarships to afford. So the pressure is not just about getting into a good university, for many it is being able to go at all.
Hate to be that guy[1], but this does not refute the comment you're replying to.
1. There may be more than one important explanation.
2. Your data doesn't provide any information relevant to the evaluation of the hypothesis.
3. Many of the students at non-elite universities, however you define that term, are the ones that were not successful in their quest to go to an elite university. That's why the acceptance rate is so low. Those students would be the most likely to be affected by changes in the competitiveness of college admissions in the wake of the Great Recession, not the ones that were successful.
4. "Certainly the high pressure scholastic environment of certain high schools is not common." This is conjecture. It does not seem plausible that it is "not common".
> If we want a healthier society, we need to take a step back and give teenagers a chance to actually live life.
We (American here) need to take a step back and let everyone enjoy life. That means providing healthcare, food, and shelter to every single person so that they can live their life and work in a non-anxiety-inducing way. Every therapist I've talked to in the past few years has told me that they think the number one thing that would reduce their workload is if people weren't so stressed about paying for the most basic things for their family. Most of the people they see would still have issues they need to deal with, but wouldn't be on the precipice of suicide and taking loads of pills. That's an anecdote, but to me it's clear that the "hustle culture" and lack of social support have combined in the USA to make things very hard for the average American. This applies to kids directly, too, because that hustle has to start pre-college!
I agree wholeheartedly. I was working a part time job in highschool to pay for my gas and other expenses, when I should have been doing kid things. Also as an early teenager I turned to online communities because there was no other way to interact with irl friends outside of school. It was too dangerous to ride a bike to a friends house (cars), I couldn't drive, and my parents were always working so they couldn't give me rides. I still needed some sort of social interaction though, so of course I turned to the internet.
right, teen kids are so worried about healthcare costs! Gimmie a break, your comment has nothing to do with the article, it's low effort and a better fit for reddit
I'm not yet 40 but I am a male single parent. With the closest family being 1300 miles away. Last year between March-May my health deteriorated so bad that I went from being fine to walking with a cane in less than 2 months. Once finally diagnosed, I went from diagnoses to major surgery in less than 12 days.
My daughter (just turned 16), picked up the slack as I become pretty much bed ridden.
I can attest that this had a very destermental effect on her health. Not only having to manage the house, school, etc but also without any support from anyone. At the same time watching me go from someone who use to be able to squat 500lbs to someone who couldn't be trusted to wash dishes without breaking a few because I had lost all feeling, balance, and depth perception.
Go one night, hearing your daughter sob in her room because she doesn't want you to see she's hurting and scared from what YOU are going through and then come back and comment because right now you are a very ignorant human to think it doesn't. Especially since see already lost one parent.
I think you identified something here. Kids are very capable, often more than us and if we let them, they can be just like adults. But we really do need them to just be kids and not carry all our burdens. I really hope you two get a break.
That is a good question, although it is tangential as even with socialized medicine, these kind of issues happen. People get seriously ill and die every day, regardless of the amount of care they receive.
you're ignorant or extremely privileged if you think kids dont worry. have you ever had a parent be ill and your family has no money for their treatment?
OP is sarcastically pointing out that since the US has never had socialized health care, that cannot be the explanation for a sudden uptick in mental health issues circa 2012.
Well, in fairness, OP is right: everybody would be under a lot less stress if all of their needs were met for the entirety of their lives with no expectation to ever contribute anything. He's missing the realization that somebody has to contribute something to meet the needs of all the people whose needs are being met regardless of their contribution, which is why communism always fails in practice.
Everybody would be under a lot less stress if [a basic level] of their needs were met [to avoid at the very least bankruptcy and preventable life-long injury or even death] for the entirety of their lives with no expectation to ever contribute anything. He's missing the realization that [everyone] has to contribute something [via progressive taxation] to meet the [basic level of] needs of all the people whose [basic level of] needs are being met regardless of their contribution, which is why [every other industrialized nation, even with failures and economic issues in parts of their systems, is able to provide at least this basic level for their citizens, except for the US because of for-profit healthcare lobbyists].
Most teenagers don't stress over college admissions in my experience. The top like 30% academically successful teens probably do, but I believe this effect is seen across teenagers of all groups
I don't think you're quite right, as that might not account for those that are missing out on an admission.
Not everyone is stressed ONLY about admissions to college or University, many kids are stressed because of the pressure to be something. You might find higher rates of depression in those that don't get an admission because of the pressure to make something of themselves.
When I was in my final year (2011) I remember feeling like I was under so much pressure to know what I wanted to do and have something lined up. Each decision felt like it had significant consequences.
Presuming people who aren’t stressed about college admissions aren’t instead stressed about not going to college and having extremely stunted career prospects.
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 telling me this every moment of my life.
Get the grade or become a ditch digger. Pursue the right interests or be poor all of your life.
There is NO CHILL. College is, for most people, a ONE TIME opportunity - the default track is you go to college after high school, and there are ways to do it after but most people don't end up doing it. Degree programs mostly assume you're coming out of high school. Getting a degree while paying for living expenses is practically impossible without going into massive debt, which you may or may not be tolerant of the risk to take on. You can't work min wage and make rent in most places, let alone go to a community college. Young people's economics already is horrific.
I say this as someone who didn't have the opportunity to get a degree and who managed to scrape my way into a software engineering career - something that I don't recommend anyone do as its nearly impossible without connections and mentorship. Structurally we are making kids make decisions that will effect their entire lives and giving almost no recourse to anyone who can't make it happen right at 18. If you have a shitty home life, you're fucked. If you have health problems, you're fucked. There's very few second chances for college in this society.
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.
So many people here want to say, "That's not it, it's {something else}."
Might be more fruitful to argue about a stack-rank of the things.
But, as the father of a son who is a freshman in college at a Research 1 university, I'll say that his college experience so closely mirrors my enterprise organization work bullshit experience it's shocking. And he doesn't have a social media account or a mobile phone.
So, my humble counter is: it's all of it. We've entered a peak bullshit culture moment in time. We throw a million negative and spurious cultural and professional expectations at young people and then couple that with the death of a reasonable middle class end-game, and then are shocked that so many of them, and the rest of us, are angry and unhealthy and impoverished in various "whole person" ways.
IMHO peak BS is yet to come. Humans want to believe there is only one problem responsible for complex outcomes. Life seems simpler and understandable. Solutions consist of doing this or stopping that. The reality is much more complex and potential solutions always have consequences in addition to the ones desired. For me it always comes back to population. The population of the US (and planet) have more than doubled during my life time. Out psychological and social infrastructure that worked well for smaller groups of people has not scaled well.
I understand your point, because I was the same. But I’m not sure our experience is a super common one among teens.
Reason I think this now, is that I have volunteered at large local high schools for college admission help. There just aren’t that many students who get pushed or push themselves like this. The majority in the US don’t go to college, and the vast majority don’t put in a stressful amount of effort into college/career prep and extra-curricular activities.
I don’t know what theory to replace it with, but I don’t think the majority of the students in the US are overworked like this.
You're in a bubble. It's nowhere near that hard to get into non-elite universities, which the vast majority of college-bound students attend. Just keeping your grades up and doing well on a standardized test will get you into a good (well-regarded in at least some fields, very well-known at least regionally) state school—and the ones in the next couple tiers under that are even more lax. Then there are community colleges—ask nicely and they'll probably let you in at least on a probational basis, even if your grades were incredibly bad in high school and you don't have much else going for you.
And that's for the students that go at all.
[EDIT] Incidentally, from tales told by my various teacher friends, the students who genuinely have crazy-busy schedules are almost always the ones who are extremely into playing two or more sports. Even half-serious participation (so, maaaaybe gunning to play college ball, plus the mostly-delusional but fairly-common parental aspirations of having a pro-league kid) means being in a league that makes you travel a lot, and lots and lots of practice, for each sport, plus extra training camps and shit like that. I believe tales of some schools where the students are stressed over academics and non-sports extracurriculars (plus the single requisite sport to keep Harvard from binning your application) but out in the vast reaches of non-elite America, only a few students have very-high schedule pressure, and most (not all, but most) of those are because of a strong focus on sports.
Im an immigrant that attended a community college, transferred to a “top 10 CS Uni”.
the CC didn’t even acknowledge the school I went to exists so i just took some placement tests that landed me at Calc 1 etc
most americans dont know how good they have it, sure things could be better but you’re literally better off than most of the world no matter what class you’re born in here
I think community colleges are one of those under-appreciated excellent institutions the US has (in addition to our institutions and systems that actually do kinda suck, compared to our peers, that get a lot more attention). They're available just about everywhere that many people live, it's pretty easy to get them to give you a chance unless you have a very recent history of being a committed academic screw-up—even if your history's a bit unusual, or you've had some screw-ups farther in the past—and in a couple years you can establish a record that represents a big step toward achieving an at-least middling life outcome, while opening up access to the next steps.
I hope the admissions process and the rest of it was still relatively painless, despite their not recognizing your school. I'm sure immigration itself was pretty unpleasant—sorry about that :-/
Exactly, its a bubble many teens feel they are in, that's the problem.
It's easy to say years later "You're in a bubble", but that doesnt make the situation any better.
I'll likely look back on my life when I'm retired and say "I was in a bubble" worrying about housing prices and the cost of living, but that doesn't diminish its importance to me right now.
For about 2.5 years starting in 2015 I was a high school teacher at a Title I (low income area) school. There was a lot of anxiety and depression -- obviously not far outside trends around that. Very, very few kids were doing extracurriculars beyond maybe one sport, or a part-time job for a minority of the juniors and seniors. The (very) few kids who were oversubscribed the way you were didn't seem to have a rate of anxiety or depression greater than their peers, and the greatest incidence seemed to be in the lowest-achieving students.
Obviously this is anecdotal, and there can be multiple causes, but teaching gives you a lot of anecdotes and they don't seem to fit this narrative.
This is my experience as well, having multiple relatives who have worked at Title 1 schools and going to public school myself which was on the poverty side of things.
They aren't being drafted to go fight in Vietnam. The Russians aren't bombing our cities. The main health problem is eating too much food, not too little. Teens aren't even expected to have jobs anymore. (In my day, teens got jobs at 16.)
My dad volunteered in WW2. He expected to die in combat, as his cohort had an 80% casualty rate. 4 out of 5. Every mission meant holes in the airplane, and you stayed on course and took it. He helplessly watched men die. His best friend had his face burned off. When he returned home, he thought the concerns on the home front were trivial. After all, they were going to live another day.
My grandfather survived Pearl Harbor and became a B-25 pilot in one of those cohorts with an 80%+ casualty rate. As a kid, I enjoyed reading and hearing about his experiences. It made me proud of his service. But I'm not sure it lessened the stresses and anxieties I felt during my own adolescence. Years later when a close family member had a near death/should have died experience, that meaningfully altered my perspective on life - because I experienced it first hand.
I feel like this is because school, especially college, and particularly exams, is about as high-stakes as most people's lives ever get, so they look back at that time as peak-anxiety. Think about it: you're being evaluated and the result of that evaluation shapes the next step in the pipeline, and ultimately the trajectory of the rest of your life! Well, at least that's what the university officials, professors, your peers and parents all tell you. You pretty much have a series of "one chance" events that you must pass or you're done for. Failure of any step is permanent, and affects your average (seemingly) forever.
The whole path from elementary school through to college graduation feels like a career development game where the stakes are raised every year. Fail once off the path, and it's Walmart Greeter for you, forever! It's no wonder I still wake up in a cold sweat over it, 30 years on.
> During the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), authorities narrowed the content down to mostly texts on Neo-Confucian orthodoxy; the highest degree, the jinshi (Chinese: 進士), became essential for the highest offices. On the other hand, holders of the basic degree, the shengyuan (生員), became vastly oversupplied, resulting in holders who could not hope for office. Wealthy families, especially from the merchant class, could opt into the system by educating their sons or by purchasing degrees. During the late 19th century, some critics within Qing China blamed the examination system for stifling scientific and technical knowledge, and urged for some reforms. At the time, China had about one civil licentiate per 1000 people. Due to the stringent requirements, there was only a 1% passing rate among the two or three million annual applicants who took the exams.[3]
Something to consider is that many European countries aggressively track students in conjunction with that free/cheap college. As a consequence, failing during early education can put them onto the vocational track much earlier than you’d see for a U.S. student.
We need to stop knocking vocational programs in the US IMO. College has a learning modality that is not well suited for everyone. I wish I could find the Youtube video but there is a German Manufacturer of CNC machines in the US. Their apprentice program looked excellent/fun. The students were building electric bikes and motors - learning undergraduate level electronics in a hands one fashion - using CAD - then milling the parts out on a multimillion dollar machines. Mostly learning by doing. Getting paid to do so and would likely have a job when finished.
In the US there is a perception that the vocational or trades route mean failure. We tend to think of trades as an expense, dangerous or someone that works on an assembly line. Some people just get bored sitting in a classroom.
100%. Stuff that needs done, will still need done and a lot of it is going to be difficult to robot away.
The trades have never been busier, and all the different trades I see at different job sites have the 30 whatever being the young person.
Not only are they in demand, but can pay pretty decently as well, plus have directly applicable individual life uses, causing most of us tradesmen to spend very little $ maintaining our own things (cars, houses, etc).
Go to college, awesome. Or learn to use your hands and do something well, awesome.
The stuck in retail / service middle ground seems to be the hardest path in life, and obviously so very subjective, but I'd find that long term path not very internally rewarding, either.
Yeah, probably the main reason that US high schools seem to perform worse than other countries is that the US doesn't kick students out in middle school.
My son is 10 and is naturally accelerated across many subjects (12th grade proficiency in ELA, 9th grade proficiency in Math, talented in music, writing, etc).
We have been actively indoctrinating our kids with the idea that college is not the be-all-end-all, that they should NOT apply for Ivy schools, 3rd tier schools are very good and if they want to go abroad or even eschew college altogether, we will support them. I've seen the effects that college admissions have on kids, especially in schools like Gunn and Palo Alto high in the Bay Area. Children committing suicide because they screw up a test is disgusting.
There is NO WAY I'm letting my kids go through that mental hell. And from some of the TikTok videos I've seen, you can dedicate your entire life to having a top application (sports, grades, extra curricular activities) and still get completely rejected by all Tier 1 schools. I won't allow my children to go through that just to be subjected to the whims of a racist, capricious admissions board.
To be a good parent is to remind your child that a life's worth and future does not amount to what school they may get into or what career they may have. There is much more to life.
Sure it is. We get indoctrinated that murder & rape are bad, that eating vegetables is good, that you should brush your teeth, that the scientific method is a good approach for discovery, etc. Raising children is an exercise in indoctrinating them; no one (typically) objects.
It's also important to note that social media doesn't operate in isolation. We can blame social media all we want, but when we keep preferring candidates in the hiring process who have presentable social media, it's just amplified for teens. Now they have to keep up a grand social media presence, good grades, stay in physical shape, manage their changing family dynamics, get and hold a job, and their own internal systems changing on them.
It's no wonder stress levels are peaking. We demand they carry immense burdens the second they're able to hold a full conversation, but without any of the freedoms associated with responsibility. Can't move out, can't afford help, so what do we really expect to happen when people are placed into such conditions?
We place them under constant pressure, and act surprised that this pressure hurts. Why can't you be more like your sister who's doing good in school? Look at your cousin he got a job already and he's only 16. When you turn 18 you need to have your act together because I'm kicking you out. Endless pressure because we are unable to process our own feelings of insignificance, we just project it on kids all without the help of social media.
The rising wealth inquality amplifies these problems more in every way.
Social media gets a lot of negative attention but there's also a huge positive here. You can connect with others who get you and can maybe help you get through those unbearable days - they make it feel tolerable. And so for people to pin the blame entirely on social media, we're just going to cause so much more harm when we realize how many teens are out there that are only avoiding suicide marginally because of social media.
I only avoided suicide because of social media. I had no way to hang out with friends because my parents were always too busy working to take me places so I talked with my online friends to numb the pain.
It's sad that you depended on your parents for transport to your friends. Ideally a teenager would be able to walk or ride a bicycle to hang out with peers. Or take a bus. Did you live in a place where homes were very far apart?
That’s got to be an outlier? Small remote town + over aggressive cops with nothing better to do. This same exact story comes up in these conversations repeatedly. One would think that if there was an epidemic of parents being arrested we would hear more about it.
Around where I live (suburban though not as remote as the place in the article) I see groups of kids by themselves all the time. Older than age 9, but still.
There's a LOT of different organisations that all had to contribute to create a result this bad. Cops, yes, but that's just step 1. Social workers, of at least 2 different organisations. The justice system, including prosecutors and judges ... because if they wouldn't back the social workers there's nothing they could have done.
... which adds up to a lot of people that could have stopped this if they wanted to. NONE of them did.
Coincidentally 2012 is IIRC the year I bought (then a university student) my first smart phone. IIRC when doing my abroad term overseas the american students all had smartphones in like 2010, I think most where on plans that provided smartphones eventually.
So I would not be surprised if smartphones are part of the reason for a poor state of mental heath.
I agree that the college admissions process is quite stressful, and we should take a critical look at it. But did it really only begin happening around 2012? Across all demographics? I don't think that this explanation really fits the data.
> I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process.
I have absolutely no data to back this up but a difficult college admission process isn't novel to 2012+. This is also ignores the plenty of kids/young adults that never went to college and still suffer from whatever this epidemic is.
We'd need to review data for people who didn't go to undergrad/grad to see if your idea still holds truth.
I don't agree. If you past the point where you are rising new potential and you have any income or some kind of right to income virtually nothing is expected of you. Kids in the mandatory school years face a fair amount of expectations in return for nothing tangible and only receive a smaller portion of the modern ultra conveniences.
while true, teenagers in particular have lost a great degree of the agency that was afforded to prior generations. the concept using surveillance devices on your children did not exist 20 years ago and yet you can see threads of HNers discussing how they or their schools monitor their children quite regularly.
It gets harder every year. Twenty years ago you would've said cabin in the woods, but now you have to be a licensed electrician/general contractor/plumber to build a cabin, and the woods aren't zoned for residential. They'll be coming for the people in vans next.
Grade inflation could be part of this. Look at canadian university admission averages. [1] What percentage of students had 95% or higher grade in high school?
I have a son who’s a sophomore (15 yo, second year in HS) and this comment absolutely rings true. He fences competitively (2 HR training four times a week plus a few hrs with physical therapist) and his life pretty much consists of school, homework and sports.
He has to be at school at 7:45am so gets up around 6am, goes to bed around 11am usually, so much for the 8 hrs of sleep per night!
And he hasn’t even started the college death March yet.
1. Why does he have to fence competitively? Is it not merely a choice/preference?
2. Same question but for any sports.
As for college, what is he/you aspiring to? Is it some average university like Oklahoma State University or something like UCLA?
I've yet to see evidence that it is hard/competitive to get into the former. And while people who go to highly ranked schools do have a minor advantage, it is fairly slight. I've been to both types of schools, so I have an idea.
School, homework, and sports. But what is he missing? Are you saying there is zero time for
- hanging out with friends
- going on outings with the family (skiing or to the movies)
- self-directed activities - walking, photography, church groups, getting a job
?
If you're saying there's ZERO time for those things, I find it hard to believe. Weekends there is no school. The days are not consumed with training and homework, I guess.
When I was in HS, my mother strongly encouraged me to engage in competitive sports to keep me away from the neighborhood crew. Most days that meant a 530am alarm clock, 615am in the pool, and after-school workouts too. So more like 3.5 hrs daily. Then a nap before dinner, then homework. Keeping busy with structured activities kept me out of trouble. The control group, my brother, got in lots more trouble than I did.
I had time for friends and self-directed activities, especially off season.
Not OP, but I think I get what you mean - my own son, who just started college, went through the same grind and honestly had been on it since elementary school. So technically, no, nobody has to do this stuff, and in reality there's a low ROI for most of it. My son (chose to) do a lot of extracurriculars to fluff up his college application in the hopes of getting into an MIT or a Stanford... and still didn't get in. He could have gotten away with doing a lot less than he did and still would have ended up in the same (good) state school he ended up in. But kids in affluent areas are surrounded by suggestions that you do have to do this stuff to get into a "good" school, so they get caught up in it.
I agree that this is a serious issue. I know 3 kids who graduated in 2019 and got into top universities. Three years later
-- One flatly refused to leave home despite a lot of pushing from their parents. They are working at the local theater and taking community college courses here and there with no real future plans or goals
-- One also decided to go to CC, with her parent's support this time. She's 21, just got married, and has decided to be a vet tech with the anticipation of being a SAH wife and mother.[0]
-- One went to a top university and had a mental breakdown earlier this year - going back home and almost refusing to get out of bed or eat. Fortunately(?) this happened over a 4 week winter break, and with support from her parents and a prescription for anti-depressants she is back in school.
Not very inspiring outcomes. I personally think that the pressure from high school really ended up convincing them that they never wanted to work that hard again.
[0] 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.
> 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 people that go to grad school and take on tons of debt, only to be in a position to try to start having kids in their late 30s/early 40s seem a lot more short-sighted. I watched some consumer interviews while I was at my last employer. The market segment we were interviewing were very high achieving people, but some of them were 38+ and saying they're thinking about having kids soon; there's like a 25% chance that ship has already sailed, even ignoring the reality of being almost 60 when they graduate from high school.
I suppose it comes down to knowing what you want out of life and what will bring you satisfaction with the time you've got.
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 earth she's going to support herself. Life insurance only lasts so long.
I'm old enough to have seen a lot of young happy couples turn into divorced bitter singles and I can't speak to the average experience but in my circle, the women end up screwed. They've got the kids, ( the ex wanted nothing to do with the kids ) they've got no income ( the ex either has no money or is fighting tooth and nail to avoid sending any money ) and they are living off of parents, friends, and social services trying to find some job they can do part time ( no daycare ) that has a hope of supporting them.
Some of these women stayed in bad circumstances for a long time because they knew how hard it would be to manage without their spouse. Some women are still in terrible circumstances because they can't afford to leave.
> some of them were 38+ and saying they're thinking about having kids soon; there's like a 25% chance that ship has already sailed,
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.
>> some of them were 38+ and saying they're thinking about having kids soon; there's like a 25% chance that ship has already sailed,
> 25% is nonsense.
Yes, I think it's worse than that.
"A woman in her early to mid-20s has a 25–30% chance of getting pregnant every month. Fertility generally starts to reduce when a woman is in her early 30s, and more so after the age of 35. By age 40, the chance of getting pregnant in any monthly cycle is around 5%."
(https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...)
> I'm old enough to have seen a lot of young happy couples turn into divorced bitter singles and I can't speak to the average experience but in my circle, the women end up screwed. They've got the kids, ( the ex wanted nothing to do with the kids ) they've got no income ( the ex either has no money or is fighting tooth and nail to avoid sending any money ) and they are living off of parents, friends, and social services trying to find some job they can do part time ( no daycare ) that has a hope of supporting them.
Are they better or worse than the lonely 40+ women who have careers and money but no hope of a partner or family?
And the deteriorating job market when they get out. My son has struggled/struggles with this. I 100% understand and I would, too, if I were in his position. I compare his situation to mine and they are night and day. The prevailing sentiment when I was in college: get a degree (in anything) and you'll be OK if you want to work hard.
What deteriorating job market? Despite some recent high profile tech industry layoffs, the US unemployment rate is 3.4%. There are jobs available for those who want to work. They may have to move.
A recent survey showed that most college students seriously overestimate their earnings potential. There is a mismatch in expectations. Students graduating with low-value degrees need to take whatever job they can get and work their way up.
Yeah, that was badly phrased. I was replying too quickly.
Yes, the job market has roared back in the last couple of years, but before that it was cooler. But, I should have mentioned other things besides jobs. The world is a pretty bleak place, in a lot of ways. Yeah, the cold war was always hovering about, but it was not really something that my peers really worried about.
The world is less bleak now than it has ever been in human history. If you zoom out and look beyond the news headlines we as a species are doing pretty well. Rates of extreme poverty are down worldwide and relatively few people are starving to death or being killed in wars.
The world still has a lot of problems but let's be objective about the data instead of succumbing to defeatist narratives.
This whole line of thinking strikes me as emotional reasoning: “I feel bad, therefore the world must be bleak”. People like to look for rational explanations for something that’s not very rational. These feelings of anxiety and depression are probably more correlated with things like lack of religious belief and overexposure to news media than with any facts about objective reality. Plenty of examples of “poor” (on paper) societies being happier on average.
Haven't median real wages in developed countries dropped since the 1970s or so (even more so if you include housing costs in your inflation number)? The world as a whole may be better off, but that's cold comfort when your future in your country looks worse than your parents'.
Median real total employee compensation in the US has increased significantly since with 1970s once you account for non-wage benefits like employer-funded health insurance premiums and retirement plans. (I am not familiar with the data for other developed countries.)
If the reason people are getting paid less is that health insurance has gotten more expensive then that's interesting and relevant as an explanation, but hardly refutes the idea that their lives are getting worse.
The last thirteen years have been a job market going from around 10% unemployment to practically zero to approximately 3% now, a period of continuous growth in employment and the economy, followed by the hottest extended job market in the last 30+ years of US history, consistently at or below the average for the last 40 years. The idea that these people have graduated into a tough market is nonsensical.
Yes, 2009-2010 was cooler, the rest has been average to significantly better than average.
Completely agree with this opinion. Teens expected to attend college are under tremendous admissions pressure. You don’t even realize how much more difficult it gets every year for them. For some students, nearly every waking moment is spent on something to fill an application/study/practice. While this itself isn’t new, I’d wager that the number of students having this experience has grown tremendously.
However, as someone who was in high school right when Facebook/Instagram became ubiquitous amongst teens, I can’t emphasize enough how horrible the pressure of appealing to your peers was. There is a constant, deeply unsettling fear of being publicly shamed/embarrassed online at any time & for any reason. I am confident that this is still present & stronger than ever.
Part of the distinction between why this process has been made harder is primarily due to finances. If you do not get a scholarship, you are expected to have a job. Not a good job either specifically crafted for 18 year olds so they can get used to work and also handle school properly. No, we throw them into the depths of dealing with ghoulish customers with no way to climb so of course they feel they have to go to school to get out. It's a self reinforcing cycle of pressure.
> It's very easy to think that you're a failure if you don't know exactly who you are and what you want to be at age 17
I'm 26 (almost 27, so let's say 27) and I think this echoes my experience fairly well. I felt like a failure because I didn't get into the top schools for undergrad even though I struggled so hard and objectively had good stats that I (at the time) thought would've made me a compelling/competitive applicant. Varsity athlete, played instrument, loads of APs and top of my class, yadayadayadayadayada.
I think the evolution of the college application process and the perpetual rising bar has definitely affected teens mental health. Anecdotal but I experienced pressure to do well from peers, the school, and my own family.
You'd have to do it worldwide, though. Part of the reason my own teenage years were so (relatively) peaceful is because they took place in the late 80's, before globalization. I empathize with my own kids who've been on this treadmill since kindergarten, but it's there because they're competing with kids from countries that have never had childhoods.
All those things didn't affect me because I didn't care about any of it. I made barely enough grades to barely squeeze into university. I just didn't care, not too much.
I would think that college admissions is too narrow of a reason as to why. Only about 35% of high school graduates go on to university. I'm sure a significant number of university attendees don't have these issues to the extent that they have to go to a therapist. It's great that you went, wonderful that you did, but I am not convinced that anywhere near the majority of university students had that much pressure - to the extent of having their life break down.
I do agree that everyone needs a healthier lifestyle.
Sorry you went through this as that sounds like some terrible teenage years. You should of been having the time of your life at that age. When I was 17 I was screwing around more than anything else and basically having a blast 24/7. Was a mediocre C student at best, but ended up jumping through the right hoops after HS and got all but 4 classes of a CS Master's at a well known Upstate NY university completely paid for. This is not meant to brag, but just wanted to bring up that even a total idiot kid like me did well.
I've seen it again and again. Parents and communities pushing on their kid's academics and sports lives to no ends. I was lucky to have well grounded parents that mostly just let me be a kid and figure things out for myself. Unfortunately I don't see this strategy getting bigger any time soon.
>If we want a healthier society, we need to take a step back and give teenagers a chance to actually live life.
We need something like Rumspringa[1], a period in life when I young person is given a bit of slack, and is expected to eventually voluntarily take upon themselves the duties and responsibilities of an adult, or leave the community.
I can't find it now[2], but I remember either Joseph Campbell, or some other such person in a TV interview describing how in earlier societies, the children once of sufficient age would be set outside of society, and allowed to sleep in the ashes around the camp fires, until they resolved to join society as an adult, with all the privileges and responsibilities.
Having a child that hit teens then and hindsight being 20/20. Crazy parents and social media i feel can be the root of the majority of. Really location specific and not the deciding factor but it laid a solid foundation for mental health issues even today.
This is such a weird experience. I’ve heard this more often, and it’s just so foreign to me.
I thought there was so much academics in my life at every age from 7 till 17, but basically I got to play as soon as school was out, with no other responsibilities.
The same was true for all of my friends, and everyone surrounding me.
It doesn’t hit me until today what an enormous privilege this solid educational system was, that would allow everyone to get (nearly) free schooling up to whatever level they wanted, with a quality high enough to require no further out-of-school lessons. No entrance examinations for university (bar a few extremely in demand or difficult courses), and roughly equivalent universities all over the country.
Meanwhile the comments below the article have already determined the unmistakable cause of the epidemic: Today's youth is just too coddled and the school environment is just not violent enough anymore.
>I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process.
I am 100% behind this, and a lot of my professional career has been spent in higher education, specifically working with college access programs for pre-college students.
The amount of pressure kids are under today is just astounding. When I was looking at colleges, the pressure started slightly in 10th or 11th grade. Now, it's in the grade schools. Colleges are trying to get into 6th grade classes to "offer services" (read: recruit those kids under the pretense of supplementing underfunded school classrooms).
This may come off as a "things were better in my day" but hear me out:
I played baseball starting in kindergarten. There were summer YMCA leagues, and a couple of kids played baseball on travel teams in junior high and high school. The really good ones got scouted in college, but 99% of us were in it because we liked the game and liked playing. No matter what our parents may have dreamed, we knew it was a fun way to be part of something we liked.
My oldest plays baseball, he started in kindergarten, and has played all the way to high school now. He loves the game, but we also made sure it was a game, not a job. All kids in his class who could afford it were on travel teams, starting in first grade. All but three have private coaches for whatever position they specialize in. . . starting in first grade. The parents sponsored tournaments. The parents made sure their travel team attended tournaments that college scouts or colleges sponsored. Starting in first grade. The kids on his school team (town population of around 1000, school k-12 enrollment is around 400) have literally played or practiced baseball every weekend, barring some holiday weekends, since they were 5 years old. That is not an exaggeration, it is a statement of fact.
I actually got cornered by other parents asking why out child (left handed) wasn't going to be on the travel team when they were little, because he'd be a great pitcher. In first grade. They were absolutely astounded that I said I just couldn't get behind putting that much pressure on a child.
I don't think that people over the age of about 32 understand just how unbelievable the pressure is on kids these days. They're expected to be ON all the time, and their future is at risk if they're not. Parents see it as just trying to set their kids up for the best future possible. But it's so much pressure.
It's astounding. I live in a poor, rural area. I have to imagine it's much worse in urban/affluent areas.
And that's not even touching on the fact that social media and technology means the students literally cannot get away from social issues and bullying. That's a whole other thing.
> My oldest plays baseball, he started in kindergarten, and has played all the way to high school now. He loves the game, but we also made sure it was a game, not a job. All kids in his class who could afford it were on travel teams, starting in first grade. All but three have private coaches for whatever position they specialize in. . . starting in first grade. The parents sponsored tournaments. The parents made sure their travel team attended tournaments that college scouts or colleges sponsored. Starting in first grade. The kids on his school team (town population of around 1000, school k-12 enrollment is around 400) have literally played or practiced baseball every weekend, barring some holiday weekends, since they were 5 years old. That is not an exaggeration, it is a statement of fact.
This is one thing I've noticed about kids' sports, too, now that I have (youngish) kids and I'm trying to find sports for them. What used to be the low-end leagues—which were a bit serious, but not too much—seem to mostly be gone, with a new ultra-casual tier that didn't exist before replacing it, and then... nothing, until you're looking at really serious leagues with lots of travel and a huge time-commitment ([EDIT] yes, even for like 1st-graders).
All I can figure is parents' preferences changed—more of the half-serious players are pushed into the very-serious leagues now, for whatever reason, and the kinds of kids/parents who were always kinda unreliable and didn't seem to really have their hearts in it in the old-style somewhat-serious leagues are happier with the more-casual, even-lower-time-commitment replacement, leaving insufficient demand for what used to be just standard youth sports leagues.
Parks & rec funding has also cratered so the "little league" that you think of as a way of putting together local kids of all abilities to play a sport is less common that it used to be. The privatized equivalents are usually more competitive or religiously focused or both
Oh man—is that part of it? Now that you mention it, all the leagues I used to play on were either city-run leagues or YMCA (which seems to have shifted toward the very-casual end, too, but maybe that's just our local ones) I think.
> Things only started getting better when I started seeing a therapist and worked on my issues over the second half of my high school experience.
I'm curious, would you mind sharing how a therapist helped you? I'm in a similar (but not the same) space mentally, and put everything down to environmental issues (high pressure job, etc) and disregard the thought that a therapist could help with this (unless they had a time machine, etc).
therapy helps you develop efficient thinking ime. This is evaluating your emotions without added judgement, addressing problems without the added emotional burden of shame, and rapidly and genuinely accepting things (like past harm) that can’t be inherently changed without the added agony of fighting yourself over it
> I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process.
Spoiler: it won't get easier :)
I'm sure everyone has a different experience, but I find professional life to be much harder than being a student, even a student preparing for very selective admission process. You often work as hard as an adult (if not harder), plus have more responsibilities.
This is exactly why I advocate for less breadth and more depth starting from high school. I really didn’t need literature, history, or art. I knew I was more of a math and science person early on. Why do kids need to be so well rounded when they already have a bias towards certain fields? Lets let them focus on what they are good at, and give them a little more free time on their hands.
I think this is your personal anecdote and there isn't much to support it, but I do think, separate from college, that kids simply just can't be kids today. There is social, political and academic pressure that just didn't exist when most of us were growing up. I think the pandemic made it much worse.
Unless you’re really pushing for Ivy League, I don’t think colleges in the US care either. Who is calling your high school to verify that they even had an Open Source Club and that you were the treasurer of it?
Agreed: the data in this article only discusses the US, so I was only discussing the US here. I'm not sure if there's a similar crisis in other countries. Some in this thread have indicated yes, others no.
I'm 43 and I felt the pressure of getting into a good college back in highschool. I remember anecdotes of older kids talking about it when I was in later elementary school grades. I don't think the college pressure is all that new. Maybe more widespread?
Yeah... there's nothing wrong with growing up with a bit of a bubble, but yikes by 24 you'd think this person would start to be aware that their experience wasn't exactly universal
As other comments pointed out, a large portion of society doesn't go to college, let alone "stress out about extracurriculars to make sure my app looks extra good"
This is a tad bit insensitive. I have excelled at public school for the first years, then there was a rough patch in life caused by parents which TANKED my grades and social life for years.
I recovered and eventually got an excellent Master's degree in Bioinformatics but it is condescending to assume that everyone was dealt the same hand as you in life and that anything at all is fair.
Maybe schoolwork isn't so easy if you're being abused by a parent once a week?
I had some serious incidents in High School, mostly with other kids, and while my grades dropped, I never lost the ability to make up for weeks, sometimes months of doing nothing for school in a matter of hours.
Didn't stop me from getting bad grades for those weeks/months and making stupid mistakes like not completing assignments and the like.
It's very easy. It's just that in a depressed/anxious/... state people aren't capable of sustaining even the most basic levels of effort after a while. Frankly, I bet that if it was a lot harder, that would have helped me.
Having exited my teen years just before the smartphones became ubiquitous in the US, I got the opportunity to watch externally how social media and other similar systems effected the day-to-day of my younger siblings through their teen years. It was not positive. Maybe someone younger can attest to my observations:
- more localized isolation as kids spent a higher % of their attention in internet communities
- less cultural cohesion due to hyper diversity in memes resulting in fewer shared experiences.
- a shift in perceived life value/success based on internet influencers and incentive to emulate their lifestyles.
- always online presence increasing the stakes making embarrassing or uncool mistakes permanent and detrimental to one's image.
An additional one I noticed with my female cousins was that a lot of fun was sucked out of high school girls' social expression/reconnaissance.
On the recon side, gossiping is a fun bonding activity, but scrolling through snaps/reels is relative drudgery.
On the performance side, "be pretty and vivacious at fun social events" is no longer sufficient without obsessively managing your profile's brand. This doesn't only include posing for, curating, and editing photos, but a bunch of arcane rules about tagging etiquette, who's included in your photos, etc.
This is all from the horse's mouth, with a little bit of editorializing. The social environment of an in-crowd high school girl has always been extremely intense, but these tools hage made the process simultaneously more work and less fun, to hear my cousins tell it.
On that note, I wonder how much of these results are due to social media specifically and how much is caused by addiction to screens more generally, and the resulting insomnia, lack of exercise/time outside, and lack of human connection.
I know that in some respects, social media is uniquely bad, but perhaps the bulk of the problem is just being hooked on anything that makes you look at a phone or a screen all the time and neglect other aspects of life. Social media just happens to be the most popular thing currently to be hooked on.
I think you're on the right track. Personal screens consume so much time. Many of us defend it as just killing time, or researching, or keeping abreast of things but it eats up more than that until the average person feels harried and barely able to keep up. I know that's true for me.
The always online I think is a big issue, because now if you're not invited to things or not popular it's very in your face with livestreams that your friends or schoolmates are all having fun together at that exact moment without you.
I think it's also that you and all your friends are invited to completely different livestreams. No one feels left out even though they physically are.
Like it or not, you're supposed to fit in with people around you. If you can't do that then there's something either wrong with you or them.
That inherent urge to fit in is being digitally compensated, and I don't think it's healthy to avoid being challenged by all these factors we take for granted, from something as simple as eye contact to behavioral consequences.
I graduated in the time before YouTube. I read books alone and left my small town when I could. Sometimes the solution to a better life is changing the people around you and not settling.
Shared experiences. These help you learn to socialise: you can talk about what you watched and heard last night on television with a wide and local social group. You feel closer to your community through having shared things to discuss and learn the skills to operate within a social group. Without this you feel isolated which leads to depression.
It seems to me, with modern technology, things are shared amongst people to create shared experiences and discussions but these are not people within your local physical community--leading, again, to isolation and the dangers therein.
Can you elaborate? I only ever see children like 9-14 happy doing the latest Instagram or TikTok dance craze in the park/at the mall/with groups of their friends.
What you don't see are the kids that weren't invited to the park or mall. The ones those kids are possibly making fun of. Or those same kids you did see, but later at night as they stress about what to wear tomorrow, why Jake didn't like their post earlier today even though he liked Jasmine's post and Mia's post.
Many characters in "Nosedive" (Black Mirror episode) looked really happy as well.
How does one measure whether it's a net positive (for those who are laughing/dancing with their friends at the park) or a net negative (for those like you described) without being biased/projecting?
It feels a little "anarchist" to say "down with all social media! it's most likely a total net negative! nobody should be allowed to enjoy it because it isn't inclusive of those who might be left out!"
I can't answer your question, but do note that there are many who are studying this and coming to some similar conclusions. (But of course it's really hard to separate the moral panic from the real trends!)
I agree that we shouldn't just ban anything that exclude some users. I'm not as shrill as some people are about the dangers, but I do have a generally negative opinion of childhoods that are spent so online.
I have several young relatives—ages 9-22—that are heavily online. For the most part, they're the popular kids in their schools. Yet I see and hear constantly how they would never dare do things because of the pile-on potentials. Things I (a nerd who desperately wanted to be cool) would still have done.
When I was in elementary and middle school, I was definitely in the lower quartile of popularity. I was bullied occasionally, and I would sometimes dread going to school because of my social standing. BUT, I had friends at home! I had a life outside of school that I could return to after a short day of that stress. Even in school, the social pressures abated during class. If Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok existed during my school years, I would have found no refuge from the hierarchies and drama of school. The game I was "losing" between first bell and final bell would have gone 24/7.
My only saving grace would have been parents that refused to let me play the game in the first place. I think parents and schools should lean harder in this direction. Kids need to learn their social skills in small settings first, before they're exposed to literally the whole world. An awkward 11-year-old can only do so much "damage" to themselves in the limited setting of IRL. Let's get the mistakes out of the way before they're broadcast across space and time.
> It feels a little "anarchist" to say "down with all social media! it's most likely a total net negative! nobody should be allowed to enjoy it because it isn't inclusive of those who might be left out!"
The middle ground I've settled on is regulating it like alcohol.
Children should not be hanging out in bars and they should not be on social networking sites, period. COPPA should be vastly expanded.
Social media is our generation's nicotine. "Wait, it's HOW dangerous??" followed by the next generation's "How could those idiots not realize?"
I think with social media, the problem can't be put back in the box. With mass communication mechanisms, kids will still replicate many behaviors over group chats, discord, Teams, etc... And realistically how are you going to keep apps out of the hands of kids, when we can't even do it with nicotine and alcohol?
> Children should not be hanging out in bars and they should not be on social networking sites, period.
Have you ever watched a child watch YouTube before? I don't know if comments are turned off for kids videos (maybe they are) but most kids videos have 2m+ views if not much more.
People do need common culture. I have a friend in his mid-20s and he is always "Do you know [YouTube personality]?" or showing me memes that require extensive explanations. And we're actually very similar people in many ways.
Some of this is just me not being hip with the next generation's culture. But he also has not seen almost any of what I would call the American film canon. So we can't even discuss cheesy 80s action films. Eventually we figured out he had seen Stargate. He was surprised I had seen it.
He can't tell what's mainstream and what's highly esoteric. I do think that's a problem. I know no one will have any idea what I'm talking about if I bring up my favourite synthwave artists in conversation.
It occurs to me that the form of media often informed my awareness about that. Was it on TV? Popular book at the library? Or did I find it in the back of some weird 'zine?
It's all the same on YouTube. Though there is the view count. It's often watched alone, so no social feedback. When it comes to movie nights, for example, finding something that's acceptable to most, not just hyper-tailored to yourself and full of in-references, is an important social skill.
Ok but… this is so obviously a generational thing. You know who does know the YouTuber? His peers. He does not watch cheesy 80s films and you don’t watch 40s theater. People absolutely don’t need mainstream media. Mainstream media hits the lowest common denominator and tends to suck.
I think most YouTubers and uncomfortably fake to watch, but I would still prefer people watch that over mainstream tv…
I'm only some ten years older. The films I spoke of were released before I was born. Yet most of my generation is familiar with some of them. Star Wars, then. Or Schindler's List. Maybe I'm Spielberg biased. The Exorcist.
My point is that there was such a thing -- a common film canon -- that people who were interested in film, could be expected to be somewhat familiar with. No longer true?
Yes. Lowest common denominator. Some common point of reference gives a common vocabulary. Even if it sucks.
Ten years is a lot of years. You specifically called out a single decade of films. If someone is twenty, a film in 1980 is more than double their whole lifetime away. Wanting to chat with the youth about things before their time as the SHARED culture is dumb. If you’re 35, you were born in the 80s.
Believe it or not, not a whole lot of people will watch Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time and think it was an amazing movie anymore. That’s not to say it isn’t well made. It is. But is also just not very interesting to modern youth.
OP hit on a really interesting point, and if he's referring to the same thing I've seen, the issue isn't "difference." I think the issue is the degree of difference.
The place I volunteer at has quite a few teen volunteers, and I've noticed I can immediately spot the chronically-online teens (and there's a lot of them), because it's like they're from a different planet. They use language I don't understand, their humor revolves around memes I don't understand, they constantly reference people/events from their favored internet niche, and then completely lose interest in talking with people who don't understand their niche.
I think this ends up decreasing the amount of difference and diversity teens are exposed to, because when there are a million [insert niche here] fans online who "totally get you", there is far less incentive to make friends in the real world. And if you do make real-world friends, they likely are going to be part of that same niche, and have the exact same language/interests/etc that has been crafted by the online community. (It's honestly a bit eerie how good these niches are at creating cookie-cutter teens. I've had bizarrely similar conversations with kids who have never met each other, but are into the same niche. And it's not just their interests that are similar, it's their attitudes/outlooks/political views/etc.)
I find this really concerning, because it's important for teens to be exposed to a wide variety of people/experiences and be encouraged to respect them all. And that's hard to do when you're in a bubble of people who are identical to you, and have very little incentive to branch outside of that bubble.
I think back to my teen friend group, and it was a hodge-podge of computer geeks, theatre kids, journalism nerds, etc. I got so much benefit from having such a diverse friend group, and it's concerning to see those types of friend groups becoming rarer.
I appreciate this comment and generally agree. I have observed that teens themselves seem not to understand each other to a greater degree: perhaps the effect is not limited teenagers. Increased inability to relate in ways that allow ideas to be shared, and importantly -- challenged in real settings.
Memes don't necessarily make it harder. However, memes can be used to simultaneously include and exclude -- as references to something the "tribe" gets, but others outside the tribe do not. Inside jokes are an example of such references.
When you make hyperspecialized memes, and you have many of them, you're basically fragmenting a larger pool of shared meaning into many smaller ones.
Diversity, and of itself, is not inherently a virtue -- although lots of people would like it to be. Rather, diversity in the ecological sense, leads to more resiliency. There's still have to be some kind of unifying aspect (such as, unifying on humanity as a whole, or better yet, the whole earth as a whole) within which there is diversity. There's a sense of belonging to something greater than you while simultaneously participating and relating from the uniqueness of an individual.
Teenagers having the idea reinforced through social media that being different is bad, is bad. Left to their own devices, that is the default social order that children create.
Merely existing on the playground, on the field, or in the cafeteria in the 80s and 90s reinforced the idea that being different was bad.
How is this unique to post-2012? At least Instagram doesn't hold you up against a chain-link fence while TikTok punches you in the gut for being different.
But come on. Diversity is not actually bad. People being diverse even if they think it’s bad is not bad. And memes are not a meaningful driver of diversity.
Anecdotally, I was (as probably many here were) ahead of the curve in digital devices usage when I started hanging out in IRC and various web forums as a teenager in early 2000s. At some point I noticed that just using computers induced some amount of anxiety compared to "old tech"; whenever there was some period of time when I used my computer less (like christmas, vacations, etc.) and joined back to the "world of the normal people", I felt much calmer and happier. Even though I noticed this, it was difficult to log off during normal times since most of my life was in the internet.
Now everyone is using digital devices all the time and the "normal people world" has ceased to exist. Also almost everyone is anxious and/or depressed. I think this is not a coincidence. However, I do not think that this is due to social media per se, but using digital devices for anything (social media being just the reason why most people use them).
My theory is that just using digital devices for anything is somewhat stressful; you have to keep the eyes focused all the time (Can you think of other activities that require this? There aren't many and they are all somewhat stressful), you have to navigate all the various applications and menus, you have to occasionally solve minor problems that you run into when using the devices, etc.
Using digital devices is the same for your brain as heavy, repetitive physical labour is to your body; in small amounts it might even be healthy, but several hours every day is going to destroy your body/mind.
> 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 could be cutting into other things, like sun exposure, exercising, perhaps face-to-face social relationships, social support networks.
Something I've noticed since about that time as well is a growing unease and pessimism with our collective future (and even present!). Some things are bleak (like climate change, uncertainty with technologies, etc.), but there's a sense of little hope that definitely should have an impact on the youth. I remember the 90s as a quite hopeful time and that definitely had an impact on my mood. My personal contribution would be spreading more hope about life.
My favorite author w.r.t. this right now that I recommend is Jane Goodall:
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 page. It seems to be a combination of the "paper" look making it seem less virtual (than the blinkenlights matrix), and the impossibility of scrolling on e-ink making it by necessity a more calming medium.
Real books are even better, of course, in both regards, but can't compete on price / delivery time.
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.
> Some things are bleak (like climate change, uncertainty with technologies, etc.), but there's a sense of little hope that definitely should have an impact on the youth. I remember the 90s as a quite hopeful time and that definitely had an impact on my mood. My personal contribution would be spreading more hope about life.
I was a child in the 70s/80s and I was in constant fear of Nuclear War/Winter. The level of fear in kids of that generation I suspect is as bad as any generation after.
> Something I've noticed since about that time as well is a growing unease and pessimism with our collective future (and even present!).
This is why I like movies and stories about the world coming together to overcome great difficulties. Like Pacific Rim, for instance. I'd love to hear more stories like that, no matter how far-fetched. I'd especially like to get some of the pariah states (North Korea, Iran) to be welcomed in for some more team high-fives. We really do need optimistic visions of the future to keep us going.
I think it's the connectivity of the digital devices that is specifically at fault, and that offline-only digital devices wouldn't cause this. At any moment, my phone or computer may deliver unwelcome news to me. My boss asking me about some work shit, my family with some sort of unwelcome sad news, or whatever. In the past these would have been relatively mundane stresses, but now there is a social expectation that everybody be attentive to incoming communications at all times. You get at most a few hours a night where people don't expect you to respond, but even then sometimes they forget about timezones and freak out when they don't get a prompt response. There is never any real reprieve and it's starting to seem like this represents a permanent cultural shift.
I have another hunch: that working as a programmer, and maybe with computers in general, is anxiety-inducing. As Campbell put it, computers are like old testament gods: lots of rules and no mercy.
Exactly, everything (outside some probability (which is still a discrete decision point) comes to 0 and 1. I am a big believer of the core assumptions in any system having outsized effects in practice
> My theory is that just using digital devices for anything is somewhat stressful
I don’t know, talking to the government and figuring out stuff about your taxes or health coverage over the internet is soooo much less stressful than if I have to call, or worse, go there in person, wait an hour, and have to talk to someone who really doesn’t want to solve my problem.
I can now pay my property taxes online and know it’s done, instead of sending them a letter and hoping for the best, that’s such an improvement.
Ugh, I guess it varies from person but for me (nearly?) every human contact is somewhat stressful, even watching humans interact can be very stressful. Using devices is downright bliss and calmness in comparison. I'm so happy when I see people interacting with their devices. I feel they are more like me and I feel safer with them than with people who don't.
Not sure if it's true for everyone, but you can see this when you're staying with others or have guests. When they're gone, you can relax and just sit or read or continue a game you'd started or look at your phone guilt free. That's the calmness you mention. You're not starting/maintaining conversation, maintaining eye contact, am I wearing the right thing, etc.
But how much is that and how much is addiction to the device/content? For most people in 202x, I'd guess these things are part and parcel.
Another possible explanation is that we are simply diagnosing these kind of mental health issues better – due to decrease in stigmatization and/or more attention to it – but that our treatment is worse than doing nothing, and is leading to higher rates of self-harm and suicide.
I have no idea if that's the case – and if it is a factor at all it probably doesn't account for all of it – but it seems something worth exploring. Certainly in my own teen years I benefited more from the occasional swift kick in the backside and being told to "man up" than treatment with school counsellors and such. Not that counsellors are bad, but sometimes you can take things "too serious" which can make matters worse, in spite of being well-intentioned.
I think the opposite could be true – that we're too quick to diagnose mental illnesses in kids today. In the last few years I've witnessed several kids in my family get referred to doctors for potential mental illnesses and then end up on a cocktail of drugs as a result.
It's something I've found really difficult because I was never personally convinced they were mentally ill in the first place and in many cases these drugs have really nasty side effects. I don't think it's going too far to say part of that child dies when they're given high doses of depressants, anxiety and ADHD meds.
Imo we probably need to stop telling kids they're mentally ill and giving them medication, while also finding a way to be compassionate about their struggles. I'm constantly trying to convince one teenage girl in my family at the moment that it's okay to be shy and anxious sometimes. That she doesn't need medication and there's nothing wrong with her. But it's a hard argument to make when certain teachers and family members are telling her she possibly does in an attempt to be compassionate.
Myself, for example, I had raging ADHD throughout my life and only recently in my 40s started to get treatment. And incidentally, treatment isn't _just_ drugs, it's also counseling, to help identify coping mechanisms, work through trauma, identify strategies to help you to become effective despite working differently from how neurotypical people work. I'm in a good place now, but it is largely due to luck. It took a lot of work for me to not feel grief over how my life could have been different if I had been diagnosed earlier, if I had had the level of treatment available now, back then.
And I don't want to get too far into it because it's not my story to tell, but I have friends who are way worse off. They dealt with far more than I ever had to, in terms of depression, anxiety, etc, and they did it by themselves, with no or limited medical and psychiatric support, while suffering the stigma of a society that did not respect what they were going through at all, with friends and family who could only suggest that they "toughen up". Many of them I'm not in contact with any more, for reasons related and unrelated, but overall though, I _wish_ they had the options and respect for their conditions that kids today have. I can't even imagine the difference it could have made.
> It took a lot of work for me to not feel grief over how my life could have been different if I had been diagnosed earlier, if I had had the level of treatment available now, back then.
Well my friends weren't really convinced either when I told them about my ADHD diagnosis. Luckily for me I seriously did my homework on it, and finally getting treatment has helped a lot.
In the last several years since getting diagnosed I have done a lot of reading on the brain, trauma, mental illness etc. I've come to learn that actually a surprisingly large number of people have something going on, and whatever that something happens to be is complex enough that laypeople aren't in a position to understand it very well or at all.
> I've come to learn that actually a surprisingly large number of people have something going on, and whatever that something happens to be is complex enough that laypeople aren't in a position to understand it very well or at all.
I think I have a different perspective on things.
I'm far from normal. I'm prone to depression and anxiety. I'm autistic and anti-social. Most people would suggest there is at least one or two things "wrong" with me.
And sure, I clearly have issues and I'm not "normal", but I suppose I don't seek to be normal either.
I think our increased fixation on being as neurologically normal as possible is half the problem we're having with the increase in mental illness today. And it's possibly being over diagnosed.
You could make an extremely good case for me needing anti-depressants and how they would make me functionally closer to what we consider "normal". Similarly, with the anxious teen I was talking about in my prior comment – anti-anxiety meds would probably make her more "normal" too. But the assumption in both cases would be that normal is always better, which I don't agree with.
Growing up I was taught to hate myself for being different. In my early twenties I went through a bit of a crisis where for the first time I realised how much harder employment was going to be for me as an anti-social autistic weirdo. I hated myself more than ever – why I am autistic, why can't I be normal – I'd ask. But there's only something wrong with me from the perspective of others. I have no problem with myself apart from the fact I struggle to satisfy the preferences of those around me.
It was going down that route where for the first time in my life I actually started to question whether I was the one with the problem or if the world had a problem with me that finally gave me a much healthier outlook on things. The reality is there are just certain people who won't get me and will refuse to try to understand me.
This is a lesser problem today, but I suppose I had this also with my sexuality growing up. There was such an obsession with being hetrosexual that if you were anything but it was easy to hate yourself for being different and wish there was a drug you could take to be normal. Again, it's not that being gay (or whatever else) is an issue to you as an individual, it's that being gay is an issue to others which drives self-hatred.
My whole life I've had to try to get along with happy, extrovert neurotypicals, and rarely will they do the same in return. Instead these people suggest I need to drug myself so I'm more like them – "normal". So screw them.
These days I just embrace myself. I'm awkward as hell. But if you have a problem with that, then piss off – I'll find people who are okay with me as I am.
But what I find funny is that my girlfriend suffers the exact opposite problem to me. She's unable to see the negative side of anything. She's constantly happy and chirpy to the point of often being delusional. But she's seen as normal... But we work because I accept her and she accepts me, and we balance each other out. I'm the one who worries how we're going to address everything that might go wrong in our lives and she keeps us focused on the positive outcomes we're working towards.
Over time I've come to realise there's strength in the vast majority of these "mental illnesses" if we're able to accept them. I can only speak for myself here, and obviously others need to do what's right for them, but my depression and anxiety is no simply longer a problem in the way it used to be because of how I view it and allow it today.
So I guess I don't even understand why you would view ADHD as an issue? Why weren't you able embrace that side of yourself? My understanding is that people who have ADHD are super creative and tend to be less mentally restricted than people like myself? Did you have a problem with your ADHD because the world had a problem with you?
I understand this perspective, but I think that it's an overcorrection. I grew up with depression that went untreated until my late teens, and if I wasn't medicated when I was or soon thereafter I would in all likelihood not be alive today. My sister has really severe ADHD and she was unable to function until she got medicated for ADHD before teenagerhood. Saying "it's ok to be anxious and shy sometimes" is all well and good, but being shy and anxious can often be painful and prevent people from interacting socially in ways that they want to do but are too painful. I think it's probable that we are overmedicating psychological ailments, but I also would be loathe to stop medications without another solution.
This is spot-on. Over-diagnosis and over-medicalization of questionable mental illnesses is a huge problem in (at least) Anglophone societies. Many people know that privately, but it has become a hard thing to say publicly due to the large numbers of people who have received such diagnoses from medical/psychology professionals who they, understandably, believed.
Neurodivergence in general is under-diagnosed, especially women. One of my close friend struggled with OCD her whole life but since it didn’t present like it does in the movies she nor her doctors had any idea. She didn’t get diagnosed until she was an adult which, while good, 20 years of unnecessary struggle isn’t exactly a win.
The increase in suicide rates for both genders (but especially females) are astounding. I really don't believe that any changes in treatment have been so radical as to cause this to manifest the way it has.
Tell someone with an issue with their physical condition that it is because of diet and lack of exercise and many would change habits, tell them it's due to a incurable but perhaps treatable cancer and some will chose suicide.
Tell kids that they are unhappy due to choices made in day to day life and they might change those choices, tell them it's due to a incurable but maybe treatable issue with their brain and some will chose suicide.
The problem may be classifying typical human misery as incurable illness.
That's not how this works. Having a reason for why you are struggling so badly is a relief.
Your problem now has a name and it's not your fault. Having a name opens up a lot of support and treatment options. This gives you hope that your suffering isn't endless and infinite.
You may not be able to be cured, but you can have a much better life.
I've found the opposite usually happens in my experience. It is easy to give into the temptation to then blame all problems on the condition, and start to abscond responsibility for your behavior. This leads to increasing feelings of helplessness, and not taking any actions that could help.
This ultimately results in you feeling miserable powerless and see no hope.
I think that the framing around this is very important. I had a teacher that constantly used the phrase "Don't let your reasons become excuses." Knowing there is an issue can bring relief and be helpful only if it empowers one to act.
An example I have seen in my life is two people that have anxiety, one started using it as a reason to avoid interacting with people, to avoid school, and to basically hide in her room and read books all the time, to the point they would have a breakdown when forced to talk to a grocery store clerk, her sibling had a similar struggle but forced themselves through it, to learn how to interact, to push themselves to be in difficult and uncomfortable situations, and eventually although still struggles with social anxiety presents a pretty passable facade of being able to function in society.
That is a very optimistic outlook. One person's new relief is another's new label, stigma and anxiety. People experiencing depression-related mental health conditions could lean towards the latter.
In addition, many diagnoses in mental health aren't really tangible or helpful to think about as a layperson, they're just a vague description of a symptom (this applies across a lot of medicine, see IBS, etc.).
Tell kids that they are unhappy due to choices made in day to day life and they might change those choices, tell them it's due to a incurable but maybe treatable issue with their brain and some will chose suicide.
The thing you are trying to say isn't really true, though.
Tell some kids that it is all their fault, and some kids will commit suicide. Some of the kids already think this way and someone telling them this stuff is just going to intensify it.
Especially considering that getting treatment isn't such a stigma now, a lot of the folks being told that it is the cause of the disease will feel relieved and certainly not choose suicide even if they refuse medication.
I think your take is totally ignorant, and your problem is that you imagine people are being diagnosed with mental illness and/or committing suicide because of “typical human misery”.
Physical condition is an excellent analogy. Many obese people are told that any physical complaint is caused by their weight and told to go exercise. This includes people who are later correctly diagnosed with asthma, broken bones, hormone deficiencies and appendicitis. How do you think they feel to be told that they are causing their own problems and should stop doing that?
This shit is a rabbit hole that never ends. If there is anything about you that is seen as abnormal by a doctor (including being a woman yikes — and age also yikes) it gets blamed for everything regardless of whether it makes any sense at all.
I swear so many doctors treat medical diagnosis like it’s a game of spot the difference between you and the reference 25 year old white man.
Not at all, it's exactly the opposite. People feel understood and very relieved when they are diagnosed mental illness. Accepting and managing some condition give people hope.
To respond I need to separate mental illness into three categories.
The first category contains illnesses like schizophrenia, with schizophrenia you can induce symptoms of the illness in healthy people by giving them medicine used to treat parkinsons. We can point to specific structures and chemical reactions in the brain as a cause for the illness, it may not be perfectly understood but we have a good understanding of what is going on.
The second contains things like personality disorders. It's not clear these are actually related to physical defects, at least in the same way the first category is. For example people who meet diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder often report no symptoms and are successful in day to day life, some even thrive. Borderline personality types are often distraught over the state of interpersonal reletionships, that is the primary source of their suffering, however they behave in ways that destroy those reletionships. These behaviors aren't accidental, they involve sophisticated thinking, borderlines spin complex webs of lies to justify and hide these behaviors.
The third are things that are normal human suffering. Most people feel anxiety for a big date or a job interview. Most people feel sad when they lose a loved one. Negative emotions are a part of life. It's hard to draw a line on what is normal but a nonzero number of people are medicated for having normal human emotions.
It may not be helpful for the second and third category to be enabled in the way they have been.
For the second group, as the root of their strife is generally interpersonal, and only changing day to day behavior, over a lengthy period of time will have any effect in alevating the true symptoms of the illness. We can pretend the problem "isn't their fault" but essentially all their issues can be tied directly to their own behavior, it may not be their fault but it's certainly their problem.
For the third it isn't clear that they need to be treated at all, if you are too sad to go to work because your son died a month ago, nothing is wrong with you. Perhaps people are sad in society in general because the society in general sucks, medicating them in mass lowers the collective motivation to fix the society, what's the end game there?
Untrue, at least for functioning autists. It's incurable, but knowing there is others in the same situation, reading about coping mechanism and that what you feel is indeed normal, albeit atypical help a lot.
I don't know enough about the topic to judge most of what you've said, but I can appreciate something about your final point and something you suggested in a later comment: most people feel anxious about meeting someone, going to a new place, interviewing, presenting in public, etc. Or they put off work without a deadline. These are common and largely modern problems.
We might be able to revise society/expectations to address this, separately to how we diagnose/label problems.
I don't doubt that it couldn't in absolute terms, I doubt the timeline in which this happened: treatment protocols don't change that rapidly for this very reason.
SSRI use has skyrocketed, and multiple meta-analyses have confirmed that they lead to an increase in suicidal thoughts and behavior when used by children and adolescents.
I don't necessarily agree with the grandparent poster's point of view, as I do think there are big societal changes leading to decreased mental health that are unrelated to the way we treat mental illness...but I do think the increase in usage of psychiatric drugs is a big problem, and may at least partly explain the increased suicide rates.
> SSRI use has skyrocketed, and multiple meta-analyses have confirmed that they lead to an increase in suicidal thoughts and behavior when used by children and adolescents.
The prevailing wisdom on this is that many people suffering major depression won’t even have the motivation to go through with suicide. Once the depression has begun to be treated, certain executive functions start to amplify giving sufferers newfound task salience and resolve to go through with it. The problem is that all the symptoms of depression take far longer to subside with consistent SSRI/SNRI usage as prescribed. These drugs take on average 90 days to reach their full effectiveness but not everything happens at once during this adjustment. Along the way, you do reach a strange state of: “well I’m still depressed but I feel empowered to do something about it now.”
I remember this stage when I started taking SSRIs when I was an older teenager. I was warned about it and was seeing a short-term therapist and so I dealt with it well, but there's a short 2-4 weeks where the crushing demotivation that has dominated your life is lifted but you still are stuck in the life-despising thought spirals. I assume that much of this can be mitigated by regular consultation with mental health for the first two month while trying a new medication, but it's possible that isn't true.
It could be that being diagnosed with an illness, even with excellent treatment, symptoms can become a self fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you are at increased risk for suicide, maybe you start thinking more about that and it comes to fruition. Or maybe you take some meds, which make you better 99.9% of the time but that one time your flight is late or whatever and miss the dose and the rebound is twice as bad as never having been on them.
Also ultimately suicide by definition is based on most harmful decision of life event rather than what a doctor is probably optimizing for which is best day-to-day ability to function. These are two different optimizations that can be at odds. Almost nobody would choose to feel worse 99.9% of the time to reduce the risk in that 0.1% of the time they're suicidal.
IMO opinion, the patient hostile nature of mental health providers is likely driving some of these suicides, and the industry isn't even trying to detect this (although it would be hard).
I don't mean changes in treatment, but rather that some people previously went undiagnosed and "just got over it" on their own. As I said, in my own case treatment didn't help and actually made matters worse as I saw myself more as a victim who "couldn't help myself". n=1 of course. And many people of course do benefit from treatment.
As I mentioned: even if this turns out to be factor – and I'm not sure it even is – then I don't think this accounts for 100% of the increase. I don't profess this is the full explanation, merely a possible factor, out of several.
I'm also reminded by my uncle, who was born with a serious and debilitating heart condition; he always said that if he had listened to his doctors he'd be a "victim" in a wheelchair inside all day. Of course he did need serious medical attention, including a heart transplant, and he did end up dying from his condition at the age of 51, but overall he led a "good life" and just carried on with things without seeing himself as too much of a victim. It probably would have been a different life if he did. Mental feedback loops can be pretty powerful.
It's also worth pointing out the charts look a bit less drastic if you zoom out to the 70s; in fact, suicide for boys especially was a lot higher in the 80s than it is now. The author does address that briefly at the bottom, and provides a link with more detail (which is too much to quote here, but tl;dr is that they believe it's correlated to lead exposure and crime rates – this link also contains the longer timeframe charts).
n of 2, this has been my experience as well. I was almost killed in a shooting in 2021, and in 2022 I started seeing a therapist. Going into therapy made me relate to my trauma more, think about my trauma more often, and self identify as a "traumatized individual". I don't think any of that helped. The only thing that really helped was daily meditation/mindfulness, which does the opposite - it teaches you that the thoughts and experiences you have are fleeting and rather than hold on to them you can let them go.
That being said, I don't think this is a strong enough phenomenon that it explains the rather large trends upwards in self harm/mental health. I think a good control is the graph that shows Schizophrenia - a 67% uptick shows that the diagnosis rates are probably a lot higher than the early 2000s, since I doubt that schizophrenia is really becoming more common due to social media.
Relating this back to social media, I've noticed that at times younger people almost exert a social pressure to link all behavior to anything remotely traumatic. I've had some shitty stuff happen to me, life has had it's rough points, but I've always felt pretty lucky overall. I've noticed in arguments with roommates/friends/etc who are younger by a few years, there is significantly more forgiveness towards anything that can even be tangentially linked to something that can be identified as a trauma. I noticed it because over time it led me to start slowly reframing experiences and actually focusing more on the damage they'd done. And its funny, the most traumatizing experience of my life has probably been the push to open up and focus on my traumas. My mental health has improved a lot since distancing myself from people who are too eager to focus on trauma. I wonder how that plays into the whole social mental health conversation. Like when does starting a conversation and destigmatizing a topic turn into feeding it and enabling it? Not to say by any means mental health was handled well before, but I think we might have made something of a deal with the devil in how we frame mental health on social media.
I have a lot of thoughts on this as well and I'm not sure. I definitely felt like my mental health got worse when I started therapy, but was it because my mental health was already doing worse?
The times in my life when I've been the most anxious or unwell have been when I'm questioning my mental health. And I think that the society we live in does encourage people to open up more. But if you have ADHD / obsessive compulsive tendencies, and your brain works like mine, that opening up can just look like obsessing over why you aren't feeling 100%. Then it's a self fulfilling prophecy.
Not sure of the value of this tidbit but I heard that in the US, blacks suicided a lot less than whites (quick google seems to say rate of black suicide is a third of white) and it could be because they grow up explaining their issues with external factors, while the whites have no convenient escapes, and even are told they are privileged due to their skin color... so self blame.
Really flimsy, I am not an expert but... fits a bit the idea that just looping around yourself self introspecting how much of a failure YOU are might not help.
I would offer the really flimsy statement most blacks in US are descendants of slaves, who were bred for generations to be optimized for unskilled labor that was given very little mental and health support which meant anyone slightly suicidal just killed themselves off. Slavery is pretty stressful. Society tends to want to ignore the fact the colonists and early Americans literally bred slaves under stressful conditions for centuries and that tends to have ... effects on the genetic pool particularly in remarkably stressful environments where risk factors can cause rapid attrition from reproductive population.
I think a more plausible theory is that white people feel more entitlement than black people, not because of some weird genetic memory thing but because they see other white people (or maybe even their parents or great-grandparents) enjoy much higher success than they are. Higher expectations = more pain from shitty circumstances = worse reactions.
This might be true, although I think it depends on the age group of the people committing suicide.
I forget where I heard this, but I believe a significant number of people committing suicide have a high correlation with other issues like chronic pain (e.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24916035/) or addiction. I'm suspicious that those white people have the kinds of problems you're referring to because I suspect their peers are less likely to be successful or affluent, as people with chronic pain issues probably are more working class, performing physical labor that results in their issues.
(Granted, I suppose there is probably a racial element that would account for why, if this is the case, more white people with chronic pain issues kill themselves vs. black people with chronic pain issues.)
This is obviously speculation, but so is your comment. I find both to be potentially likely. The scenario you came up with seems more likely for younger people (probably not experiencing chronic pain), and the scenario I came up with is potentially more likely for older people. But we're just spitballing some hypotheses here.
I don't wholly disagree with you, but do think it's probably several things based on things I've seen (my n=1 experience is no more important than yours). I do want to make it clear that there is no good data on this.
Why is more diagnosis better diagnosis? I hear this constantly, literally every time people point out we might be calling people mentally ill now that we wouldn't have called mentally ill 20 years ago people go "wow we must be diagnosing people better". To me better diagnosis would be reflected in things like the suicide rate dropping, drug abuse falling, general health metrics improving, and so on, not in simply increasing the amount of people we give labels and medicalise.
I am so incredibly unconvinced that labelling a bunch of people as mentally ill is "better" because the more we're diagnosed people as mentally ill, the more things like suicide have increased. Now obviously that can be due to an underlying increase in mental illness driving suicide, the thing is the diagnosis itself and the resulting differential treatment of society and your self-perception of yourself can be the cause of that mental illness. Making the diagnosis a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So far the increase in diagnosis over time has completely failed to actually improve peoples mental health. I am constantly perplexed at why nobody is worried about this. It seems how we diagnose people is totally unconnected from any empirical data on if a culture more willing to diagnose people is making people healthier on a population-wide level. To me it seems like most evidence points to the population-wide trend getting worse and the increase in diagnosis being a failure making people sicker, and I can't help but also notice many of those who advocate that the increase in diagnosis is a great thing have a conflict of interest and financially benefit from more people being labelled ill.
> It seems how we diagnose people is totally unconnected from any empirical data on if a culture more willing to diagnose people is making people healthier on a population-wide level.
Speaking of an absence of empirical data: People are being told by doctors that their brain has a "chemical imbalance" which medication can fix, despite those doctors not performing any chemical tests on the patient's brain at all. Supposed "chemical imbalances" for which the science of chemistry can produce no empirical data. My brother lost years of his life in a drug-induced haze before he questioned the wisdom of doctors, got off the psyche drugs, and saw a massive improvement in his outlook on life all around. Turns out he had real problems to address and the drugs were only helping him to ignore those problems instead of actually confronting them. He never needed drugs, he needed a mature mentor.
Generally I think mental illness will remain in the dark ages so long as there is a divide between neurologists and psychiatrists, and so long as the ICD and DSM are the gold standard of diagnosis. Mental illness is mostly defined based on others perception of you, and is rarely defined based on any sort of psychological testing. There are a few which can be objectively tested for like Alzheimers but they're in the minority.
The best description I've heard of why more diagnosis is better is that as a society we're moving up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs from level 2 "Safety Needs"
to level 3 "Love and Belonging".
For the first time in history there is psychological space to care about mental health and social issues en mass. So, of course, there's going to be an explosion of diagnosis.
Maintenance of “safety needs” is part and parcel of finding love and belonging in the first place. If we’re offloading that all together, then yeah I can see how more and more get depressed and suicidal. They don’t have anything to live for when you get down to it.
That's not what moving up means; they're cumulative from the bottom up. You can't move up to the next level until all lower levels are consistently met.
Moving up means those needs are being met satisfactorily and can be maintained without prolonged attention. And if a lower level stops being met, your level will fall to that level until it is met again.
I.e., if you're hungry and don't know when your next meal is, then who the hell cares if you're anxious, angry, or happy? You have more pressing concerns.
Sure, I agree, at best it is a gross simplification.
But it’s useful and, in my opinion, captures the most basic relationship which is that some needs have higher priority than others and will drive those other needs to the recesses.
The industry itself could be to blame. It's not fun to have your provider insult your appearance and try to push you to make devastating career choices, while cutting you off from effective treatments.
While non-gender conforming people need special protections, it's deeply sad that the industry wasn't able to recognize this itself... they just keep doing it with other people.
As always with these issues, no one stopped to think at a high level about labeling people's personality as a disorder that must be fixed. They just said, "we have to stop doing this to trans people"... "we'll make an exception for them"
True, of course labeling is only the first step before treatment. Maybe the root cause of the rise is then we are telling kids they're depressed and we have relatively ineffective treatments for it.
Labelling wouldn't be a problem if we could actually help everybody with the diagnosis, but they're too often stuck with a "ehh. maybe this pill" approach.
Having a diagnosis also gives you a set of tools to actively deal with your issues. Personally I have trouble with avoidant personality disorder, and I really wish I had gotten diagnosed earlier. Maybe school and my early career would not have been such a dumpster fire if I understood how to properly deal with myself back then.
So I think there's lots of examples of diagnosis's helping individuals, my specific concern is why it is if all this diagnosis is apparently just helping everybody, why is the general population getting more mentally sick over time? I can think of only two reasons -
1: That the mental health system is actively harmful at the population level.
or
2: That the mental health system is impotent to address mental health issues (more keen on this idea honestly, but I can't even rule out 1)
The latter case means that the mental health system could be helping, but at the very least, the mental health system is a distraction from the bigger issue of mental health. I believe declines in mental health are driven by things like increasing inequality, scarcity, competitiveness, loneliness, and so on which we can't nessecarily solve by telling people you are disordered with such and such so live in such and such a way and you can maybe be better adapted to a society which has their collective mental health in freefall which I dunno is something but it's pretty depressing.
P.S. I specifically resent the label of "disorder" in general and think that label is part of the problem, because no matter how you spin it, somebody saying you are "disordered" is an insult, and as we call more and more of the population disordered I think the adjective will become untenable to keep using. I'm more keen on the concept of neurotypes, because neurotypes CAN be negative, and CAN require accommodation, and CAN require treatment, but none of those things are NECESSARILY true becuase "neurotype" isn't loaded in the same way "disorder" is. If you discover your "neurotype" you can try tools and techniques that helped others with that same neurotype. Whereas the word "disorder" sort of has an intrinsically negative connotation, and I don't think it's medically necessary for psychiatrists to regularly insult their patients.
The mental health system is so condescending and some of the shitty things they do don't really get examined or critically looked at that much. Like why don't we ask, is telling millions of people they are "disordered" likely to improve their mental health and confidence and self-esteem? Probably not and it's totally viable to avoid doing this.
Are there any positive connotations for the personality disorder umbrella? I really struggle to think of any. It's cool that the ASD camp has managed to become "differently neuro'd" or whatever but everybody I have talked to in the PD camp knows we are just subject to different flavors of unhelpful irrationality and not much else.
Except maybe shizoids who can count on being aloof to any bad interaction instead of being uncontrollably dragged around by them, but miss me with the anhedonia thing please.
It's not. There are Physician Incentive Plans that incentivize doctors to prescribe SSRIs for anyone complaining about generalized anxiety or depression.
Another possible explanation is that we are simply diagnosing these kind of mental health issues better – due to decrease in stigmatization and/or more attention to it – but that our treatment is worse than doing nothing, and is leading to higher rates of self-harm and suicide.
I think this explains a lot of it, in particular in regard to rising rates of autism. Doctors are looking for symptoms, hence more people will be diagnosed.
If it's less stigmatized you'd expect fewer suicides right? More people getting help. Perhaps it's less stigmatized because a larger part of society has real mental health issues.
This is an intriguing idea which I think you should send Haidt's way, he seems to be willing to listen to the ideas of others and it's something worth considering. Not just counselors, also, it might include overuse of medications.
No, that is not what I said. Aside from that fact that these two fields are hardly exact sciences and have different schools of thought with large fundamental disagreements, I never said that all of psychology is bad. I specifically said "Not that counsellors are bad, but sometimes [...]".
In my specific case it didn't help and was more harmful than helpful. For other people it is helpful. n=1 but I'm probably not a very special individual, so situations similar to mine probably apply to other people as well, although I have no idea how many exactly, or if this number has been increasing or decreasing.
> Either you are in denial or a whole field of science is wrong.
The value of the advice to "man up," is that there exists a good way to be and you have to make some basic effort to help yourself before others will help you.
The field in question is psychology and its appendant body, psychiatry, who you may remember from such treatments as trepanation, lobotomy, chemical castration, solitary confinement, valium, re-parenting, diagnoses like hysteria, and the APA's most recent forfeit of any remaining credibility with "toxic masculinity" - to say nothing of what it is doing to actual children in the last decade.
To be clear, psychology isn't a science, it's a critical theory of mind. It uses drugs, dresses itself up in some limited statistics from "social science" and prances in front of the mirror saying it's doing chemistry and biology. Therapy and drugs help some people by reducing their suffering, but it's a pretext, not an empirical inquiry into the nature of matter.
Are you suggesting that people should ignore their personal experiences if they do not align with what the science tells them? Why would you declare that anyone is in denial about their own reality?
i'm kind of in agreement - i think there's an extraordinarily strong nocebo effect and dearth of belief in agency after being diagnosed with something like that. At the same time, nearly all treatments are effectively worthless. so what's even the benefit? at the same time, I do believe mental health issues partially exist to signal to the tribe that something is wrong with that member and it's a call for help. so there should be some way to triage and provide support. but idk if our current transactional system that exists to pay pharma is good
This is a good piece, with the author consciously examining their own biases and assumptions. I do think underdiagnosis is an issue; when I sought mental health treatment in an earlier period, there was a veritable line of people telling me I couldn't be mentally ill because my clothes were clean and my sentences coherent.
I think the author errs in not projecting his data far back enough into the past and looking for correlations with previous rises or falls. I agree that social media is probably a main driver; the ability to receive mass communication at scale is not something the brain evolved for, and there's a lot of maladaptive online behavior that doesn't show in these statistics but is nonetheless problematic. I'm honestly appalled by the pervasive tendency to rely on repetition of cliches in favor of original communication, for example.
But I think there are other factors in play, like the 24-7 news cycle and deep political polarizations, both of which have a huge impact on adult behavior and create an unhealthy psychological environment in which kids have to operate.
> I'm honestly appalled by the pervasive tendency to rely on repetition of cliches in favor of original communication, for example.
Shaka, when the walls fell ;)
honestly there's an interesting argument to be made there that memes and cliches provide a higher symbol density to our communications via shared context/subtext. A meme has additional layers of context and nuance that are implicitly carried along with the actual words themselves, it has higher "meaning-density".
Whether or not you like them, this is how human communications are evolving, and have been for a long time, particularly as we reshape language around our new technologies. "lol" as an interjective is a tonality carrier, just like vocal tone. Emojis are short textual-form memes. Etc etc. Image memes as high-density multilayered communication are just another form.
I mean half the time when I write out a longform comment, the response I get is "I ain't reading all that shit" even here on HN. ;). People just want higher symbol density, it's the same reason they don't read the article or watch the video. The human brain is a meaning-density machine and we inherently seek ways to increase the amount and preciseness of meaning-interchange. Higher meaning-density per symbol is a great way to do that given our physical limitations at processing more symbols.
In ironic contrast to the rise of youtube-driven content production - I think people inherently crave symbol density and meaning. But since we've monetized attention, there's a perverse incentive to decrease symbol density/meaning-density to allow greater time for monetization... but I think that also rubs against what our brains want to do.
In the aggregate, the way memes bounce around communities nowadays is also not dissimilar to a neural network working with higher-order objects instead of zeros and ones or floats. Memes that don't get passed between groups are the ones that are less relevant - so we have activation energy in some form, short-term storage, and cross-group linkage between neurons. And the memes are symbolic encodings of some groups of features (concepts). They are an emergent cluster of features that activates various groups reliably.
Higher meaning-density is also the reason some people prefer face-to-face communication or phone calls. Things like facial expressions and tone of voice also increase meaning-density as well. People say things like "it's less ambiguous/more immediate" but I think that's because of those sub-channels increasing the meaningfulness. And while meme culture/emojis isn't all good, maybe it's best viewed as replacing some of those sub-channels we lost in the shift from verbal to written communication rather than a regression to repetitive communication.
I agree with all of this, and I'm fond of memes myself. They are definitely an important sense-making tool. But there's a distinction that I can't quite articulate, between memes as shared shorthand, and cliches that are actually reflexes or performative gestures, but are meant to be processed by the recipient as original communication.
As an extreme example, I used to know someone who was quite brilliant and would regularly make profound statements on a wide variety of topics, which he could explain in depth if needed. Some years after getting to be friends with this person, I wound up living with him for a few months and had access to his extensive library. I was surprised to discover how many of his profundities were actually quotations from books, but were uttered without any attribution or reference to the book. It would be like a HN commenter systematically lifting vc quotes but never mentioning their originators by name.
The other thing that this meme-language does is signal some sort of unity of understanding. The memes with deeper meaning tend to have much further longevity and come back time and again, in many different contexts. The father the meme travels, the more likely it is to absorb additional contextual significance.
Yeah I mean if he's presenting them as ideas he came up with that's intellectual fraud which it seems like most people are uncomfortable with. To some extent we are all living in a soup of ideas and we're just synthesizing from a lot of the same sources and riffing on a lot of the same inputs. But if it's systematic and specific and presented as ideas he came up with then yeah.
I think a lesser form of "intellectual fraud" many of us are guilty of is speaking too authoritatively about things we're not deep experts on, that's why it's always uncomfortable to get called out on things we're wrong about like that. Even things like citing concepts from books we haven't read/etc are kinda "intellectual fraud".
The concept of intellectual fraud is a really interesting one though because it's very ill-defined in general. Academics believe self-plagarism is intellectual fraud, you are presenting ideas constructed for another intellectual exercise as being ones for this exercise, you should independently construct each work or cite your prior works. I kinda feel like that one's a bit bullshit, that you can plagarize your own ideas. Ideas evolve continuously and I think it's a little weird to atomize their development like that.
The idea of "you stole my meme, you should re-attribute when you re-post" is an interesting one that cooked for a bit there too. Like half the time who even knows where a meme came from let alone randomly crediting users every time it's reposted. I think in general it seems things like removing watermarks is going a little far but some people also go nuclear with the u/biggusdickus @xXxBD420xXx ON TWITTER stuff too, and it's also kinda crass with the way memes derive and are remixed to think you own an idea forever. Derivative works in copyrights are really another one where the law is kinda weird, I think we have this sense that Disney doesn't own your star wars slashfic because it's a derivate work, but it do be like that, even your additional creative input is subordinate to that original conceptual ownership. And that really feels weird and out of step.
That's one of the reasons AI gen is awkward too, it's like an exam question of the most impossible chain of intellectual ownership. Who owns the ideas, the person whose stuff was used to train the net and was riffed upon? The company who built the net itself and tuned/trained it etc? The person coming up with the ideas for the prompts and curating/editing the results? Actual artists are influenced by each other all the time, who owns the idea of vintage anime artstyle or whatever, (forgetting assignment of copyright) does some artist from the 80s have social-intellectual ownership of gundam or whatever? how about Touhou? How is a neural net different, and who really owns the ideas? Like, you go to college to learn to mash up ideas gooder and come up with some new twists of your own, and neural nets can do the "ok now draw daft punk in the style of 1980s gundam" art homework assignments now.
(really it's sort of like raising a kid, yeah the parents did a lot of it but the kid is also kind of their own intellectual entity, and the exact behavior will depend on trained responses to a particular life scenario ("prompt").)
Intellectual ownership is a super interesting concept, like don't we all own these ideas we're discussing right now? is it some star trek TNG writer, because they wrote the proto-meme that sparked our discussion 30 years later? Which neuron initiated the wave, and does it even matter? (stolen meme: which pebble causes the avalanche?) Like physically it isn't even one thing, it's brain waves, neurons firing themselves in self-organizing clusters. Can you say who owns a meme? (which version?) Like yeah if it's a bunch of direct stolen quotes that he's presenting as his own that's easy, but, the concept of intellectual ownership (and the accompanying intellectual fraud) is really interesting and fuzzy in human society. derivative works are a sticking point in mapping onto our ideas of "ownership", and we intellectually derive all the time as a matter of course of life, sometimes inappropriately (like the "talking authoritatively about things you don't know all that well" thing). Our brains are information summary generators right down to things like daily routines, and that's inherently "derivation" of information in the ownership sense. Who really made any of that, which neuron is the "brush your teeth or they'll fall out" neuron and is that owned by my parents or by the dentist or by university biology, or some dead guy from the 1900s who invented the toothbrush? Which neuron was the one where I got good at python, and how much of that weight is from being good at C#/java? We are just giant idea machines that riff off what's worked, constantly, deriving and mashing up ideas is all we do.
Ideas are weird and "I own that" really doesn't work for derivation, we have this inherent idea that if we add enough of ourself to it then we have at least some ownership of something that's not subordinate to someone else's ownership. Our ownership of the idea is intuitively relative to how much we add vs re-use... and that is our society-organism's gradient descent. ;) And maybe that gradient-descent is why the idea of your friend claiming those ideas as his own is offputting, or getting caught lacking on something you don't know well that you spoke too rashly about - it's an error in the backprop, if you will, and socially we know that and that's why it's taboo. It's fine to estimate the backprop a bit wrong (some fuzz even can improve results!) just try not to fire grossly wrong too much or in an adversarial fashion.
(and in this model... self-plagarism isn't really a thing. I cited me, that's who I'm always citing, there is no error in the social backprop there, that's why it doesn't really "feel" wrong.)
Memes as elements of cultural communication are interesting in that light because there's an explicit physicality to it that isn't present in just a raw idea. We definitely have a cultural idiom for "that's my image you can't steal it", despite it actually being a token/stimulus/idea itself in our culture ("the sign becomes its own pure simulacra" dot meme). Because that intentionality is also present in any act of creation. Art doesn't have to be good art, it just has to be trying to communicate a message, and the element implicit to that act of creation is really intentionality.
Just a random interesting tangent I've been thinking about lately. Completely independent idea with no input from current events or anything else happening or being discussed by anyone else - original idea do not steal. You're all on notice, better cite your shit, cause my ownership of those ideas is clearly the most significant! /s
(anyway the real meme weapon was Metal Gear all along. The Orange, pretty good, kept you waiting huh, even the idea of surpassing metal gear? All according to the will of the patriots... in 1992 nobody was prepared for a memetic weapon of that kind. It caught humanity unprepared. It's hilarious that one of the greatest theses about memes is itself an absolute memetic powerhouse, Kojima is really a William Gibson-level visionary about where things were going to go and also a master of the medium before it even existed. Modern meme but also not an unfair summary of Kojima's work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srTqxL_6Ysg )
Is creativity an exercise in invention or discovery?
If it is the latter, attribution is all that is warranted, but even that will be a bit silly. Does it really matter which particular human gets credit for "finding" a landscape feature, organism, or principal of physics? In the landscape case, over the course of eons those landscape features are meaningless. And if we include paint blobs, strings of words, or better mousetraps in our discovery scope... attributing any "invention" to any of us (instead of all of us) feels weird. I feel fine with "humans made it". Less fine with "that particular person made it, and gets all of the glory and money, even though it would have been impossible to make without a bunch of supporting everythings and also someone else was going to get to it eventually".
Intellectual ownership is indeed super interesting.
Tangential, and yet not entirely unrelated observation: it’s becoming more common for me to see someone writing this much and my first thought is “did they get ChatGPT to fluff this up for them?”
Things are going to get worse before they get better, I suspect.
Okay, data is great, but the conclusions at the end have almost nothing to do with the data. They're a bunch of unsupported assumptions about what we've changed that must have caused all of this. It includes two separate links to his article about how we're ruining the children by coddling them with woke bullshit. Here's the tagline: "In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health."
This is not an accurate reading of the Conclusion section. He just sums up what has been observed and does not mention any causal factors. Earlier, he explicitly says that causal factos will be covered by other posts.
While he indeed links to another article, he claims at no point in this article that coddling is a factor here.
Boomers are full of men white knuckling their way through lives of quiet desperation (is the English way. The time is gone, the song is over. Thought I’d something more to say). Their children were brought up that way, and maybe only started to question it in adulthood, with their own children, or before grandchildren came. As long as the kids don’t get parenting advice from grandma and grandpa, there’s more permission to ask for help.
I’m surprised the numbers for girls are still so high relative to boys, but not surprised that the rate for boys is catching up.
I don't know if it is much of a generational, ignore your feelings bit. We're all so busy, never seem to find the time. Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines. If anything, I think time pressure has increased, we're all more "available" now. Increasing pressure to get into a good (and hopelessly expensive) college, too, may be a factor. I know seventeen year olds who think they've missed the starting gun.
The increase in poverty was pretty small (<5% over the recent average), disappeared by 2015 and the poverty rate has been generally trending down ever since.
If poverty were a major contributing factor, it should be immediately obvious in terms of who's affected. The children of the professional-managerial class should be roughly exempt. What we see is in fact the opposite.
Social media is global, so any effects it has should be visible globally.
> Teenage suicides rates have, on average, declined slightly over the past two decades or so. While in 1990 there were, on average across the OECD, 8.5 suicides per 100 000 teenagers
(15-19), by 2015 this rate had fallen to 7.4. Much of this decline occurred during the 2000s. Between 1990 and 1999 the OECD average teenage suicide remained fairly stable at around 8.4 suicides per 100,000, but this average fell across the 2000s before reaching a low of 6.3 per 100,000 in 2007. With the exception of 2008, the average rate remained lower than 7.0 until 2014, although it increased slightly in 2014 and 2015.
> Social media is global, so any effects it has should be visible globally.
That isn't true at all.
There may be a hundred factors at play, which are all different in different cultures, regions, countries, etc. The cultural context of an individual can dramatically change how they react to situations, pressures, and mental illness.
Fascinating. It is a pity then that our culture is so terrible as to make teens have mental illness at rates that dwarf other nations (who have cultures that are far superior at keeping teens mentally healthy). It is a shame that we blame social media for this when clearly it is our culture that is the difference and the cause.
Do schools in other countries let kids—elementary school and up—take smartphones to school and (due to inability to harshly police it because of reluctance to take phones, since it pisses off parents) use them quite a bit in class? I was shocked to find out that's a widespread policy/practice in the US, these days, and I'd be surprised if other countries are following us off that particular very-stupid cliff.
What's the median age of first smartphone for kids coming up in other OECD states?
Social media has a much smaller effect if you have to go to the family computer to use it, or whatever, than if you've got it in your pocket all day and are checking it constantly when the teacher's not looking....
I just randomly picked France, and it looks like their age of first smartphone is around 11-12[1] (as of 2018 study, so maybe even lower now). In the US it's 11.6 years[2]. So seems about the same. I don't feel like checking every other country but hopefully this disputes the claim that the US is somehow completely abnormal.
Agreed. As an aside, I find it interesting that people are willing to attribute cultural differences to disparate outcomes in this context, but not in other contexts like racial income disparities.
>Social media is global, so any effects it has should be visible globally.
I don't disagree, but that conversation also needs to include data around how frequently teens in different countries use social media/smartphones. Without that data, the data you cite about global teenage suicide rates is sorta worthless.
Comparing against 1990 is wrong though, as we should compare against the start of widespread social media use (2010 at least), and it's also pretty likely that other OECD countries are lagging behind with widespread adoption by a few years.
If we don't see an increase from 2015 to 2022 THAT would be counterevidence.
Social media isn't totally global, though -- I would be interested to see this youth mental health data correlated with smartphone uptake in a given country.
For all intents and purposes, it is global. Facebook claims multiple billions of users and I myself am from a pretty isolated area and can say that social media definitley has a big presence here.
A lot of the stats cited are ultimately subjective assessments of things like mental health. Calling more people "bipolar" or "depressed" or "anxious" can just as easily be a change in language as to what those words mean, as easily as they can reflect a change in the underlying language and how people express things. Notably the definition of most mental illnesses in the country Haidt is pulling his data from changed in 2013 due to the release of the DSM-V, so I don't really think pre-2013 data is comparable to post-2013 data at all, as these words in question are not medically or socially defined in the same way that they were before. In fact one of the most common criticisms of the DSM-V when it was being drafted to the present day is the allegation that it leads to more mental illness diagnosis's.
Attempted suicide is one of the few stats I treat as grounded relatively firmly in reality because it's not nearly as subjective, but this measure seems to have started skyrocketing in the mid 2000's not in 2012.
If the conclusion is that the rise of the internet has caused more and more teens to label themselves as mentally ill, I would say that's a conclusion I'm firmly convinced of. The conclusion that mental illness is actually increasing population wide, I'm very very sceptical of. I could imagine that it's happening to an extent due to things like economic pressures and increased inequality, we are seeing things like declines in lifespans and increases in suicide, but I don't think mental illness is increasingly nearly as much as the stats would lead you to believe at face value.
Plus quite simply, using time series data about when mental illness increased in society doesn't really shed much light on WHAT caused the mental illness to rise even if you can establish such a rise was happening, but I'm not even convinced by the date "2012".
> we are seeing things like declines in lifespans and increases in suicide, but I don't think mental illness is increasingly nearly as much as the stats would lead you to believe at face value.
This just seems like a flat out contradiction. How would suicides ‘skyrocket’ if mental illness is not increasing.
Agreed that 2012 may be irrelevant and we may not know the cause.
It's not a contradiction, I'm saying that an underlying increase in mental illness plausibly explains some of the effect, but I'm unconvinced it explains the entire effect.
I'm not sure suicides strictly are the result of mental illness. I, for example, have an uncle that killed himself. He may have been clinically depressed, but mainly, he was an alcoholic. I think it's likely what depression he had would have resolved if he successfully dealt with his substance abuse problem.
Did he die because he was mentally ill, or because drinking can be a pretty bad problem?
I'm drawing a distinction between "mental illness" and "mental illness diagnosis" that I maybe didn't make entirely clear. I think the former is increasing, but the latter is increasing faster than the former.
It seems like only around 10% of suicides are not associated with mental illness. So I agree it seems implausible that this 10% would account for the entire increase, but it could be some of it.
Digital society sucks, and to a degree modern society in general.
There used to be religion, which you may dislike, but it offered social bonding at scale. You'd get to known an entire community, neighborhood, might make new friends or even find a spouse. Learn about people hobbies and form sub communities.
Or you go to school. Or to work, where before globalization you'd have a stable local team that you'd get to know very deeply. Or you may go to a bar, a hobby club, and attend public places for shopping, entertainment, whichever.
Now you wake up and the first thing you do is check your phone. Next, you may learn or work remotely, sitting alone, watching a screen breathing low quality air. You don't go to a store, you use delivery. You use your little work breaks to watch another screen, the smartphone. After dinner, there's more screen time. Passive entertainment, doomscrolling or interacting with a "community", weird little avatars on a screen.
You don't even have a relation with objects either. In the digital world, you don't really own anything. There's no stability. It's all fleeting, flexible, disrupted, empty. That's increasingly the dominant lifestyle: void.
The world is entirely financialized, hence you don't really live in a society, it's performance culture. You're expected to juggle 10 balls from an early age, which are life's "expectations". It offers no time for discovery, play or recovery. You need to check the damn boxes. The reward of mastering the boxes is that well actually...you still can't afford a basic middle class existence. The financial system constantly rug-pulls you whilst technology constantly disrupts your relevance.
Am I dramatizing? Yes, somewhat. But I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better. We lost a lot.
> I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better.
If there is anything I’ve learned in my old age, it’s that things were not better in the past. And while I don’t accept Steven Pinker’s optimistic claims about the fruits of progress as much as other people do, I think he makes a good baseline argument regarding how much progress we have made over the last century. It’s just that we have so much farther to go and that seems overwhelming at times, at least to me.
There’s a common cognitive bias known as nostalgia or rosy retrospection that makes people think the past was better, as well as any number of psych studies showing how this works and why people do it. The most common example is of a parent who only remembers the good times while their children remember the bad. I won’t bore you with the details, but you can look into this phenomenon for yourself.
With that said, you have listed some legitimate complaints about negative societal changes that have occurred over the last thirty years. That doesn’t mean or imply that everything was better in the past, but it would be accurate to say that some things have gotten worse while other things have gotten better, but mostly, humanity has achieved some measure of progress that makes even the most recent past look barbaric, IMO.
We have this idea in our head that progress and advancement and the uplifting of humanity (and its relationship with nature) should be neat and orderly, when in reality it’s extremely messy, gruesome, and violent, much like the labor pains of a woman giving birth.
If you were an alien and had never seen a human giving birth, you might think the mother to be was being attacked or suffering from a disease. I think progress is a little bit like that. Its appearance looks like chaos and suffering and pain, but the end result is a new form of life, a new form of living. That’s what we are experiencing.
I personally believe it is a dangerous error to believe the past was better, because it prevents people from looking towards a better future, as they seek to repeat the same mistakes from the past, over and over again, endlessly seeking a Golden Age that never was.
The other problem with looking in the rear view mirror, is that you neglect working to improve the present, which inevitably informs all future progress. If we are looking backwards, then we are neglecting the present and its subsequent future, so we have to be wary and cautious about people who tell us that things were better in the past, as it tends to impose a false historical mythology on the past, present, and future, disrupting the timeline of progress in all directions.
While I don't doubt that social media can have a negative impact on teens... my own experience as the parent of a teen is slightly different and doesn't point to social media as being a driver. At least in my case.
I have a teenager that struggles with anxiety, low self-esteem and depression. He's incredibly smart and is an honors student in high school. BUT he also thinks he's terrible and he's incapable of accepting a compliment or congratulations on a good grade or work which he immediately deflects and says he was lucky or he's not really smart or something negative.
What does this have to do with the article as far as my experience? He's not on social media. While he might consume some social media (ex. TikTok) he doesn't have his own social media accounts. He doesn't have a Facebook account, Instagram account, etc. Which might sound hard to believe and you are likely thinking "I bet he has burner accounts..." but actually he doesn't.
He didn't have a smartphone until he was 13. And while he used an iPad before that it was primarily for playing games and watching Youtube.
What he is into is online gaming and Youtube. I guess you could count Youtube as a form of social media but even with that he's a consumer of the content and not a creator or commenter. So he's not posting videos on Youtube or getting into arguments with people in the Youtube comments, etc. He simply watches content.
So I'm only a sample size of one but I deal with a teen who struggles with a lot of what is described in this article... yet it isn't being driven by social media.
I think there are far more factors at play than simply smartphones and social media. And those factors could be different depending on the individual. Although some of the factors are obviously going to be shared. And I have no doubt social media can have a tremendous negative impact on mental health. But I think there is much more going on than just that.
As an adult I realized my attitude came from simply not having any example or basis for what I was doing. All I had were long term goals that always seemed just beyond the horizon.
In that situation almost any expectations will seem lofty and it's just as easy to feel either pride or shame regardless of what is actually accomplished.
This is not easy to deal with, but it is possible. As they say, you should surround yourself with people you can look up to. That's how you grow.
Consuming is the worst. The Internet is a toxic cesspool, for the most part. Having an account and interacting with friends would be one of the few exceptions, and maybe learning some stuff now and then.
Yea. I agree there is a lot of bad things to consume.
In general what he consumes tends to lean towards the toxic end of things. A lot of learning, science and educational content. And then gaming-related content (Minecraft, etc.).
Obviously, some of the gaming content can get toxic. But he's always been pretty good about staying away from more toxic gaming content. And while he will watching gaming content on Youtube he's not really into watching live streamers (on Youtube or Twitch) which is where a lot of toxicity can be on full display (both on the stream and in the chat).
So overall the majority of what he consumes tends to not be swimming around in the toxic cesspool end of things.
I think you're the first here in this topic that talked about Twitch and streamers.
I know a few streamers and we're aware of people that spend sometimes up to 5 hours a day on every single stream they do. Some of those donating hundreds of dollars a month to a single streamer. The stream chat is their hobby and the majority of their social interaction. The streamers are also burned out.
I'm all for people finding a community, and that's sort of what we do at HN. But that's a bit extreme for me.
Streamers who aren't big enough to be financially successful (which is 99.999%) but have dreams of high viewer counts and big advertising checks (they work hard at growing their channels) are like an underfed child army of influence. The desperation to be popular online fuels a tremendous aggregate effort with little return for the streamers, but which is very effective at drawing their peers and adjacent peer groups into this unhealthy viewership, all in the service of showing ads.
The whole culture around twitch, TikTok, and social media influence generally is very exploitative of teens and younger people with more time and energy than wisdom.
I don't think it's the technology itself that is harmful to kids, not even slightly. It's the environment created online by adults who act to make a profit that drives the pathological use of technology. It's exploiting people's psychology, their need for attention or belonging, and constantly driving engagement that makes the impact of tech on society so ugly. The biggest danger to our youth online is arguably unfettered capitalism, not child predators.
Capitalism can and does work synergistically without the kind of pathological, societal self-harm that's so broadly accepted. Modern technology has just enabled perverse new ways to chew up and spit out the young and disadvantaged en masse while essentially looking the other way, just seeing the participants as rows in a DB table. From most parents' point of view, the threats posed by the profiteering actors in tech are hard to detect and reason about, and hard to protect from in ways that aren't net harmful & draconian, so many young people are left very vulnerable.
Further, for many tech workers, or for those that use the tech to generate business, it's hard to steer away from "evil technology" that is so effective in paying the bills.
All the things he cites are lagging indicators. Self-harm and suicide typically follow long, long battles with mental health issues; they're not the first thing that happens, or even close. Diagnoses are also typically far from immediate; having depression and being diagnosed with depression are two very different things. (And without increased awareness, many people never get care and are never diagnosed.)
As such, the inflection point, if there is one, is likely much earlier than 2012.
How does that apply to children though? They haven’t got a lot of time that’s earlier as they would be too young. Additionally, a key part of a child’s behaviour is that it’s impulsive.
Looking at the "suicide attempts requiring medical attention" we see a low of 1.7% in 1991, then a peak of 2.8% in 1995, and another low in 1.9%, and then now another peak (but less than 1995).
For actual suicides I found this chart https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm which shows we are well below baseline trends for males. For females we do seem to have an increase lately, so that part seems like the main thing to be concerned about. Although it seems to have started more around 2007 than 2012 which seems a bit early to be blaming social media (almost no one really had smartphones in 2007, let alone teens). So I do think it's worth looking into this but it's easy to try to find data to fit our preconceived notions rather than the truth.
We didn't have smartphones, but we did have cell phones. I was in 7/8th grade at that time and had a cell phone as a lower middle class kid. I mainly used it to call my parents or text with friends. That time was shortly after providers moved to unlimited calls/texts in the US because kids would steamroll through a billion sms messages anyway.
My daughter hit her teens in2012. It was a horrible couple of years not just for her but from about 8th grade up.
Our HS had a suicide wave. Many attepts (my daughter being one) and quite a few of those attempts were successful later. Thankfully my child responded well to therapy.
This was in a high competitive HS IN NORTHERN VA.
My thoughts on factors:
Crazy parents pushing kids to try and get in TJ who had no business there. (We did not)
Peer pressure to over perform at everything
(If you did t have a 4.5 gpa you were stupid)
And the big bad social media really started going for teens then. And it was brutal
Over scheduling for activities. We played travel soccer. Super competitive. We had girls that played travel basketbal,soccer and softball. One of those is almost year round. Three? Your never home
We balanced it all with camping. It helped so much. One weekend a month minimum. No excuses.
Rambled a bit but from about 2011 on kids have been fucked.
I taught at the high school level for about ten years before shifting into tech. I was always astounded by the level of devotion many families had toward traveling sports (notably hockey up here in Minnesota). Outside of truly elite athletic pipelines, I honestly believe competitive youth sports have gotten completely out of hand. Here’s to hoping my son grows up to be a mediocre athlete.
It has. Everyone’s kid now is a future pro millionaire. Our family has a decent few pro football (american) and baseball players and we have always played high level sports. My deal with the kids was always you play what you want at the level you want. If its not fun pick something else. I think sports are important. 2 of my kids did very well with soccer (college scholarship level) my youngest said nah. She danced and worked at the pet shelter :)
My brother recently retired after a career (~18-38ish) as a professional basketball player. It worked for him and there were opportunities to leverage contacts for employment after sport. But that was a 15+ year career. Anything too far short of that is a risk, IMO. Watching many of his peers defer tertiary study, or forgo jobs for training roles, or be out of the league after a few underpaid years while contemporaries were getting promoted with years of study or work under their belt - I figured you want your children to be very good or hobbyists playing social sport or to keep fit. Anything in the middle might just be distraction or disappointment.
Awesome for him. Parents dont want to hear what .000001 % actually have a chance to go pro? Every year after the season we always asked if they were still having fun. To us it was good skill building. Social,fitness, how to lose etc.
Exactly that. Good life skills. And guess what. They still play casual and have a blast are fit healthy and pretty mentally strong. (Proud dad eeking out).
We have life long friends whos kids went more music or arts but with the same kind of attitude. Guess what. They are happy too. To us it was just helping them find stuff they liked doing.
The biggest rule was if you start a season you finish it. (There were exceptions for sure) it wasnt all roses but they learned from that too
Does all of this stem from parents worrying about their children being set up for their future? Or trying to develop well-rounded people? Or trying to socialise their children?
I'm mid-forties in Australia. In my early twenties, it was pretty viable to save a deposit in a year or so, get a loan and buy a house. Now, you'd want 5-10x the deposit and I doubt early-twenties types here would have a chance of buying a house now. Maybe if they were a couple, both in very good jobs, saving aggressively, and even then they'd have a fat mortgage. It will be harder again in 15-20 years when my children would be doing this.
I figure extra-curricular activities for kids that involve loads of travel are a risky burden on a family. I'd rather travel and camp where I want to go, not just where the sports tournament happens to be, or give up every weeknight shuttling children. One of our kids has done dance because the lessons are 3 mins walk away. Or two have done tennis because their lessons are together and the third kid can play at the adjacent playground. Or music lessons during school time or immediately after. Not sure if it's parental laziness or reasonable!
I think parents use “preparing them for the future” as an excuse tbh. Part of it is they are trying to relive their childhood through the kids (seen this ALOT). I coached rec league basketball and soccer for 20 years and it was very prevalent.
It was funny/sad as every once in a while i would have the kids bring a book or a boardgame to practice and parents would loose their shit. Kids loved it but a lot of i was hampering their childs development type talk. Give me a break. Its rec league. Made for learning the game and having a blast doing it
It’s so weird that so many people ruin the happiness in their lives trying to compete for a spot at an elite university so they can get in the fast lane to making money for a corporation as a VP or something. And for what? So they can have a bigger house or “better” vacations?
Why don’t we push kids to find happiness in whatever they do and that living in a bungalow in a working class area and driving used cars doesn’t really matter.
Its all superficial competition. As a society we have made it so if you dont make x dollars youre a failure. I do think the pandemic opened a lot of eyes to change though.
Also the push for college or youre a failure and will never get a job has been supremely harmful to kids via debt and a myriad other issues.
I agree with the authors premise and argument but the data visualizations are not well done, and I'm confused about the conclusions he draws from them.
For starters, it's unclear why he draws a line at 2012, when in many of the graphs the slope gets steeper at 2010 instead, and in fact that's where the percentage increase calculations start from as well. That vertical line at 2012 is misleading and confusing.
Also, in the US Teens, Suicides (Ages 10-14), the uptick clearly started in 2007. I don't disagree that social media is bad and I've seen firsthand people who become mentally ill because of the standards and expectations supplied by a constant stream of highlight rules that make you question your own worth. But I think that the data provided here is not strong enough to come to that conclusion.
I think if you do a moving average that the trend would adhere more to 2012 being the inflection point. I'm basing that on just noticing that in US Teens, Suicides (Ages 10-14) chart the there was a decent amount of fluctuation in the leading years.
As for why these trends exist, one of the interesting things is that these are present in all of the anglosphere. Can we think of another explanation? What else has changed on a global scale in the last couple of decades?
For boys suicides 10-14 it sure looks like it started in 2007, yeah. For girls the 1 year increase from 2012 to 2013 is kind of suspicious, so I could see an argument for 2007 as well. That does seem to decrease the strength of the argument for social media specifically since I don't believe it was all that widespread until the 2010s.
I think the point is that you can't just draw a single year as the change, which obviously makes sense with any social trends. It's not like people wake up Jan 1 and suddenly they have depression.
The dismissive statement "people have made similar claims before, therefore this claim isn't true" is one of my pet peeves. You see it a lot around issues like this as a way to not engage with an argument.
It's an obvious fallacy: it doesn't matter if something was said in the past, or whether or not it was true when said before. The only thing that matters is whether it is true in this case.
This is just complete speculation, but to me, the timing and difference in ratio between male and female seems to correlate extremely well with a hypothesis that much of this is driven by the "sexting age" brought about with the advent of snapchat and similar apps. These apps have the dangerous duality that they are viewed very naively by less tech literate who see as something that facilitates sending nude pictures by only letting your recipient see them and deleting them after a fixed period. Of cause to anyone slightly more tech literate apps like that are a bombshell waiting to happen anytime anything remotely compromising is sent. This fits well with a lot of the cases you hear about where what would have just been hallway gossip of "did you hear that XX and XY broke up and are fighting?" which now is a viral package of pictures typically of XX being sent around to everyone on campus.
This hypothesis also helps to explain why European countries where snapchat and similar apps never gained huge popularity before there where already campaigns warning young people never to trust that something sent through them would not end up on the internet forever.
But that's all just random speculation on my part, and I have no real evidence to make the connection. All I can say is that the timing and ratio makes me thing that it's worth looking into just how many major depressed teenagers have had some sort of personal material leak outside of the intended recipients.
Having seen our kids pass through this timeframe into adulthood, experiencing various forms of "mental illness" along the way, the main "obvious" factors that were different from our childhoods were ...
a) social media, and
b) schools pressuring them to commit to major life decisions before they were even allowed to drive a car, and never letting up, and
c) the magnitude of student loans necessary to comply with that pressure.
This was all hammering them long before any sort of college admissions process came into play.
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.
One of the core dilemmas of raising the next generation:
1. We base much of our own sense of self-worth on difficulties we have overcome and our ability to take care of others.
2. We fairly extend that same metric to others and judge others by the difficulties they've overcome and what they do for others.
3. Therefore, the better we are at living up to our own values and improving the lives of the next generation, the less we respect them for it.
If kids had it as hard as us, it would indicate a failure on our part to provide for them. If they don't have it as hard us, we see them as soft.
(The current generation has tackled this dilemma both by destroying the climate and functioning economic and institutional systems they had the luxury of growing up under thus making it worse for the next generation, and still calling them weak for, unsurprisingly, wanting to tune out of the horror show that is the world by staring at their phone.)
I think adults forget how much time and opportunities they frittered away. Heaven knows I've done that through my teens, twenties, and even some of my thirties.
A lot of people looking at their phones are just watching TikToks of people dancing to 80s songs with their dog and weird shit like that. They aren't all doomscrolling the news.
Looking at the graphs in the article, they just sort of have a line drawn at 2012, but I don't think there's an obvious change in trend in almost any of them, not that sticks out from the rest of the noise-level in the data at least.
If anything, judging from the graphs (all of which have been cropped very close to the beginning of the span so as to not give much of a baseline), the change, if there is such a thing, seems to have happened at about 2006-2009?
Another random possibility: the social aftermath of Occupy Wall Street (late 2011), where global corporate interests found it very useful to pit the 99% against each other through endless support of smaller and smaller atomized groups that are told it's the highest virtue the hate each other (but pretend it's not hate... "we're against hate, honestly we are, just look at our manufactured PR slogans on our websites!").
Children, being impressionable and the next generation, were especially heavily targeted by the media and big tech. Social cliques have always existed amongst the young, but those mostly developed organically. Now children are being victimized by companies worth hundreds of billions to ensure the kids don't grow up to be a threat to the corporate dominance of society and finance.
do you have any hint of evidence? Don't you think, people on HN would spill the beans? We found out from Snowden what the CIA is capable of, wouldn't someone working at big tech notice?
Social media, and smart phones are partially (or even largely responsible) ... However I wouldn't discount 'social contagion' as a contributing factor since 2012 was around the time focus on "mental health" (specifically focusing on 'mental health' and related issues) came into wide prominence, especially amongst the younger crowd.
It's a pretty good start. "Kids these days" doesn't explain teens' self reported problems, or objective data such as suicide and self harm. Clearly something really is going on. Is social media the culprit? Maybe a case will be made in subsequent articles. One thing I don't see mentioned is the fact that - regardless of whether it comes through "old school" or "new school" media - kids today are barraged by negative news. Incomes for most have stagnated (at best). Costs have skyrocketed (especially housing, health care, and education). Inflation is back. The political situation is an absolute dumpster file. Evidence of climate change is all around. And most of these things seem to be getting worse. Advances in science and technology are positive, but not quite as dramatic as going to the moon or as life-changing as electronics and plastics a couple of generations ago. If my life after ChadGPT is different than my life before, it's likely to be in negative ways.
Who can blame kids for feeling overwhelmed or defeated, which often end up being expressed as not-obviously-related mental (or even physical) health issues? They are, after all, facing a bleaker future than we did, including my own GenX and the Cold War. If social media is part of the problem, then we need to identify how much it's a problem itself vs. as an avenue for a constant flood of depressing news.
Biggest issue I'm seeing is people in the digital ecosystems (even myself) often lack in high quality friends who they regularly see. I noticed how I would form bonds with people over a game, but as soon as we both move on, we effectively just fizzle away and lose friends.
Meanwhile my daughter is having similar issues. She has more closer ties to people online than in the physical world, which means that when we want to host parties or she just wants to do things, she's unable to invite her closest friends because they may live on the opposite side of the continent.
Now the shortcuts to social gratification are VERY easy, compared to before, and because of this, it is easy to spiral into the shortcut path, and not meaningful long term relationships. And so now more than ever it is important to be very intentional about keeping up friendships compared to before where you simply had to do things to create bonds. Even the "loners" would find friends in comic book stores, but now that moved online and less regular or connected.
I don't think it is social media. I think it is just the ease of remote communication. I am sure there was a similar problem when the telephone came out because people could now keep in touch with friends outside their neighborhoods. Hell at this point I only know 1 non-family member in my neighborhood who I interact with at all.
Indeed. Real people are just so danged inconvenient. Even just talking to them involves this degree of ritual where the desired communication is bookended with wasted time on introductory small talk and then a denouement you're never quite sure where it ends. If you're meeting up in person it's almost guaranteed you're going to be tired of their company before you actually leave, and then you have wasted time again traveling home.
This article is great because it looks at the self-harm and suicide data, which is pretty compelling.
Obviously everybody's willingness to talk about their issues has gone up, but perhaps something else is happening too.
It's already scientifically concluded that sperm counts and testosterone is down (for better or worse) [just google scholar it for journal articles], and one correlate of low testosterone is worse mood. So there would be precedent and reason to look for environmental causes.
> sperm counts and testosterone is down (for better or worse)
Sorry to nitpick but why did you qualify it “for better or worse”? It struck me as misandry. The implication being that masculine traits are bad and perhaps low sperm and testosterone is a good thing!
I think you're reading too much into that statement. The connection between masculine traits and t/sperm count is not 1:1. I think the obsession over testosterone levels and the implicit association between t levels and masculinity is far more damaging to men than the low t itself. See also: https://youtu.be/C8dfiDeJeDU?t=729
The role of testosterone in the behavior of cattle or monkeys is obvious to any casual observer. I don't know why we try so hard to overlook it in humans. Like the GP, I don't view it as an objective negative, but there's definitely a reason 90+% of the humans in prison are males. And that's true in every culture across the entire planet.
I suspect this trend will continue for at least another generation. And I don't believe it's restricted to teens; they're merely the most prominent examples.
The explanation I heard that strongly resonated with me was that, as a society, we're moving up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs from level 2, "Safety Needs," to level 3, "Love and Belonging."
When I read descriptions of life in the early 20th century, it's nearly impossible for me to connect with it because even the poorest people I've met have a standard of living that's nearly unimaginable to someone from 1910. People who grew up in the 1950-1970s saw this change happening, but going from neglecting a thing to caring about it is almost certainly a lagging indicator.
For the first time in history, there is psychological space to care about mental health and social issues en mass. So, of course, there's going to be an explosion of diagnoses and an apparent epidemic.
Couple this with the dawn of social media, and you've accelerated the trend 10x as we figure out how the hell to handle it responsibly.
Social media, and more controversially a public orientation towards their 'values' defining their identities, which maybe has roots in some nice thinking and especially in trying to get kids with non-standard identities to not feel bad about it - but which ultimately causes a morass of confusion for all the kids.
I think kids need at least some structure and guidance on social development and this 'chose your own identity' thing is leaving them listless.
We don't become men and women arbitrarily, we grow into those roles with guidance. Given a new 'social convention' towards basically not defining those things, we're seeing a lot of kids fall off the side of the boat.
When you add constant social media into the mix, which reinforces all of these things from peers, other toxic things, life pressures it's all too much. You used to have to 'compete' against kids from HS, now it's a national competition.
I can't fathom how hard it is just to be a regular kid.
I want to raise my children in a very rural place where they can run and play outside in the woods. Where they and other kids don't care about phones, social media, etc.
Sounds like a pipe dream, but for the sake of my kids, I'm going to try to find this place that's right for us.
Until then, we've created a microcosm of it by implementing a strict no screen policy. It hasn't been that hard to implement so far because our child is only three and it's been great but we realize it get will harder as they get older, thus the plans to move to the aforementioned place.
To me, social media has so much downside compared to its upsides, trying my best to help my family escape it makes sense to me.
Perhaps related: the Affordable Care Act was passed by US President Obama in 2010. the US prior to 2010 had also experienced nearly seventy school shootings.
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 unrelated to the existing 0.01%.
Suicide rate is not a ROI or conversion rate. Use absolute percentages please. I get they're writing to accentuate big impact -- and suicide is a big deal -- but this is disingenuous.
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 the average from 2010-2020?
A bigger issue to me is that small window of the data. It's hard to tell how bumpy this curve is over the long term. Like is a suicide rate amongst teens that fluctuates 34%, decade over decade typical?
I am so damn happy I was born at that perfect time where cellphones just started to become popular in highschool and yet I never had to deal with Facebook. I got to start with mixtapes and end youth with my telephone as my vinyl player and the worst thing that could happen to me was that I might go to my friends Myspace page and accidently blast "CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES" from my family computer.
We definitely owe it to the future kids to figure out how to replicate something similar to that in the modern era. But I have no idea how.
I can’t help but feel like our brains didn’t evolve to understand the scale of competing against thousands of others to get admitted to college slots and get jobs. Once the internet opened the world to make comparisons against the hierarchy of everyone online, compared to a once much smaller local community, lots of mental issues have shot up. Things like body dysmorphia, imposter syndrome, etc…it just doesn’t seem like our brains can handle the scale of the hierarchy now. That’s just a personal theory of course
It is remarkably easy to expose yourself to truly horrifying things on the Internet. Stories, images, and videos of deaths of all kinds, from videos of terrorists cutting off people's heads to people live streaming their suicides to Reddit stories about motorcyclists having limbs ripped off in traffic accidents. News sites, forums, and social feeds are a parade of horrors. You cannot get away from the Internet, even if you want to, because your job constantly pings you on email/chat/whatever.
It feels like the "learned helplessness" experiments where researchers randomly shocked animals, who could not stop or do anything about the shocks.
I wonder if we are all traumatized by what we have seen over the years on Reddit, Twitter, etc.
There is an incredible recent song "Oh No" by Wet Leg that captures some of this. Here are the lyrics (sorry about the formatting):
I went home
All alone
Checked my phone
Oh no
Oh my God
Life is hard
Credit card
Oh no
You're so woke
Diet Coke
I feel gross
Oh no
I went home
All alone
I checked my phone
And now I'm inside it
On my phone
All alone
In the zone
Oh no
Hours pass
Pizza rat
I like that
Oh no
3 AM
I feel Zen
Fucking Zen
Oh no
Suck the life
From my eyes
It feels nice
I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling, ah
If you're going to the party
I heard there's gonna be some arty
People talking 'bout themselves
Or whatever it is that you always talk about, ah
I went home
All alone
I checked my phone
Oh no
I went home
All alone
I checked my phone
And now I'm inside it
Nah, gore is gore, death exists, farm kids have been doing this for years. Kids deal very well with death as long as they understand the concept from an early age.
My highschool, like most of the time, was full of kids who sent Iraqi beheadings and shock sites to each other. Voluntarily viewing something disgusting isn't a traumatic experience. Nor is being tricked into it when you can just press a big red X and never have to think about it again.
Coincidentally (or not), the same year Facebook launched the Feed as the default UI and opened it up to advertisers.
I've been screaming this since the moment it was introduced, but I don't think people will ever realize it until years from now in retrospect, that the concept of the "Feed", an endless scrolling ad monetized horse trough of clickbait, was one of the single most destructive ideas in the history of human civilization.
I think this idea that the teen mental illness epidemic began in 2012 is probably wrong. What is far more likely is that society began to open up more to these ideas, more people got diagnosed than before, and more young people identified with these struggles and felt more comfortable talking about them.
Susanna Kaysen's 1993 mental health memoir "Girl, Interrupted", which recounts her experience as a young female adolescent struggling with mental health in the late 1960s, for example, received an enormous amount of renewed attention and interest when it was adapted into a film in 1999.
The popularity of that film really opened up the conversation for a lot of young people in the 2000s, but even before that, similar struggles by teens were covered in the 1967 novel "The Outsiders", which also was adapted into a film in 1983, and if memory serves, there was also a similar rise in reports of an epidemic in the 1980s.
I’m not saying that any of these books or movies led to a mental health contagion, I’m saying that the struggles that today’s teens are going through have always been there, but in the past, they were either ignored or hidden away. Today, everything is shared far more widely and freely, which is why it looks like teens are suffering more than the past.
I also think if you go back into the literature of the past, you’ll find these same mental health concerns expressed just about everywhere. It’s just that instead of talking about them, they did everything possible to hide them away. Let’s not forget Bertha Mason, the character in the 1847 novel Jane Eyre, who was locked away in a room in a house. We are no longer doing that to people so it seems like there is a new epidemic at work, when it’s always been with us.
I'm a late 80s Gulf Coast America kid and any talk about therapy of depression growing up in the 90s/2000s was met with disbelief or family being upset that I'm not praying enough to Jesus. Those same people are now gladly taking anti-anxiety meds and dabbling in therapy.
It was obvious to me as a kid that plenty of people need some form of help or therapy even if it's just being open and honest about issues and feelings to those around them.
Well said. Do you follow Kitty Tait and the Orange Bakery? I just bought her book "Breadsong" as a gift. Her story about dealing with mental illness is incredibly inspiring. Check it out.
2012 was a major shift in culture. Major hacks, social media, phone culture, the beginning of the 'scandals', globalisation was on full tilt, people had never really moved along from occupy movement, and this was when corporations decided to just feign support to avoid getting targetted. I think this was the wokening across the culture which came hand in hand with mental health crisis.
This should be incredibly obvious, especially to adults who've realised (particularly during the pandemic) the effect that social media use can have on themselves.
Smartphones should be banned from schools entirely, and parents should be much more careful about keeping track of what their kids are up to online.
(But it's probably too late, we've got a generation of young teachers who've grown up hooked on this technology, and who see the world through the distorting lens of social media)
Another data point that should point out the obvious, is this coincides with the unexpected rise in traffic fatalities in 2012-2013. It is the societal effect of smart phones.
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.
For the sake of thinking outside of the box, I would want someone to comb through all data and evidence and try to find out if MAYBE the teen mental illness epidemic could be correlated to the other gigantic epidemic that is currently bringing down western civilisation: Insulin Resistance.
Right around when Obama was elected again and the Mayan calendar predicted.
But I am partial to his conclusion. For what it's worth, I am diagnosed with a half dozen mental illnesses, but if I'm being honest I just memorized the DSM-V criteria and appropriately played along and I have a bunch of prescriptions. I never use them, but it's nice to know I can get amphetamine and ketamine whenever I want.
America requires you to play sick to do certain things. So I can play sick. I wonder if the kids have found this loophole too. They're usually smarter than us adults and have less wisdom, so probably.
As a teenager myself, I definitely think that this recent rise in teen mental illness epidemic worldwide is definitely due to the fact that we are globalizing American concepts of mental health. I probably wonder if naming and pointing to a mental health problem is making it worse.
This is a complex issue, but one factor not addressed in the piece is the Affordable Care Act, which went into effect shortly before the rise in depression diagnosis rates. Before the ACA the uninsured rate among young people was dramatically higher than it is today, and mental health coverage (which is an essential health benefit under the ACA, and included in all health plans now) was not always included in the health insurance people did have. I’m not saying there hasn’t been any actual change, but a substantial portion of prior cohorts were likely undiagnosed because they couldn’t afford mental health treatment.
Did you actually read the article? If this was just due to increased diagnosis, one would expect rates of self-harm and suicide to stay the same or fall as kids are able to get better treatment for mental health issues. Instead, we see the opposite happening, self-harm is going up in lockstep with diagnosis, which suggests that the increase in diagnosis corresponds to a real increase in mental health problems among teens.
I think this is only perceived because it is of recent focus and more openness about feelings, as US population suicide rates are within a small margin from 1950s to present.[1] I suspect close to the same rate of depression in teens in the 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, etc.
But you know what else happened in 2012? Linux took over the datacenter. Probably just a coincidence.
Teens are going to therapy a lot more and there are lots of mental illnesses that weren’t defined earlier. Depressed, anxious, and angsty teens isn’t new. All the diagnoses and innovative “billable events” are however.
It might be, since the actual rate decreased as recently as 2018-2020. Obviously this may increase due to the ramifications of covid - but that would certainly be a special circumstance.
"The total age-adjusted suicide rate increased from 10.4 per 100,000 in 2000 to a peak of 14.2 in 2018, followed by a 5% decline between 2018 and 2020 to 13.5."
I think in 2012 you couldn't look back and say that things had changed because these findings were still near their historical averages. But looking back from now it appears the upward trend started in 2010, which tracks with the effects of the Global Financial Crisis. It is possibly leveling out now, and who knows the directionality in the future.
Are these findings substantially different from other groups? Do 30-35 and 40-45 experience a different trend? Is there any cohort data?
Let us note that the sharp uptick in Haidt's graphs occurred the year that the DSM-5 was released, 2013, which had several major changes around depressive and anxiety disorders and removed multi-axial assessment. I was disappointed to not see any mention of this.
I find Dr. Gabor Maté's work much more interesting in explaining the decrease of mental health in society and understanding where that comes from.
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.
Counterpoint: as we’re more open with with mental health challenges in adult life, teenagers are more open as well, or at least we can tell better.
The terms teenage angst and peer pressure existed before 2012.
P.S. I’m not saying that social media isn’t bad or making it worse, but there are other factors as well. And when I think of teenagers, I think of poor young humans that are just trying to find and prove themselves, and that is a lot of pressure.
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.
The very first thing that comes to mind is this is the first year after the '08 housing collapse where all students in the school had experienced it before entering high school. I wonder if the massive housing instability had an oversized impact on mental health which just... never recovered?
I don't recall anyone I knew using Instagram very much in 2012, people still used facebook a lot back then and Instagram felt really niche. It hit 110 million users in 2013, which is around when I recall people I knew starting to use it, but rally it blew up in 2014.
Yeah, Facebook started in 2004 and it was much more Instagram like in its early days before everyone's parents joined and started ranting about politics.
I’m blaming the parents. I’m a single gen-xer so I admit to not having skin in the game but it seems like my generation has managed to raise incredibly neurotic kids. I don’t think it is the fault of the kids. The parents have not allowed their children to develop any resiliency.
It doesn’t seem to me that whatever stresses that the current generation of American kids are facing are any worse than what previous generations have had to deal with. As a Cold War kid I was terrified of nuclear apocalypse. It was a big deal. Remember the “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech? It began with, “The Soviet Union has nuclear missiles pointed at the capitals of Europe…” Was that a greater or lessor stressor than climate change? Every generation faces stress, it’s how they deal with it that is important. The question is why is the current generation having so much trouble coping?
Universal access to information causes depression if the information about the state of the world is depressing. Might not be social media that is the issue. No evidence for that tho, just playing devils advocate.
It doesn't help the fact that less teens now believe in God [1].
Whether or not God is real, the belief of one gives more purpose to more people with religious text helping you think beyond what the limbic system wants but on your character and the people around you. And not people as objects but as other sacred beings also with a purpose.
To degenerate a society, strip off traditions that have been formed over centuries collectively, including people with far greater minds than most of us and make everyone more individualistic.
Impact of the 2008 financial collapse on their lifestyles and career prospects? How's the data from the 1929 financial collapse impacting teen mental health?
Was 18 in twenty twelve and obviously social media was a huge thing but we grew up without it. Teens in 2012 had seen it most their lives. That has to fuck a person over.
FWIW, I graduated from Redwood High School in Marin County, CA in 2014. Redwood had ~1600 students and many were high achievers, and many came from middle-class or upper-class families. We were a blue ribbon school, probably with a hefty PTA budget and a myriad of AP courses and honors classes available. We had some dedicated teachers too. We even had a ceramics room, a music building, a beautiful gym, track, and field. There was a drama program, and of course the drama room smelled of illicit substances, but they did deliver impressive improv shows. Our graduating class had a record number of students who had achieved honor roll or higher GPAs.
To my knowledge, there were some bullying incidents at our school, but the rate was said to be relatively low. I knew at least one person who had been cyber-bullied. We had one suicide that I can remember — a girl who I didn’t know very well but shared maybe one or two classes with my freshman year. It was tragic to hear of her family’s loss when it happened, and looking back at the few interactions I had with her, I would not have pegged her to be at risk. She seemed like someone who would have no trouble making friends or performing in school. Most of the suicides we heard of came out of different schools in the Bay Area that were even more academically challenging. St. Ignatius or “S.I.”, a private school in San Francisco was infamous for their suicides.
In reflection, I didn’t invest as much as I should have in getting to know more of these individuals while in high school — I was shy, but mostly bored, fixated on keeping my grades up to impress a favorable profile to universities, and fatigued about how fake so much of life seemed to be. During our graduation ceremony I realized if that I could have and should have taken more of an interest in getting to know more of my peers, and participating in their lives. High school students aren’t fake people, even if high school feels fabricated and pointless. Social media wasn’t a huge problem for me, but it did have an effect of making me think that some people appeared quite dull — I have learned my lesson not to be deceived.
For me, social media amplified the feeling of being stuck — a feeling that was already exuded by the physical form of our school, which was designed by the same architect who did San Quentin State Prison. It also amplified a story people could create about themselves or others. We saw that gave people an opportunity to weave themselves into a web of negative self-image or belief about others, or the world. It seems to do this effortlessly, while excluding the human contact that usually comes along with in-person communication. For kids who have an abusive parent, I suspect that this was particularly insidious because social media empowered parents to be more involved in their children’s social dynamic than before. While a lot of people were saying that it’s important to keep an eye on your child’s internet activity, I suspect that some parents with abusive tendencies took advantage of this and misused it to the detriment of their children.
There is the apparent option to delete one’s profile, but that doesn’t stop others from mentioning you or posting photos that you are in. And someone’s absence on social media is potentially a statement itself. What would you make of a job candidate has no presence at all on LinkedIn? (To clarify, this last question is posed to ask you to consider it and I don’t mean to plant a particular answer in your head).
Perhaps the most damning impact of it on our generation is that it was a pervasive opportunity for kids to fail forever. The school would undoubtedly respond in some punitive way to anyone with online presence or interest that may, in any way, be deemed negative, and on top of all that, the media itself has its own algorithm and presumably saves all the data forever. Kids had to either censor themselves more carefully in communications online, or risk the consequences. This is the biggest issue I see that has contributed to a whole generation of people that doesn’t feel safe to express a unique opinion, and perhaps fears being judged. It’s one thing to be surveilled by the government. It is another entirely to be surveilled by people in your peer group, your community, and your friends. We’ve been taught that if you appear to think a certain way, then you are done. Period. Until then, come play in school rallies and don’t mind the police officer who is watching you the whole time.
My expertise and academic background on this is zero.
But I'll add my own uninformed opinion just like everyone else.
I think it is because we live such an unhealthy indoor life.
Nobody goes out to play anymore. When I was a kid, there were other children swarming all over the streets. No longer. Instead, everyone is inside, glued to the tv or mobile apps.
Losing touch with the dirt, with the grass, playing, hiking - we lose touch with "mother earth." Maybe that means that as animals, we have been directly on the ground for all existence until now. It means that the negative ion charge from the ground was part of all of our existence. you get negative electrons when you put your bare foot or body on the ground.
Now, we are inundated with positive ions - cell phones, tvs, pollution, wifi. So our bodies collect positive ions and they stay in our bodies. Postive ions are removed when we step on the ground with our bare feet. Or during recess when we used to sit on the ground or fall on the ground doing various activities.
We also ground a gas tank to keep it from exploding...
Negative ions:
Reduce inflammation, which contributes to chronic disease
Improved sleep
Reduced cortisol levels
Relieve pain
Faster healing
Calms the sympathetic nervous system
The Earth’s surface is “the ‘battery’ for all planetary life.”
Shoes are insulators from the ground.
Feet are major portals to the natural world - our whole evolution we had mostly bare feet, or at least a lot of it.
Farming also connected us to the earth, even if wearing shoes, you get down into the dirt. Most of the population in even as soon as 120 years ago or so, 80 or 90% of people were involved in agriculture.
In addition to grounding, we also have removed much of sunshine, clean air and water, nutritious food, and physical activity.
Physical activity is also extraordinarily important. About 70% of the entire population in the USA is overweight or obese.
This chart is so accurate and I personally noticed the EXACT same thing during this time period. Also, this graph is only for the obese and morbidly obese. Overweight is not included, but I'm sure that will be the same, if not more of a accelleration.
I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and nobody was fat then. I remember the fattest person I ever saw, he was monsterous then. Now he would be on the slim side of fat.
We were not made to be this fat. It is so incredibly unhealthy on so many fronts, and there are SO many terrible side effects from being overweight or obese. It's not just one or two things. There are multitudes of being fat. It messes up all the hormones, creates all kinds of mental issues.
Shoot, I bet if we all got to our correct body fat percentages, the mental health epidemic would drop like a rock.
Put the phone down, get outside and walk for 2 hours per day. Exercise 2 hours a day.
And finally, food. Food is garbage today. Ice cream, cookies, candy, white flour, salt, white rice, potato chips, soda. You know what the unhealthy foods are. You should only shop on the "outside" aisle of the grocery store and not go up and down each aisle. Just the outside aisle - that is where they keep the veggies, fruits, dairy, meat - all the healthy stuff. The sole exception being if they have a bakery/donuts/etc on the outside wall.
I guarantee you that 2 hours outdoors, every day, will immediately dispell anxiety, depression, and the rest of the stuff by a great deal. Maybe not 100%, but maybe you will have only 10% of your stress and depression left in your body instead of 100%. Of course, not saying it will cure clinical depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, or any of that knind of mental illness.
Conceptually, it is the simplest, easiest fix in the world. But it is the most difficult to do. Because nobody wants to get out into the world and walk or hike. Nobody wants to put the donuts down.
Men - Opioid epidemic since 2008
Women - One in four on antidepressants in middle age
Internet Addiction - companies need to boost "engagement"
ADD - notifications and multitasking 24/7 is normal now
We need to realize that these "epidemics" and "rises in incidence" have more to do with the capitalist industry and government working together, than individual incidence. They have women vs men, black vs white, so people are distracted from the real causes: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
Big Tech is a big part of the problem, and much of the unhealthy habits and emergent depression come from the influencer industry. In other demographics, unhealthy influences were specifically pushed and promoted until they became normalized. It takes hold easier when you are young and impressionable:
Gangsta rap, Drill music - music industry, corrupts Black youth
Instagram and TikTok - influencer industry, corrupts adolescent girls
Most of the cartoons you watched, down to the "programming", was based around merchandising opportunities and ways to sell stuff:
But it's not just the young. Many adults are at each other's throats with Democrat vs Republican, Shiite vs Sunni, wars between countries, etc. because the media tells them to. Their brains have developed beyond the youth, but the masses can be manipulated by a top-down media machine:
The American community collapsed around 2000 and social media has grown up to dominate it, instead. Our public forums are privately owned and controlled by Zuck and Elon, and in China - WeChat and TikTok work even closer with the Chinese government than here. Governments are very much involved in all this, of course.
Both parents work for corporations, and are told to "lean in", corporations co-opt women's lib movements to promote climbing the corporate ladder as a way to find meaning in life: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286
But meanwhile, the kids are left to be raised by public schools (or the street). Divorces are up. No one's really happy. Young people who move to the cities work like dogs to afford the rent and live alone and no one knows their own neighbors. They cope with cellphones in their hand.
Before medicating society, consider building better tools than Big Tech has, and exit the system dominated by profit motive and exploitation of others. Open Source, Science, Wikipedia, Creative Commons and more, can be made possible with safety nets like 30 hour work week overtime protection, Universal Basic Income and Universal Health Insurance.
If you want a healthier society, start by opting out of the current system, and invite others in your life to opt out also. In many cases of overdiagnosis, medication is a lazy bandaid for society's problems. They want you to stay medicated and think you can individually recycle your way out of the metric tons of plastic they produce, diet and exercise your way out of the High Fructose Corn Syrup they put into everything, and so on. The more you believe this, the less political will you have to demand politicians and corporations change.
But we do need to hold their feet to the fire. They've failed us. 1/3 of arable land has undergone desertification around the world. Insects are dying. Species are going extinct. Overfishing. Garbage piling up. Coral reefs dying. Kelp forests destroyed. Rainforests being cut down. THe biodiversity of the world is repidly being turned into monocultures and farms. And the only thing people seem to care about is "climate change" from fossil fuels. These things are far more pressing.
One of the author's suggestions is a strengthening of COPPA:
> Second, Congress should toughen the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. An
early version of the legislation proposed 16 as the age at which children should legally be
allowed to give away their data and their privacy. Unfortunately, e-commerce
companies lobbied successfully to have the age of “internet adulthood” set instead at 13.
Now, more than two decades later, today’s 13-year-olds are not doing well. Federal law
is outdated and inadequate. The age should be raised. More power should be given to
parents, less to companies.
I don't think it takes a genius to see that this suggestion would have virtually no effect on the problems the author is trying to address. These COPPA age limits are impossible to enforce, raising it would only mean more kids lying about their age when making accounts on websites, or just getting parental consent. And even if it were possible to enforce, how does it address social media causing mental illness?
One of the author's other suggestions is to pass a version of the UK's Age Appropriate Design
Code(!!!!)
California passed its own version of this law in September 2022. It has already been commented on and critiqued extensively on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32646043 Age Verification Providers Say Don’t Worry About California Design Code; You’ll Just Have To Scan Your Face For Every Website You Visit
Putting aside the main subject of the OP, it is important to remain vigilant and watchful for legislation that will hamper privacy on the internet in the name of "saving the children". I myself can agree that "social media" is a contributor to increased social discord and depression, but these problems affect everyone, not just teenagers. And I think the root cause is, of course, the design of these sites; the way they crudely attempt to quantify "likes", the way they use metrics like the "like" and the "view" as the sole guiding principle behind their design philosophy, rather than productive and humanistic conversation. It is the way these platforms lie to the user, presenting content as if it is the user's hidden inner desires discovered by an external algorithm, when in reality it is the user being shaped by the platform, not the other way around. The way these platforms prioritize content meant to inflame, to provoke, to get "engagement".
This is the real problem of social media, the product itself, the structure of it. But those with power in our society are addicted to it, and instead propose all kinds of useless "safeguards" like age gates and ID checks that only serve to increase the power of these platforms as surveillance tools. The mantra of each side of the aisle is, "if only we were the ones in charge of moderation." I think it is clear to see that this is a naive and unconsidered approach.
2012 was Sandy Hook; teens today and since have been watching the inaction of experts and leadership tackle security problems in deference to appeals to authority to dead people's political documents.
They're watching experts and leaders to nothing to stem environmental mess they get to clean up.
They watch the adults complain kids are coddled, then flip a switch and complain social media is exposing them to the world.
They're sick of the cognitive dissonance of the elders who prefer the clean room, fake figurative world of fiat economics they live in while fucking over the real world teens will inherit.
Similar to increased cancer rates being linked to better measurement, it's not social media, it's that social media is allowing teens to see how shitty their society is.
Are you seriously suggesting it's a good idea to kill off a bunch of folks? Let me guess, you are in the group that gets to survive, and you just want to provide a "solution" to all the people that you dislike.
I have a better idea: lead by example. Why don't you demonstrate the effectiveness of removing a bad branch on yourself first?
I much agree (not with literary having a war of course...)
Burnout rates are higher than ever, many people use painkillers daily, 10% of today's children are diagnosed with adhd and are often drugged [1]. Like drugs are a solution to everything. In the old days kids spend a lot of time outdoors, nowadays average screen time is around 7.5 hours [2]. That must have a tremendous impact on body and mind.
Drug drugs drugs, to quiet the kids, to solve your headaches, to feel better, to lose weight.
Like common sense has left us.
Self-help books sky rocket in number of sales, everyone has a coach and/or therapist. I would argue if everyone needs a therapist, people just forgot how to live. A lot can be done by start living more offline again and use your body. [3]
Let's have more common sense! (and no war please :)
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). Most of the little extra time I had remaining would go to additional extracurricular activities that had the potential to enhance my college application. I only really got to socialize by talking to my teammates on our runs.
As a result, even when I had extra time I was so burnt out and stressed from everything else that I felt consumed by anxiety. I would sometimes start crying spontaneously after I got home in the evenings. Things only started getting better when I started seeing a therapist and worked on my issues over the second half of my high school experience. Not everyone is so lucky.
If we want a healthier society, we need to take a step back and give teenagers a chance to actually live life. Sure, less social media would help, but it won't solve the root of the problem. Today's society demands so much from adolescents for so little in return. It's very easy to think that you're a failure if you don't know exactly who you are and what you want to be at age 17, and that's not a fair expectation for any 17 year old. We shouldn't be surprised that many break under this kind of pressure.