Relationship between Education and Mental Health: New Evidence from Twin Study | Hacker News Reader

Relationship between Education and Mental Health: New Evidence from Twin Study

sf.oxfordjournals.org

64 pointsrandomname220 comments

The study argues that the positive relationship between mental health and higher levels of education is due to confounding factors. The take home message seems to be that higher levels education is not important to mental health.

I think the larger narrative here is that higher education is not as important to success as previously believed. Was someone successful because they went to college, or were they already on a trajectory for success, and they just happened to attend college because they were offered a free ride?

I think that depends a lot of your definition of success. Are we defining success in terms of general health and wellbeing? In terms of life satisfaction? In terms of wealth?

It's all statistics, I would think the highly educated has a higher probability to be more successful then the less educated when a large sample pool is used?

It's turtles all the way down.

Full text on SciHub: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1093/sf/sow035 (PDF)

So in short, by comparing identical twins, this study found that people with better mental health tended to achieve a higher education, meaning that the arrow of causality doesn't go the other way: education doesn't necessarily improve mental health.

TL:DR "If there are social factors that systematically drive differences in mental health within pairs of MZ twins, our findings suggest that education is not among them."

If every article on HN had a TL:DR, I'd be a happy camper.

It's funny that we now need a tldr for the abstract, which is itself used as a tldr.

"confounding factors. "

I'm going to go ahead and state the obvious. School systems (all social systems) filter for (relatively) functionally stable individuals. This is the case with the work-force too, and easily explains the correlation between the unemployed and the mentally ill. One does not cause the other, one filters out the other.

I guess it's easy to ignore this dark possibility; it would imply deep, and possibly irreparable facts of human nature.

I wonder if this a relatively new phenomenon, or if it has always been the case.

Nice to see this linked to the original article rather than to a pop article misrepresenting it.

I don't see the surprise however.

it's spelt out in the abstract, no?

> Prior research has documented a strong and positive correlation between completed education and adults’ mental health.

...

> Results from our analyses suggest that the observed association between education and mental health is attributable to confounding on unobserved variables.

The title is misleading, though the original is not descriptive. Suggestion: "Higher education does not improve mental health, twin-study proves"

It's a journal article title, not linkbait. Most scientific articles don't give away the ending, they're just a statement of what is. The idea presumably being, you must read at least the abstract

"proof" is not correct term. Find evidence supporting some hypothesis, they don't provide proofs.

That would have been a useful title. Even the payoff in the abstract 'Results from our analyses suggest that the observed association between education and mental health is attributable to confounding on unobserved variables.' would have left some people none-the-wiser.

We reset the title to that of the article, shortened to fit 80 chars.

sociology was right.

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