Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't mean changes in treatment, but rather that some people previously went undiagnosed and "just got over it" on their own. As I said, in my own case treatment didn't help and actually made matters worse as I saw myself more as a victim who "couldn't help myself". n=1 of course. And many people of course do benefit from treatment.

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).

n of 2, this has been my experience as well. I was almost killed in a shooting in 2021, and in 2022 I started seeing a therapist. Going into therapy made me relate to my trauma more, think about my trauma more often, and self identify as a "traumatized individual". I don't think any of that helped. The only thing that really helped was daily meditation/mindfulness, which does the opposite - it teaches you that the thoughts and experiences you have are fleeting and rather than hold on to them you can let them go.

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.

Relating this back to social media, I've noticed that at times younger people almost exert a social pressure to link all behavior to anything remotely traumatic. I've had some shitty stuff happen to me, life has had it's rough points, but I've always felt pretty lucky overall. I've noticed in arguments with roommates/friends/etc who are younger by a few years, there is significantly more forgiveness towards anything that can even be tangentially linked to something that can be identified as a trauma. I noticed it because over time it led me to start slowly reframing experiences and actually focusing more on the damage they'd done. And its funny, the most traumatizing experience of my life has probably been the push to open up and focus on my traumas. My mental health has improved a lot since distancing myself from people who are too eager to focus on trauma. I wonder how that plays into the whole social mental health conversation. Like when does starting a conversation and destigmatizing a topic turn into feeding it and enabling it? Not to say by any means mental health was handled well before, but I think we might have made something of a deal with the devil in how we frame mental health on social media.

I have a lot of thoughts on this as well and I'm not sure. I definitely felt like my mental health got worse when I started therapy, but was it because my mental health was already doing worse?

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.

Not sure of the value of this tidbit but I heard that in the US, blacks suicided a lot less than whites (quick google seems to say rate of black suicide is a third of white) and it could be because they grow up explaining their issues with external factors, while the whites have no convenient escapes, and even are told they are privileged due to their skin color... so self blame.

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 would offer the really flimsy statement most blacks in US are descendants of slaves, who were bred for generations to be optimized for unskilled labor that was given very little mental and health support which meant anyone slightly suicidal just killed themselves off. Slavery is pretty stressful. Society tends to want to ignore the fact the colonists and early Americans literally bred slaves under stressful conditions for centuries and that tends to have ... effects on the genetic pool particularly in remarkably stressful environments where risk factors can cause rapid attrition from reproductive population.

I think a more plausible theory is that white people feel more entitlement than black people, not because of some weird genetic memory thing but because they see other white people (or maybe even their parents or great-grandparents) enjoy much higher success than they are. Higher expectations = more pain from shitty circumstances = worse reactions.

This might be true, although I think it depends on the age group of the people committing suicide.

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.

I don't wholly disagree with you, but do think it's probably several things based on things I've seen (my n=1 experience is no more important than yours). I do want to make it clear that there is no good data on this.

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