Suicide Rates Are Up for Gen Z Across the Anglosphere, Especially for Girls
afterbabel.com
afterbabel.com
"Since the early 2010s, stable in-person communities and relationships have rapidly disintegrated, as transient networks of low-investment relationships took their place."
This is a well worded way of saying the deep networks as opposed to shallow ones are the most vital for mental health it would seem.
I remember seeing a comment in here quite a while ago, and saving it. I haven’t bothered to see if it could be verified but this reminded me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31458101
> Reminds me of some story I heard (would be great if someone has a source) that you can spot who has more chance of dying of suicide in social graphs, because they are connected to (perhaps many) people but are not part of a single clique (group)
This roughly aligns with when first and second gen iPhone owners started to upgrade and pass their older phones to their children, creating the first generation of smart phone owning teens.
These issues have been going on for a long time before social media took off.
Might be completely anecdotal but in my lifetime I've experienced the transformation from local communities to online ones and how unhappy and unsatisfied it makes me in 2024. It was exciting in 2005 but I'm slowly clawing back a much more offline existence for the past 5 years and am much happier, even more after finding communities that are shielded away from internet dramas, the world is much nicer outside of it.
The internet nowadays is amazing for knowledge and learning, and terrible for social experiences, I made many more online friends (whom I met offline and I'm friends to this day) on BBSs and internet forums from the 90s-2000s than on anything branded "social" from the 2010s onwards.
Others above have noted we've been in social decline since the Reagan era, and being a teen starting high school at the time, I recall our teachers noting the rapid decline. They complained about our lack of school spirit, the fact we didn't have as many school dances, prom had become an extravaganza as opposed to an end of high school dance. I've talked with many other Gen X'ers and they all tell the same story. Something happened between the time we were born in the late 60's to the mid 80's that made us markedly different from the way the Boomers, the Silent Generation, and the Greatest Generation had been.
The older I get and reflect back I can come up with a panoply of causes:
- Watergate. Not only did we lose all our after school cartoons, but it's all the grown-ups talked about. In the end, we learned at a very tender age that the POTUS is a bad man. (Yet here we are in an even worse place with Trump).
- The Vietnam War. This was the first televised war. Guess who was watching? Gen X children. Remember, cable TV didn't exist yet and there were only 3 channels on TV and guess what they were all showing?
- Latchkey children. Gen X was the first (and essentially only) latchkey generation.
- The SALT treaties. By the time Gen X was going to school they had stopped atomic bomb drills as they were deemed as being useless. Of course the adults made sure we knew that. All-out nuclear war was a widely publicized threat.
- Iranian Hostages. After losing the Vietnam War we learned we couldn't even execute a mission to remove American hostages from the Iranian revolutionaries.
- Reagan and the rise of the Christian Right. We could see people supporting that were full of shit from day one.
That's why Gen X is so apathetic - our response to all this was fuck this shit. We knew we were watching a system in decline and failing and that it was all a bullshit show to pretend that it wasn't.
Now, who are Gen Z's parents? Gen X.
Kids are always interested in their parents and how the world was way back then. Shit. That's how the world was. Absolute shit. An oil embargo that resulted in long gas lines and people literally killing one another while waiting in lines wrapped around the block to get gas. Our schools shutting down because of a natural gas shortage that sent natural gas prices skyrocketing and school systems could no longer afford to keep their schools open in the winter. High inflation that made it so that many of our parents couldn't afford homes (mortgages were 12% to 15% back then) - yes, Gen X was America's first generation raised in apartments. The world was shit. Then Reagan came and did the unthinkable: he figured out how to make it orders of magnitudes worse.
Any rate, that's what Gen Z has been raised with. My own daughter pointed out that the United States had been at war since before she was born and noted that when she went to college, the United States had been at war for all her life. But it didn't seem like we were at war. Gen Z sees the rise of Trump and easily see he stands for the exact opposite of what America stands for. They see people arguing for gun rights and not giving a shit about kids being slaughtered while going to school. Gen Z knows they're getting fucked, and they're committing suicide as a result.
But sure, let's blame smartphones. Sure beats any introspection of where the hell our society went off the rails! The fact our children are killing themselves and lots of parents are killing their children before they're even born tells you there's something royally fucked with your society.
At this point it appears there's a huge swath of the population that have lost their minds and are no longer capable of seeing reality. Assuming the human race survives this mass madness, it'll be interesting to see what history has to say about this era.
What have I done to help my grown children (the oldest of Gen Z)? I've advised to hang in there as the demographics are changing. The Boomers are dying and the combination of Gen X and Gen Z make for the largest generation in America. We have the opportunity to right this ship. That's why the Republicans are terrified: they know this.
So, Gen Z - hang in there!
What a fantastic demonstration of the fact that a statement doesn't have to be false in order to be highly misleading.
"Fake" (i.e. blatantly incorrect) news isn't the main problem in out media landscape. Headlines like this one are, which are technically correct, yet are (usually intentionally) crafted to lead the average reader to a conclusion that can be the exact opposite of what is really happening.
2. It is genuinely interesting if we're moving from a 4:1 to 2:1 M:F suicide rate, and I think that can be placed on social media. And if there is a single concrete cause of the change in ratio, that increase in female suicide rates can be reversed. That would be a good thing, even if it only improves young women's lives.
3. As unfair as it is, people don't give a shit about male suicide rates; the general response is "they deserve it," and no argumentation is going to change their minds. If people start seeing suicide as an issue that affects both sexes, perhaps that can provide the basis for some policy that will have the unintended effect of helping male suicide rates.
Yes, for decades this attitude has been caricatured by the fake-but-entirely-too-plausible news headline "Male suicide rate increasing; women most affected". Something I would expect to see in the Guardian if not elsewhere.
"Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children."
Source: https://clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/WH/EOP/First_Lady/ht...
Holy crap, it's true. Oh well. Still would have been a thousand times better than Trump.
There is a broader point that is being missed and that is, in the Anglo-sphere people don’t care much about mental health at all, we stigmatize mental health as a weakness (thanks puritans!), so yes men don’t seek access to mental healthcare as openly as women and that drives other outcomes like higher suicide rates, higher levels of stress related medical issues and in the extremes mass-shootings.
A "fun" fact: the majority of men who commit suicide do seek mental health services. And the mental health system fails them. Shifting it purely to a matter of "men are just too toxic to seek mental health services" is just a thinly veiled way to blame men for their suicides.
A gentle nudge, I hope.
I'm not sure how the examples you give place any undue onus on individual men, nor how they absolve society at large.
I read both examples as gesturing at how the society socializes boys and what it expects of men. I doubt many would suggest individual men are making abstract, rational, uninfluenced, ruggedly-individual decisions to prefer suicide over seeking mental healthcare.
We're all responsible for how we expect people to perform their gender (and how our personal expectations factor in to what society at large expects), but the most-direct way to change those expectations is to reject them at scale.
In this case, men have the greatest leverage to initiate change. The point isn't that millions of men need to individually make a quiet decision to seek mental healthcare in secret--it's that millions of men can change the weather here if they individually choose to reject traditional expectations (including the reigning hyperagent ideology you cite) and make space for others to follow.
I hope it's obvious that retooling our gendered expectations of men (as a society) is a thread that's at least worth pulling on with respect to reducing male suicide rates. I hope it's also clear that a lot of individual men would have roles to play in that process.
You're right that it isn't the whole story. Creating the preconditions for men to readily seek mental healthcare doesn't matter much if the care isn't obtainable for other reasons. But I think it's a reasonable focus until there's good evidence that men are motivated to seek care that isn't ~accessible.
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Few social problems are best addressed with an answer from one perspective.
Some people over-flatten the gender pay gap, for example, into something inflicted on women by a culture that doesn't value them like it does men. Some people over-flatten it into something women inflict on themselves when they aren't as likely to negotiate a higher salary, ask for raises, job-hop, work in more dangerous industries, put in gobs of overtime, pursue management positions, get STEM degrees, and so on.
Some read the former as shirking personal responsibility and begging society for equal outcomes. Some people read the latter as putting the onus on individual women, not on society at large.
We can break out of frames like these and focus on helping people flourish. Some of us may not be able to walk and chew gum--but some of us can walk, and some of us can chew gum.
i grew up without friends for various reasons, and i spent a lot of time alone and isolated, but, at the same time i also grew up without anyone ever putting any kind of undue expectations on me. of course i was expected to help at home with some housework, but when it didn't happen i was never made to feel guilty about it.
i believe for me this freedom from expectations counteracted the negative effects of not having friends. it allowed me to pursue my interests only limited by financial resources.
when i saw as a young adult how many people had expectations on others, i did what you suggest, and reject the whole idea. i had no desire to fit in. it's one reason why i left europe at the time.
i realized one of the problems europe has with immigrants is that expectation to assimilate and fit in. that particular problem is less strong in the US due to the less homogeneous society there, but it does exist there too. it's just a bit easier there to find your tribe as it were which lessens the difficulty of needing to fit in.
this is at the macro level, on the other hand at the individual level the problem remains. again for me that meant that since i grew up alone, it was a lot easier to stay away from people who had expectations that i didn't want to fulfill. if you weren't able to accept me as the person i was, you were not going to gain my friendship. i expect many others are not able to do that so easily. for them, losing a friend, or having trouble finding friends hurts a lot more.
i have a few friends. and i do want more friends, but not to the degree that i would give up my individuality as a human being in order to get those friends. in fact the worst experiences in my life were when people confronted me with specific expectations that i could not fulfill. my reaction was to protect myself by disconnecting from them.
Visit any Mastodon server and you can see this and other blood-curdling statements posted every day, often by people under their real name, and to the thunderous cheering of the crowds.
Not only that, in general men don't seek help from friends in the same way that women do with their social circles. It's not only professional help but camaraderie and support among men is very different (and lacking) compared to women.
This is all in general terms, of course.
Which makes the headline, which is the only thing the vast majority of people will look at (something the author is well aware of), even more disingenuous bordering on dishonest.
So when they don't make it the headline, it's a conspiracy. When they make it the headline, it's still a conspiracy? At a certain point, we need to accept the fact that you're the one that's hopeless.
It seems like you're framing gender dynamics as a zero-sum game, where improving the situation of one results in stepbacks the other. I agree that men do face significant struggles in today's society [1], but there are ways to move forward in ways that benefit everyone [2].
[1] Perry, Grayson. The Descent of Man. United Kingdom: Penguin Publishing Group, 2017.
[2] hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2000.
So yeah people represented by the more afflicted group will find it particularly offensive that it's being reframed in yet another female-centric manner.
> It seems like you're framing gender dynamics as a zero-sum game
With “lol ya”
You start by saying that men have a harder time getting sympathy, and then minimize the same issue for women by implying that women who attempt suicide aren’t “trying” as hard and they don’t feel ‘actual’ distress but rather they are being manipulative.
There are a lot of ways to get attention, which is a totally normal thing for humans to want, and if someone is that desperate for it I think it’s safer to go ahead and assume it’s because they are actually unhappy and it’s worth addressing rather than calling them a liar?
But even if that wasn't the case, there is a measurable difference in the rate of change. The number of female suicides is increasing at a far faster rate than male suicides.
2. Suppose men succeed at suicide 30% of the time, and women succeed at suicide 3% of the time. The greatest risk factor for suicide attempts is having previously attempted suicide. A useful exercise: calculate the gender ratio of suicide attempts, assuming equal likelihood of a first attempt and repeating attempts until success.
In a sense they're inversely correlated, since if at first you succeed, you'll never attempt again.
Unless you're specifically controlling for that by not counting subsequent attempts by the same person.
That's exactly my point. The title is accurate. In the sense that its factual claims are correct.
But the same headline also implies conclusions that are not correct at all. And, knowing how the social "sciences" operate, this is not an accident.
Perhaps you're looking for some agenda, and perhaps that does exist in other places on the internet (apparently you read things you don't approve on on mastodon?). Whatever conclusions you drew from that, this article and title just doesn't seem like a good example of that and probably the wrong thing to get upset about.
In my opinion it's a good article and the title is both accurate and highlights the most significant conclusion.
> I believe Zach has made some real discoveries here. He demonstrates a pattern in girls’ suicide rates that has not been noticed or much discussed, as far as we can tell.
The article headline mentions girls, not in an attempt to downplay boys' suicides, but rather to emphasize a discovery that they believe that others haven't yet made.
For the same reason, a headline, "Suicide Rates Are high for Gen Z Across the Anglosphere, Especially for Boys" (note high; not up), doesn't discount that girls are also committing suicide. This headline would be apt for an article which highlights the gendered discrepancy in raw rates, rather than the gendered discrepancy in rates of increase.
This article is highlighting how the increase in suicide rate amongst young women is greater than the overall increase in suicide rate is and pointing out probable causes for this. If something suddenly goes from 10% of the total to 20% of the total, why is pointing that problematic to you?
To me, it seems like an okay headline. The focus of the story is on the change, so it's not wrong to focus on the areas that change more.
The title as-is is accurate
Is it wrong to say the "gender wage gap narrowed" when men's inflation adjusted wages have fallen?
"An Analysis of Suicide Rates in the Anglosphere"
Shocking, right? It's basically an admission that the facts are too complex to compress into a half-sentence, and if the reader wants to understand them they should read the actual article.
But social cargo cult science has been operating like tabloid journalism for so long that this wouldn't even be considered.
Talk about how male suicide is significantly higher and feminists will start shrieking about how teenage girls try more, because somehow that's more relevant than more boys actually dying from suicide.
It is absolutely not implying what you think it is.
> What a fantastic demonstration of the fact that a statement doesn't have to be false in order to be highly misleading.
Suicide rates can be rising but especially for girls, all the while keeping the ratio valid. One fact does not make the other invalid.
Its the landscape of framing. By now people should be familiar with the works of Edward Bernays.
Phrasing it as “at the same rate” makes me think... yeah, should they be different? I do see the point that the rate going up is bad and it’s currently trending closer in the wrong direction but I can also see how one might read the comment as suggesting that the rates specifically should not be the same.
This is one of those things that should be so obvious - but because of the overwhelming use of that thing, nobody will admit it. We spent decades listening to big tobacco insisting that cigarettes were healthy and cool despite the fact that the science was clear and it should have been obvious that inhaling burning shit into your lungs was bad.
Having unceasing ubiquitous access to all the toxic shit that the internet serves up via a phone should be obvious.
What would you do? Get rid of mobile computing altogether by government fiat? Ban providing a smart phone to someone under the age of 18? What about tablets and computers, how would one even enforce that? Would you force kids together to socialize for a period of time which is just as likely to develop trauma as relationships?
The only reasonable solution I've heard to the phone problem is individual parents getting involved and active in monitoring and limiting their children screen time, and unfortunately, involved parenting is not something that can be legislated into existence.
1. Encourage education. Explain to young people early and often through a number of avenues that phone use can cause anxiety, depression, etc. Knowledge is power and all that. Will it solve the problem? No. But it might move the needle and save some lives.
2. Fund further and more detailed studies. Are there critical periods of child development where phone use is more likely to lead to suicide? Are there particular patterns of usage? Narrowing down the hypothesis space makes it much easier to develop more nuanced studies and more targeted interventions.
This! You don’t need laws for this, the solution starts with you. Then more people like you, then you’re the majority and the schools ban phones just like they did in that one school in Ireland recently.
Parenting is hard, and just like in the 90s, it’s easier to blame the technology than assume responsibility.
"It's not our fault that people became addicted to our product via darkpatterns, addictive chemicals, misleading marketing, corruption, and suppression."
I'm all for individual responsibility but like cigarettes on the plane, this product creates irreparable harm to children.
You clearly have no idea how cigarettes were marketed.
"there are some benefits to being connected"
Define 'being connected' because we're not talking about kids calling each other on a party line right now.
smoking has no benefits, regardless what marketing says.
being connected means the ability of my kids to talk to their friends.
we have no landline anymore. there are also no more payphones if you are outside. a computer or a mobile phone and online messaging are now the only way that my kids can communicate with others.
taking away that tool would be worse than the time when landlines were still common and kids could call their friends at home.
so simply banning social media is not going to work.
what we need is kid friendly communication tools that do not try to drive engagement but just let them send messages and call.
Sounds like you figured out the solution on your own.
this isn't hard
besides you have to consider that all the other kids will not be limited to such a phone.
we need to create communication tools that are "safe" but that kids actually like to use too.
a voip phone won't solve that either.
How does your theory of it being “the phones” make sense when boys and girls pretty much have equal access to phone?
If it’s phones, you would expect male suicides to be up as well.
And if it’s how girls react to phones, then isn’t the cause that more specific thing than just “phones”.
> Since 2010, rates of self-harm episodes have increased for adolescents in the Anglosphere countries, especially for girls
Also, I would not expect male and female rates to be the same if it were to do with phones. The two sexes have very different experiences online, just as they do in real life.
I’d guess I’m not the only person who clicked on this particular post because of personal struggles with suicidal ideation, and reading through some of the other comments I just wanted to say that people Do care about suicide and mental health. It’s easy to make generalizations about “society”, but we can be the change we want to see in the world - yeah maybe there’s some assholes on Mastodon or whatever, but there’s no reason to elevate or legitimize toxic opinions like that across the internet. From one vulnerable meat sack to another: your life matters, and so do other people’s lives, no matter what their age or gender. Be kind, y’all.
It's not hard to find correlations with all kinds of events, e.g. the 2008 economic collapse had many knock-on effects and mental health doesn't benefit from families losing homes, jobs, stable community relationships, etc. This has even been studied:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4844458/
> "All studies showed that the economic crisis was an important stressor that had a negative impact on workers’ mental health. Most of the studies documented that a rise in unemployment, increased workload, staff reduction, and wages reduction were linked to an increased rate of mood disorders, anxiety, depression, dysthymia, and suicide."
Is that the reason for the increase in suicide attempts and rates among adolescents since 2010? Who knows - but clearly, rising suicide rates are a sign of societal malaise, indeed this was leveraged as a criticism of communist East Germany, which reportedly had an overall suicide rate twice that of the USA today.
Its always easy to feel bad about kids who need to grow up in todays world. I would recommend considering this before you misplace your birth control. People already do it with species appropriate living conditions for pets.
Edit: Pls dont take this as encouragement for suicide. Read the book, you already have sunken cost, you might as well stick around and enjoy it. Doesnt make procreating any less egoistic though.
That’s too arbitrary of a grouping for me to care about these results.
Arbitrary? It’s the UK, and former UK colonies with historically majority UK settlers where English is the most common language spoken, their legal and political systems share a considerable amount in common, and who have one of the strongest cultural, political, and military relationships in history. This is perhaps the least arbitrary grouping on the planet.
Many businesses use it because it accounts for a dominant share of revenue & profits.
Countries with higher levels of individualism (where young people are less rooted in binding communities) appear to have been more affected compared to less individualistic nations (which is why I began my posts by examining the Anglosphere and Nordic nations)
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa...
In Nordic countries too:
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa...