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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

> Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller.

Bullshit. These numbers are self reported and show exactly the opposite of reality. Boys aged 15-24 are about four times[0] more likely than girls to die by their own hands, so clearly relying on self reported cases of mental illness is not very helpful and is likely to shift focus away from those groups who most need help.

Everyone who asks for help should receive it, but don't forget to keep an eye on those who stay silent.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187496/death-rate-from-s...

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I'm not writing off what you're saying (I agree that young men are suffering and less likely to admit as much) but you are equating mental illness and suicide. I think it's important to note that it is possible to be depressed and anxious without being suicidal.

It's quite possible that young men are less likely to be depressed but that those who are depressed are more likely to turn to suicide. If that were the case it would be a very important distinction to make.

One way to think about it is that we can't reliably measure mental health conditions. So, we can't objectively quantify how many boys or girls are depressed, we can only rely on self-reports. However, we can see the extreme consequence - suicide, and that is an objective measure. If the one objective measure we have indicates boys are suffering much worse, then that's reason to suspect that our subjective measure (self-reporting) may not be giving us an accurate reading.

Reason to suspect, perhaps. Reason to call bullshit... IMO, no. There are way too many alternative factors to jump to a conclusion.

I agree which the general sentiment. If we want to determine how much worse things got in recent years, though, we would need to compare those numbers to what they were a few years ago. I understand that boys were always more likely to die by their own hand than girls, but I'm not sure by how much.

I'm going to say this as someone who's attempted suicide more than once and failed.

How can you rely on self-reporting? Self-reporting requires awareness and it can't be assumed that people are aware of their affliction; it also requires that the doctor takes it seriously.

You know how many people commit suicide, but unless you leave a detailed note behind your reasons are completely unknown and all that is left is a medical history which in itself may not be reliable or complete.

This is where the pain of dealing with a suicidal loved-one kicks in: you don't know what they were thinking. You can only fill in the gaps: they were happy all of a sudden, etc.

What do you think is the correlation between suicide and severe depression? If it’s greater than 1/3 the comment you’re replying to is correct.

You are comparing two different metrics: depression and anxiety per se on the one hand, and successful suicide attempts on the other. It can be true both that rates of depression are higher in girls than in boys and that rates of suicide are higher in boys and in girls.

Furthermore, while in that age group boys are more than 4 times as likely than girls to take their own lives as of now, the question is whether that proportion was the same before the advent of social media. For instance, maybe at that time boys were 10 times more likely to do it, which may support the hypothesis that social media is to blame—or maybe they were only twice likely, which would be evidence against it.

Finally, while depression and anxiety may be increasing in both boys and girls, I understand that Haidt is pointing out that these disorders are increasing faster in girls than boys.

The author discussed suicide in his previous article [1], also discussed here on HN [2]. Boys succeed more often than girls due to choice of method but hospitalizations for self harm in general are far more prevalent among girls. See section four and five as well as his collaborative doc.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707734

There is a huge social stigma for boys and men to admit negative feelings- even to themselves. This leads to the widespread assumption or observation that most mental health issues predominately affect only women. In reality, denying and suppressing the issue makes it much worse, and prevents people from taking actions that might help.

Boys 15-24 committing suicide at 4x the rate of girls is not something that has changed much since at least 1975. If anything, the disparity was even greater between 1985-2000:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm

Meanwhile, the premise of this piece is that social media has increased mental illness for teen girls. Yes, that's self-reported, but it's always been self-reported (and can only be self-reported), so that's not a factor which has changed for boys or girls. So why are girls, but not boys, reporting more mental illness and at greater rates than boys now than they have in the past. That's what this piece is trying to figure out.

Boys also had an increase in self-reported mental illness, so your assumption is wrong. The article is claiming that the increase is larger for girls than boys. However there could be reasons that it's now more acceptable for girls to report mental illness and not for boys, so it doesn't really resolve the sex comparison issue.

BTW the chart you linked shows that we had higher rates in the 1980s than now. It makes the recent increase look like it's just part of a long-term cyclical trend.

> These numbers are self reported…

But aren’t the data for both girls _and_ boys self-reported in the cited CDC study? In which case, if the data for boys is unrepresentative relative to that of girls, then there is either systematic underreporting or a gender-based methodological flaw in ascertainment. Either is possible but I’m not sure how one would glean that from what was published.

I didn’t read the methodology carefully but the ascertainment almost certainly did not involve asking (non-silent) people with distress to identify themselves; but rather to take a representative sample and assess the rates of mental distress within that population. So the point about being aware of silent suffering is entirely valid but I’m not sure that it explains the delta between observed rates of emotional distress in boys and girls.

Boys may be less likely to either admit that they have depression or classify their feelings as depression in the first place. This seems consistent with how we differently socialize the two sexes.

Yes, we need to help both boys and girls. They have different needs and need to be approached in different ways.

I don’t have a link on hand, but what I recall regarding sex differences in suicide is that there is a higher incidence of suicide attempts among females but a lower success rate than males. This is what I know about adults, I don’t know if that includes adolescents.

If I remember correctly, the same author recently wrote another post that included that argument, in fact using it exactly to point out that self reported data only goes so far but the increase in suicides doesn't lie.

I’m inclined to believe you. In my experience men are socialized to downplay mental illness whereas women are the opposite, they wear their illnesses on their sleeve.

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