CDC warns of a steep decline in teen mental health

I don’t speak for anyone but myself, and I am an extreme outlier. But I would have been delighted. Alone, I could spend my time how I want, learn what I want, and associate with who I wish. There is also a much larger pool of love interests online than offline, especially in small town Missouri.

People just feel differently.

My sister-in-law is a middle school counselor at a large midwest US public school system and her stories about kids dealing with the pandemic are heartbreaking, the mental health support system in some US schools is completely falling apart due to the workload.

She's never seen a mental health crisis on this scale in schools in her entire career. She remarks that kids really weren't able to learn much during the pandemic due to remote learning and in many cases are now playing catch-up to get back on track. The school system she works for basically didn't hold anyone back for a year because they had no real way of knowing who progressed as her school district cancelled standardized testing.

Anyone who believes that the pandemic wasn't a serious setback for many kids developmentally is woefully out of touch with reality.

In California, it was absolutely forbidden for anyone to be indoors without a mask for more than 15 minutes, but you still have to serve school lunch to kids.

Some schools solved this by moving lunch outside. No matter the temperature.

Some schools solved this by giving the kids a 14 minute lunch break.

No talking, no socializing, no enjoying the meal together in peace. This is how you give kids eating disorders.

It's the same exact dynamic as how the media scares everyone with sensationalized school shootings, and then schools respond by making kids go through metal detectors and draconian zero tolerance policies and the like (also horrible for kids' mental health). We've built this no-win bureaucracy where the primary dynamic is avoiding any blame. Because if the blame does come, it will itself be merciless and unempathetic, despite how reasonable or well-intentioned an administrator's motive was.

It shouldn't be so astonishing. People who wanted to take a laissez faire approach to COVID (especially pre-vaccine) would often incoherently throw literally every idea they could think of against all the mitigation measures, including various mental health arguments. Of course, that approach didn't change a thing except 1) lead to more polarization, 2) harden people against those arguments forever.

COVID was a serious problem, and it's rare that serious problems can be addressed without cost.

Young people's education during lockdown have been pretty much written off as a casualty of pandemic. Suspending state testing or admission requirements was just a band-aid solution. Now young people are left to fend for themselves, to try to plug holes in education they received. No wonder their stress levels are high.

The CDC study was specifically in relation to covid lockdowns. Virtually everyone pointed out how this would happen and that this unprecedented move to lockdown the healthy vs the standard for thousands of years of quarantining the sick. The cost is far worse than the healthcare system melting down. Then again you look at Quebec nurses... they literally went to the United Nations to say they are slaves. Provincial government is doing it to them. Federal government is tyrannical. They had to go to the UN. Insanity how bad our healthcare system is collapsing.

> I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental health.

So something that north america doesnt seem to have that most of the world does have... imagine you are poland or somewhere in the middle east. You fear war every single day. People who live there think about having to escape every day.

North America doesn't have that. Nobody fears a surprise war because thousands of nukes will launch out of fear wiping out whoever is attacking. Flipside, Russia's new threat of imminent nuclear war means North American teens will now have to worry about their impending doom.

This return of the cold war will make things worse; not measured in this study.

I think this is a consistent theme throughout the entirety of the United States. There's so little leeway. Fail a class -> you might have to go into an extra 20k of debt. Lose your job -> Homeless, foodless, insuranceless.

Something will eventually give.

Tell them to look at their Screen Time or Digital Life applications: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/05/26/why-technology-will-never... and ask about their weekly time usage. It's often over four hours a day. I commonly see six and seven hours a day.

That observation doesn't obviate some of the other points—there seems to be an "excellent sheep" problem: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/11/30/briefly-noted-excellent-s... most people who claim to be busy, but show many hours a day on their phones, will privately admit that perhaps there's something else going on than purely being "busy."

As someone close to a high school student, I’m actually surprised how much “make up” is allowed. All missed assignments can be done any time during a semester for no penalty. Two exams can be retaken for a max grade of 80.

When I was in high school there were no retakes at all.

Who knows what will happen. I think the mass control of people has basically been perfected, so revolution feels really unlikely. Instead we'll see a police state and quality of life continues to go down for the plebs. Throw global warming on top of that and I think 50 years from now is going to be a pretty dire time. Better get that job at Evil Corp.

Not just adults. This is a difference even compared to students who graduated in 2019, which would include siblings and other near-peers. We're in the middle of the college selection process for the HS class of 2022 right now. Many colleges are getting record numbers of applications, because of all the deferrals and transfers from the last two years. That intensifies the competition for this year's kids, leading to a lot of waitlisting and outright denials even from schools that would have been fairly safe bets any other year. Just about every kid has had to lower their sights an extra notch, and some who didn't apply to enough safeties are facing unexpected gap years.

> Many are going to bed after midnight every night.

Some aren't? Between extracurriculars and homework loads for the more advanced classes, any kid who hopes to get into a first- or even second-tier college doesn't have much time to socialize or play games etc. any earlier.

Notes from then:

- Saw a group of high-schoolers discussing grades. Asked "What's considered a good grade point average today?" Reply, in a bleak voice, "4.5".

- Teen shows up at the barn with her arm in a sling. Asked "What happened, did you get dumped?" (Meaning, off a horse.) "No, I fell off the cheerleader pyramid. And now I'm letting the swim team down."

- One of the less bright ones, worried that she can't keep up, saying how hard it was. "Less bright" here means "can't get into Stanford/Harvard, will do fine at a lower tier college.

This is real, but it's not the typical teen experience.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...

The pandemic was the last straw… I thought. I’m disturbed to see that the world is going right back to 'the way things were'. Folks take the idea that you have to work for a living, and have dialed it up to eleven…thousand!

As best as I understand: hard work is not rewarded, it’s exploited. A natural resource to be drilled, pumped, and burned out.

None of it really matters, you can drop out of high school, go backpacking in Europe, and as long as you find a way to support yourself, no one has a right to judge you.

You definitely don't need to get into college. In the last 30 years or so, we've turned everyone into maniacs. Back in the day, if you just graduated high school that was something to be proud of.

Now, no, you need to get straight A's, no, you need to take a foreign language. If you're not able to pass a foreign language class, maybe you're messed up in the head, maybe we can give you some dangerous stimulants to fix you.

Again, none of it matters, I make significantly more money than most of the rest of my family and I'm one of the least educated. I was making more than what they make now with their fancy masters degrees, before I even finished my BA.

The only thing that really matters is finding peace with yourself, and again as long as you can support yourself. Nobody really cares. Of course. Someone's going to be smarter on paper, someone's going to get into a better school, someone's going to have a bigger house. But if you're constantly trying to compete with every other person, you're going to find, no matter how well you do, you'll devalue your own accomplishments.

I agree that the pandemic is probably not a root cause: I think the global reaction to the pandemic could have a related root cause (social media, outrage / attention culture, the breakdown of normal human discourse, polarization) as the mental health problems. Blaming "the pandemic" fails to acknowledge that covid was as much or more about our collective reaction as it was about the actual virus. It's the "powder keg" thing - the conditions were there, and inevitably something would come along to set it off.

But must protect meh narrative!!

As you said, "kids are glued to their phones anyway." That was already true before the pandemic. Which, again, suggests to me that the extreme factor here is the isolation, not the phones.

Not that social media is good or healthy. But the way it's scapegoated reminds me of the way television and video games were demonized when I was a child growing up in the 90s. It was over the top.

I would suggest that the basic human feedback loop just got more tightly coupled and that mass personal communication was always going to lead to this.

In many places this was actively encouraged during the last two years. Virtually every other activity was banished. Playgrounds, schools, extracurricular activities, pools, museums, you name it... closed. In many places you literally couldn't go outside without some kind of government issued hall-pass.

We absolutely, shamefully fucked over kids the last two years. And so many people cheered it on despite kids being the lowest risk group out there.

4chan did not incubate redpill. Reddit was the primary spot for redpill to congregate, until Reddit started cracking down on TRP and related subs. Cherry on top, Reddit has not acted against the highly similar FDS and many other subs.

Incel culture is also skeptical at best. Yes, 4chan did have the famous Elliot case, and several boards were famous among them. However, Reddit also banned several subreddits related to them which made them flock towards 4chan.

This doesn't change the issue (rampant media exposure is bad for the human psyche). It just puts into perspective things have been going downhill since the masses got access to social media and unlike 4chan, the darker corners of Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and whatever else aren't nearly as taboo and may even sneak onto the homepage feed randomly. 4chan was mostly the place where the extremists would congregate, but extreme cases don't explain why the number of moderate or higher cases would increase.

To put things further in perspective: 4chan started in 2005. Twitter founded in 2006. Reddit, 2007. Smartphones took off somewhere late 2000s/early 2010s. The "average" kid did not have access to these platforms 24/7 before 2010. Those that would likely didn't spend the little PC time just browsing the darkest corners of the net on a single monitor.

The article is literally reporting a major change in mental health metrics in teens as of a year into the pandemic. You honestly think social media/4-chan/reddit is the culprit? I think I'm starting to see why a million Americans are in a box today. There is a disconnect here.

There are many who are addicted to their devices. But there are many that are not. Why?

No one knows and there is no consensus why this is happening. I have a few opinions as a middle-and-high school teacher. But talking about this is important to help wrap our heads around it.

If a definitive understanding or reason were easy to acquire, we'd have done it already. So, the toil continues: for researchers, policymakers, laymen... and those of us in the trenches trying to do something about it with not enough information.

Leader in the clubhouse for the 2022 Accidental HN Slogan Contest.

They won't cite data about N95 use because N95's DO work, and if we just let people who wanted to / were at risk wear N95's we'd solve half the problem right there without burdening anyone else. And yes, N95's with a vent are fine and should be encouraged because they make mask wearing a LOT easier.

Instead we are just fed endless BS. Citing the CDC and WHO is pointless because their stuff was not actually grounded in science but in BS. Witness their loud announcements that travel restrictions (time honored method to reduce spread) was racist and wouldn't reduce spread. Or that masks don't work etc. You have an airbone disease, masks probably help. You have a transmittable disease, reducing travel may help.

Meanwhile, moving into the deep woods is not just for Bible-thumping gun-nuts anymore.

The lack of community in current times is absolutely a negative.

I think there's an economic component to this as well. Housing prices are rising, meaning a lot of people are pushed out of their existing community, or that they perceive their community is temporary (until they all get pushed out). It starts to feel pointless to build a community of renters when you don't think it will exist in 5 years.

A lot of local shops have been overtaken by corporations, who exist in the community but aren't really part of it. Walmart/Target/Dick's/etc isn't sponsoring the local little league, or throwing a potluck, or creating any kind of space or events to build a community around.

Religious service attendance is also down, which is another way people used to build communities, and I haven't seen a lot of secular replacements (not a criticism of anyone, I don't attend myself). I think a lot of people replaced religion with politics, which has created communities more focused on things outside themselves (laws and public opinion) than within themselves.

I don't even know that social media is the cause of loss of community. It seems to me that social media was the market responding to the loss of in-person communities; it was responding to an already-established need. It might have accelerated the decline, but I think healthy communities could have withstood social media. We just didn't have many healthy communities left.

People forget the concrete institutions that were dissolved that led to communities collapsing.

First it was families falling apart due to high rates of divorce and low birth rates. Also people moving away from home for job opportunities split the family apart. Entire towns were hollowed out.

Also the dissolution of institutions like church, political groups, fraternal orders (e.g. Elks, Kiwanis), Charity Groups. See the book "Bowling Alone".

Social media and entertainment spiked afterward to fill the void – but it was the collapse of the families, community groups & towns that were a precursor to the death of communities.

Correlation isn’t causation.

AFAIR there are studies looking at families with different cultural stances on divorce (but good luck controlling for other factors there). Also they tend to measure more easily measurable outcomes in the child than mental health, such as grades, which don't necessarily correlate.

I often feel my development went... much different than most in my peer group due to my much earlier access to the Internet/on-line services and me being a "curious hacker" getting into places and reading things I definitely should not have at that age. Seeing how utterly incompetent "powerful" institutions were (combined with teenage arrogance) that I was raised to deeply respect is still something I have difficulty processing.

I can't imagine being bombarded not just with 100x more information about how the future is f*cked and how incompetent those running the show are, but also it being amped up to 11 by hucksters selling "engagement" and ads. The content is coming to you now.

I think a lot of early adulthood is just brazen naivety. For example, I'd never have started the company I did at 17 at age 37, there would be too many reasons I know it'd fail. If you lose that naivety too early, at least personally I would have utterly lost any motivation to "try" since the odds were so astronomically against me.

When a generation collectively believes they will have it worse than their parents I'm not entirely sure what to expect the outcomes to be.

All this is to say there is no causal relationship between the government lockdowns (mandated at the state level in the USA, no?) and the CDC reporting on mental health. Both occured independently. There are however plenty of plausible arguments to make for lockdowns being causal on mental health though.

Who wins? Did I do it right? Do I win?

Aren’t we in the longest economic boon ever? This might be the first bear market in over 10 years.

Schools didn’t require sats and other exams and were actually easier to get into during the pandemic. The past two years were like a glorious time for school admission.

We fucked kids the last two years and it requires some serious mental gymnastics to rationalize it away.

Personal income per Capita went from ~$30k to ~$63k in the last 20 years [1]. REAL weekly earnings are at an all time high [2].

Debt service reached an all-time low during the pandemic [3]. Even for new buyers with house prices at their peak, with interest rates where they WERE, mortgage payments were historically quite low.

Now that interest rates have gone up, payments are ~20% higher. But unsurprisingly, the insatiable demand has also dried up.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A792RC0A052NBEA

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP

I honestly feel sorry for all the people like you who can't see how manipulated prices are and realize that it's a good deal. The market shouldn't be this manipulated (by our government) and confusing. It's screwing over so many people who think common sense still applies.

If you interpret "the pandemic" as just that core, maybe it's a misdiagnosis. If you include all of the secondary and tertiary effects, the case is much stronger.

Hope you and your family do well

One of these is not like the others.

[1] https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/tuberculosis-a-fashionable...

I think the big difference now is smartphones, and being always online. It's much easier to have your entire world view informed by the Internet now than it was twenty years ago. It's a stark contrast. If you look on twitter and reddit, everything is always burning, the sky is falling every day for a hundred different reasons, the bees are dying, the Russians are about to trigger a nuclear apocalypse, there's indignant outrage and injustice everywhere.

If you look out the window, there's literally none of that going on. Like it's almost all speculation, or happening somewhere else. Twenty years ago, a lot of bad things were happening as well, but they weren't up in your face in nearly the same way. For some things, you had the dotcom bubble, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq. While they made a prominent impact on the news, the news was only on while you watched them. They didn't follow you around everywhere you went like they do today.

The people who grew up with east to access online porn are now in their 30s. In the early 2000s it was harder to escape porn online, because you'd see it in ads and people would trick each other with (eg the content of downloads were swapped out).

>Between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported having “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 37 percent.

The starting figure from 2009 would consider teens who grew up with easy access to porn. But it fell from there.

I’d argue social media is far more damaging, especially Twitter and the advent of outrage culture. It breeds hatred and intolerance, two thought patterns that will send us back 30 years.

Now everyone is expected to be on social media and it is the main community for a teenager, not an escape for nerds. If you're not successful there, you're also an outcast in reality.