Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

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All other issues aside, it would be shocking if reported rates of teen mental illness did not increase as long-standing stigmas gradually wane and these topic become more acceptable to speak about. If your kid cut themself in 1975, what were you going to do? Ask you husband to spend money to "shrink their head"? More likely you'd hide it, like past generations hid most of their traumas.

Now, there are many outlets for both that teen and their parents (and their teachers, and their friends, and their friends' parents) to say or do something in response. There are resources online that virtually anyone can access, phone numbers you can call, authority figures better-trained to recognize these problems. And perhaps most importantly, we got rid of the absurd mentality that what happens in other families is none of our business, no matter how many unexplained bruises or cuts we witness.

Only now that we are openly discussing and grappling with these issues do we have ay hope of turning the tide.

I agree reporting bias could be a thing, but there are statistics like completed suicide which are less susceptible to it (though still present; you can imagine a suicide being declared an accidental death to help a family "avoid embarrassment"). And those statistics have also been steadily creeping up for decades.

Interestingly enough misreporting suicide as accidental death may have helped keep the base suicide rate down.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262

I think reporting bias should be the starting point and the primary area of inquiry when looking at this topic. Unless I'm imagining the recent past where mental illness was literally verboten to speak about and mental health services were widely derided as scams. The change in discourse has been as rapid and dramatic as any social change I can think of, yet the authors seem to think it's enough to simply acknowledge that and focus instead on their many charts, most of which are about self-reporting or diagnoses.

> mental health services were widely derided as scams.

Doesn’t this data indicate (or even confirm) that that’s still the case?

If mental health services worked, at least some of these issues would be solved, right, not trending upwards?

I don't think many people are still calling therapists "quacks" and extreme things like that. Though I'm sure there's some Boomer men keeping that tradition alive.

Some of these issues are solved! People seek help, or are referred to help, and they get help. The article is showing in part that more people are seeking help, not that they're not getting help.

Though with minimal mental health funding, any kind of sustained help is out of reach for most people.

And speaking of men, it doesn't surprise me that the data is showing a larger increase among women. Men really seem to fetishize "handling things themself" and that kind of nonsense.

> And perhaps most importantly, we got rid of the absurd mentality that what happens in other families is none of our business

I agree with your general sentiment (more recognition and treatment of mental illness is a good thing), but this line troubles me. Most of what happens in my family should stay in my family. Our business is our business. It's no one else's business. There's nothing absurd about this. There may be exceptions (and a child with severe, untreated mental illness may be an exception), but like all exceptions, they are special cases, not the norm. Let's not do away with all privacy in a rush to "turn the tide"...

You conveniently left out the rest of their sentence.

And the destigmatisation happened in 2012? I think it happened much earlier than that.

I think it is an ongoing process that accelerated over the past 10 or so years. There are still many people who stigmatize mental health issues and view mental health services skeptically at best.

We've over-corrected so far now, people make up and put mental illnesses in their twitter bio to be part of some in-group. Mental illness has become a fashionable affectation. There's probably now people out there who keep theirs quiet because they don't want to get lumped with those groups.

The last thing most people want is turning their very real mental illness into an identity, but we've somehow made that the de-facto default.

I think people who claim this are massively exaggerating any possible effect.

It's compelling, but the international nature of the phenomenon makes me think it'd be incomplete as an explanation. Surely the stigma isn't equal everywhere

I suppose it depends on where you are. My work sent me from the US to the UK for six months in 2016. The difference in mental health stigma between these two first world nations was staggering. From what I've heard, it's even worse for eastern Europe.

There's no way that would account for such a steep rise in such a short amount of time.

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