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Comment by algem | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t depression period at an all time high? When ever depression is explored or written about it’s always in the context of females and not males. At least from what I see. Everyone knows boys and men have a really hard time with mental health but nothing is really done about it. Man up as they say. I wish the conversation was evenly distributed.

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They talk about the boys... at least enough to say the girls have twice the rate of depression, that the boys' depression can manifest as aggression, and that these teen boys are victimizing the girls sexually.

It's from surveys, as far as I can tell, so attempts to compare results with anything except same results for previous years for the same sub-group needs a giant asterisk next to it (and even comparing across years is iffy, depending on what conclusions you're trying to draw).

Twice the rate of self-reported, when asked persistent sadness, as boys' also self-reported rate, then.

Hell, the article even kinda covers this, noting that boys' depression may not be experienced as persistent sadness. And that's before we consider biases in tendency to report such things to begin with, which may (to put it lightly) differ between the sexes.

(Nb. it may well in-fact be true that girls are experiencing depression at double the rate of boys—but a survey's not enough to determine that)

On another topic:

> On a handful of topics, the survey results suggested teenagers were doing better than in previous years. They reported lower rates of illicit drug use and bullying at school, for example. And teenagers are having less sex, with fewer sexual partners, than in previous years.

I mean... the jokes write themselves. "No wonder they're all sad!"

The first sentence:

> Nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys

Yes the article mentioned boys a few times but doesn't go into any depth. And its not so much this article its really the overall quantity of these types of articles that focus on female over male. Of course an article can focus on one or the other and that is fine but I find it just tends to be lopsided towards females.

Doesn’t seem like this is a girls only article - it covers adolescent mental health issues sourced from survey data

What specific points seem lopsided here?

In recent years it’s felt like there are always more stories about mental health in males. Job market, etc. Not sure how you’re missing them?

I can't find major newspaper articles specifically focused on suicide among teenage boys, even though the rate of it is 400% higher than for teenage girls, and getting worse faster.

Has it always been ~400% higher? That aspect might get lost if the rate is notably high for all youths?

Here's one about male problems I remember reading and could quickly find because the title was memorable: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/08/andrew-ya...

And another with the same title: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/opinion/boys-violence-sho...

Yes, males have done about 80% of the teen suicides since basically always.

I can remember a handful of articles about boys struggling over the years but like your Yang example they have been on the opinion page and tainted with the whiff of "men's rights" grievances.

Everything seems to be getting worse. I get surprised when the media mentions anything developing in a positive direction. And it’s not about “the media” since that’s been a source of negativity forever. I mean, these last few years everything seems to be getting worse, and media bias doesn’t even factor much into it.

Anedoctally, I see the opposite: immense pushback to "toxic masculinity" pressures to man up, over the past 5-10 years roughly.

The conversation has definitely evolved to push back on it but in any practical sense its still "be a man". I feel that is the general expectation of males.

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