The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere
jonathanhaidt.substack.com
jonathanhaidt.substack.com
I think it's social media, that's what's really changed: Every single teenager is now comparing themselves against every other kid in the world instead of just their local peers (and maybe a few grainy MTV stars over 525 scan lines). And of course the "popular" ones they're comparing to are the most successful, most good-looking, most privileged i.e. the most "perfect" ones (because that's how they got to be the most popular). It's a terrible yardstick for anyone to measure themselves against, let along impressionable young minds.
Reality for kids seems so much more competitive and ruthless in every way. And there are so few resources available to them to help them deal with it.
At the same time opportunities are shrinking and pressure to perform is increasing. It's not enough to be adequate, you have to be outstanding in looks, talent, ability, work ethic, party ethic, lifestyle, income, and education.
But you can't be. Because you're not competing with a small group of relative peers, you're competing with the entire online world.
At the same time there's incoming doom in the form of climate change, Covid mismanagement, outrageous and crippling economic inequality, various wars, and now the threat of AI.
It would be strange if kids weren't getting depressed under these circumstances.
It's actually even worse than that: you're competing separately in each field, in parallel. But you only see the others in the context of that which they are good at, which is why you see them in that space in the first place.
I believe a large amount of the negative effects is that people take themselves too seriously. Every quote on social media is put on the scale and becoming a pariah is basically random. The haunting is mostly done by people with a lack of self-worth and confidence themselves.
But some values also changed for the worse in my opinion. Confidence is valued much more than humility and seen as leadership material. I don't believe it prudent to encourage people that actually do look for strong figures out of fear.
When I was a kid you went to whatever school was in your neighborhood. On the other hand, when i was a kid my parents had no idea what a good school event meant.
Dr Varshavski can project charisma but i don’t know how well that translates in one on one interactions as his patient. He also doesn’t really seem to be at the top of his field in knowledge and skill, maybe in bedside manners.
Probably the icing on the cake for me, looking like no job prospect and potential for serious consequences ranging from mass scale disinformation to extinction.
We need to get our priorities straight as a species.
She does, however, uncritically ingest way too much TikTok shit.
But parent comment abv has a point teaching is a big factor here. And teaching in the current environment has become much more complex.
There is endless over stimulation and distraction which ruins environments where learning is possible. And secondly information has exploding. Kids can easily get overwhelmed just looking at a Wikipedia article. Teachers have a very hard job keeping things on track.
All of those issues felt less existential (or at least had very clear points of no return that we managed to avoid going over the brink on), and climate change for many, maybe quite reasonably so, feels like we will be the proverbial boiling frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
It feels different because of the complexity and scale is no longer definable or predicated on a clear discrete set of objects (e.g. Nuclear powers, key banking systems, a hot war with defined participants) but is by global definition....everything.
It's abstract yet ever present (e.g. all the recent climate weirdness, and the disasters that have followed, both in terms of pure environmental impacts as well as economic and overall regional stability as byproducts thereof) and that becomes much more difficult to "manage"
This is so out of touch. You might as well be using the "It's the video games!" excuse of yore.
Teenagers and those in their 20s see what their parents were able to do. They hear what their parents bought their house for, they know about their pensions, they see that their parents could afford raising a child into their teens, they find out that college was actually affordable. They know that's now all out of reach.
Some even see their parents struggling, and know it's going to be much much worse for them.
You all really think this is about influencers?
I think you're on target about the discouraging aspects of being visibly worse off than your parents' generation, and I think that millennials have that problem as well.
The situation is likely to get worse as AI-fueled productivity increases are unlikely to improve wages either.
The movie Red Dawn was the ultimate manifestation of 80's red hysteria and triumphal American exceptionalism.
~625 scanlines (PAL)? We only had ~480 scan lines with NTSC.
My parents had a roof-mounted VHF/UHF antenna that could be electrically rotated with a dial. Looking something like this
Antenna:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Channel Master:
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/WXgAAOSwGJJfoJlz/s-l640.jpg
My grandparents had an analog HBO pirate cheat box with a fixed, directional antenna. I remember watching George Carlin standup specials.
Has this specter gone away?
I remember when I realized I was making enough money that I could pay all my bills and no longer needed anything from my dad. It felt really good. For me that was the dividing line between being a child and an adult.
Sorry, I don't get fulfillment from a job, nor do I base my personality on it. A job is a thing that I have to do to live and do some stuff I like.
That's it, nothing more. I'd never do actual work unless I had to, and I'd never work full time if I didn't have to. I'm never going to be motivated to work harder for a fancy car if I can have a reliable, efficient car. I'd like more space, but it needs not be huge or pretty (though, I'd like to cook and make art).
Making art is fulfilling. I enjoy making food - work means I eat more convenience foods. I don't need to be paid to help folks, either. I can get a sense of accomplishment by doing things that are difficult, from projects to playing games.
Productive work, in general, is fulfilling even if you don't happen to like your current "job." It is not the job itself, it is the act of taking action in order to achieve your values. If you value producing art, that is productive work even if it's not your "job" and even if it doesn't pay the bills. You are achieving some value from that. If you are truly fortunate you can find a way to monetize doing work that you would do even if it didn't pay ... but if your job is "just a means to an end", that end is clearly a value and the job is helping you achieve it. It's the achievement of the value that is rewarding.
Fundamentally, people value what they work to achieve. Things gotten without effort are not valued.
BTW, having a job does look good on a college application.
Your words, not gp. A part-time job as a teen helps you navigate and integrate into society. Part-time helps you get out of your bubble and interact with the public, who may be different to your upbringing.
It is immediately clear to me who has had a job as a teen (read: service job), and who has not in my experience. This may be a form of reverse-classism on my part, but learning to sweep a floor and take out the trash for a few months during summer is not going to KILL YOUR DREAMS which seems to be the meme. In fact, you could view it as service to your community!
While I was working 10h/w during high school, I was also making DOOM wads and learning BSP algo in my extremely ample free time.
Also note, that many skills gained in these jobs can directly translate to irl skills. For me, working at a deli taught me how to make food, be on time, measure crap, clean things, interact with people not in my generation, and more!
Maybe you don't get fulfillment, but as a teen with nothing going on it was nice to have some extra money and essentially a playground to learn new skills on someone else's time. It wasn't to live, it was to prime the pump for later in life.
I don't recall having what I would call "ample" spare time in high school. I recall being at school 8:30 to 4 every day, then a few hours of homework daily and/or exam prep for the endless exams ("don't fail" they said, "or you'll never go to university and your life is ruined forever!"). I wasn't even that social and rarely spent time at friend's houses, let alone partying or clubbing. In fact, I had so little time I didn't explore "computers" as an industry until I finally did get to university and could actually spend 6 hours a day after lectures fiddling with a laptop and this thing called "Python".
In fact probably the one thing that got me going on electronics and computers at university wasn't the lectures and assignments as much as the free time and ability to spend whole days on things, not to mention socialising freely and at length.
With the min-maxing of pre-university CVs that it seems you need to do to get into the Right Schools (TM) and then into university, I'm not sure it has gotten better since then.
In retrospect I should have told them all to do one and spent high school on what I wanted rather than another essay about WWII and the endless, endless coursework that would suck up any spare time ("I've got an hour, I'd better polish the portfolio even more"), and even if I'd gotten the dreaded lower grades and so not gotten into the same university it would probably have been better over all.
I think homework overload could be part of the problem.
When I went to highschool in the Aughts, UC tracked students rarely had homework, maybe 30 min a day, and school got out at 2:15. If you had a good job, you could get 1 or 2 hours of school credit instead.
Young family members I know now talk about several hours of work per day.
I certainly wouldn't be happy with that
I did not have a "portfolio". I had a bunch of weak programming experience from books I checked out from the library and a compiler I stole from my high school because I wanted to program so badly. (1998~, open source compilers existed but to my eyes I wanted Borland Turbo C++) Yea that's right I copied that floppy! :D Imagine a time when you had to BUY compilers!!
I wrote an entrance essay that I used for all four of my college applications about how computer games were the next huge entertainment media, replacing movies. I didn't min max anything because I didn't care / had no idea / was stupid. I was accepted at all of them, Case Western Reserve, Drexel, Rutgers, Rowan. I went to a non-ivy competitive engineering school in my area, which I'm repeatedly discovering was a very good computer science program.
I went on to a fruitful research career for 10y, and now industry.
Maybe I'm telling on myself that somehow I have incredible luck or privilege, since compared to you I sound like a failure. I am the first person to go to college in my family, and worked while I was in college as well as paid internship at a research university.
The only skill I had was doing the thing directly in front of me and keeping my eyes on the next thing. The jobs I had were nothing special: a dogsbody at a deli, delivering newspapers, Toys R Us, Staples, Dominos Pizza.
Every job taught me something different: - something can go wrong and it not be your fault - if you have time to lean you have time to clean - some jobs are just fighting entropy, and that's normal (note: this is in service of bigger goals, every time) - everyone is happy to see the pizza guy
I'm not sure how old you are, I'm ~40, so it is entirely possible we have different eras. Maybe it's possible to over optimize, also maybe I'm too old for this discussion. Anecdotes aren't data.
In short, if you've never cleaned a toilet that isn't yours, it is less likely I will trust you.
I long ago lost all interest in playing games. The problem with them is nothing is accomplished. Play pinball and get a number on the display. Play Doom and - nothing. Although I invented the Empire game, most of my pleasure in it was developing it.
Seems normal enough to me. I found a plateau in playing games, so switched to modding and making them, even as a teen. Everyone has different thresholds and can find joy wherever it suits them.
When I was a kid there was never a time when I could pay for everything. The first time that happened was an internship I got during college, and then my first job right after.
$12/hr is the absolute lowest I've heard of in the past year or two.
Employers do value experience at menial jobs, at least for their own entry level positions. Any work experience is better than none.
0. How do kids socialize without devices these days?
1a-b. Do they meet new people like them and/or unlike them?
2. Do they go outside and explore the world nearby?
3a-b. Do they get in the same or different kinds of trouble as past generations of kids?
4a-d. What are the fundamental social values they share that differ from 1-4 generations ago?
5a-c. Do they have as much curiosity, work ethic, or resiliency to setbacks?
Here's my neon fuchsia fanny-pack, old personitis for reference:
When I was a kid, I had to wake up at 5:45 am to get ready to walk 1.3 mi (2 km) to a school bus stop when there was a perfectly good school 0.25 mi away. (Supposedly, I was denied a slot due to race-integration busing but I attribute it to paranoid parents rationalizing their lack of resolve.) The bus ride was 90 minutes each way for 3 hours total, depending on traffic. It was a magnet school where there were many kids from broken homes, abuse, poverty, undocumented parents hanging on, and situations adjacent to drug gangs. The non-IEP classroom material was too slow for me and I was often bored. The turnover of teachers was about 50%/year. Many substitute teachers. There were bullies, girls who behaved in age-inappropriate manners, carved graffiti-encased desks, and mountains of scantrons and dittos (spirit duplicator). No school uniforms, but gang colors and teen pregnancy were omnipresent concerns. Hardcover textbooks were worn to where bindings had saggy wrinkles. No computers and no cell phones.
I've used your numbering system to organize answers.
2. Less than previous generations.
There's simply far less places that will let kids just hang out.
Until a certain age its likely CPS will be called and police will be involved if your kids are out exploring, and after that age said kids hanging out is deemed antisocial and undesirable... So private security or the police hassle them.
3a-b: some the same, some different. Underage drinking/smoking/fucking is down, illicit drug use is down somewhat, but smoking's been replaced by vapes, and the drugs are different - often pharmaceuticals (real or counterfeit) such as xanax, etc.
Actual antisocial behavior is way down, but perceived antisocial behavior is up. Behaviours that previously were deemed largely benign (kids hanging out) are deemed unwanted. As per answer 2.
4a-d: the kids tend to be significantly more "tolerant" than previous generations. Make of that what you will.
5a-c: yes? They are still curious as all fuck, but work ethic is a funny animal.
Most traditional avenues for teenagers to "work" (outside of academics) are being closed off due to labour rules, liability, etc.
So a lot of younger people try make money online, have some kind of hustle. This ranges across the board of legality, morality, etc. Be it flipping clothes on Depop, dubious schemes involving dropshipping or selling knockoff designer gear online, selling artwork/crafts, trying to become an influencer/streamer/whatever... There's massive pressure to try monetize any hobby.
Resilience? Its teenagers. Some are hard as nails, some are drips.
I'd like to add some nuance to this. While student performance seems to be clearly declining (at least at the college level, which I'm familiar with), I don't know how well we can distinguish the contributions of poor teaching and poor student preparedness.
I'll give a concrete example from South Korea. For several years, the English proficiency of incoming university students was so high, there was serious talk of closing English language programs as no longer needed. Within the last few years though, student ability levels have plummeted, requiring drastic dumbing-down of the curriculum at the school where I work. I know many Korean primary, secondary, and college teachers, and I don't think the decline in student achievement is due to their slacking off. It seems to be due to something going on in society outside the schools.
Whatever is happening in public schools, you'd do well to increase your child's odds by putting them into something else if you can afford it.
Private school, tutoring, homeschooling, college (dual-enrollment), etc..
most of the poor here still is relatively much better off than those from under-developed countries, plus our school provides free lunch, many programs will waive fees if you're economically disadvantaged, etc. It's not as good as those well-off families but it's really good enough for you to do fine in education.
I saw so many economically challenged kids carrying new iphones, dressed well, yet not really into learning at schools, it's certainly not just an economic problem.
Education wise, middle class in a developing or under developed country will still beat poor in a developed country even if the latter have more money than the former. Culture has a lot to do with it, a lot has to do with the latter's parents not teaching current parents the same thing that the former's were taught. Home situation is much of the problem, and you can't just throw money at the problem, unfortunately.
European countries might do a better job at this by either (a) having less poor people (immigrants) or (b) putting in more resources to ensure that these kids get more support at home and in school to make up for their disadvantage. But often, you'll find in European countries that they have the same problems with kids from disadvantaged background being behind middle class kids, they just work at solving the problem better than we do in the states.
It's a mixture of reasons, from low pay to high demands, but I think a large part is a lack of respect from students, parents and admin. Teachers have been stripped of most of their power to do anything about it. The last year I taught public school a student was verbally abusing others and threatening them in class and I couldn't get him removed. It ruined the class and scared other students, but because he had documented issues they said they couldn't do anything.
I teach in overseas private schools now, and the kids are fantastic and the pay is decent, but the job has an increasing amount of non-teaching related stuff which detracts from the what matters, the kids. Also, the syllabus for CS is so outdated, and I find myself apologizing to the kids since I need to to teach it to them for their exams. I teach around the syllabus as best I can, but you still need to get results.
TLDR: Experienced teachers leaving, lack of autonomy, curriculum suck
A completely different explanation could be that our societies are so advanced by now that we can finally listen to mental illnesses and take them seriously - while in the past people just had to 'function', no matter what.
Could it be just a coincidence that young females are exactly the demographic that is constrained by a gender role where aesthetic appeal and social interactions are the most valuable assets? And those are exactly the type of things that social networks exploited, monetized and massively gamified in the last decade?
What's more likely: a rapid change of the cultural norms and roles associated with growing up as a woman or of those related to recognizing and treating mental health issues (all in a single decade!); OR: a purely technical revolution that put interactive screens in the hands of each kid and made the former much more effective in harming their development and leading to the latter?
At least for the young female demographic, I think there is a massive burden of proof for anyone claiming the epidemics is not social-media induced.
In theory we should have seen a spike and then slow decline as gender norms and roles continue to become less segregating.
"Yet other categories see linear or token increases."
Yeah, because other categories may manifest their problems differently. Such as young men turning to violence and drugs more than intentional self-harm (almost the inverse of young women). That doesn't mean it's not the problem, just that it's not such a great proof.
But, gender roles and stereotypes are being more forcibly institutionalized, not becoming less segregating. Particularly in the US.
In my opinion it seems like there is more institutionalize going on, but that's only a subset of restrictions that are being rolled back. Eg. If 25 states roll back restrictions (or implement protections) and the other 25 reinforce those restrictions, then you still have a 50% reduction. On the corporate side, I've seen a ton of protections/benefits being increased which didn't exist anywhere even 10 years ago.
I lived in the Eastern Europe of the 1980s and the 1990s, not the best of times, economically speaking. I used to play football with Rroma children that were walking strange, at least that's how it looked to child-me, only later to find out that most probably they had been afflicted by polio in the past. All this to say that things were tough.
Even so, as a kid back then I had no acquaintances of my age who were harming themselves or, the worst of all, who were off-ing themselves. We would have known, kids used to know this sort of stuff because we were almost always outside, playing together.
Suffice is to say that things are now totally different. I've heard of kids harming themselves at 11-12 years of age and I know of a young lady who took her own life (at 16 or 17). Again, that was unimaginable 30 to 40 years ago.
I was a teen in the 1980s, never knew of anyone who harmed himself other than accidentally. But we also didn't have doctors and counselors incessantly asking if we were depressed, or thinking of hurting ourselves. A kid today who says "yes" to either of those questions is going to find he's getting heaps of attention all of a sudden.
I have been thinking about this because I was at an orthopedist this week for an orthopedic isssue and I had to answer their "depression screening" questions. Trying to decide if these are being pushed by big pharma to get more people on antidepression meds or where else this might be coming from. The whole time I'm jsut thinking "you people aren't mental health specialists, or even general practioners, why are you asking me these irrelevant questions"
Who knows if this is a possibile contributor or not. Would be interesting to look into.
The article references massive increases in ER admits for self-harm, among similar data. That isn't a matter of "listening".
Haidt continually publishes detailed analyses and meets with retorts like this that obviously didn't engage at all with the content.
For instance, imagine that the data were showing the opposite effect, that is, adults having a significantly greater increase in depression and anxiety than teenagers.
If that were the case, one could just as easily argue that it fits with the "our societies are so advanced that we can listen to mental illnesses" hypothesis quite well, because adults have the autonomy, resources, and maturity to get the attention they need to tackle their issues and symptoms. Teenagers don't, on the other hand, as they depend on their teachers and guardians and older adults often dismiss kids' symptoms as “not real illness” and just angst and moodiness.
I was in high school during late 90's and early 00's. I was not diagnosed with anything until 2009 (around the articles timeline) looking back in hindsight I struggled with issues for years, lack of energy (some days just dragging myself out of bed was chore), lack of motivation to do anything, I avoided socializing with people I had no energy to stay in touch with friends I would make excuses to avoid hanging out with people all of the time because I never felt up to it.
If I spoke up to family members etc I was told what I was going through was normal, everyone feels tired, in essence to suck it up and stop being a wimp. It got to the point I just assumed everyone felt the way I did all of the time.
It wasn't until by chance I saw a different and younger doctor one day for an unrelated health issue I mentioned (again) how tired I felt all the time lack of energy I had it was explained to me that what I was experiencing very much not normal. That was the first time anyone took what I was saying seriously. My life drastically improved afterwards. I was 24 at the time.
When I was a teenager no one talked about mental health it just wasn't done. So I would not be surprised if some component of the statistics is an increased willingness among medical personnel to notice and diagnose the issues.
Obviously, the part in italics is fiction. It is referring to the alternate world I mentioned in my comment above where the effect was the the opposite of what we're seeing (with the added extra of adult men appearing to be seeing a greater increase than adult women) and how it's so easy to come up with post-hoc explanations using what seem like reasonable and factual premises.
(Edit: and whoever downvoted me would help a great deal by explaining how exactly an increase in hospitalisation rates are an indication that we take this stuff more seriously. A wound remains a wound.)
Sometimes sucking it up is, psychologically, the right answer, and results in a more resilient individual. (Not all the time, perhaps not most of the time. But sometimes.)
So no. It might not. Not for the reason you say at least. Improvements in diagnosis, self awareness and hospitalisation rates would have to happen specifically to teenagers, and unless someone can cite a specific reason why this is the case I just don't believe it. The increase is real.
Broadly if we are going to respect mental health more, the one cohort that is broadly capable of receiving mental health assessment medically, has enough agency to introspect to their own mental health, and still generally have adults responsible for their wellbeing, aka teenagers, are most likely to reveal this.
And then there are the hospitalisation rates. Did we lower the seriousness threshold to get our kids to the hospital? Unless they were talking about psychiatry hospitals that doesn't seem likely.
Alternatively, sometimes one has to cut people out of their life because one is insufficiently advanced to accomodate the others' deficiencies.
Taking that extra responsibility is what makes life difficult.
Teenagers (and younger) in their formative years are pouring a significant part of their lives into virtual environments and identities. Their digital lives are literally disconnected from their physical lives. Their sense of self is tied up in a system that has completely different rules and exists in some nebulous otherworld.
The physical basis for being is deprioritized and a new way of being is sitting uncomfortably alongside it.
Why doesn’t this affect everyone the same way? Some people are able to keep a lid on it, and reintegrate their iPhone lives into their real lives. Some people are not.
I don't really know who I am as a person because I spent all my time online and not spending a lot of time with people. Not developing as a person, not realizing who I am and what I want to be. No social skills, etc.
Is it some kind of ego-death or personality-death? If not death, then something that hadn't been developed and is now far out of my grasp as my brain cements itself as I head into my 30's?
It sucks and I constantly remind myself of it, but maybe there's hope for the younger generations now that we've lived through the early stages of social media and know how it can harm the younger ones.
My friend, I can tell you from my personal perspective that the difference is staggering and very consistent. Anybody I ever talked about this shared same opinion. So there you have it, some opinions.
I want more specifics too, it would help tremendously to fight against it compared to 'technology=bad', but we still have no fucking clue how our brain works, how our personalities form etc. Without time machine, I don't think we get much further in this century (nor millennium). Just bunch of theories, some wilder than others, with variable amount of proofs out there in the wild. While people often can't have rational debate about basic aspects of life.
This is a multi-faceted issue and let's face it, part of the problem is that the world is just getting depressing as hell for young people who see less and less of a future for themselves.
Step away from the news & social media for a few months. You can't effect the outcome anyway and you might find you're happier.
Everything is relative. My grandfather's biggest dream was to live in a city, that's it. Now young people dream (and envy) of way more.
So I'd say there's more and more future for youth. They can afford, at least once in one's life: travel abroad, snow skiing, parachuting, going to a restaurant. It's just baseline jumped.
I heard exactly the same thing in the 1970s.
It's sort of peculiar for Puritanism to appear suddenly and simultaneously in widely distant countries that share a common language but have different cultures, right?
No, I think the change in phones and what they enabled in social media is a better explanation.
That’s…honestly, exactly the combination of race and gender I would expect to be most depressed right now, even thinking only about expectations people have been raised with about the direction of progress for their own conditions and how the reality currently manifesting clashes with it, and that’s without considering how concerns for conditions other than their own might play into it.
White liberal women have a lot of incompatible expectations placed on them. If they stay home to raise children, they're labeled as lazy, "betraying the feminist cause", etc. for not participating in the workforce. If they work, they're labeled as neglectful of their children (if they have them) or told they're going to regret their choices. They have to outpace their male coworkers to be respected at work, but their career is also seen as a "nice to have". So the standards for women are impossible, but simultaneously so low that achieving them doesn't earn respect.
In a strange way, the group's relative privilege is a contributing factor to depression. If you're a member of a group that is violently oppressed, the act of protest and standing up to oppressors provides a sense of purpose. Because white women's position isn't "that bad," though, attempts to improve their situation are considered too small to celebrate at best and entitled whining at worse. Further, there's been a movement, particularly in liberal spaces over the past few years, to lift up the voices of the most oppressed. So liberal white women have pressure to just shut up and swallow their concerns from both sides of the political aisle.
None of this is to advocate drowning out the concerns of other groups to prioritize the mental health of white women, only a recognition that a seemingly easier life doesn't necessarily mean a happier one. In fact, an easier life can be more depressing.
In terms of cultural expectations of progress and very visceral potential personal impact and perceived position in society, this is a radical reverse for that group (on the second point probably less than for non-whites, but the first and third points probably bite white liberals harder.)
I recently had a conversation with late '20s guy from a small town in Illinois who said guys in his town at any point in time were either working, hunting or drunk. He felt the need to get out of there.
I would be more interested in seeing the rates of mental health professional access regarding these girls, what's the rate both parents are also talking to their own mental health professionals, their male siblings too, how often do they talk to them, etc. If I were to guess, it would still disproportionately skew towards these girls primarily because of how mental health professionals are viewed as "problem fixers". You go to them, they fix your problem so people assume. I can see many parents encouraging their daughters to speak to one ("fix her depression"), but never seeking help themselves while simultaneously being ignorant to problems their stoic male offspring are dealing with.
The reason I'm disregarding Reddit as a significant cause is threefold:
a) Reddit is overwhelmingly male, and the most affected group are teenage girls
b) Reddit is not that big of a platform in the teenage demographic
c) Even if it were, its popularity is not in any way homogeneous across countries. If Reddit itself had an effect, the USA would be much more affected by the phenomenon than the UK, for instance.
What isn't?
But yeah, social media sites should be treated as the powerful propaganda weapons that they have become, not just a casual way to pass the time.
At around that time, you would have the first batch of fully indoctrinated (trained by Socialists from childhood to adulthood, with no oversight or counterbalance) graduating.
That is also the group that sets the stage for the demoralisation phase of the plan and allows for the next phase: destabilisation.
Good summary here: https://www.oaoa.com/opinion/columnists/hart-kgb-defector-re...
And the original interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA
I don't think this is purely a Soviet ploy working out, but you can't help but look at the Western education system and realise that's a big part of the problem.
One could form hypotheses of course, but they won't be much of relevance here I think :)
I don't know how important being white is there, but I also don't see much discussion of race in this line of articles, only gender geography age and politics.
out-group bias: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1074524252638982144.html
If you take for granted that there is a large amount of emotional strain floating around, where are the outlets?
Men bottle it up and retake control (school shootings, as an extreme).
People with precarious lives can express the stress as worry and fear (mostly women).
Depression is a luxury version of stress - not happy, but also physically safe and not worried for your well-being. "White liberal female teens" = privilege.
That certainly is A Take on Depression.
Let's not forget that depression can end in death through suicide. It's a serious life-threatening illness.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/images/databriefs/401-450/db450-fig...
I'd be interested in the explanation behind the aforementioned.
I think the causes are multifactorial. First, you need a social structure that promotes or at least not inhibits mental illness. That I think is given in industrialized countries because of high stress for parents, little commitment among people and always increasing speed of life. In addition the middle class got smaller and smaller. Three are only two outcomes, poor or rich with little in-between. Then you need some awareness of mental illness. Even today mental illness is highly stigmatized, but back then it was even worse. There are a lot of older people who are visibly not well but won't get treatment for whatever reason and thus won't show up in statistics. And then, yes the media in general. My mum told me that back when she was young the sentiment of the media was more positive, there were articles about achievements without a critical differentiation. More negative news more frequently. All of that set the stage for young people to feel the need to get ahead to survive combined with a larger group for comparison results in a feeling of hopelessness in many.
I hope we find a way to mitigate or reverse the trend these studies are highlighting. Schooling is essential and we can't allow it to become unbearable.
There was a ton of depression and even suicides when I was growing up. I felt like 50% of teens at my large HS were suffering from some kind of mental issue. And then you had major events like Columbine. The US school system has always managed to produce a lot of very miserable people, and no one seemed to care or do anything about it.
And now we have these studies all blaming social media, like there is some kind of epidemic that never existed before. But I am deeply cynical. I think these issues already existed, it's just there is a convenient scapegoat now.
I think it is undeniable that that social media is bad for the psyche. I can’t say it is to blame for the current situation but I do believe if it went away we’d all be better off.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/teen-suicide-rate-spi...
To your point, the model of school hasn't really changed in a long time; but, then again, we do see rates of mental illness changing. So, I don't really know if you can put the blame on the model of schooling in that instance.
As a side note, one thing that has changed in schools is the drop in physical fun, either in the expectations of gym classes, or during recess, or in school sports. It's either study like crazy, or focus on an extracurricular (possibly a sport) as if it's a second job to get into a good college; a lot of kids just aren't having good old physical fun as much as they used to, at least from my observation.
I grew up in the 80s with a material wealth that is probably 10% of what modern teenagers have. The era also contained a massive economic crisis with actual record high unemployment and interest rates triple the current "high" rate. Also, the nuke could drop any day.
I don't remember spending much thought on any of it at all nor was I worried about any future. Why would I? I'm a teenager, I spent the early teens largely outside playing with friends and the late teens partying.
However, if I'd replay my childhood in modern age conditions, I'm sure I would have been far more miserable. That's what I mean with it being programmable. Modern teens are far more lonely than I was and spent that lonely time filling their head with garbage at a very critical part in their development. They've already given up before they even started.
Honestly, in my work with kids I'm not seeing social media as being a big problem. Mass media has existed for well over 100 years. Kids have always known kids who were exceptional.
The difference now is kids are much more aware of the news and thanks to the hyper-partisan news reporting they're being continually bombarded with Bad News. Not bad news as in airplane crashes and stuff like that, but bad news with a political spin: the economy is crashing, AI is going to take all our jobs, the left wants Big Government to take away all your rights, the right wants to create a Christian theocracy - the list goes on, and on, and on, and on.
If anything, kids' social media, i.e. where kids actually hang out, gets them away from all that crap. That's why kids love TikTok. They watch videos of kids doing cool and interesting things. No politics.
If you take away a teenager’s phone in 2023 you’re casting them away to a proverbial deserted island. Also not exactly great for mental health.
I wouldn't discount social media and related issues out of hand, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's a contributing factor. I understand there was a similar sentiment in the 70s and 80s where there was a certainty that nuclear war was going to happen.
And there was exactly zero evidence of this having anything to do with it, and none of it really fits the bill of having "switched on" around 2010 or a little before (hint: facebook).
We know that severe mental (and even physical) symptoms can "spread" in social groups (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness), particularly among young women who are now experiencing the sharpest rises in mental illness. There is also strong evidence that affective states (e.g. happiness or depression) spread socially, with even next-door neighbors of depressed people being significantly more likely to be depressed than those on the same block but not next-door (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830455/).
While the TikTok Tourette's phenomenon is clearly an extreme example, it seems possible that something similar could be happening to kids constantly hearing about anxiety and depressive disorders as an immutable trait that everyone around them seems to have.
Bad metaphor - if we think of ideas spreading between people like neurons, we have increased the interconnectedness (social reach) and decreased the activation energy (removed stigma/provided language/triggered introspection).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_univers...
The big one is “does that mean there’s more self-harm, or does that mean parents are more willing to ask for emergency help?”
> "Note that there are two ways to calculate increases. We can measure an increase in absolute terms, e.g., a rise from 5% to 15% of teens with a diagnosis is a ten percentage-point increase, or we can report it in relative terms, e.g., a rise from 5% to 15% is a 300% increase, relative to the anchor point"
Uhm… maybe in an "alternative mathematics" universe? Where I learned math, an increase from 100% of the anchor value to 300% of the anchor value is not a relative increase of 300% but of 300%-100%=200%.
In contrast, A "300% increase, relative to the anchor point" would be adding 300% of the anchor value to the 100% of it that it already has, i.e. resulting in an end value of 400% of the anchor value. So in the case presented by the article quote, to come back to the absolute terms, it would be a rise from 5% to 20%, not to 15%.
No, they are both about relative increases. I didn't even write about absolute increases because (unlike relative increases, where the article makes a mistake) absolute increases were the part that the article got right: a rise from 5% to 15% would be an (absolute) increase of 10% … just like the article says.
> 300% relative difference just means 300/100 = 3x
…My point was: 300% relative INCREASE (i.e. positive relative difference) means that it's the DIFFERENCE (increase) between the initial value and the end value that is 300% RELATIVE TO the initial value (thus the end value being 400% of the initial value), not that the end value is 300% of the initial value (which would only be a 200% relative increase).
Let's take, to better illustrate the point, an example with a relative increase below 100%. Let's go with an example with 40% relative increase. So let's say:
* in the reference year, your company made a profit of 5 million dollars out of a revenue of 100 million dollars, i.e. a profit margin of 5%.
* the next year it still made a revenue of 100 million dollars but managed to be more profitable, making a profit of 7 million dollars i.e. a profit margin of 7%.
* The ABSOLUTE increase of the profit margin is (7%-5%)=2%,
* The RELATIVE increase of profit margin is the absolute increase of profit margin divided by its initial reference value i.e. (7%-5%)/5% = 40%.
And my point is: having a 40% relative increase of profit margin means that your end profit margin is 40% higher relative to your initial reference profit margin and is thus (100%+40%)=140% of your initial reference profit margin, not that your end profit margin is 40% of your initial profit margin… which would be a 60% relative DECREASE (i.e. -60% relative increase) of the profit margin.
But it's really just a hypothesis.
Another hypothesis is that it's environmental. There's a lot of research showing depression and stress are correlated with inflammation. There are a number of other health biomarkers that are going bad fast (sperm-count, testosterone) and it's known testosterone levels inversely correlate with depression for example. Pollution is also correlated with health and mood.
So rather than declaring it over before the research even begins, let's at least consider environment.
Sounds stupid right? There's a plausibility scale, and despite various hypotheses being possible, it's reasonable to rank them by what fits best with out prior knowledge, and social media is way more plausible than some post 2010 rise in inflammation, even if that could causally lead to depression in the first place.
You're assuming that depression and other mental illnesses only started in 2010, which is theoretically possible, but not an established fact.
We've actually seen a drastic rise in most mental illnesses diagnosed going back at least 50 years. There is a hypothesis that it's diagnosis, but again, merely a hypothesis.
Some of the cases which clearly aren't "diagnosis" (e.g. nearsightedness) we have no explanation for.
Solitary entertainment has grown drastically more engaging in the last few decades, and it seems reasonable to think that it has contributed to increased isolation and sedentary behavior.
Even though it's not absolutely certainly the cause of all ills in the world, I think it's worthwhile to be cautious about digital entertainment.
I want to point out that pollution can be invisible. As a thought experiment - the amount of lead in your water it would take to permanently damage your brain would be invisible, untasteable, and miniscule. It's worth remembering how fragile we really are.
Is it water? Most water supplies only test for about 8-10 chemicals. Who knows? Is it the microplastics we eat?
As for why it would be worse now when our environment is getting better -- perhaps the damage is accumulating each generation (like sperm counts are going down each generation). There are a lot of cases where pregnant mother being exposed to something can have severe effects on the child, and sometimes even the grandchild (look up diethystylbestrol).
Anyways, this is just a hypothesis, but it seems to me it should be given as strong a starting consideration as anything else. I'm sure it's not too hard to take blood samples from a few thousand people to look for health correlations to these mood issues.
Which one caused which? Does hanging out on Reddit 8 hours a day not have an effect on sperm-count; or is the decline in sperm-count part of the reason you are on Reddit?
Or maybe not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34830936
Social media and phones are environmental factors. Increasing obesity is definitely a factor. Whether sperm and testosterone are decreasing is still speculative because the old data being used for comparisons is pretty poor. I think air pollution has actually gotten better since the 80s last I checked. Maybe increases in 'forever chemicals' are having some effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Harms_to_Mammali...
-declining quality of education
-poor sleep from late-evening screen use
-social media use
-influencer culture makes ones own situation look dull
-overmedication
-state of world (wars, ecological risks etc)
-measurement artifact
-electromagnetic fields
-health issues that cause inflammation
-junk food/poor nutrition
Did I miss any others?
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-coddling-of-the-am...
The results of this data gathering exercise is alarming regardless.
Address the content/message, not the speaker.
Late stage, winner-takes-all & loser-gets-nothing, Capitalism.
Those of us who are well-entrenched in our careers may not understand how vicious the world is for the entry-level and those aspiring to launch careers. The secondary schools preach and harp about college nearly every single day. If you don't go to college then expect to work meaningless jobs and live in squalor. I'm paraphrasing, but only a bit.
If you don't know anyone going through today's college admissions process then whoo-boy! There have been a recent spate of articles here on HN complaining about developer interviews and how insane they've become. Multiply the insanity by 10x and then re-label it as college admissions. You'd better have made sure you played the right sport, had the right extracurricular activities, volunteered for the right organizations, and be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. That should at least guarantee you a spot at your state college, maybe even a scholarship or two.
And speaking of scholarships - you need money for college. Lots and lots of money. More money than your parents could have ever possibly saved - and that's if your parents are in the top 10% of wage earners. You're going to be taking out loans, maybe spending a significant part of your adult life paying back those loans.
Why would you do this? You don't want to have a menial job and live in squalor do you?
Meanwhile while killing themselves to get into college they're watching billionaires literally buy the government and pass the laws they want passed. They watch politicians gerrymander so that the majority doesn't actually have a say. They watch a moral minority strip them of every personal liberty they have and tell them how to live their lives.
Oh, and all these assholes are completely destroying the Earth, and their future, without a care in the world for what will come after them. In fact they don't think there's going to be a future because Jesus Christ is going to float down on a cloud and save them all and leave your sorry ass behind to suffer.
And we're wondering, actually wondering, why an entire generation is depressed and apathetic and looking at the older generations with derision.
Meanwhile the depression will continue until they rise up and burn the place down. That is if they're not so downtrodden they can't even lift their heads any longer.
But yeah, let's blame smartphones instead.
My kid asks me what career she should be when she grows up and I honestly don't know what to tell her. Every job category is fighting for its life against the capital ownership class's unquenchable need for more of the pie. The truth is that it probably doesn't matter. Unless I'm a multimillionaire and pay her way to the elite club, she doesn't really have anything besides downward class mobility to look forward to.
I think what is going on isn't that complicated. The biggest problem is that internet and smartphones have reduced the meaningfulness and weight of local and in person interactions. When we hung out as kids and teenagers the people around you were all you had. They mattered much more to you because what else was there to do?
Also, we measure our social status in a relative manner and the comparison group is no longer the people in your town or high school. It's the whole country or world in some case.
You meet a new person and find out they are really good at an instrument. In the past that would garner a decent amount of respect. Now using your phone you can instantly pull up thousands of people who are better. Thirty years ago imagine the ego sustenance a person would get from being the best guitar player or artist at their high school.
Basically the social value of the younger generation to each other has decreased. How would that not cause widespread depression?
The main way to curtail late stage crony capitalism is to raise taxes on the wealthy. We're at about half the tax rate that sustains a healthy middle class, which is directly correlated with wages being half what they should be, the lack of personal savings for the bottom half of the population, etc. It's been well-understood since the Great Depression, but empires have always known that there's a limit to what workers will accept before they revolt. I believe that we passed the point of stability around the Dot Bomb and 9/11 2001. But a strong argument could be made that the writing was on the wall by 1990 when the USSR separated but world powers kept funding their own militaries to create new bogeymen like terrorism to control the population.
Everything since has been theater: from the way we reward financiers and penalize employees, to how our legal system protects status quo players like the RIAA/MPAA, and how threats to our environments are just treated as externalities and not addressed directly because that goes against "free market" capitalism.
I learned about the situation we're in today with looming global threats like nationalism and fascism in high school AP government class back in maybe 1993. Back then, guys like Robert Bork, Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh were curiosities, and Newt Gingrich was just getting started. Never in our wildest dreams would we have imagined that Fox News would dominate all media, thanks to bitter old men like Rupert Murdoch. They created such a dark reality that I feel awful for young people today who think that this is how it always was and always will be.
The silver lining is that every bully eventually realizes that everyone is laughing at him. I think we're in one of those moments now with stuff like the TikTok ban hearings illustrating how comically out of touch bitter old men are. Their time is ending, and I still hold out hope that when Gen X attains power in government, we'll pull the plug on the fear mongering. But I'm generally wrong about these things, so I also expect the powers that be will prevent us from ever gaining any power whatsoever. Which is why it's so important to organize outside of whatever circles the mainstream media deems appropriate. Thankfully Gen Z appears to be doing just that.
I seriously can't understand why some people scratch their heads around the youth's mental health crisis. I'd be baffled if they weren't depresesd.
- 1950s: Civil Rights, Korean war, dawn of the Cold War
- 1960s: Vietnam war, more Cold War
- 1970s: stagflation (high unemployment + high inflation), Watergate, even more Cold War
- 1980s: more stagflation, worries about AIDS, environment (ozone layer, acid rain), urban decay and crack epidemic, rise of Japan, Greed is Good
- 1990s: amongst the more optimistic decades in the US, but there was still lingering AIDS anxiety, dim employment prospects for the over-educated coming off age ("Generation X"), domestic terrorism bracketed by Waco and Columbine High. Abroad there were the Rwanda and Yugoslavia wars.
- 2000s: 9-11, war in Iraq and Afghanistan, financial crisis
And there's probably tons more anxiety inducing events in each decade that I forgot.
I think social media is the main culprit, but there's a lot behind that.
I think PG's identity essay comes into play.
"Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you." [1]
As teenagers pick up all these various identities and labels, it makes them dumber. And it's also exhausting for them mentally to defend them or champion them.
A teen may have as part of their identity: atheist, climate change activist, transgender rights activist, feminist, liberal Democrat, goth, aspiring influencer, etc.
Back when I went to school, you might just be a jock or a nerd but it wasn't anything you felt compelled to defend. There weren't that many identities or groups organizing to recruit you to their cause. You didn't have the weight of putting all your time in so many things AND maintain some bullshit presence on social media.
So how do you address this? Only thing I can think is to help our young people develop a mindset or philosophy for dealing with bullshit. How to be resilient in a dynamic world that really gives zero fucks about you. Once you accept that as a fact, I think it is infinitely easier to be happy.
I had a professor say once something like "nobody gives a shit about you except maybe your family and a few close friends" and that you need to be compelling and memorable. The class was about helping students reflect on that and how they wanted to tackle the world.
I already had that kind of outlook at the time, but you'd be surprised at how many students had a completely stunned look on their face because they were raised in an environment where they were the center of their parents' lives and were told that everyone loves them, that they are super special and that if they go to school, do this, do that, then they'll be good. So the professor shocked them with that statement.
In my opinion, that's part of the core issue. We aren't preparing our youth with this mindset. And they get frustrated when they take their identities and dreams and run into the world's brick wall. It overwhelms them. As Neil deGrasse Tyson was told by his father - it's not enough to be right, you must be effective.
If we teach them to accept that the world gives zero shits about them and that they need to develop skills to be compelling, then they can be more effective and get more reward.
I'm not advocating for that message to just be dropped on teens as is, although I think all universities should have that course along with personal finance. But when raising kids and in our elementary and high schools, we should be challenging them in a way that let's them know that if they want their way in anything, they should think of compelling reasons and they should be able to articulate those reasons without raging on others, to be effective.
Ultimately it's the fault of the parents and society. People are showing kids that it is ok to just rage on your friends and family when you find out they disagree with you. Defriend, talk shit behind their back. Constantly comparing themselves to others. We've been grooming citizens with strong identities with every form of media and built systems around divisiveness and social outrage. It's a nefarious engine that rips families, friends and communities apart. And this leads to mental illness with teenagers and their parents too.
The only solution is to try and disconnect from that engine. It's extremely powerful though. May take a generation unless someone or something with major influence is able to connect with the youth in a meaningful way.
I wouldn't give correlative studies much thought. It could be just as likely that people who were more anxious or depressed were found to be mobile phone users or any number of other things causing both anxiety and depression and increased mobile phone use. Critique of causal errors should be no different here than any other conclusion made from correlations.
Science depends upon the reproducibility of experiments. This means if I perform an experiment twice, then the second experiment (up to relativity) is done in the context of the experiment having already been done once, so the outcome of these experiments can be thought of as a fixed point of performing applying the have-done-the-experiment context (often with respect to all other experiments). Science is made up of these fixed points, which we can think of as the "set" of properties of the capital-W World.
Fundamentally, however, what it means to observe the outcome of an experiment, is to be able to condition your behavior upon that outcome, so if your own behavior is the thing that you are observing, there aren't necessarily any fixed points of this process.
This isn't merely a technicality either. For example: I measure that people experiencing insecurity about their performance are mostly pessimistic, and dub this phenomenon "impostor syndrome". I publish my results and, as a result, people assume that the insecurity they feel about their performance is explained by impostor syndrome, rather than being an honest evaluation of their performance. The next time I try to measure this phenomenon in the population, I might indeed find that it's the other way around, that people are optimistic about their performance, as a result of the previous experiment.
As an aside, do you think that the data, not the hypothesis, is accurate (i.e., that mental health has declined in teens)?
Full series here: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/archive
I find the complete argument really compelling. It convincingly argues that teen use of social media has drastically reduced the time spent in person with friends, and drastically increased social comparisons. These two effects are awful for the mental health of a human who's brain is still developing. The specific issue is the combination of smartphones with cameras and social media based on images and video, which only became prevalent in ~2012. Social media is causing a public health the scale of COVID, Opiods, or smoking - a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering, and 2-3x the rate of teen self harm and suicide.
Here's the longer version of the argument, with citations:
Teen mental health has unambiguously dropped off a cliff. Both self reports of depression, and objective measures like hospital admissions and suicides, have increased drastically since ~2012 [1].
The decrease in health does not correlate with the economy [2], or with academic pressure [3]. It does not correlate with 9/11, school shootings, or any particular American issue, because the decline started at the same time in all Anglophile countries [4].
There is no evidence of the "doomer" hypothesis: that teens are right to be more depressed because the world actually does suck, and they're just the first to notice [5]. And that thought pattern is itself specifically characteristic of depression: Depressed people view the world as worse than it actually is [6].
The decline in mental health does unambiguously correlate with social media use. And every class of study that examines causation has shown that social media causes declines in mental heatlh. The issue seems to be specifically the combination of smartphones with cameras and social media based on images and videos. These two technologies both became common ~2012, at the same time mental health started dropping [7].
Some combination of social media has radically altered the social life of teens, in ways that we know to be terrible for mental health. Time spent by teens in person with friends has decreased ~70% [8]. And I don't have a specific source for this one, but it sure seems like social media has vastly increased social comparison. Nothing else can explain the decline in time spent with friends. We know depression and anxiety are tightly linked to social support - how could time spent with friends fall by so much and not cause a crisis.
I think tech-savvy people are so used to baseless moral panics that there is a set of defense instincts kick in whenever something seems like a moral panic. But all of the evidence is that this time is different. If you don't think social media is a major contributor, at least understand the evidence that it is, or use evidence for your alternative hypothesis.
[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...
[2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/104255435/conclusion-so...
[3] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/academic-pressure-socia...
[4] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-il...
[5] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-g...
The same point is made better and I think less ideologically by Matt Yglesias in the link before. Half of the piece is behind a paywall, but the first half is the most important.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depre...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beck's_cognitive_triad
[7] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
It's another example that "sapiens" are so lame, so even having AbUNdAnCe TeCHnOlGy and PrOgResS they manage to terribly screw their environment. A handful of ancient greeks living in "undeveloped" conditions with infant mortality, slavery and no mcdonalds managed to produce philosophies, which are heavily quoted today. Take stoicism, it manages my mental health like charm, and I'm only shallowly practicing it. "Developed" countries have thousands of universities full of "educated" people who have access to orders of magnitude knowledge than the guy who taught at Stoa. They should've cured not the teenage depression, but the mental health issues at the scale of humanity. If they are _really_ developed and educated, of course ;-)
Would love to see mental health numbers of teenagers that:
1. Havent been medicated
- I understand this biases the sample
1. They're not medicated. Boys are most likely to be medicated, but out of all these dozens of kids there was only one boy. Boys are so rare that one girl thought it was a girls-only therapy group and wondered where do guys go to get help?
2. Most of them were highly physically active - more so than most of the people I knew when I was growing up.