The rates of people diagnosed with depression. Things that were once taboos, had stigma attached to them, or were poorly defined may once have been more often kept under wraps. See ADHD or ASD diagnosis rates, for example.
1) The rate may have been constant over time, but we're only now observing the "true" rate because societal taboos have decreased.
2) The diagnostic criteria may have lowered over time. Thus, we may now be diagnosing people who wouldn't have previously met the criteria for diagnosis.
I've been wondering the same about the notable rise in self-identified LGBT+ individuals across generations[0]. Are we witnessing this surge merely because societal acceptance has improved, enabling more people to openly identify as LGBT+? Or could it also be because the definition of what it means to be LGBT+ has broadened and it's increasingly desirable for young people to identify as such?
[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/18228/share-of-americans-iden...
I still find it weird when queer spaces are full of people in hetero relationships but the demographics make sense.
[1] https://kinseyinstitute.org/research/publications/historical...
https://slowrevealgraphs.com/2021/11/08/rate-of-left-handedn...
Nothing caused the population of left handed people to soar. We just stopped hitting them in schools for using their left hands.
I'd bet that a substantial portion of humans are naturally bi and shaped by their environment but there are some humans that really are Kinsey 0s or 6s. We're just rarer. I'd also guess the reputation that conversion therapy has for not working is because anybody in such a hostile environment with even a smidge of opposite-sex attraction is going to act 'straight' and the only people sent off to the conversion camps are the people for whom it wouldn't work.
> People who are straight occasionally do become bi or gay, and vice versa.
Past puberty? Do they really change sexual orientation or do they realize they were X all along? And is it really the result of acclimatization or the result something else, like a biological process? I admit I didn't know that was a thing. Also, a problem is that most of this research is based on self-reporting, which is notoriously unreliable. Ideally researchers would find ways to measure sexual arousal directly, but I guess it would be more difficult to find participants and setup experiments.
Adult pedophiles can stop being sexually aroused by children, because there's still a cognitive component to it. In the same way that you might for example, stop being attracted to your partner if you start associating them with a negative memory, a softcore pedophile might lose their attraction to children if they begin to associate it with a negative emotional response from the child.
>Past puberty? Do they really change sexual orientation or do they realize they were X all along?
They quite literally change sexual orientation. The same way you might stop liking sugary foods if you go off them for a while, or how you might develop a taste for leafy greens if you give them a go enough times.
As far as general sexuality, the keyword you can look for is 'sexual fluidity', and as far as pedophiles are concerned, Mashall's "Are pedophiles treatable?" covers current approaches that seem to be successful in attenuating or replacing attraction to children.
>Aversion conditioning is understood to change behavior more than desire
Behavior and desire have a complex relationship, it's not necessarily the case that behavior follows from desire.
>And many people do not develop a taste for leafy greens or heterosexuality after decades.
Many people don't, but some do, and my comment concerns the 'some', hence my saying 'occasionally'.
Zoloft was Pfizer's second best selling drug during most of the 90s. So people were still going to get diagnosed and treated despite the stigma. They just wouldn't tell anyone about it, other than their therapist.
To your final paragraph, that also highlights the flaws in Gallup style polling. Even if people were being diagnosed in equal number, it doesn't mean they would admit to it in a poll.
Both "it's not a real disease, you are not dying of something" and "it's not real, just snap out of it!".
Some people react with depression to a serious grievance or ill inflicted upon them (this is the form of depression other people are most likely to understand), and some react with extreme depression to the most ordinary and mild of life's occurrences.
I'm saying depression sometimes has an identifiable trigger and sometimes it doesn't. In both cases it's a serious disease.
For many cases of depression, there's no identifiable "trigger" you can point at and say "this, this is the reason this person started suffering from depression".
Even when there is such a trigger, e.g. a divorce, losing their job, or the death of a loved one (say, a parent), people who are not depressed can overcome it. Life goes on, you don't get wrecked forever, you slowly rebuild your life. Whereas a person suffering from depression may never recover, so that a dramatic event in their lives overpowers everything else, forever, and they fail to recover, if they do at all.
The person I'm replying to seems to imply the depressive "let's get wrecked forever, life has no more meaning" is the "correct" response, and on the contrary, that picking up your life is "sick".
Some may lack the tools to identify the reason for their depression, that's not the same as nothing having happened to them.
>it's not out of the ordinary or different to what's been done to other people who are not depressed
It's entirely possible that the people who are not depressed are in fact the ones who are sick.
>some react with extreme depression to the most ordinary and mild of life's occurrences.
Or, the mild life occurrence just serves as a tipping point that cascades and causes the person to reevaluate their situation and come to the conclusion that they are dissatisfied.
In some cases. In others that's not the case. The latter are the cases of depression I'm talking about.
> It's entirely possible that the people who are not depressed are in fact the ones who are sick.
No, we can safely rule this out. The people who are not depressed are not sick, and depression is a real disease.
I also believe that ADHD still carries a stigma in the workplace. I wouldn’t personally discuss it in an interview.
Granted, suicide is also under-reported due to stigma, but it's another data point.
To your point on suicide, though. The OECD has some data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/... .. It's hard to say. US is flat. Norway is up a bit. Most countries are down or flat. I don't see any particular upward trend over the past 60 years.
16.4 16.9 17.3 17.1 17.2 17.1 17.5 17.7 18.1 18.1 18.5 18.9 18.9 18.8 19.2 19.9 21.2 22.5 21.8 22.4
and OECD (per 100k intentional self harm starting @ 2010 https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?ThemeTreeId=9)
12.8 13 13.2 13.4 13.8 14 14.2 14.8 15 14.7 14.1
(USA, if not implied)
Breaking down the US statistics into demographics makes for some disturbing yet interesting reading https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db433.htm. Seems like the bulk of the growth has been older men (trending down) and women aged 15-24 (a shocking 87% increase from 2007).