When asked for an opinion on why so many young people suffer from depression:
> the political turmoil that we’ve been through, the racial issues that we’ve been through in this country, the global wars that are going on. It’s pretty discouraging.
That doesn't really make sense, does it? These issues have been going on for centuries; how does that explain a rising trend?
I'd rather assume that the lack of a framework to understand the harshness of the world is what makes people go crazy.
I find Jonathan Haidt more useful and more concise for the recent decline of mental health in youth. In a nutshell he provides evidence that interaction with social media feeds (TikTok, Insta, FB, you name them) is at the heart of it because they by construction hinge on how the brain reacts to content and they play this to maximize online time and advertisement revenue, not mental health or societal well being or any of the things we might hope for.
IMO, I think blaming social media is an easy-out to explain things. The reality is that we live in a brainwashed no-trust society full of greedy monopolistic corporations and an utterly dysfunctional government who has zero desire to address actual issues combined with extreme wealth inequality...really makes things pretty bleak and hopeless.
oh social media are just the _means_ by which a most profitable atmosphere is created.
it's a bit akin to Santa Clause and Christmas shopping. shopping areas flood synapses with visual auditive and olfactory impressions because that lowers internal barriers to spending. the whole purpose of the western style pre Christmas frenzy is more sales.
if it was for inner transformation spiritual something, Christmas would look like pre Santa Clause (a guy in a highly carnevalistic red suit but I digress). pre coca cola Santa Clause, Christmas was a time of fasting, one candle, then two, then three, then four, and the family sitting together and _creating_ gifts for each other.
in the very same vein, social media are the pipe dream of 24/7 advertisement flooding. to increase sales. and fun it works for influencing elections, too!
even if social media (not: social networks!) were innocent, those placing targeted content for political or financial profit or both are not. and social media is the means they use.
We always have been. The difference is that we’re getting a constant firehose of refuse spewed at us 24x7.
As we lowered the cost of publishing, we created a vicious cycle. Segmented audiences mean more targeting is required. More targeting requires appeals to more and more specific, and weird segments, fueled by YouTube and podcasts.
Look at the growth of conspiracy theories. That stuff was the province of truckers and other listeners of overnight AM radio. Now, people have a heartfelt belief in flat earth and chemtrails.
I think that there are a lot of things to be elated or miserable for in the modern world, but widespread social media disproportionately amplifies negativity.
It was a lot easier to compartmentalize things in the past. Wife was wife, kids kids, work work, friends friends, and in the Sunday Times was a war or whatever, you could be pissed off all Sunday afternoon, but provided the nightly 30 minutes news was focused on other things during the week, generally didn't get as triggered. News and discourse came slower, was easier to process, gave time to cool down etc. Healthy or not, I don't know, but that's how it felt in the 80s and 90s, maybe a little easier to manage? Folks these days, especially young folks, seem quite overwhelmed, and it's hard to manage anything well when one is in an overwhelmed state. I think though, it's probably a combination of a lot of things, as highlighted by the comments in this thread.
I believe it's more awareness of these issues, and engagement-driven algorithms presenting them over and over (because they're engaging).
The world has always been filled with negativity, but for most of history, most people only really knew what was around them. Now people are online more than ever before, which means they are exposed to more non-local content than ever before. People seek out engaging content, and negativity, especially fear, turns out to be particularly attention-grabbing due to human instinct formed through natural selection.
You can blame currently social media (Facebook, Tiktok, etc.) on this. But I believe even if it were replaced by the Fediverse and IRC, the current generation would still form a more negative outlook than previous ones. It's human nature to seek out negative content, so an algorithm would need to hide this content to prevent people from finding it.
Personally I still believe it's a good thing overall that people know about bad things in the world. I think it's better than the alternative, where most people are blissful and ignorant, and other people suffer with no-one to save or support them. Some negativity is important: just enough to motivate the feeler to do something and make a positive impact on the world.
I agree that part of a solution is "a framework to understand the harshness of the world". The world has a lot of bad but it also has a lot of good, and the massive amount of exposure is only an issue because negativity affects people and grabs their attention more than positivity. It would help people to understand this, so when they catch themselves hyper-focusing on something negative, they can take a step back and realize that e.g. it only affects a small percentage of the population.
I think a big part of this is changing social values. It takes a certain amount of callousness and abstraction to not obsesses over distant problems, and western society has deemed these characteristics shameful. Instead unbounded compassion carries more social currency and esteem.
Maintaining mental health requires the ability to balance these skills and perspectives.
Which distant problems? How many? It would be endless.
Maybe at college level there is a bit of 'If you aren't vocal about issue x, you're an uncaring person'? I don't see it amongst peers at 40-50yo that you would be considered callous to not obsess over a given issue. (I'm accounting for some level of exaggeration with "obsess" and assume it would mean making public comments, donating, protesting, etc?)
>Which distant problems? How many? It would be endless.
That's kinda the point, they are endless. I have some peers that are continually in a state of distress, concern, and preoccupation. If you are inclined to fixate on these things, you wont ever run out of topics. I have serveral friends in their 30's who will be at a beautiful summer BBQ with friends and be unhappily fixated on negative news of police violence, foreign wars, or other things happening thousands of miles away. Im not saying paying attention to these things is bad, but the inability to stop and smell the proverbial roses is.
In my opinion, the phenomenon is more pronounced with younger generations, and also mellows somewhat with age. I think cranking out a kid or two certainly helps draw ones attention to the "here and now".
> I'd rather assume that the lack of a framework to understand the harshness of the world is what makes people go crazy.
I think this is exactly it. And I personally think this and the general decline in mental resilience we see in society is strongly correlated with decline in religion which (for better or for worse, depending on the religion I suppose) does provide exactly such a framework for dealing with the challenges of life with a more "eternal" perspective (i.e. death is not the end, life's challenges are temporary, God has a plan for you, etc).
I think learned helplessness is the best model of depression we have. In other words, depression may simply be a natural response to repeated bouts of futility. Many animals show similar depressive like symptoms in experiments designed to cause it.
So maybe it's becoming harder for the young to avoid something they don't want, or obtain something they want, and this is the fundamental reason behind rising rates of depression.
I think it could also be related to diagnosing these issues. Nobody knew about depression in the 17th century, so nobody was diagnosed with it. As time goes on, more and more people in different parts of the world have access to the facilities required for getting diagnosed with a mental illness.
They knew about depression in the 17th century but called it by different names such as "melancholia". And they thought it was caused by an imbalance in the humours rather than something in the brain.
Yup, young people just need to be handed a framework. It would go something like this: you are poorer than your parents and your grandparents, but look - Jeff Bezos made a rocket that can take rich people almost (but not quite) into space! Young people also need to be told there is no recession and the economy is booming. The fact that they are seeing none of this boom is their fault. Oh, and all the foreign wars that we are paying for instead are for a righteous cause.
> you are poorer than your parents and your grandparents
Maybe only in the major rich developed western countries whose economies peaked in the post-WW2 boom, and then switched to profiting by fleecing their young in order to enrich the existing wealth holders (usually through horrible housing policies), but in most of the former undeveloped and underdeveloped parts of the world, average young people are now richer than their parents or grandparents ever could have dreamed of.
Back in my home country a few decades ago, you would have to wait 10 years to be eligible to buy a commie crapbox car and vacationing would mean 1-2 times/year in some local village a few km away from home, and that's if you were lucky. Now some any young people can buy a car after saving a few months of wages and can afford to go on city breaks abroad in Lisbon, Barcelona or even Asia, something unthinkable to their parents.
I think a lot of westerner from rich countries have forgotten what true depression inducing poverty and suffering actually feels like since 2-3 generations ago, hence why they can afford this luxury of being depressed over petty things and forget how good they actually have it: that happiness comes from having friends, family unit, health, safety, life experiences, and not from having bigger McMansions than your predecessors.
Good things to remember. Forget McMansions though – a primary reason that many in the US feel poorer than their parents or grandparents is that, even with two incomes, they cannot afford to buy any house at all (even a townhouse or modest "starter" home) within 100 miles of their place of employment.
This is social media bias. Homeownership rates in the US are fine except in a few coastal areas, but those areas are where all the influencers and journalists live.
Also, the US is extremely not in a recession and currently has the strongest economic performance in decades or ever. (Yes, for young people. And for poorer people most of all.) It was of course in a recession in 2008 and in 2020.
But, /other English speaking countries are in recessions/, and their housing crises are worse than ours. Part of what's happening is that you're picking those posts up because they're in English and not realizing they're in London.
> Of course it's not just housing that has become more expensive – health care and higher education costs have also outpaced inflation for decades.
This one's partly natural for Baumol reasons - basically, having any highly paid industry near you raises the price for any service. But it's also partly the US has many bad ideas intended to create explicit limits on supply in healthcare, like limited residency seats and certificates of need for hospitals.
I live in a somewhat rural area, and while I haven't gotten the house appraised recently, I talked to someone not too long ago and he said houses(really the land) are going for roughly 10x what I got it for (in 2001). I couldn't afford it if I wanted, now. But sure, home ownership is just fine, that's why I'm the only homeowner* in my peer group. (*technically in a trust, for me)
The reason homeownership is fine is that there was a burst of home purchases in 2021 right before interest rates went up, and the US has fixed rate mortgages. We know it's fine though because of national statistics, eg:
Sounds like you own it though. So you could afford an equally priced piece of land if you sell that one. Most people's houses are the largest component of their net worth, so it of course looks bad if you leave it out of the calculation.
(This is why blocking housing construction is bad for the elderly though - it makes it hard to downsize so you can't use your housing net worth towards retirement as easily.)
Other approaches which many people do include having your parents help with the down payment or inheriting.
And of course land value tax would solve this. So would upzoning, which would allow 10x more productive use of the land.
While I do appreciate the injection of statistics in this (really), it doesn't change the fact of my house being inheritance and approximately 0 of my local friends owning their own homes despite being of the age where they should at least have a mortgage. Maybe things are going well overall, and I'm glad. But I don't see it.
It's best to enjoy experiences and having perfect weather is fantastic. I'd live in Colorado if I could, but I'm stuck in Mississippi for reasons. The weather is pretty decent(way too hot in summer, way too many tornados, no snow most years which sucks); worst part of living here is other people but I'm pretty sure that's everywhere.
I think you misunderstand my point that there is no such framework. There used to be religion, tyranny, and some other fulfilling frameworks, but those no longer apply.
I don't know, certainly seems like this is one that's currently on offer: that the benevolent octogenarians (and you even get to pick one of two!) are all-knowing, and if you disagree, or think your experience doesn't match the story in the media - then you are wrong (and also an uneducated boob and should feel bad). This is a kind of religion - the aristocracy knows best.
I don't agree that a missing "framework" is the whole of the problem. It just isn't that simple.
Sure, people need to use resiliency skills to cope with the stresses of life. Often times, this is an important part of what therapy for depressed people is trying to achieve.
But this isn't to say that there isn't a constellation of causes in recent decades and years that cause the world to be particularly stressful, especially for young people. It also isn't to say that we should dismiss what is occurring in the world today as "the same old stuff" without acknowledging that it may actually have unique properties worth understanding. Off the top of my head: world population is at an all-time high, global warming is becoming increasingly understood, it is increasingly acknowledged that we can no longer simply extract unlimited resources from the earth to solve all problems, the Internet has changed the way the world works that seems to speed everything up: communication, changes within social groups, larger societal shifts, economic change, etc.
I must agree that it is not that simple. That would be highly unlikely.
But how does one measure the impact of recent changes, such as the rise of the internet? Did the invention of the crossbow, the invention of money, of language, of the wheel, not also impact our lives in dramatic ways?
World population has almost constantly been at an all-time high, because it is mostly increasing.
It sure may feel different this time, but if you read the Book of Revelation, or consider 14th century pandemics, our current situation looks like child's play to me.
People lack a support system. Before we lived in villages with lots of family and a very tightly woven social fabric. With technology and urbanization everyone is isolated. Covid isolation has exacerbated it. We are still evolving to create a race that can thrive in this new social setting after thousands of years of a different type of society. I prefer the former, my neighbors kids just randomly pop in almost daily, they have fun and it’s like a village and family. But I suspect society is progressing more towards this type of socially isolated type of dynamic, people on screens, to themselves. Easier to control us that way and better for disease transmission.
If people are isolated and don’t have social support and are therefore more emotionally vulnerable and unstable (basically we are put into isolation to a lesser degree than prison inmates) then it is easier for the government to control us.
Not OP. I don't think they actively want it or pursue it as some sort of conscious objective, it's just something that makes a lot of things easier for government. It's essentially gradient descent and the government following the thing that's slightly better for it, with no view of the bigger picture.
The government has laws that it makes you obey. American Values they want you to have. Money of yours that they take. How is it different from control?
Maybe, among other things, more widespread and easily ingested news has something to do with it. Centuries ago, foreign news was what happened two villages over, and you only knew about that because of some wanderer that came and told you, because you couldn't read and there were no newspapers to read anyway. And it your world was limited to a radius of a few tens of kilometres, then most of the time, in that world, everything wasn't going to hell in a handbasket.
Now, it's easier to find that there's lots of things happening across the entire world, so it's more likely to feel that 'everything's turning to shit.'
>That doesn't really make sense, does it? These issues have been going on for centuries; how does that explain a rising trend?
The noise of negativity is both exaggerated and amplified while the sights of positivity are both downplayed and silenced by media, both mainstream/commercial and social media.
There's a reason terms like "doomscrolling" came to be. Reducing exposure to the media can go a long way to improving mental health if someone is overexposed.
I don’t know if this is even required… from kahneman & tversky (iirc) basically negativity is more ‘visible’ in relationships so that for every negative comment, it requires anywhere from 5 to 20 positive comments to balance it.
So if we assume that negative and positive is amplified equally, and there are even amounts of each, the end result will be pretty negative.
And while this was probably always true, the volume was probably low enough that the connection to your family and tribe were more dominant. Now, the volume from the internet might be more dominant.
>if we assume that negative and positive is amplified equally
This is a false assumption, at least with regards to mainstream/commercial media. Positive news simply doesn't grab as many eyeballs as negative news, so they are strongly incentivized to bias towards negativity.
As for social media, while the platforms themselves don't have as strong of incentives (they still do) it's easy to see that more people respond to negativity than positivity.
We even see this outside of the media. For example in elections, it is far more effective to go and ruthlessly attack your opponents than be positive about yourself because people respond better to negativity. Also reviews; nobody writes positive reviews, everyone writes negative reviews.
The moral is humans are hardwired to ignore positivity, because positive things are supposed to happen and thus not worth caring about. Nobody cares that thousands of airliners flew safely on a given day (positive), everyone cares that one airliner out of thousands happened to have an issue (negative).
My thoughts as well. If we are settling into our armchairs, I think a big part of it is cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile the risky and imperfect world with the impossible idealism they were raised to believe in.
Also they are confronted with having less and less agency and control as information shrinks and standardizes the world.
I think being raised in impossible idealism is maybe an understated part of this, for sure. My main impression from adults as a kid in the 90s was that the world’s problems were solved. 9/11 was a very rude awakening.
But some of the ones most relevant to this conversation - SSRI antidepressants - have had wrong theories about how they work that to this day many healthcare professionals still believe.
Why does it make no sense? A lot of the social and mental frameworks that were available for previous generations have disappeared or are on the way out. Why would this not have an effect?
One datpoint; I visited Nepal in 2016 and was overwhelmed by the general baseline happiness of everyone there. Everyone smiled. Then contrast returning to the West was stark. I went back in 2023 and while it's not gone it's waned. The only other major difference I noticed when I went back is even in the more remote villages everyone has a phone.
Because they are objectively quite a bit worse off than older generations? Education costs, housing costs, job stress, increased competition for a 'middle class life'...
> That doesn't really make sense, does it? These issues have been going on for centuries; how does that explain a rising trend?
I think basically this is just a visibility issue: the problems always existed, we just used to accept them as inevitable. We just demand more of life today, and actually pay attention, and that's a good thing.
There was a notion in the past that suffering was normal, and unusual behavior that very distressed people exhibit was just people being people. Like if you survived hunger in the great depression and a few decades later during boom times you still hid money in the seat cushion and wore rags and and went into fits when someone suggested you ought to spend the money you saved a bit more for your own good, no one thought that that was a form of suffering a doctor should help with. Not for poor people anyway. Or if you had been assaulted a woman who was assaulted by their husband and couldn't tell anyone about it, or if you were harmed by the clergy, or if you're a veteran who has a breakdown every time a loud noise happens, and all these other scenarios. Any unusual response to all that wasn't seen as a medical problem to be named and treated at a mass scale, I personally think because learning more about these things medically and making societal adjustments to prevent these things from happening required that society face some extremely uncomfortable truths, which did not happen easily or on its own.
And in fact I feel like the opposite even happened: I read, for example, about how shell shock was purposely not considered a real medical issue in WWI in the UK, to be able to return soldiers to the front as fast as possible even though more than a quarter of soldiers in the hospital were considered shell shocked. Eventually, the diagnosis was banned by the brits. Official shell shock rate at 0%. If you don't look, there's no problem, right?
So instead it was said that there's nothing wrong with you, you just need some rest. And if you had a really severe case and were not better, you were just weak or a coward, and you need to man up and get back out there. Then you get a court martial or electric shocks. It's no wonder that people pretended that they had nothing wrong with them - nothing good happened otherwise anyway. And so no wonder it took so long for society at large to accept this as a problem.
So now we finally have a more accurate pulse on these types of problems, and we see that unsurprisingly they rise as people have problems in their lives. Makes perfect sense to me.
> I'd rather assume that the lack of a framework to understand the harshness of the world is what makes people go crazy.
The framework is realism: it is very much that people do understand that the world is harsh and that hurts you, but then you now get to recognize that it hurt you and do something about it maybe.
To me is that there are so few problems now days, people reach adulthood without having to deal with any challenges. Yes some people get some traumatic event like always but most people this isn't an issue, its a life of too much stuff and too many options.
yeh its a nonsense reply to take the attention of the food industry and big corp using sugar, chemicals to create processed foods, pesticides, mass intensive farming etc and instead blame it on someone else
> the political turmoil that we’ve been through, the racial issues that we’ve been through in this country, the global wars that are going on. It’s pretty discouraging.
That doesn't really make sense, does it? These issues have been going on for centuries; how does that explain a rising trend?
I'd rather assume that the lack of a framework to understand the harshness of the world is what makes people go crazy.