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Comment by braingenious | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

>Lorenz isn’t wrong to suggest that economic conditions can influence the prevalence of mental distress. Unemployment and poverty are both major risk factors for depression. Recessions are associated with elevated rates of suicide. And there is some evidence that robust social-welfare states improve mental health by reducing material insecurity. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that America’s relatively stingy social safety net and elevated level of child poverty are implicated in its youth mental-health crisis.

lmao he agrees with her main point and then goes on to just shrug his shoulders in the next paragraph.

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The whole point of the article is that, although in general economic conditions can negatively impact mental health, in this case the increase in mental health problems does not coincide with a deterioration in overall economic conditions.

The point of the article seems more like NY Mag getting clicks by having one of their writers throw together a rebuttal to some recently popular tweets. I think the lack of seriousness is highlighted by the paragraph I quoted along with other bits from the author like this one:

>Thus it is possible that the social pathologies cited by Lorenz are preconditions for today’s mental-health crisis.

and

>It’s possible that Lorenz’s general intuitions may someday be validated.

and

>What we can say with confidence is that we do not know and that we owe it to those suffering in our mental-health crisis to be honest about that fact.

It’s clickbait meant to congratulate people that disagreed with Lorenz before they clicked on the article. Its substance is considerably less strong or confident than the headline assigned by the editor.

It is repackaging the case being made that social media is the key driver for the startling increase in mental health problems.

And the evidence for that case seems to grow stronger by the day.

Beyond that, it’s simply good writing style to address the strong points of the argument you want to rebut, before rebutting it. You seem to be set on finding on something more nefarious than that going on here.

“Writing flashy headlines for less than groundbreaking content” isn’t a nefarious conspiracy, it’s just a hallmark of kind of mediocre media. It’s not some big conspiracy, it’s just boring.

If I were to write an article about how I think [person a] could possibly be right or wrong about [topic x] for understandably valid reasons in either direction, I wouldn’t title it “No, [opinion of person a on topic x] is wrong” because that would be stupid.

Yeah I cackled. Quite literally the skinner "am I out of touch" / "no it's the children who are wrong" meme.

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