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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Just like people's incorrect perception of crime: that it seems like it's going up while we are at historic lows, I wonder how much of this perception is just that mental health problems are more visible now. Homelessness (correlated with mental health trouble) is much more visible and in your face now. Social media has given everyone a megaphone, so the few crazies can now be as loud as they want and algorithmically drown out sensibility. You can go browse r/PublicFreakout and other "crazy videos" subreddits and watch unhinged people for hours. Political rhetoric paints "the other side" as insane rather than simply as opponents with differing views. All this combines to give the perception of a crisis, just like endless, breathless reporting about crime gives the perception that criminality is out of control.

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I take your point, but a lot of people are worn out from the pandemic, increasingly hopeless about climate change, and observing the decline of democracy in almost every influential country.

Those are all justifiable things to be more depressed about now than people were in the past. People are smarter, wealthier, and more educated now than they were in the past, and that causes them to think further into the future (which is depressing).

As a 20-something, I see a lot of people my age that way, way overestimate the negative impacts of climate change, to the point where they admonish and make fun of people who want to have kids. I can’t help but think their media diet is somewhat to blame. Climate change is not going to be good, but there is good news on the technology front that you’d almost never hear if you got all your news from the big news outlets. For example, the IEA predictions for new solar additions have been terribly out of touch with reality for nearly a decade now [1], and before I saw this all I had seen was doom and gloom about how we could never scale up renewables fast enough. Seeing even the IEA be so wrong really makes me wonder what other good news I’m missing out on seeing.

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/experts-bad-forecasting-sol...

I think it’s increasingly likely that technology change will not be fast enough to offset the worst effects of climate change due to the non-linearities in the process, including things like vicious cycles (melting permafrost causing massive methane leaks) and tipping points.

I also don’t think most people anticipate the political instability that will result from hundreds of millions of people needing to move.

Very much agree with this sentiment.

Even 10 years ago everything seemed to be "normal" in the sense that it's same old stuff, nothing too major. There's always going to be the political disagreements and all that. But things have shifted like crazy.

And I don't think it's just because of technology that we are able to read what more people are thinking right away and have more instant access to news. Although, it kind of is simply because we are able to see how insane more and more people are.. but it's more than that.

There has been a massive shift and divide in many countries and it's literally to the point that it impacts people on a daily basis. Seeing how so many people care so little about others has never been more apparent.

You had the US president trolling people every day on twitter for 4 years straight. And then seeing just how much of the population is OK with the utter insanity. Don't tell me that doesn't take a toll on people even if you try as much as you can to avoid it.

We also have rights we've had for generations being stripped away and threatened along with more recent hard-fought rights, we're living under the eye of a panopticon watching our every move and collecting data that is increasingly being used against us, a bad day or careless word can cause you to lose everything you have as mobs (online and offline) are foaming at the mouth to punish whatever they personally don't like, we're learning that many of the everyday products around us are poisoning us and our children like the PFAS in our clothes or the arsenic we've been spooning directly into our baby's mouths (https://apnews.com/b3e7bea244cdf68da3e0d91842fe3e87) and we're seeing our standard of living decline and our children struggle in ways we never had to while an increasing number of Americans can't reliably get the most basic services like electricity and drinkable water.

There is very little hope of any of this being fixed any time soon. You'd pretty much have to be crazy to not be having a mental health crisis right now.

It seems like people on the Internet have very short memories, or are just all somehow very young. The "past" goes back further than 2012. Bad times have happened before. Is this even worse than the late 80s/early 90s? We had much of the world still behind the Iron Curtain, the specter of nuclear holocaust, toxic waste dumps, acid rain, holes in the ozone layer, all things painted as much worse than climate change. I would rate the AIDS epidemic as quite a bit worse than Covid. There was a time not so long ago that it seemed a legitimate prospect that much of Africa just wasn't going to exist any more a few decades out.

If you go back to the 1930s and 1940s, now you're talking 25-50% unemployment globally, countries losing half their breeding age males to war, entire cities being wiped out in seconds due to nuclear explosions and not just the specter of them. Existentialism and post-modernism came out of that shit. We got Kafka and Sartre, things were so depressing.

Go back further and then what? Slavery? Post-industrial black lung? 8 year-olds working 100 hour weeks in factories?

When were things better than they are now other than some tiny blip of early 21st century techno-optimism?

As far as mental health is concerned, I guarantee you every male in my family that I ever knew going back to at least the 1920s suffered from severe undiagnosed depression. They all drank like crazy, beat the hell out of their kids, never smiled. The trauma they experienced was insane. My grandfather was ship-wrecked in the South Pacific by a kamikaze pilot and survived on driftwood for 6 weeks by drinking fish blood. I don't even want to imagine what those kinds of lives were like. Did it make it better that they didn't realize they were depressed and just thought that was what it meant to be a man?

(US specific) "Crime is at historic lows"—depends on how you figure. Compared to many decades ago: yes it is lower. Compared to 4 years ago: murder rates have risen greatly in most major US cities, and murder is the most consistently and accurately reported crime (as opposed to lesser offences, where if they become very common that could induce people to not bother reporting them, because what's the point).

Like crime, Mental Health is an umbrella term that covers a lot of different metrics.

With crime, you can look at some Bellwether metrics like murder and try to understand the trends from there. Murders have indeed gone down over time.

When it comes to Mental Health, you can also look at bellwether stats. In the United States, there is certainly a dramatic increase in suicide deaths. I would argue that suicides are a fairly objective metric unlike diagnosis. Suicides have gone up significantly for most populations. Someone could quibble that drug overdoses could fall into the suicide category and contribute to this, but I would counter that even drug overdoses deaths are themselves supportive of a mental health problem.

When you see something like a 50% increase in suicides for 15 to 24 year old within a decade, I think it should ring some alarm bells and spur discussion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States

> Social media has given everyone a megaphone, so the few crazies can now be as loud as they want and algorithmically drown out sensibility.

Right, but if I'm sane, and I'm surrounded by crazies with megaphones, that might not be good for my mental health...

If we're talking about the US, then crime is up, especially murders (coinciding with large increase in gun purchases). It's still below all time highs, but the trend shifted around the pandemic. Anecdotally, I also have seen/see much more crime than I used to and had my house robbed for the first time in my life last year.

I think people advocating for increased funding for mental health services have started to define all social problems in terms of their impact on mental health, e.g. prejudice as a traumatic experience, the stresses of poverty, etc.

Increased funding for mental health services seems like a poor solution.

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