Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest | Hacker News Reader

Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

52 pointsmpweiher11 comments

Haidt and Lukianoff were saying this six years ago when I was in undergrad. I didn't like the way he framed it then, and I'm not a fan of it now, either.

Most of what Haidt has been decrying all these years does have a basis, though. Leftists (myself included) tend to point out that leftist discourse is a circular firing squad. People get stomped on all the time based on objectively flimsy logic so that other people can accrue social capital. See for example the cases of Isabel Fall and Lindsay Ellis. This happens in real life --- and sometimes it makes the news and gets cited in whatever book Haidt is writing next --- but far less often than it does on the internet. The words "extremely online" are usually pejorative for a reason.

I am, however, entirely unconvinced by the general message of "white liberal professor, almost 60, thinks 20-somethings would be okay if they just did CBT harder." This isn't to decry CBT or to draw a dichotomy between him and me; I just think if two presidential candidates and twenty-odd states were trying to restrict his medical care for seemingly no reason other than realpolitik and his job paid him barely enough to make rent he'd be singing a different tune.

A compelling case for a cause in the growth in teenage depression: reverse CBT.

> In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways _causes_ depression

The past decade these three beliefs have grown in prevalence:

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker

2. Always trust your feelings

3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

They are all cognitive distortions and many schools today endorse them. Rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking, they encourage the distortions (reverse CBT).

> A compelling case for a cause in the growth in teenage depression: reverse CBT.

No it isn't. The hypothesis might have merit, but the article is hot garbage.

The author straight up brings up a more fitting explanation- that liberal girls adopted social media use and correspondingly reduced their IRL interactions first- and completely disregards it in favor of trying to spin it as liberalism itself somehow harming young women.

He then proceeds to cherry-pick data from older studies, uncritically brand concerns about wealth inequality/climate change/etc as cognitive distortions rather than merely possibly-unhealthy ways of processing ground truth, cherry-pick data points from studies, describe tumblr as the villain in the culture war between 4chan and tumblr, disregard corresponding smaller effects in conservative girls, bring up medical gaslighting that young women often face as an argument(how??), etc.

A vastly more plausible case seems to be that liberal women entered the "culture war" and started becoming polarized much earlier, in addition to the fact that the ideals liberal people identify with - such as reproductive rights, freedom and safety for LGBT and disabled people, security of housing and healthcare - have in fact been under assault for most of that timespan.

The way I see it, early 2010s and social media created a rise in self-awareness of just how discriminated young women are against, possibly shifting the lens through which they evaluate their experiences and eventually dragging everyone into this culture war, but most likely primarily just increasing exposure to harmful technology.

>The past decade these three beliefs have grown in prevalence:

Uh what? That's news to me. Do you have any evidence of this?

He is quoting directly from the article. The author who wrote the article, though, wrote an entire book about why he believes this to be true.

I like the "Reverse CBT" framing of the problem. Interesting insight.

great something else to get banned in florida.

A corollary is that the policing of microaggressions, as a form of catastrophizing, works against its own aim of protecting sensitive people. A healthier response would be the stoic sentiment that "sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me." I'd bet the popularity of that statement would be inverse to the mental health trends. People can grant or refuse the power of words to hurt them to a wide degree. Their willingness to do one or the other appears to cluster by gender, age and politics.

> Here’s the same data, showing three main effects: gender (women higher), age (youngest groups higher), and politics (liberals higher). The graphs also show three two-way interactions (young women higher, liberal women higher, young liberals higher). And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition.

That will probably be denied by claiming the the groups with lower rates are lying about their mental health, due to "inferior" ideology, and the higher rates are a reflection of the "true" human condition.

It's almost like how you see the world is a self-fulfilling prophecy...

>Surveys began to show that most students and professors felt that they had to self-censor. The phrase “walking on eggshells” became common. Trust in higher ed plummeted, along with the joy of intellectual discovery and sense of goodwill that had marked university life throughout my career.

This is a consequence of a rapid and widespread dispersal of information regarding systemic inequalities. And, sadly, the reduced power of the individual to reduce or overturn them in modern society. We're learning so much more so much faster about how our peers are being subjugated or disempowered that the human mind cannot rationalize it and cannot formulate a plan to stop it. The amount of terrible things isn't increasing proportionally, but the spotlight on it is growing brighter and the extremism that results is growing more aggressive. Which is why I disagree with this:

>The authors of the study try to explain the fact that liberals rise first and most in terms of the terrible things that conservatives were doing during Obama’s second term, e.g.,

>Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.

Matt Iglesias gets the closest in the article but then just says "Well that isn't convenient to me." The conservatives are literally ignoring the warning signs because it's been ingrained into them from childhood to do so. "Do not question authority because you are the one who has given power to the authority. Do not engage your curiousity because it will not be rewarded. The system cannot fail you as the system was designed by you." Reality normally is depressing. It's just that in the past we didn't have the spare time to worry about that between rushing for daily survival up until the Industrial Revolution, and being mislead by organizations meant to stabilize centralized power such as the Catholic Church. With all this free time, access to the information, and ability to communicate it, we're realizing how much everything sucks.

Depression after all is the brain going into a survival mode designed to shut down or reduce reliance on all other parts used for information processing except those required to continue existing. Chronic depression occurs when the brain can't exit that temporary survival mode and this reduced functionality becomes standard. Constant bombardment with news of negative outcomes and negative societal trends means obviously more people will not be able to escape the short term depression, marking the permanent change into chronic depression.

The intellectual and empathetic curiousity of those who tend to be progressive also means that they're more likely to not only learn about the inequalities which will negatively affect their moods, but they will actively seek them out in order to educate or satisfy themselves. Teenagers who are just becoming politically aware have a litany of tragedies to gorge themselves on, with everything from generational wealth decline to information suppression to surveillance capitalism to an environmental apocalypse. A lot of these kids feel like they have no future.

And this slams right into another issue that has roots going back over two thousand years: Paternalistic societies that feel the need to both guard and exploit white women, to both infantilize and fetishize them. Euro-centric and Euro-derived societies still haven't gotten past that paternalism because the first major challenges to it in millennia only started a little over a hundred years ago. When you have a society that's still trying to divorce itself from that but still fetishizes that ideal of what womanhood is, it's so much easier for young girls to get confused as to what they should be and what they should believe in. What results is these women are told that upholding the paternalistic societies is in their best interest, and that comes into conflict with the (often lived) information that they receive from people who aren't in the position to benefit from that paternalistic society. And this isn't even getting into how this affects asexuals or transgender individuals, which I could be here for hours talking about.

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