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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.).
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.
So no, that probably isn't the issue.
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?
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.
We might be able to revise society/expectations to address this, separately to how we diagnose/label problems.
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.
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.”
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.