Saw a post on Paul Graham's twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that's a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho.
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.
The only "revocation of rights" I can think of would be Dobbs - which also does not fit the trend (see my response to the other comment).
If (white liberal) teen girls are supposed to actually see their real lives getting worse, I still don't see any reason for this to have become a problem in the early 2010s.
I’m not saying this is the whole story, but it’s possibly part.
“Having it all” is a blessing and curse. The choice to do more, the burden to do more. Now you need a career, family, insta following. And it’s quite likely you’re going to have a hard time finding that perfect husband since men 18-30 as a demographic are doing horribly. What would normally be the backbone of a society is just not functioning well right now.
Insta following could be a new pressure and I agree it would fit the timeline, but that'd be a social media effect and not a decrease in real-life quality of living for white liberal girls.
[0] https://genderdata.worldbank.org/indicators/sl-tlf-acti-zs/?...
It’s actually dangerous to think it’s “too pretend”. My bank account is just squiggles on the screen, but I can somehow buy stuff. Same thing that online relationships can have physical outcomes, even if just by turning it into cash first.
I think the OP meant the whole "lean in" movement. I'm not sure why that would affect teen girls though. Social media and decreased socialization seem like much more plausible factors.
Dobbs didn't just happen. It took decades to take those rights away from women, and there was incremental (anti)progress along the way. In those decades, a massive political project was created specifically to message that women who get abortions (a lifesaving medical procedure) are murderers, and they should be accordingly punished (life in jail). The result of this political campaign is that women in America have the worst medical outcomes in the developed world, and in some cases it's worse than the developing world. Infant mortality is on the rise, giving birth can put you into debt tens of thousands of dollars, and if there are complications you now have to be literally on your last thread of life before doctors will feel comfortable trying to save you.
So I guess you can see why women in America might feel under threat. There is one political party in America who has been telling women for decades that their goal is to use their power and influence to turn the clock back on women in America.
Existing in the state of being where you're constantly feeling under pressure and attack that your rights may be taken away at any moment, I dunno, maybe that's stressful! If I can sense this tension from my Canadian women friends who are stressed just being adjacent to USA news, I'm not at all surprised that American women would be feeling even more stressed and depressed about the situation.
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.)
And there are some trends in the opposite direction - iirc hormonal birth control used to be much harder to get (telehealth has made the prescription requirement much less onerous), and anecdotally nowadays it seems a lot easier to get info on sterilization or methods for intentionally changing menstruation (ex. skipping the placebo week).
I'm not saying Dobbs doesn't matter, only that I both 1) doubt it's a central driver of the trend, and 2) think [outside the world of news/social media] most women can still expect more rights & a higher quality of care in most US locations than they could a decade or two ago.
Yeah, I’m not saying it (or reproductive rights & health care more generally) is the central driver of the trend, I’m saying its one of the key reasons why if someone asked me, today, what group in American society would be most depressed, my intuitive response would be “white liberal teen girls” (particularly, its a key reason why “female, white, and liberal” are parts of that) – why that element that was called out as surprising upthread would not be.
Though Dobbs didn’t just appear ex nihilo without many years of clear lead up to it that reflected a change in the direction of society, so I wouldn’t dismiss the issue being deeply connected to an important part of the broader, earlier trend.
It's just hard to wrap my head around what this trend would be, or why teens started picking up on it in 2012. I am not conscious of any major modern debates around women's rights except abortion/birth control, and I see no particular link between the causes of Dobbs and that generic time period.
Also, possibly as proof that I'm not a great commenter on the issue, I thought only ~8% of women had abortions, but in looking it up while writing this comment apparently it's more like 25% (so abortion & related issues affect way more women/girls than I expected).
The medical procedure you're referring to is dilation and curettage (a.k.a D&C / DnC). The common term "abortion" is imprecise, and refers to several medical procedures, and D&C has multiple uses other than pregnancy termination.
In the case of spontaneous abortion (commonly called "miscarriage"), even in early pregnancy if the fetal remains are allowed to naturally be expelled, afterward the ob/gyn will often need to inspect the uterus and perhaps remove some remaining tissue. So, rather than waiting for the fetus to naturally be expelled following spontaneous abortion and going through the pain and trauma of seeing the blood and tissue being passed at home, the ob/gyn will often advise a D&C rather than waiting for the body to naturally resolve the lost pregnancy.
Unfortunately, my wife has had 3 first trimester miscarriages under 2 ob/gyns, both of which advised D&C rather than waiting for the fetal remains to pass. Also, her ob/gyn performed a 4th D&C to make sure the surface of the uterus is free of tissue that might interfere with pregnancy. This 4th D&C seems to have worked (along with a ton of medications), as we're expecting identical twins in September. Every D&C weakens the cervix, so it's a delicate balancing act.
In any case, D&C has several uses and shouldn't be conflated with "abortion". In our case, my wife's 4th D&C was a fertility treatment, and the first 3 were to resolve lost pregnancies.
2011-2012 was when the major wave of state anti-abortion laws (135 in those two years) and the first notable state executive measure defunding Planned Parent that represented the beginning (well, the visible conversion to a major active push rather than mere rhetoric) of the anti-abortion push by the Republican Party that led to Dobbs occurred.
One conjecture could be that fewer young women with children is correlated with higher rates of diagnosis of mental illness. And if I know I had mental illness, I'd be scared shitless to let it known on the record I had a disorder that a CPS worker or family courts could use against me -- without a child those concerns are lessened. I can also attest having a child means you have way less time for your own personal care, which means perhaps these women now have more time for their own care.
I still think social media / smartphones / etc as an explanation fits the trend more simply & cleanly, but I'm much more open to the idea that I could be wrong.
Prior to the Texas private-enforcement-only hack that occurred just before Dobbs (and was huge news before Dobbs eclipsed it), most of them were either funding/access restrictions that didn’t directly target the Constitutional right just made it difficult to exercise in practice (because that had some chance of surviving the courts), while the rest were struck down (or enjoined, and then struck down later) before going into effect and never enforced, serving primarily as strong social messaging rather than enforced law.
One reason could be they started talking to each other more. Women and girls who had similar life experience shared them on the internet. This is how the whole Me Too movement started; the experiences shared during the Me Too movement were old, but it was the internet and social media which acted as a catalyst to dislodge them from the past and bring them into the present.
> I am not conscious of any major modern debates around women's rights except abortion/birth control
Don't you recall the 2016 Presidential election? There was a huge debate about whether or not a woman was ready to be President of the United States. I don't know about your family, but in my family people thought it very clever to say that a woman could never become president, because her period would make her too volatile. This kind of rhetoric may have flowed right past you, but it wasn't lost on women (especially the very cogent point that men have in fact started most wars in all of human history).
The outcome of that election was that America chose a serial sexual predator who has admitted to spying on women in changing rooms, has raped women, and who has admitted to using his power and prestige to assault women. It wasn't lost on women that this man, with a famously volatile temper, was chosen over a women because he was viewed as more trustworthy and more stable than her.
That man ended his term by waging a violent coup against the United States government with his supporters, who themselves made an effort assassinate the vice president. Yet it was the female candidate that America considered a priori too "volatile".
> I thought only ~8% of women had abortions, but in looking it up while writing this comment apparently it's more like 25% (so abortion & related issues affect way more women/girls than I expected).
As with rape, the number of women who have abortions and the number of women who report abortions are quite different. That number is going to diverge even more now that it's illegal and criminalized in many jurisdictions.
Most of my family voted for Trump, but mostly for immigration & military reasons. I don't remember anyone I knew in real life saying anything negative about Hillary on the basis of her gender -- though, as always, there was plenty of it online. Pretty much all of the negative talk I heard about her (irl) was about her emails, her policies, or her party.
(My mother is still angry about Hillary's "there's a cold place in hell for women who don't vote for a woman" thing, but that wasn't the main reason for her vote.)
The presidents bracketing Trump (Obama & Biden) seem generally feminist, so I'd be surprised that the trend started during Obama and continued to accelerate during Biden if something like Trump / related to Trumpism was a big cause. Maybe the SCOTUS justices he left behind could be pointed to as a continuing political pain point now?
I agree that our abortion statistics will become less indicative of the actual rate now that we're post-Dobbs; this'll be a very interesting time to look back on.
Previous research has suggested that news and commentary concerning political candidates can vary based on a candidate's gender or race. Race and gender were especially salient in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. A content analysis of editorial cartoons was conducted to examine patterns in content or imagery related to race and gender. Editorial cartoons that featured Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and/or John McCain and were published during the primary season were analyzed. Cartoons featuring Obama were more likely to be favorable than those featuring the other candidates; those featuring Clinton were more likely to be unfavorable. Clinton was more often presented as ugly and small in size than was Obama. Clinton was shown perpetrating violence more often than the male candidates; she was also portrayed as the recipient of particularly gruesome violence. Some cartoons featured imagery or content that relied on racial or gender stereotypes; a qualitative analysis of these cartoons is provided. Overall, findings support previous research showing the continued relevance of race and gender in media coverage of political campaigns.
Much of that abuse was explicitly misogynist. Misogyny had been deprecated for a long time, but had a resurgence starting right around 2012.
Why would a teen in Australia care about US law?
Maybe I'm missing something.
The US culture war is a significant cultural export, especially to the rest of the Anglosphere.
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.
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.
What else do we really know? For all we know, the guy who left was a teetotaler and would characterize any social gathering with a few beers present as "everybody getting drunk."
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.
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.
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.
a) Reddit is overwhelmingly male:
- Distribution of Reddit users by gender: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255182/distribution-of-...
b) Reddit is not that big of a platform in the teenage demographic:
- Distribution of Reddit app users by age group: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1125159/reddit-us-app-us...
- Popularity of Reddit in teenagers as compared to other social media platforms: https://www.statista.com/statistics/250172/social-network-us...
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.
One could form hypotheses of course, but they won't be much of relevance here I think :)
Do you mean for this specific item or in general? The former makes sense, but the latter I'd find a little weird given how publically well-known it is that there are group differences (take educational attainment in the United States for example).
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.
Especially because left/right dichotomy smells particularly anecdotal here.
Now correlation isn't causation, but in this case the causal path is pretty clear. If you believe that the world is systemically racist, sexist, unjust, doomed to extinction and that half your friends/family are secretly evil fascists/Nazis, then we'd expect you to feel depressed. When people with those beliefs turn up more frequently in ER for self harm and suicide attempts, we have both a correlation and a plausible cause.
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.