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Comment by matteoraso | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually writin an article about youth mental health for my substack. I'll post it on HN when it's done, but the tl;dr is that the evidence for the youth mental health crisis is very thin at best. Despite what this article says, the youth suicide rate in Canada is near its all-time low. Self-reported youth distress is up, but our only 2 datapoints are 2012 and 2022 (middle of the pandemic). Every group has also reported worsening mental health, and the adult suicide rate is (and always has been) much worse than the youth suicide rate. I don't think mental health isn't a serious concern, but I don't buy the idea that young people specifically have some major crisis while everybody else is doing fine.

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I also quickly thought of bias when I read this, and that concern was reinforced by the bit about substance abuse rates in male-predominant fields of work. I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that has been the case for a very long time.

Another way to interpret the data might be, "When interviewed by researchers, men talked more openly about their feelings than they did a decade ago."

I find this hard to believe without seeing the data. I finished high school when the first iPhone was released. It was absolutely awful for me and many folks I grew up with.

I cannot imagine how much more difficult it would have been with social media and cameras everywhere like it is today.

> I don't buy the idea that young people specifically have some major crisis while everybody else is doing fine

You can't imagine the stress and anxiety that is fabricated by immature minds from being on the internet all of the time?

> I don't think mental health isn't a serious concern

Double negative makes this hard to read

It may be easier to read that line as "I'm not saying mental health is totally fine"

"I think mental health is a serious concern."

That's the clearest version. Just drop the negatives.

The double negative adds to the tone, it's a pretty common construction.

Clarity is the ultimate priority in technical writing, but for everything else it needs to be balanced against expression, and it's a little impolite to unsolicited stylistic critique based on your personal experience reading an off-the-cuff comment in an informal environment.

Spot the non-programmer in the room :) The two negatives apply to different things. One is how they feel about the mental health situation and the other is the mental health situation so it reads just fine. Of course it could be reworded but was it really that hard to parse?

Sure, it parses, the same way !isNotEnabled compiles. Doesn't mean I'd want to read it in a PR. You should read the book 'Clean Code' by Uncle Bob if you haven't already.

The sentence may be valid but it has poor readability. That was my point.

It's !believes(!isSerious(mentalHealth)) which is both poor code and writing.

'I think mental health is a serious concern' would be preferred.

Both are true. It's a less than desirable structure, but it's not going to lose somebody used to writing code. You simplify the expression when you find something like this, but to simplify it you had to understand it first.

Programmer in the room, meet bikeshedding senior UI/UX designer in the room

I guess code quality/readability doesn't matter to some developers. To each their own. Since OP is promoting their substack Id assume they would avoid turning off readers with their poor sentence structure.

I appreciate your critical analysis of the topic, even if you turn out to be incorrect in the end! I'll definitely read your article when it's posted, if I can remember (or if perhaps I can subscribe?)

My substack is called The Canadian Observer. I would greatly appreciate it if you subscribed.

subscribed! I found it a bit hard to find the site, if anyone else is interested it's here: https://matteoraso.substack.com/

I'm reading your new article, and just wanted to say it is really good! This kind of analysis is what I _dream_ of getting from coworkers when they're diagnosing a problem.

What's this argument?

It's thin because we don't have enough data to say otherwise and everyone else is doing worse? Go get more data then before negating the signals and the two confirming data points we have. I "don't buy" is not a reason. It could be everyone is doing worse and men are doing worse than most (or impacted the most), those are not mutually exclusive.

It's not just that we don't have a lot of data, it's that the only area about youth mental health that we actually do have a lot o data about is the suicide rate, which is decreasing. It's increasing in America, but it's increasing for everybody, not just young people. There's no clear youth-specific decline in mental health except a vague increase in teens that report feeling that their mental health is poor, but this is plagued by bias. I don't think the problem is that we don't have enough data to say if the youth mental health crisis is real, it's that I think we have enough to say that it isn't.

The article was mainly about young men. I'm no a sociologist, and I don't have data myself, but I find it hard to believe that they this category won't struggle.

Job market being automated, poor economy, expensive houses, and a culture that encourages casual dating, onlyFans, porn etc, I just don't know how young men can't be more depressed than the generations before it.

So I'm not sure why you can't buy it when so many factors would more likely point to the result in the two data points shared and the sentiment of the young men expressed.

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