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.
As long as literally everything else remained the same, or in changing, had zero implications on the mental health of the population.
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.
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.
Also the GP comment was arguably more about sanitized childhood in general, which is a more gradual trend than starting at the 1900s exactly.
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).
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)
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.
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'm prone to bouts of depression but that's probably got more to do with reading too much news and chronically overextending myself.
For example, the lowest suicide rate in the US in over a century (and ever, as long as records were kept) happened in 2000.
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.
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.
>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.