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