<story><title>The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere</title><url>https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-illness-part-one</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grammers</author><text>The article has a point, but there&amp;#x27;s no proof for cause &amp;amp; effect.&lt;p&gt;A completely different explanation could be that our societies are so advanced by now that we can finally listen to mental illnesses and take them seriously - while in the past people just had to &amp;#x27;function&amp;#x27;, no matter what.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cornholio</author><text>While I agree there is no statistical proof in the article, it&amp;#x27;s a very strong hypothesis: we somehow only &amp;#x27;listen&amp;#x27; to the mental problems of female teens, who see geometric increases in self harm, suicide and various disorders, twice or three times the pre-social media levels. Yet other categories see linear or token increases.&lt;p&gt;Could it be just a coincidence that young females are exactly the demographic that is constrained by a gender role where aesthetic appeal and social interactions are the most valuable assets? And those are exactly the type of things that social networks exploited, monetized and massively gamified in the last decade?&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s more likely: a rapid change of the cultural norms and roles associated with growing up as a woman or of those related to recognizing and treating mental health issues (all in a single decade!); OR: a purely technical revolution that put interactive screens in the hands of each kid and made the former much more effective in harming their development and leading to the latter?&lt;p&gt;At least for the young female demographic, I think there is a massive burden of proof for anyone claiming the epidemics &lt;i&gt;is not social-media induced&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>
<story><title>The teen mental illness epidemic is international – Part 1: The Anglosphere</title><url>https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-illness-part-one</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grammers</author><text>The article has a point, but there&amp;#x27;s no proof for cause &amp;amp; effect.&lt;p&gt;A completely different explanation could be that our societies are so advanced by now that we can finally listen to mental illnesses and take them seriously - while in the past people just had to &amp;#x27;function&amp;#x27;, no matter what.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paganel</author><text>&amp;gt; A completely different explanation could be that our societies are so advanced by now that we can finally listen to mental illnesses and take them seriously&lt;p&gt;I lived in the Eastern Europe of the 1980s and the 1990s, not the best of times, economically speaking. I used to play football with Rroma children that were walking strange, at least that&amp;#x27;s how it looked to child-me, only later to find out that most probably they had been afflicted by polio in the past. All this to say that things were tough.&lt;p&gt;Even so, as a kid back then I had no acquaintances of my age who were harming themselves or, the worst of all, who were off-ing themselves. We would have known, kids used to know this sort of stuff because we were almost always outside, playing together.&lt;p&gt;Suffice is to say that things are now totally different. I&amp;#x27;ve heard of kids harming themselves at 11-12 years of age and I know of a young lady who took her own life (at 16 or 17). Again, that was unimaginable 30 to 40 years ago.</text></comment>