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Comment by awb | Hacker News Reader

> Researchers, though, cautioned against drawing direct lines between these spikes and conditions brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, which disrupted nearly every aspect of U.S. life starting in the middle of last March.

> A heightened appreciation about mental health in 2020 might have prompted parents to get their children mental health treatment, they said.

> “Conversely, by spending more time at home together with young persons, adults might have become more aware of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and thus been more likely to take their children to the ED," according to the report.

Happy to see a correlation != causation disclaimer.

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What a classic HN response.

Humans are social creatures. How are lockdowns and social distancing not causal? There's a reason long distance relationships fail and solitary confinement is an ultimate punishment.

Add to this doomsday news on loop, confusing messaging on vaccines.

I also have too, too much anecdata to counter this.

I spent time helping families during the COVID crisis. The amount of confusion and uncertainty generated by the pandemic hit many families hard especially in states with strict lockdown regimes.

I have friends who work as RCs at a top university: they are swamped with students devastated by the pandemic who are uncertain of what their futures hold given the gap.

I have friends whose four year old has began pulling her hair out for no reason early on in the pandemic. They started taking her to a private prek that was opened. It stopped.

> There's a reason long distance relationships fail

???

“ Research has even shown that long distance couples tend to have the same or more satisfaction in their relationships than couples who are geographically close, and higher levels of dedication to their relationships and less feelings of being trapped.”

https://time.com/5316307/best-long-distance-relationship-tip...

Survivorship bias. Most fail quickly, the only ones that make it are the super dedicated couples.

All kinds of relationships fail quickly.

I was looking at a variety of discussions on age-gapped relationships and have noticed the same, people blame the relationship failing on the age gap and the younger persons own admissions about how they look at it differently, instead of the general distribution of all relationships failing

People basically get what they want tk hear out of it, instead of checking whether the same standard yields different results elsewhere

They could be causal, but the effect the parent described is real that messes up the data. Mental health has become a thing that’s allowed to be talked about and taken seriously in literally the last few years. It’s a massive and extremely positive societal shift that shines a light on how absolutely awful school is even in non-pandemic times. I had severe depression in my teens and it wasn’t until I tried to take my own life that the adults in my life at the time even acknowledged it. I had friends at school who were cutting themselves, emotionally dependent on weed, drinking themselves to blackout every weekend, starving themselves to death, throwing up in the bathroom, and studying/working themselves to physical illness because of lack of sleep. Nobody cared.

There is no doubt that that the pandemic is making things so so much worse but there’s also a danger in scapegoating it and then being collectively “shocked” when it doesn’t get better when things go back to normal.

I think the poster's point was about general data reporting, not specific to the situation. If you're going to use data to argue something, you need to be careful not to overstate what the data says. And the worst misuses of stats are when they fit intuition or anecdotal experience. The vaccine-autism argument that won't die is not the result of a bad study, but of autism symptoms typically arising right at vaccination age. Then people did a study looking for this commonly-believed "causation" and misused the data they got to make a case they wanted.

A ton of things happened to many kids during the pandemic.

0) Physically away from school 1) Poor learning experience 2) Spending more time with parents 3) Relatives getting sick and dying 4) Dire medical news everywhere 5) Dire political news everywhere 6) Dire environmental news everywhere 7) Many parents lost jobs 8) Many parents lost income 9) Children pressured to (not) take vaccines 10) People (not) wearing masks / Kids pressured to (not) wear masks 11) Away from friends 12) Evictions 13) Excessive drug use 14) Excessive social media use 15) Affected by evolving social justice issues

So there could well be some causation there, but which things are causing what is not immediately clear.

One could just as easily draw the conclusion that spending time with parents was the cause of the extra stress.

I wonder if there is any chance of actual actionable data being teased out.

Parents who were also trying to hold down jobs. At the time, my partner and I had a 1 year old and were both working. It was incredibly difficult, stressful, and 100% not sustainable. We cracked after a few weeks. We also strongly believe that just putting young children in front of screens for hours at a time is detrimental to their development, and did not do that like so many other parents (who all justified it because they "had to" to keep working. That is another whole debate - I am sure that not many people would have gone to the effort we did during lockdowns and restrictions to shield our kids from the poor parenting practices that are now widespread).

Also, having young children is incredibly isolating, and already something like a lockdown in itself. Humans in that position are supposed to go out and see as many people as they can, usually in the form of meeting other parents at their houses, cafes, parks, etc. All of that was illegal, at least where I lived. My blood still boils thinking of how horribly harmful that was.

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