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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Theory: A large proportion of adult mental illness is caused by an environment mismatch between adulthood and childhood. Fairy tales with disturbing themes were a good way to safely introduce the real world to children. Insulating children from reality leads to them learning the wrong things about the world both on a conscious intellectual level and a very low level as in cortisol response to stress. You grow up and then have to live in a world that is completely alien compared to your childhood and your brain just doesn't work right because it wasn't trained to handle things while it was malleable enough to learn them.

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If that were the case, you would expect the consequents of mental illness (most obviously suicide, but also violent crime) to have increased since 1900, around the time that sanitized fairy tales were popularized; and: they have not.

I doubt that fairy tails in particular could be isolated from the whole culture of insulating children, and it was never, as far as I can tell, a sudden change. You can watch kids movies from the 80s and see a significant difference in the things which children were being exposed to compared to new releases. The change is gradual and has been ongoing for a long time.

What changes are you referring to, since the 1980s? We can pick some of them, call them the next intervention you want to propose as responsible for increases in adverse events, and then look if the epidemiological data lines up with it. I bet, though: the data won't work out for you.

On the other hand, kids these days can pretty easily get access to stories which were extremely hard to find way back when.

> they have not.

That's a bold claim. Especially given your starting year, where religious attitudes predominated, and suicide was considered a mortal sin. It seems that quite possibly suicides might have increased since 1900, if only because it has become an organic disease instead of an express ticket to an eternity of torment. Do you have any numbers to back this up?

For that matter, we've also noticed from time to time that there are upswings and downswings in suicide (usually explained by economics), and cultural differences. There's plenty of room for for differences in suicide rates over that time period, and it wouldn't really surprised anyone.

They have and a lot.

Source your data.

For example, the lowest suicide rate in the US in over a century (and ever, as long as records were kept) happened in 2000.

https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-us-suicide-rates-since-19...

And today the rate is higher than in 1900 and raising. Sounds like whatever we did in the 1950-1980 worked extremely well and what we've been doing since hasn't.

That is, obviously, not a graph of suicide trending upwards as a result of an intervention that occurred at roughly 1900.

And it is also not a chicken. What does that have to do with suicides increasing in the last 25 years after falling for 50.

I don't know, but it sure won't have anything to do with sanitizing fairy tales, which is what we're talking about here.

You should probably read the reply above mine.

Let me quote it for you in case tree based navigation is too difficult:

>For example, the lowest suicide rate in the US in over a century (and ever, as long as records were kept) happened in 2000.

If you'd like more context, which I understand can be difficult to remember after reading two 20 word posts, I'd be happy to provide it.

Your snark is unnecessary, unjustified, and frankly probably breaking this site rules. The original claim was:

>would expect the consequents of mental illness (most obviously suicide, but also violent crime) to have increased since 1900, around the time that sanitized fairy tales were popularized

i.e. "if fairy tales are the cause of suicide, it should increase consistently since 1900". This is clearly not the case, as proven by your own data. "Things we were doing in 1950-1980 worked and things we did later don't" is a very different discussion and not the one you were having. It seems to me that it is you who misunderstood the argument and are aggressive to your opponent for absolutely no reason.

> you would expect the consequents of mental illness (most obviously suicide, but also violent crime) to have increased since 1900

As long as literally everything else remained the same, or in changing, had zero implications on the mental health of the population.

Seems like a better objection to your GP's post? Or do the covariate "kids these days are coddled" vibes it's based on cancel each other out.

More importantly, you would expect not to see high rates of childhood mental illness.

Seems to me like the blame is with the schools and parents - bringing kids up as helpless victims (can't fight back and the schools don't do much to the bullies), the over use of screens, and surveillance culture never letting them start over (stuff follows you forever now).

My wife was for a time on the board of a local hospital.

I recall her recounting a report from the head of the mental health unit saying that there was an increasing number of upper-middle-class young women with "princess syndrome" in the unit: they have been brought up to believe life is a Disney fairy tale, and cannot cope when they get out into the world. So they end up in the mental health unit.

This is maybe ten years back?

The Disney Corporation has a lot to answer for.

"Princess Syndrome" is not a medical diagnosis, and I encourage people to go look up the origins of the term.

No, of course it isn't. Her retelling wasn't verbatim, it was heavily edited for confidentiality, nor is my recollection 100%. It's the gist.

I don't think that's a sound prediction. There are lots of kinds of mental illness, and at least in my view the ones in question are mostly depression, anxiety and the like. Not exactly famous for producing violent outbursts, and a lot of people get treated, which cuts down on suicide. Besides, I don't know if I would trust historical stats for suicide, but whatever.

Also the GP comment was arguably more about sanitized childhood in general, which is a more gradual trend than starting at the 1900s exactly.

The reason you look at suicide and violent crime is that they're clear indicators. Diagnosis of mental illness is not: definitions, diagnostic techniques, and access to diagnoses have changed radically over the last 100 years. It's similar (though less rigorous, for several reasons) to homicide being the gold standard crime statistic.

I'm not making a claim that mental health doesn't matter if it doesn't result in suicide or incarceration. I'm saying: those are two sets of numbers you can find going back to the intervention (the sanitization of fairy tales) and trace since then.

The story those numbers tells doesn't match the just-so story the comment provides. Maybe there's more going on than those numbers represents! But I think you'll have a tough time supporting that argument with facts. For instance: the claim was made across the thread that suicide levels were artificially suppressed in 1900 because of religious norms, which works against the story; moreover: you can see in the actual charts what suicide tracks with (it's not a smooth line).

> I'm not making a claim that mental health doesn't matter if it doesn't result in suicide or incarceration. I'm saying: those are two sets of numbers you can find going back to the intervention (the sanitization of fairy tales) and trace since then.

That's like the drunk searching for his keys under the streetlamp because that's where the light is! Yes, those are the numbers we have, but do they reliably measure the things we care about?

(Are you denying that the millennial mental health crisis exists at all? The fact that it doesn't show up in your preferred statistics is completely independent of any discussion of what the causes may be)

If you want to make the concession that there's no evidence in either direction for the hypothesis that roots this thread, I'm fine with that.

That's already backing off from your last post. Are you claiming that your statistics mean there is no significant downturn in mental health, or not?

No, that doesn't hold. I'm not addressing that at all. For the previous commenter to be correct, the trend should start with the intervention, which occurred in/around 1900.

I've already hinted at why that's not a very strong prediction either. Sanitizing fairy tales are only one part of a broader trend toward sheltering children in general, which, to my knowledge at least, did not start at exactly the same time. The changes in mental health would track with the intensity of the broader trend, with a time lag of around 20 years. Yes, these are both very difficult to measure. Truth is hard.

I think you're wrong.

Suicide does not have stable reporting rates. It was very stigmatized in the past, and so investigators would notoriously report suicides as "unknown cause of death" if they could.

Violent crime, on the other hand, is much more correlated with things like poverty than with mental health.

I think it's quite obviously the case that there are no clear indicators about what "mental health" looked like 100 years ago and there. Any projections into the past will involve a lot of extrapolation and have all sorts of biases.

But if the clear indicators are only tenuously linked to the question you're interested in, then you may just have to accept that you can't answer the question, neither proving it nor resoundingly falsifying it as you attempted.

Since 1900 we have invented painless dentistry.

As someone who got to experience a minor filling done without anesthetic when I was 9 I'd say that alone improved mental health by an order of magnitude.

I had a full-blown pulpotomy (baby tooth root canal) done with no novocaine injection. I was terrified of the needle.

I'm prone to bouts of depression but that's probably got more to do with reading too much news and chronically overextending myself.

So in this theory, people with rough childhoods have less mental illness and those with pleasant childhoods have greater mental illness?

...these are extremes and i bet someone with a "rough childhood" will have greater mental illness chances because...material conditions but it depends how you define it.

But i think not begin totally sheltered from every evil of the world will probably lead to a more well adjusted adult

if by rough childhood you mean being safely exposed to rough concepts under the supervision of caring and mentally stable parents, and by pleasant you mean anything else, then i think you got it

No, trauma is harmful. The whole idea here is to reduce the risk of trauma, not cause trauma.

Think of it like this: Growing up in an excessively sanitized environment leaves children's immune systems weak and makes them susceptible to serious diseases later.

The solution: Give children inoculations, let them play outside, etc., to exercise their immune systems in safe conditions.

Not the solution: Give children serious diseases.

This, this and this. And just like how kids who spend too much time in sanitized indoor environments are more likely to develop allergies and other autoimmune disorders, kids who are kept psychologically sheltered to too large a degree are more likely to develop anxiety disorders as adults.

When "getting everything perfect" is normal to you and not a refreshing exception, you feel like you're a screwup most of the time even when you haven't done anything wrong besides being too hard on yourself.

> Not the solution: Give children serious diseases.

Actually giving serious diseases (well, infestations) is being investigated as a solution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy

I would consider this an example of a safe exposure to allow the immune system to exercise, rather than a serious disease, unless the plan is to literally to make children grow up sickly and malnourished.

Children who grow up with serious diseases (i.e., diseases that cause them serious health problems) are weakened for the rest of their lives, which leaves them more vulnerable to illness later.

That is not the goal of this therapy. They will keep the parasite population in check (e.g., by using parasites that cannot reproduce on their own) to ensure that the patient's health is improved by the treatment, not worsened by it.

You’re exaggerating, there are degrees between “being exposed to disturbing concepts” (which does not imply abuse) and “rough childhood” (which does, or at least mistreatment).

You could frame it the other way: “are people with sheltered childhood more likely to suffer mental illness”? And my experience would suggest that the answer is “yes”.

The most common cause of death during the American Civil War was disease. Not bullets, not bayonet wounds, not cannon fire.

Disease.

Imagine being the guy who discovered that washing your hands and tools meant less maternal mortality immediately after childbirth and being shunned because people had real understanding of infections or microbiology.

When you think about those fairy tales, you cannot do it properly without thinking about the context in which they were written. Children were face to face with mortality every day. Polio, measles, typhoid, cholera, dysentery, diarrhea, plagues, minor wounds that got infected, etc.

Kids today live in a world where if you make it to adulthood, you have a very strong likelihood that you will survive until you are no longer able to be productive.

Your mental illness "theory" makes absolutely zero sense, because virtually all mental illnesses outside of degenerative conditions present themselves during childhood. I've had ADHD since I was a child. I didn't get diagnosed until well into adulthood, because my family never sought treatment. I didn't get this "mental illness" because of a lack of proper fairy tales. I was born with it.

I would have expected most mental illness to be the result of a chemical imbalance and/or trauma (either physical or psychological). Also, this presupposes that by the time you are old enough to experience the world your brain isn't "malleable enough" to handle it which seems unlikely unless you're really sheltered from the vast majority of the world until your late 20s.

OP is describing a form of psychological trauma.

>chemical imbalance

One, this is a mostly unsupported phrase used by therapists which may be comforting to patients but isn't actually backed by neuroscience. The best that can be said is that drugs which affect the brain help some people with diagnosed mental illness. The chemical mechanisms for most mental illnesses are not known or barely hinted at.

>Also, this presupposes that by the time you are old enough to experience the world your brain isn't "malleable enough" to handle it which seems unlikely unless you're really sheltered from the vast majority of the world until your late 20s.

This seems to be parroting the "your brain doesn't finish developing until 25 (or whatever)" which has gone around quite a distance as a meme but has no scientific basis.

There are many development windows for many different things, some known better than others. A 20 year old does not have the same language acquisition skills as a 3 year old. My eyes work a little funny because I was myopic at birth and some control systems didn't develop between birth and 6 months and that window is just permanently closed. Most things remain at least a little malleable and some much more than others but this does not mean that there aren't developmental periods at a young age which aren't very important. Two, many chemical feedback systems are trained in early life. The "chemical imbalance" could be exactly this, childhood experiences not matching adult ones and as a result brain chemistry responds poorly to adult stimuli.

> The best that can be said is that drugs which affect the brain help some people with diagnosed mental illness

emphasis on "some": https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/01/10/antidepr...

For most children of history I dont believe this was a real problem, my father for instance was a farm hand herding goats and picking olives at 5 years old - there was no time for an idyllic childhood.

"Childhood" is a fairly modern invention.

>herding goats and picking olives at 5 years old - there was no time for an idyllic childhood

I bet you could charge wealthy people $50,000 tuition to have their 5 year olds herd goats and pick olives if you had a good marketing team. You could lean heavily on calling it an idyllic childhood experience, make sure to overuse the word "rustic".

"farmhouse chic"

Alternately, it's parents who confuse comfort and security with love and do their best to shield the children from consequences of the children's actions.

Maybe those parents are also victims of fairytale indoctrination

A lot of fairy tales are just there to scare children into obedience. Probably most of them.

It's not really obedience, they convey that fire burns without the need to have it proven by trial.

Stereotypes keep children alive until higher cognition kicks in and that learn consequences

Now I do agree some of the stereotypes are antiquated, biased, and need a 21st century refresh, but there's more there than obedience.

It's not teaching "fire burns", it's teaching "whatever authority tells you - you should do, even if you really want to investigate for yourself, because you'll die".

Which I call obedience. And yeah - it's useful for parents because when your kid runs towards a busy street you don't have time to explain the reasoning and persuade it to go back. You need it to listen to you immediately. So it has some value. But let's not sugercoat it in psychological theories. It's simply obedience.

Nah, pollution did far more against mental health. And drugs.

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