Youth suicide attempts soared during pandemic, CDC report says | Hacker News Reader

Youth suicide attempts soared during pandemic, CDC report says

nbcnews.com

355 pointslxm624 comments

This pandemic is very strange mental-wise, all my doctors note that. The US, as far as I understand, has huge lockdowns and that may be the factor, but in my country it's called "an advisory self-isolation" and everyone basically lives their life like before, except wearing masks in public places and mandatory vaccination to visit a mall or a restaurant (also "manageable").

I'm not a social person (age almost 40), and I ought not to feel any consequences of that, cause even a strict lockdown wouldn't change my life too much. And I have a friend who isn't particularly stress-prone (a former warzone guy, 4 kids, a strong mindset).

And guess what, we both experienced numerous acute panic attacks in 2020, without realizing what it was. We both have called an ambulance and thought this is the end of me, only to learn later what panic attack is. And we both never got covid. Doctors say that it is a very common phenomenon to observe. Idk about him, but my mental state I find pretty questionable now, because something induces anxiety in it non-stop from the spring 2020. I don't watch TV, neither read on pandemic situation consciously. Visited therapist for a whole last year.

I can imagine what all that does to regular people, and probably can't imagine what teens may feel about it.

Can anyone share similar observations, or am I just a coincidence?

You're not the only one and more level-headed psychologists have warned about this pretty early last year. People are bombarded with horror news about ever rising case numbers of this 'killer virus' on a daily basis. Read up on mass psychosis and mass psychology in general. There are many documented cases in the past, but this time with the internet and our ever more connected world we seem to have a case gone global. The media plays a major part, just look at how case numbers are reported without putting them in relation to the total number of tests done. It's reported when water is tested positive for sars-cov-2, but then negative aspects of the panic are downplayed by for example reporting the increase in suicide attempts as 22.3% + 39.1% in this article. As we know from surveys the average reader will not understand this adds up to around 70% more suicide attempts since the start of the pandemic, because most people aren't good at math.

I'm certain if people were bombarded with touching individual case reports of people, including children, suffering under the measures and not just under the effects of the virus, public opinion would be different. As it is the reporting is very one sided though with everyone focused on the virus to the point that nothing else matters anymore to many. It's not surprising that this can induce panic, I find it scary myself.

> Read up on mass psychosis and mass psychology in general.

The entire anti-vaxxer movement makes perfect sense if you look at it like a mass psychosis of denial and a trauma response.

Questioning the mainstream media is a bit of a meme these days and unfortunately most people that bring up this point have a bit of an agenda to say the least, but: One thing that’s bothered me about the MSM from the start of the pandemic is the market fueled necessity to keep pumping out “news” when nothing important has happened.

Our desire to keep ourselves more informed has perhaps created this MSM monster that now through overexposure of fear and all other negative emotions that “sell” themselves are responsible for the trauma response that is conspiracy theories, flat out denial and a lack of consideration of expertise, not only for the pandemic but for climate change and much more.

> case numbers are reported without putting them in relation to the total number of tests done.

One other quirk of our society that has become clear is that what you hear in the media is absolutely correlated to which media you consume. In my experience, which is 99% reading news sites online, the testing is absolutely reported. Even emphasized, and made clear that the positivity % is a more telling metric than the number of cases. And that hospital utilization is the true metric we're trying to keep down.

FWIW, 22.3% was the 2019 -> 2020 stat, and 39.1% was the 2020->2021 stat. I'm really not sure what you mean by saying that stats from two separate years add up to 70%. Especially when those number do not.

> It's reported when water is tested positive for sars-cov-2, but then negative aspects of the panic are downplayed by for example reporting the increase in suicide attempts as 22.3% + 39.1% in this article. As we know from surveys the average reader will not understand this adds up to around 70% more suicide attempts since the start of the pandemic, because most people aren't good at math.

I think the article split those numbers out because one was in summer and the other year over year in winter: you can't just sum them because among other reasons there is a seasonality component to suicide I believe.

Strange is an understatement. I can very much relate.

But if I'm being honest, so much has improved for me during the pandemic that I don't know how to feel about it.

I feel very guilty for saying this because people are dying and I've got more privilege than I can handle, but consider the following:

I was already anxious and depressed and wanted to self-isolate. Now everyone is anxious and depressed and forced to self-isolate.

I used to hate interactions with random people, especially delivery drivers. Now nobody wants to interact with anybody.

Being a remote worker was sort of weird. Now I can be remote and competitive.

There's so much more good content because everyone is at home and online. Also bigger gaming playlists.

Being a science news junkie has unlocked some real world value about how to best stay safe.

I learned a lot about how the public gets information and got rid of some "vaccine hesitant" friends and family.

mRNA vaccines are going to treat so many diseases so much faster now. HIV vaccine soon!

It used to be strange to wear a mask anywhere, even though it will keep you from getting sick during flu season, but now it's become normalized.

I'm sure there's a bunch of other things that I've already gotten used to and forgotten about, but mostly it's made avoiding face-to-face contact possible in pretty much every situation, which is really working for me right now.

Sure, I'm dissociating as years drift by with absolutely no social contact or memories, but I was probably going to do that anyway.

For me, this used to be a "mental health issue". Now I'm just responsible!

Of course, I won't be shocked if the virus ends up mutating in a way that wipes out humanity... but so far, with a little bit of luck, it's been a pretty big improvement for me personally.

I hope we somehow bring this to a sane resolution the same as everyone else, but I'm going to capitalize on this guilt-free way to self-isolate for as long as I reasonably can.

Clearly this some sort of bad and unhealthy way to live, but it's kind of comfy. I think English may lack a term for how this feels.

>I think English may lack a term for how this feels [comfy + unhealthy].

Perhaps we need a word. It would be a good one, since the best words combine complex, even opposite concepts. My first thought was "sickly-sweet". I also like the new phrase "doom scrolling", combining the dramatic and the banal, which also kind of applies. Somehow the phrase "doom snuggle" comes to mind (although this sounds more like a situation resulting in an unusable arm). Maybe better is "isolace", a portmanteau describing the solace of isolation.

Agoraphobia describes the anxiety that drives the behavior. English also has the phrase "shut-in" as well as the Japanese loan-word hikikomori, though that describes a person's behavior rather than the feeling behind the behavior.

Do you go outside at all?

I recently been locked up in my apartment due to panic attacks. Only go to gym to walk on treadmill.

> Can anyone share similar observations, or am I just a coincidence?

it has been excruciating for me living alone during 2020. Getting out of bed was a battle nearly every day. The pandemic came just in time when I thought I finally learned how to manage a severe depression that got triggered by a burnout, which was lasting over a decade, and included 2 suicide attempts, drug abuse, and losing most people in my life at that time due to my own behavior.

When the pandemic hit I realized that how I felt all these years has become suddenly a very common way people feel all over the world. Depressed, isolated and on the verge of succumbing to darkness.

What I learned for myself (long before the pandemic) is that I need: a strong routine which includes time-boxing not just work but also play. avoid any chemistry that changes the way I feel naturally (sugar, coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, and especially the self-prescribed weed). after reducing anything artificial mentioned, I started facing my emotions. that means stopping everything when a certain feeling hits me, and analyse that feeling telling myself it will eventually pass, but not taking any other action. e.g. I would not continue anything (including eating or drinking) and remain in my chair until I learned that this feeling has no power over me and that just because I feel it, isn't going to change my routine or send me back into my old rut. treating such dark emotions like a "monster" that can only be killed by staring at it until it leaves me alone, prevented sending me back to the dark place.

Another thing that has hugely contributed to recovery was changing the country. I moved to a new place 3x since 2020 and that has me thinking on my feet (new language, new things to discover, different culture, warm people). I have no time to wallow because I'm flooded with new experiences, and am making new memories every day. Even allowed myself to fall in love twice since the pandemic hit. But I'm not ready to bring in other people into "my new world".

The pandemic shook me awake. I realized there is a danger out there that is at least as scary as the darkness that lives in myself or anything I could do to myself. It made me realize that I need to screw my 5 or 10 year plans and do whatever I want right now or perhaps never will get a chance. It's not that I am in an easier situation than a family with toddlers, because my kids are grown up, my ex wife is god knows where, and so I can just go and do as I please. But the story I tell myself today is very different than 5 or 10 years ago. To paraphrase Don Draper in Mad Men: "If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation." (and this especially applies to the dialogue in my head)

Just wanted to send you a virtual hug! You are amazing!

Can you share which country you liked the best? I'm an expat living in Germany and I would characterize the people and culture here as the opposite of 'warm'. It's really taken its toll on my psyche in the last years...

In 2020 more than twice the amount of people below 50 committed suicide than died from COVID in Spain.

https://www.elmundo.es/ciencia-y-salud/salud/2022/01/07/61bc... (source in Spanish)

I went to the emergency room after working from home for ~6 months when the pandemic hit. I was having severe chest pain, shaking uncontrollably, and feeling very uneasy. I thought something was really wrong, and ended up going to the emergency room, where they told me it was a panic attack, and everything was okay physically.

Like you, it was also the first time I had experienced a panic attack and learned what it felt like.

I thought something was really wrong

Yeah, the fear of death as they call it. I really didn't understand this phrase before, thinking it was something abstract. It's unlike any other feeling I've had, just off the charts. And I'm (was) not particularly the guy who is scared to watch a horror movie alone in the night.

I've experienced exactly the same as you both except all the way back in 2015 and so I'm going to offer some unsolicited advice in case it's helpful. I had never heard of panic attacks before I got one, had never worried once about my mental health etc. and so I also ended up at the emergency room convinced my death was imminent.

Considering my healthy history my doctor and I agreed to try deal with it on a lifestyle level. I did meditation, yoga and revised my diet. I became more healthy but still had the panic attacks. We then stepped this up to therapy which I did for a year but still had the panic attacks. They were totally random and incredibly draining. My life & work were seriously affected and so I eventually followed the doctors advice to consider medication. Saw a psychiatrist and started the most basic SSRI at the minimum dose for panic disorder. I had a few attacks during the first two weeks and then they just stopped entirely. 100% completely. Haven't had one since.

So - my advice. If you are seriously struggling with panic attacks on a continuing basis despite a reasonable level of lifestyle interventions please don't do what I did and basically resist trying psychiatric medicine because you're healthy, successful and happy in your life and can't see a "legit" reason to be on meds. It felt like a much bigger intervention to me than it really is. I know for some people dealing with this sort of thing isn't this easy but for a lot it seems it can be.

(Also I don't blame my doctors at all, I always felt well informed about the options available to me. Obviously in retrospect with the way my life was affected meant I should have seen a reason to try meds sooner. At least the year of therapy was good for me even though it didn't stop the panic disorder!)

Yep. The fear is real. I used to be close to someone who had regular panic attacks, and now after my own experience I feel awful about not taking them more seriously.

>> The US, as far as I understand, has huge lockdowns and that may be the factor

The US never really locked down after maybe the first two or three week period. The “lockdowns” we had were mostly performative and not really enforced. This is in huge contrast to some cities in Australia for example, where lockdowns were both prolonged (lasting months) and those violating them were smacked down consistently.

And every Australian I know was happy about it too. Australia is very similar to the US, but one difference is that they're less oppositional. Helps that it actually seemed to work though I'm surprised there hasn't been more objection to the lack of tourism.

Of course, it's ineffective against omicron which is just too infectious to be stopped, and they aren't doing it now.

> And every Australian I know was happy about it too

Hmm... that's certainly not universal. I have a couple of Australian's I met travelling on instagram, and they are posting the most extreme anti-lockdown media I've seen (comparing it to nazi germany, etc). Not sure how common that sentiment is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's quite widespread. 18 months is a long time to be locked down for.

Australia has successfully navigated to my no-go list by their insanity. The lack of habeous corpus is very alarming as a tourist. The lack of rule of law it terribly frightening when that is all you can rely on if shit goes sideways on a trip.

Australia has shown they are the same level as the Middle East, e.g. Iran and Afghanistan.

I was in Melbourne for all but the first lockdown, and we were about as "happy" as a patient going in for knee reconstruction. I know that's not what you meant, but the lockdowns really sucked, even if they were the least bad choice and even if most of us agreed with them.

There have been multiple massive protests about that in Australia throughout last year.

> The US never really locked down after maybe the first two or three week period.

Absolute bullshit. Everything in NYC was closed for three months; bars, restaurants, and schools were closed for much longer than that.

I had a series of severe panic attacks in beginning of December 2021. Ended up in emergency.

To be clear, i have chronic anxiety which got worse due to me moving to another country where i don't have any relatives. On top of that i was very overworked.

It's been a month since then and i still can't recover. It's very hard for me to go outside. If i go to unfamiliar places or there's too much people i start feeling like panic attack is building up. And on work, i can't concentrate, and have mild panic attacks during meetings(if i have to speak). Took a few weeks vacation which is ending in few days. And i feel like i'm still not ready to start working...

Yes, I felt the same, but I was able to “escape”

Mentally, VR has helped us a lot during the pandemic. Yes, it’s far from perfect and it’s not entirely the same as being physically there; but it is just awesome being able to hang out with family and friends in VR and have a sense of space. We workout together; or play racquetball, bowling, darts, ping pong, board games, or fish to name a few activities. These are people who are hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Some aren’t even in the same continent. Way better than a phone call or FaceTime / Zoom. Without it, my anxiety would seemingly get out of hand at times. I don’t live alone, but I also get somewhat isolated without it.

Outside of the pandemic, I can see parents using this as a convenient way to “hangout” and catch up with friends.

It’s too bad Facebook destroyed their reputation, or a lot more people would be trying it out and enjoying it at their $299 price point, especially the past two years. While PCVR is an option, it’s too expensive for normal people (starting around $2400 for everything) and setup is not easy for the non-technical.

It might just be different for different people. Like, my lifestyle and mental health got better and people like me can offset people like you (and I do have relative that had issues too).

I'm also curious about non-pandemic factors, such as social media.

Instagram grows in usage during the pandemic. And there's also TikTok. Both of these can highlight how much fun others are having while you're "stuck".

Yeah, the pandemic amplified the already huge problems with teens and social media.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2021/10/05/heres-ho...

The US doesn't have huge lockdowns.

Yeah - came here to say this.

> .../ everyone basically lives their life like before, except wearing masks in public places and mandatory vaccination to visit a mall or a restaurant (also "manageble").

Most places I go in public (mainly grocery/retail stores) it's around 40% of the people I see do not wear masks, even when signs are clearly posted. I'm out in public far less than I was 2 years ago, so perhaps I'm statistically unlucky in seeing particularly 'bad' times, but probably not.

Interestingly, the Apple store in town was the only place I've ever seen where it was 100% mask usage, and they had some folks at the front that calmly but firmly prevented entrance without a mask. I saw that twice over a 3 month period, but... perhaps they've reverted now?

I’ve entered Apple stores with mask but then removed it and no one said anything.

The US is not a single place

Completely depends where you live. We absolutely did in New York for a very long time.

"Has" is the present tense. Nowhere in the US currently has "huge lockdowns". Also I wouldn't describe the New York full lockdown as lasting a very long time. The most severe lockdown in New York lasted just a few months and was much shorter than lockdowns in many regions of the world.

Kinda surprised I didn't have a worse reaction. I lived alone in a very small <350sf apartment.

One thing I did fairly early on was to get a therapist though. My reasoning was that they could basically help monitor my situation. Not that I don't have things to discuss with a therapist anyways. It helped I guess. No panic attacks, just some sleep issues and minor hallucinations.

The main restriction actually imposed in the US was on indoor dining and bars and that only lasted a few months in most of the country.

*main restriction for the adult-and-privileged cohort.

For kids, and marginalized communities, school closures are surely the most noticeable.

It's your body getting a signal through, having to break through only with a panic level cascade, to get an unconscious understanding that the situation unfolding globally is potentially life threatening in an relatively uncontrollable way - and also perhaps observing the authoritarian control mechanisms being implemented around the world may have also lead to your mind extrapolating to that could become someone else wanting to "cage" you - whether you want to or not, taking away your free will; worth panicking for if you're not yet conscious of that possibility.

I've already found the source (or more correctly the trigger) of my panic attacks and while it was in the same plane you're assuming, the rest of it doesn't really match. I'm a very "free" guy who hates dumb restrictions. These restrictions could be potentially imposed in my neighborhood, unrelated to covid situation. Once I realized that with the help of my therapist, PAs reduced substantially and later went away. I would even agree with the idea of "caging", but I usually cage myself much more successfully than any pandemic measures do. I just thought about my feelings for the last hour and my anxiety is probably/in part about the mass media hysteria rather than restrictions. Compared to e.g. 2018 the entire existence background is filled with that constant creepy infonoise.

Anyway, it was a trigger and not the reason, you may turn out to be pretty close on that.

I think we're probably talking about the same thing, I could've been more careful with my language though. I don't think there's use in my working through to figure out better nuanced language to use, otherwise I'm glad you found resolution to the anxiety triggered.

The US policy response has been far more costly and destructive than it needed to be.

The pandemic response completely ignored the costs of shutdowns. There has been little or no consideration of their impact on physical health, mental health, education, business, employment, worship. It has been as if COVID was the only risk and the only negative, and any other matter was necessarily secondary. To even mention these matters was considered obtuse.

We have also exaggerated the risks. The disease has a 0.3 risk of fatality, still less for Omicron, and its fatalities largely occur among people with known risk factors. Children are essentially immune from serious effects, but this has been ignored by policy.

ETA: At some point we need a serious reckoning of how we, as a society, mishandled this so badly. I think we'll find the mistakes we've made aren't made on COVID only.

> The pandemic response completely ignored the costs of shutdowns. There has been little or no consideration of their impact on physical health, mental health, education, business, employment, worship.

Anyone who went to an open bar or a packed church service in the USA in December 2020 can tell that governors and the courts were both very sensitive to business and religious concerns about impact on worship, business, and employment.

Unclear who you mean “exaggerated the risks” but the actual risk of fatality was more like 0.6% of all infected in the USA pre-vaccine.[0] 0.3% is the case only after torturing statistics or using international statistics from countries that skew younger and have fewer risk factors.

[0] see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122...

>0.3% is the case only after torturing statistics

Ironic, since a 0.3% (or 0.6%) fatality rate is vastly exaggerated for people in low risk groups. The only reason the number is even that high is due to the high death tolls of people in high risk groups.

That is how averages work. One could equally point out that 0.6% IFR actually underestimated the risk for some adults.

Many people shared Facebook memes of a “99.9%” survival rate not understanding that they personally were at greater risk than that. This page was available on the CDC website for quite a long time explaining the different risks in a pretty straightforward table https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

> The only reason the number is even that high is due to the high death tolls of people in high risk groups.

The only reason the fatality rate is that high is because people died? What are you trying to say here? What else would it measure?

Ha - I wish they were respectful. In my home state, the respect was very much lacking. Whatever they could get away with was the strategy.

To say they were respectful - absolutely they were not.

Edit: They were literally advising people to snitch on each other, even neighbor on neighbor, and make sure to keep that Christmas gathering at 10 people! Last I knew that was a communist tactic. Respected us?

Edit 2: The above would be for Christmas. Earlier in the year it was much worse, don’t attend church unless you are in your car with windows shut for months.

Communist tactic is a bit ... weird .. of an association. Getting neighbors to snitch on each other is a technique every country's law enforcement uses. Or is the "See something, say something" announcement in the airport also communist? Is Texas' bounty on snitching on women who have medical procedures also communist?

Your comment would have been stronger if you didn't wave out the 1950s red scare tactics. Overall, it sounds like you were personally frustrated by the limitations - is that about what you wanted to say?

I guarantee you regardless of which state of the 50 you're discussing, red/blue/whatever, that people still went to bars, to indoor dining, to parties. In New York the national guard was sent to SUNY Oneonta to forcibly quarantine the entire student body because the administration was unwilling to enforce lockdown.

Also, "communist tactic"? The red scare is still with us but to see that shit on HN is always alarming. If holding people accountable so that they don't sacrifice grandma and the immunocompromised for "the economy" (whose economy? certainly hasn't benefitted me) is necessary then I'll do so gladly. If you don't care for public health or the people around you why should I?

The federal government and most governors didn't do shit. It sounds like you live in one of the few places that tried, and got fucked by the sobering reality that a constant 33-40% of this country can not handle epidemiological outbreaks while we sport a pretty weak central government.

US might have a low death rate because of fancy hospitals and some of the best specialists on the planet — it never needed to infect this many people or kill a million Americans. If COVID is no big deal I don't want to have to "never forget 9/11" or whatever bullshit people refusing to vaccinate or quarantine say.

And for the dig at communism, China's zero-covid policy worked. Westerners can say the numbers are cooked, with a population of 1.4 billion you're not going to hide 1 in 3 getting infected. That's the number in the US as of the end of 2020, 1 in 3. Vietnam's zero COVID policy was also working, until they ended it for the economy. Maybe profit motives are unethical where human lives are concerned? By what calculus do you get to determine which outbreaks are worth the bare minimum of germ theory and which ones we get to sacrifice our families and neighbors to for the economy?

I'll end with the note that there are outcomes beyond death. My boyfriend and I contracted COVID before vaccines were available (he works in healthcare) and he couldn't smell or taste for a year. Made eating very difficult. My grandfather can't walk a block anymore, and hasn't been able to in months, but survived. My coworker started to lose her hair in clumps and was embarrassed to wear a wig, but survived. Personally, as a 23 year old with no comorbidities, who was fit and had no physical issues—I'm still recovering a year later. My run times aren't the same, I have a lot less lung capacity, I developed clinical depression. I lived in Argentina for a time and caught swine flu as a child. I'd easily put this as worse. During the infection even putting on a shirt hurt. I'm happy most people are vaccinated now and unlikely to have severe outcomes, but the risk of exposure was totally unnecessary.

This may be a red state, blue state difference

> Anyone who went to an open bar or a packed church service in the USA in December 2020 can tell that governors and the courts were both very sensitive to business and religious concerns about impact on worship, business, and employment.

By December maybe, but earlier in 2020 this varied greatly by state, and there are plenty of educational, business, and religious institutions that still haven't recovered. I think people are underestimating just how much damage was done.

> 0.3% is the case only after torturing statistics or using international statistics from countries that skew younger and have fewer risk factors.

Or countries that don't keep accurate records pertaining to hospitalizations and cause of death.

I’m gonna defend a bit here.

Early on, nobody knew what covid was gonna look like. It had the potential for millions dead with a very high rate of spread.

So we panicked. It seems forgotten that nobody remembers how awful, unknown, and strange the early pandemic was back in March 2020.

What’s pathetic is how almost two years later, when we know oodles more about this disease, our solutions are identical. Where is the focus on improving hospital capacity? Improving air filter quality (it’s an airborne disease)? Therapeutics? Mass testing capabilities?

The vaccine has proven to be not as effective as we had initially hoped for because the new variants are too different. But that possibility was always known. Why do nothing else?

Have to agree on the shutdown. It’s very easy to look back with 20:20 hindsight and say “duh, that was overkill”. But at the time we were sanitising every surface because we didn’t even know how COVID spread, much less exactly how dangerous it was. The shutdown was a panic move but the panic wasn’t unjustified at the time.

I will say, though, that the shutdown went on too long. It was originally sold as a stopgap to allow us to set up testing, track and trace infrastructure etc etc and the government by and large just… didn’t. So there was no clear path out of it.

It also felt like once we in the US barely caught our breath, everything took on a political valence. Everyone dug in so hard that, when new information or considerations came to light, nobody could budge.

The whole thing shows how dangerous and stupid panic can be. There was a lot of media freakout, because drama drives audience. That's where the public health people should have been saying "it's serious but not catastrophic, take a deep breath". And that's where our government and citizenry should have taken a long, hard look at what these recommendations involve. Instead we dove into an extended exercise in groupthink.

Because Covid's broad parameters were known to the experts and attentive laypeople in February 2020: spread through the air and quite infectious, but not particularly serious to a healthy individual. The importance of risk factors was strongly expected but not known for a fact. Analogies to the Spanish Flu were drawn, and dismissed by the experts.

And the expert response was basically "this one thing is more important than anything else, and minimizing it takes priority over all other concerns". Anyone asking questions of their recommendations, never mind criticizing them, was labelled as anti-science. The "expert" response to serious and informed questions, some of them from excellent medical people, was dismissive and condescending.

But it was obvious that its spread could only be slowed, not stopped. It was clear at the start of "Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread" that the facts on the ground would be pretty much the same after as before. So the logic leading to the first fifteen days would lead to the next fifteen days, and so on. But because the first lockdowns were supposedly just two weeks, their cost was minimized. No one spoke up to the obvious logic of their perpetuation.

Our public health experts failed to push against the fears, and failed to address the obvious consequences of their recommendations. They failed to honestly consider and respond to questions from other scientists, who, if not "public health experts", certainly had the training and intelligence to pose serious questions. And we, as citizens and in our government, failed to question those experts, and to conduct a proper layperson's analysis of their technical statements. All in all, a very poor performance by all of us.

When I talk about "lockdowns", I want to split it up into a few separate instances.

1. The Initial Lockdown - The "14 days to slow the spread". Everyone was freaking out and pretty much the entire country locked down during that period, no one complained, we all understood the gravity of the situation.

2. Individual States Lockdowns - After those initial weeks, states started to open separately. Some opened immediatley, others waited. I would say the majority of these lockdowns were lifted after 1-3 months depending on the place.

3. The "Straggler" Lockdowns - These are places like NYC and California that stayed lockdown past when almost everyone else opened back up.

When people take issue with lockdowns, it's mostly with #2 and #3 but most with #3. If you lived in one of these places you were looking at other parts of the country opening up and doing just fine, then you turn to your leaders to hear over and over that where you are is different and needs to stay locked down.

No one is really arguing about #1, because we all know that was necessary. The reason so many take issue with #3 is you start to ask yourself, why the hell is my local/state government stepping in like this while other governments are stepping back. Why the hell is the gym still closed? It's open in $Place1 and $Place2 and $Place3, how are we do different than those places?

One thing that has annoyed me is that we have done very little research into things, like how it really spreads, how effective are masks, shutting down schools. Research into therapeutics. It seems, at least in USA, to be all about getting vaccinated. And ignoring anything that isn't about the vaccines.

> The disease has a 0.3 risk of fatality, still less for Omicron

I'm not sure what you mean by "0.3 risk". 0.3% case fatality rate? But where are you getting that number from? COVID19 had roughly a 2% CFR early on when testing was limited and treatments hadn't been developed. It was around 1% for most of the pandemic. It is *now* as low as 0.3% in highly vaccinated countries, but still about 0.5% in the US.

It has been one of the deadliest pandemics in history. A million Americans are dead. I'm not sure how people can think the risks were over exaggerated.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

>It has been one of the deadliest pandemics in history.

By percentage of global population, I beg to differ:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

It also overwhelmingly killed the very elderly, an age category which didn't even exist at the times of most of those other pandemics in the list.

> an age category which didn't even exist at the times of most of those other pandemics in the list

They exist now though? And they died, so we must count them among the dead. Nothing else makes sense here.

There have always been 80 and 90 year olds in society.

The deaths/case was only so high because they literally didn't have any testing available. Only those the absolute sickest even got testing. Then for a couple months you couldn't get a test unless you knew someone who had tested positive, which you didn't because they couldn't get a test either. Those inflated the deaths/case. Early on they tested an entire naval ship and 40% of the ship tested positive but was completely asymptomatic. This is why we all started wearing masks even if you weren't sick, because it wasn't just sick people who were cases. The case numbers were underestimated by huge factor, especially early on, and with Omicron the case number even though it is high, is still underestimated for the same reason, that people that don't get that sick just don't get tested.

I dunno, I don't think we, as a society, should be prioritizing the health of the old and infirm over the health of those that are young and healthy via policy.

The CFR statistics in that graph are misleading anyways, confirmed cases early on would have skewed drastically towards more severe due to lack of widespread testing. Similar arguments can be made for large spikes later on as the ability to get a confirmed case can dry up due to demand for lab tests.

The number of deaths alone is not very informative for gauging risk.

CFR is very different than IFR. And early data is worthless on this, since only the most severe cases would’ve been tested and confirmed.

>The US policy response

The fundamental flaw in your logic is there was no "US policy response", each state had their own regulations, and they varied widely from shutting down churches, to next to nothing. So you're going to have to be a lot more specific about which policies you're referring to.

And, if you have actual analysis of the benefits and costs associated with any piece of any response, you should totally publish your results. But just saying it is completely worthless.

We all know actual experts will be analyzing this for decades, probably centuries. There is no doubt some of the policies helped, and some of them made things worse. Any blanket statements about all policies being too much, is going to require some pretty solid evidence.

It's interesting to read this as an expat in Europe, where it seems like the US hasn't really done any lockdown at all compared to most other countries.

The issue I think is that there was very little government support for individuals affected economically.

I think it highlights, for better or for worse, the cultural difference between the US and the EU. Take for example the UK that went into lockdown after lockdown, the reason it hasn't been done in the US is that it would be politically untenable. If a politician in the US tried anything remotely like that, they would be burned alive by the opposition and the media.

Exactly. So it's insane to me to see OP posting about how heavy-handed the lockdown was and how it ignored business interests.

The people pulling the strings handled this exactly the way they wanted. And roughly 75% of the population enjoyed it. The are going to escalate ad infinitum. There’s no turning back now.

My observations are the opposite.

US pandemic policy response has assumed the cost of shutdown to be infitinte, and has not appropriately reckoned with the coats of letting the virus proliferate, save for the risk of mass death by overwhelming hospital capacity.

The shutdowns (shelter-in-place orders) were short and have been over for more than a year now. Governors have been eager to consistently reduce mitigation measures as fast as possible.

We're seeing the strain on our health care system. Medical staff are overworked and heavily traumatized, leading to a bidding war for their labor. Less staff leads to harder work, and can go into a death spiral. We might reach a tipping point where our health care system collapses.

> The US policy response has been far more costly and destructive than it needed to be.

As with many things, the US response combined all the worst parts of the left's reaction to the pandemic with all the worst aspects of the right's. We had ham-fisted lockdowns (of dubious effectiveness) that destroyed small business and harmed mental health while simultaneously we had a right-wing crackpot antivaccination movement that prevented vaccine herd immunity from being achieved fast enough to really impact the virus.

Our present day two party system is like a two fisted beat down in boxing. First you get a left, then you get a right, then a left, then a right, until you're curled up on the floor and you can't take any more.

Maybe a constitutional amendment to ban political parties would help, or at least ranked choice voting so we no longer "have" to vote for incompetent fools or "our vote doesn't count" against the other incompetent fool.

The lockdown was a response to a completely unknown pathogen, presumably airborne, that was causing sickness globally. A “ham fisted lockdown” was completely justified to protect everyone while we figured out what was going on.

I love everyone trying to play epidemiologist or public policy coordinator like they know what they’re talking about; what hubris.

The anti-vax movement isn't just right-wing. Blacks are the most under-vaccinated demographic.

And it is important to distinguish those who are against mandates from those who are against the vaccine.

> prevented vaccine herd immunity from being achieved

It is easy to blame antivaxxers. Could you however name a few countries where vaccine herd immunity was achieved?

I couldn't agree more. I think when people choose their side, they have to pick positions that clearly identify them as belonging to that side. "My bonafides as a republicrat can be succinctly established by espousing a hawkish kill-all-the-butter-side-up-people position."

Two parties might be the worse possible number of parties in terms of creating polarization and extremism.

I'm generally not a fan of voter initiative processes, but imagine states passing a voter initiative to make ALL public offices non-partisan?

Everybody I know who got Covid, got it from their kids which go to school.

Yes mortality is low and kids are quite safe from hard impacts but they don't live in a bubble. They meet people.

Also: even if you don't die of it, it could have severe impacts on your life. Long Covid is a thing.

It's not that simple...

Should children have to sacrifice their development to protect adults? I always thought adults should be the ones making sacrifices for children, not the other way around.

On airplanes the parents are told to fit their oxygen mask first in an emergency, as its hard to help your child when you are unconscious. I feel the same applies here.

No they shouldn't but your government should provide for those children and their development. There are countries on this planet which have shown how it's supposed to be done.

Instead some Governments went out and sacrificed everybody.

Definitely not the norm with the boomer generation. It's not people under 50 that are really victims of covid.

Harsh point to make but at this point I hold what I consider to be a very justifiable grudge.

If everyone got it, destroying businesses and families for over a year in some states to postpone the inevitable was stupid.

It wasn't inevitable, Americans chose per usual to do something half-ass, which generally is worse than doing nothing at all or full-assing it

How do/did you know it's "inevitable"?

I didn't have Covid yet. At least as far as I know. I work in health IT and have been vaccinating and protecting myself according to the book. It works.

I'm not even a parent, but I've been incredibly distressed by this trend. Several of my good friends have had their daughters attempt suicide (luckily, none have succeeded, although 2 extremely close calls). It's been utterly gut-wrenching to watch these talented, kind, ambitious girls spiral into shells of their former selves.

Luckily, all my friends are fellow techies who are upper-middle class, and can afford medication and therapy (and in one case, out-of-state long-term hospitalization.) But even with insurance, they're looking at many thousands of dollars of treatment.

It makes me sick to my stomach to think of all the lower-class parents who are terrified of their kids killing themselves, but can't afford therapy or psychiatry visits, and can't get pro-bono help (apparently the wait lists are several months long in many cities.)

It's past time the West reckons with our mental health crisis. Why is it that we're the wealthiest nations in the world, yet our kids are more stressed and depressed than kids in third-world countries? I think society will only become more and more unstable until we spend time seriously addressing that question and adjust our culture accordingly.

The problem with framing this as a mental health crisis is that it implies the solution is in mental health services. Is there a mental health crisis in North Korea? No their lives are just terrible. Therapy isn’t going to help people in North Korea. Similarly the worse material conditions are in the West the more people are going to kill themselves. I think it’s about 200 a day in the US and it has been for many many years. The fact that this is not talked about on the news is an example of one of the negative material conditions in the West that result in worse health outcomes. It is depressing to live in a society where everything is controlled by rich people who torture the population, and the answer is not therapy or drugs.

I disagree, the goal of therapy (should) be to make the patient more self-efficacious, NOT about making them happy or instilling the right mental gymnastics to feel OK about their situation. The more self-efficacious a person is, the more likely they are to figure out what is causing them problems and find meaning in their life by rising to the challenge and organizing action with either themselves or within their peer group in order to deal with their situation that causes them and their peers distress. A depressed, non-self-efficacious person will be less capable of figuring out and making plans to deal with situations that cause them distress.

Would a mentally healthy, self-efficacious population be more or less likely realize their problems and organize collective action to correct their situation?

> Is there a mental health crisis in North Korea? No their lives are just terrible.

Do they even have poor mental health there? It's quite likely, but most people throughout history lived in terrible conditions, sometimes resorting to cannibalism way back in the day[1], and probably did not have depression from it. It's all about relative expectations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_antecessor#Cannibalism

Are you a mental health professional? Seems you're overconfident that therapy and drugs aren't the solution to mental health problems, given those are the two main treatments used by doctors who are actually experts on the matter.

This is circular reasoning. "Only mental health professionals can have an opinion on the matter because mental health professionals say so, and the opinion of mental health professionals is authoritative because it's a mental health issue". Why can't we disagree that it's solely a mental health matter?

>Seems you're overconfident that therapy and drugs aren't the solution to mental health problems

And seems like mental health professionals are overconfident that their methods work. And the evidence that they do is weak, especially for the talk therapy.

medication isn't going to fix that. our society is infected at every level. Urban planning is setup so you can't get anywhere without a car so kids are stuck online all day. We don't have public spaces where you aren't expected to spend money. Our food is tainted and industrialized to have less nutrition.

We spent decades digging this grave

I think this take is a little extreme. I grew up in a very small town. You couldn’t get to the city without driving 30 minutes to a bus stop. I didn’t like it very much, and really looked forward to moving to a city.

However, there were a plethora of parks, ponds, baseball and basketball courts, skateboarding parks, and an ice rink nearby that were somewhat walkable.

Yeah I spent a little too much time on the computer but I did have a social life and went outside a lot doing all kinds of fun.

I think you are underestimating how much fun kids can have with not very much. I agree that we have serious cultural problems but I think urban planning is the wrong culprit here.

I think at least some of it is lazy parenting who are content with just giving their kids an iPad or throwing them in front of the TV for entertainment.

You know what my sister did with her friends for “fun”? They wrote and acted out plays. This wasn’t that long ago, it was in the 90s.

The issue is that it's too easy to forgo all of that and scroll through tiktok for 12+ hours a day, per day (school days included). I'm not exaggerating with that number, either. When you literally have nothing else to do, you'll find something enriching to do. But when there's an easy, lazy outlet, kids will go to that. We literally cannot say the same about kids a few decades ago, either. No one spent every waking moment watching Sunday cartoons or reading the paper, and reading that retort of "well we've ALWAYS done things like that" is so off-putting because it's NEVER been this extreme.

How close to you did those friends live? Did you need to drive in order to spend time with them?

Similar experience. Grew up in the suburbs. Was outside every with friends.

You state this with a lot of confidence!

>Urban planning is setup so you can't get anywhere without a car so kids are stuck online all day.

This wasn't a problem in the 70s and 80s. Kids would just ride their bikes everywhere.

>We don't have public spaces where you aren't expected to spend money.

Apart from playgrounds, parks, libraries, community groups, all kinds of events... I don't think we've ever had more free public services than in the 21st century.

>Our food is tainted and industrialized to have less nutrition.

This is true for processed food, but we still have less malnutrition (macro and micro) today compared to any point in the 20th century.

I think it's really easy to pick the popular talking points from one's tribe and pose them as the problem/solution in any particular situation. If the goal is to actually identify/solve the problem, though, this more often than not is ineffective.

In many places in the US they'll take your kids into protective custody if you leave them unsupervised.

About what changed between the 70s and now regarding letting your kids roam free:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/communi...

https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/04/neighbors-of-free-r...

This also answers your questions about public spaces they can use without you.

It isn't just processed food. Fruits and vegetables are declining in nutritional value as well.

The bike everywhere thing requires housing density and infrastructure. And society that won't call CPS on 9-10 years old without supervision.

There are wast suburban areas without public parks and libraries. They are meant for living only, so if you live there, you really need car

On that nutrition comment... it affects nonprocessed foods too.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-aN...

> Urban planning is setup so you can't get anywhere without a car so kids are stuck online all day

The reason kids were stuck online all day over the past two years is not urban planning; it is because kids were not allowed to go to school or socialize.

You can make claims against the base rate this way, but not against the increase over the past two years.

(also, I have no reason to think that urban kids are in a better mental state than suburban ones this pandemic, and have anecdotal reasons to think the opposite).

Kids did quite a bit of reduced quantity (in terms of heads, not hours) in-person socialising in places that #1 still have places where kids can hang out without it being some form of formal kids entertainment establishment that always ends up borderline factory farming when seen through a pandemic filter and #2 kept their infection waves in check with early quick nuanced NPI instead of waiting until only the big hammer could help.

To me this is honestly more depressing than climate change and just as depressing as global poverty. We can make sure civilization keeps existing, we can stop exploiting the global south, but even then the best-off people in the world will still often feel that life is not worth living.

I’m glad there are people for whom medication and therapy works. I hope more people can get access to medication. I’m also sad that there isn’t more being done to address root causes.

I partially agree.

The other big thing that caused kids to go inside was fear of abduction. 24/7 cable news, starting in the 80s, was constantly stoking fear of this.

In the 80's I remember watching an Oprah (while sick at home, watching TV was the way to get well, because it I hated it so much) on Adam Walsh's murder. His body was found near were I lived a few years before. I believe this was the beginning of the "your kids will be kidnapped and murdered" hysteria.

Parents reacted to this pulling their kids closer to home and when video games became a thing, it wasn't even hard to keep them inside anymore. Now, with cell phones, the battle is completely lost. These devices give kids (and everyone that uses them) little squirts of pleasure all day long.

I've been an avid walker for 26 years. Not until the pandemic did I ever see people outside (kids or adults), except people walking a dog to let it crap somewhere. I guess that's one good side effect of it.

This take is not extreme at all. Everyone with an ounce of intuition knows it. The only people who could be happy in this society are narcissists or autists (nothing against the latter). Even if you are lucky enough to find what you love you’d have to be even luckier to have it be able to make enough to keep up with all the rentiness of it all. I guess you might also find who you love and have someone to suffer with.

> It's past time the West reckons with our mental health crisis.

OK. But doing so would admit that our entire system is broken.

It's not that more kids born today want to off themselves, it's that our system makes everyone unhappy.

We need to fix the system, not give kids pills.

>OK. But doing so would admit that our entire system is broken.

I don't think this can even be argued against at this point. A truckload of societies in the west would be facing absolute collapse right now if it wasn't for immigration.

In a version of reality in which we can't afford to just import as much cheap labour as we want, a good part of western culture would be facing extreme turmoil and our hegemony would most probably end. Hell we are pretty much assuming China will explode from inner conflict at some point because otherwise that hegemony is lost either way.

It isn't even a matter of being able to pay for therapy or psychiatric visits. The mental health system has been overwhelmed throughout the pandemic. There simply aren't enough mental health professionals to help the overwhelming need of individuals throughout the pandemic. You could be waiting 3+ months before you can even be seen by someone, especially if on a state or low-income health insurance plan.

It was like that before the pandemic, TBH. We tried to get counseling for one of my kids for suspected depression and it was a complete shitshow. Therapists and psychologists were booked out for months and unless you were actively threatening suicide you could not get anyone to pay attention.

^ This ^

3 months right now is extremely fast to see someone in a clinic with a social work degree. Was told the actual Psychiatrists or Psychologists are completely full for an indefinite amount of time (As in years on the wait list).

And this is paying out of pocket.

And we were told directly from the clinics themselves, that the pandemic has led to an explosion in the number of clients.

Are waiting times for telaheath any better?

> can afford medication

I'm not sure putting chemicals in one kid's brain (especially since brains are not fully formed till 25) is a very good idea

Pretty sure things like CHIP cover mental health, but I could be wrong.

>daughters

Was it only daughters that attempted suicide? What about sons?

With this language, you are implying the life of a woman is worth more than a man's. Why?

I don't think they implied that. I doubt OP meant anything by it; they also refer to their "good" friends, do you also question whether OP is ignoring suicide when it happens to (children of) ordinary friends?

The distiction between sons and daughters is interesting though, because women are statistically much more likely to attempt suicide, whereas men are more likely to succeed at it.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've been breaking the site guidelines a ton lately. That's not cool, and will eventually get your account banned. If you'd please review the guidelines and stick to them when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

This reporting doesn't make clear that the increase was almost entirely among girls. There was little change for boys.

> There was a 22.3 percent spike in ER trips for potential suicides by children aged 12 to 17 in summer 2020 compared to 2019.

> The data was particularly alarming among among girls aged 12 to 17. Between Feb. 21 and March 20 this year, emergency department visits for potential suicide attempts were up 50.6 percent compared to the same period in 2019, data showed.

I suspect one reason are online games. Boys are more likely to play them and in lockdown, they were the one of few socialization available.

It does not matter what are reasons for disparity. But, the boys were more likely to continue some unchanged socialization ad they had before. They already had established groups to play with and so on.

Did you just pin one of the reason for suicides on online games? What is this politician talking points from the early 2000’s?

I promise you kids have been forming groups and have had feelings of exclusion that existed well before online games. The root cause here wouldn’t be online games in of themselves.

I literally did the opposite and said that online gaming helped people to socialize in lockdowns. I also made hypothesis it explains some gender disparity in suicides - boys play more likely and it allowed them to keep talking to friends which made them suicide less.

And for the record, I do strongly dislike gaming, surrounding culture and how gamers act when they play more then a little. It just was not my topic now, topic was suicides in covid.

No, they did the exact opposite. The proposed the idea that suicide did not increase in boys because they were more likely to have socialization circles around video games.

According to the CDC data, suicides were way down during the lockdown itself

Reason for gender disparity I meant. But good to know.

Girls continue to have Instagram.

Where the activity can be distressing or malicious in terms of jealousy and trolling

1.) Boys too.

2.) It is not socialization with active voice chat. That is more like writing letter or something like that. It will do less to make your brain feel like you have social connection.

The thing that is supposed to make difference (according to psychologist that had talk about social isolation) is talking. People who call have similar psychological results as those heavily socialized. if you write mails a lot, you reassemble lonely people more.

Where’s that insta internal investigation on how it’s toxic to young girls (indicative of social media in general).

Nowhere? I suspect few people actually read the report [1]. They asked teen girls (and boys) how Instagram made them feel. The most common response for girls was "no effect" 43%, followed by "somewhat better" 29%, then "somewhat worse" at 18%, then "much better" at 8%, and lastly "much worse" at 3%. The media conspicuously ignored that substantially more girls felt that Instagram made them feel better than worse.

1. https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...

I don't trust any research Facebook releases about the impact of their own platform and would take such with a grain of salt. There is no incentive for them to ever release negative results.

That "much worse" at 3% was represented by a single reply.

When i read about the study my biggest surprise was how poorly it was. A poll with 40 people is so pointless that I don't understand why they didn't hire professionals to do a real survey.

Girls are typically more extraverted than boys, which would account for at least some of the difference.

Interestingly, suicides fell sharply during the initial lockdowns in Spring 2020 but surged back in the summer and when kids went back to school.

I lost my best friend and a mentee to suicide in 2021, both in their early 20s.

My most important observation is that both of them killed themselves for a myriad of overlapping reasons: childhood trauma from physical abuse, lack of access to therapy, body shame/eating disorders, and stress from experiencing discrimination/hate in their schools and religious communities, as well as more issues which I’m sure were hidden from those around them. They both had problems before the pandemic, COVID just added another to the list.

In a way, theres a reason to be optimistic - any problem you solve that’s causing people real suffering will reduce suicides. There are so many opportunities to tackle this problem.

Every time I share with someone that I'm depressed and think of suicide they're like "just get therapy bro", but I'm depressed not just from the isolation that came with the pandemic (I'm high risk due to an underlying health issue) but also because I'm unemployed, and instead of feeling fun discovering things I can do with code, all I feel is heat because I'm unemployed.

Someday, when we mature enough as a society, maybe we'll touch on the subject on high rates of male suicide during the absolutely normal periods of time, and how it's all driven by the pressure to sustain yourself and succeed in playing the game of capitalism.

So sorry to hear friend. I've been there, I wager if you find the right job, you'll feel a lot better. I know it's tough when everyone around you looks at you with heat, that was my prime motivation to get a job tbh! Since then, I've discovered the job provides a lot of meaning and purpose, it's a great thing. Good luck, I hope you can find a position.

Childhood obesity also jumped from 19% to 22% from 2020 to 2021 (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...)

Yeah I think mine did too.

I lost a few from getting Omicron so there's that.

Covid was a wealth transfer from the youth to the elderly

Collective behavior in response to COVID was a life transfer from the youth to the elderly.

Both are true. Fiscal and monetary stimulus drove financial assets owned mostly by 40+ and retirees to the moon. House prices have become more unaffordable just as millennials (already saddled with college debt) are getting ready to buy their first homes. Inflation has eaten into real wages even with increases.

We also locked up an entire generation of zoomers in a house for two years. I was all for lockdowns in early COVID since we didn't know what we were dealing with, but we kept schools closed for far, far too long.

Assets going up in value isn't really a wealth transfer by itself. The buyer is just exchanging a lot more cash for an asset worth a lot more. Their wealth doesn't change overall. Rents are a different story perhaps.

The unfair property taxes in California and similar states is certainly wealth transfer though, which got vastly more unfair.

The assets went up because the US economy is healthy. This is a much better alternative than 2008 where we failed to fix deflation. Basically printing money is awesome.

> Inflation has eaten into real wages even with increases.

Interestingly not true for homeowners because of fixed-rate mortgages. Or people not currently purchasing a car.

Honestly, blame the far left. This was their totem and they’ve been staunch about it. I consider myself a democratic socialist, but planting the flag of progressives into the dirt at the line of perpetual lockdowns was a _huge_ and likely catastrophic misstep, both politically and (more importantly) societally.

I’ve pondered this on occasion. In this era of people in their 80s holding many of the major positions in government and business in the US, I wonder whether this was their final attempt to prevent transferring power onto the newer generations. I’m not saying this was a conscious strategy, but it certainly was a very interesting phenomenon especially after listening to Eric Weinstein decry the lack of generational transfer in the US.

There should be a mandatory retirement age for government. 65 sounds about right.

Or maybe a deadly virus swept the world and they tried to prevent as many deaths as possible, regardless of the consequences.

Very succint. Precise, correct, pithy.

I'd say a wealth transfer from the poor to the wealthy. Inflation + restrictions has dramatically exacerbated inequality, as have the expectations we put on the working poor - leave home to deliver my food etc but don't you dare enjoy yourself. It's a coincidence that this also corresponds to transferring from young to old people.

Overall, if you have a big house, country cottages, and lots of investments, you got a lot richer in the last couple years. If you live in a small apartment and work a low skill job, you have to keep doing that, for way less pay after inflation, have to find a way to look after your kids at home, and can't go outside except to work, because "we're all in this together"

The whole episode has been a serious step back in human equality

Stimulus and unemployment increases raised overall take-home pay during the year for many lower middle class and poor. For the very poor, increases in SNAP benefits as part of the stimulus outpaced food price inflation, but almost no articles about food inflation mention it. Unemployment is as low as it has been since 1999.

There are legit shortages driving inflation in big categories, but wages are up too. Average wages in non-supervisory roles are up over 10% compared to two years ago, restaurant roles nearly 14%.

Inflation directly hurts people with lots of savings in low yield accounts, not the working poor. That's not to say they did well compared to the rich in the pandemic, just that inflation taken as a single factor doesn't single them out.

Are we talking about the elderly who were locked up and isolated from any contact with people they depend on for basic survival needs?

Where were they locking up the elderly? In fully staffed assisted living facilities?

By your same description, prison is a "fully staffed assisted living facility".

I think the worst of the isolation was for older people who were living alone, not in any facilities, but regularly received help from younger friends and family.

But if you think that most "living facilities", even when "fully staffed" are a good place to leave an older person without regular visits, I am going to disagree with you.

This is a bad take. At most, Covid was a wealth transfer from governments and middle-class to many lucky corporations and wealthy investors. But in reality, everyone is suffering.

Let's say the opposite reaction happened and we prioritized heathy youths over vulnerable seniors. There would have been orders of magnitude more deaths by now, society would have collapsed in some places temporarily or permanently as healthcare systems break down entirely.

The wealth transfer from the youth to the elderly is nothing new, it's been pretty continuous and generally correlates with elderly population. Covid just put pressure on the whole system.

There is no evidence society would have collapsed. Many countries do not have the health infrastructure the US has and have not undergone societal collapse. Yes more elderly would have died. More people with comorbities would have died. But societal collapse?

The shutdown lasted for far too long. Mock Florida all you want, but they weathered the pandemic far better than many states with strict lockdown regimes (California/New York). Consider Florida has one of (if not the) largest senior populations in the US too.

Is it really a bad take? my parents & aunt had 28,34% gains respectively on the value of their main properties in just 1 year. I'm going to have to pay for that (or settle for a lot less living space) if i want to own anything here in the future. Definitely feels like a wealth transfer.

Words words words. Tl;dr yeah he’s right. That $250k house you were supposed to buy? Yeah, it’s $450k now. Pay up.

What do the elderly do with their money when they die?

A lot of them give it to assisted living facilites jsut before that happens. There is a huge industry around siphoning off assets from the elderly before they die.

worth watching Netflix "I Do Care". Sadly its very much like in the movie. At least here in USA (source: friend of family works in a assisted living facility and sees very bad stuff daily!)

Depends. A neighbor hated his family that he purposely caused his home to go into probate just to slow them down.

Most of the time the money is passed onto the next generation. But here's the current problem: the boomers, as a generation, have a lot of assets, specifically housing, locked up as rentals. This has caused house to shoot up (though it is not the only factor).

If the boomers die, I suspect that a large number of homes would become available at reasonable prices within the year of the death. For example, my parents own multiple rental homes (only of one of which they constructed for the express purpose of renting on a plot of land that the city thought was undevelop-able). When they die, my sister and I will sell the properties. While she lives near them, she doesn't want to manage them, and I don't since I live far away.

By allowing the boomers to live longer, these assets remain locked up. They can continue to rent seek at the expense of the generations that came after them. This means that multiple generations, particularly millennials and zoomers are screwed.

Pay inheritance tax.

All societies are heavily gerontocratic, democracies or not. Of course for any crisis this always happens, see climate change, 2008, etc.

This seems unlikely given how many elderly people died of covid. Presumably their wealth was inherited by their children.

No, covid is the common name for covid-19, the disease pathology that happens when you are infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus and your body fails to control it.

This assumes there’s ever been “youth wealth”. Boomers have been systematically disenfranchising millennials on down since they’ve gotten into power. They’re probably one of the most selfish and entitled generations that have ever existed.

Covid kills only old people. All the billionairs and politicians are old. (Think "don't look up")

There are lots of attempts to explain this in the comments: lockdowns, lack of socialisation, pre-pandemic poor mental health, etc. But is not it not much more simple? We were and are in the midst of a global pandemic. A once is a lifetime catastrophic event. The kind of life changing event not experienced in the west since World War II. Of course that's going to cause mental health issues in almost everyone (to varying degrees). It has affected our lives in so many ways (probably many that we don't even realise yet) that trying to pinpoint a specific cause seems like a fools errand.

> A once is a lifetime catastrophic event

This is one point of view.

A different point of view is this is comparable to bad flu year, and all hysteria is caused by msm.

> It has affected our lives in so many ways

It has. But not the pandemic, but government and media overreaction to it.

Next you'll be asking whether lockdowns caused more harm than good. Oh-oh. I think we are 10 years too early for that particular discussion.

This is a fascinating topic, though, and I can't help myself. I have two competing perspectives on this:

1. Covid is deadly, but not that deadly, certainly not to children and younger (<60 y.o.) adults. The initial decision to hunker down was warranted, but as the stresses of the various lockdowns begin to pile up, it's no longer obvious that the lockdowns and strict health regimes are worth it. The "stresses" would include suicides, drug overdoses, domestic violence, depression, and general depravity due to lost income.

2. Covid is deadly, and if not for the lockdowns, it would have killed a lot more people than it did. The number of lives saved by shutting down the economy far outweigh the cost of the lockdowns. If we didn't shut down and later push people to vaccinate, millions would have died in the US instead of hundreds of thousands.

Anyone with an educated opinion wanna weigh in? Which perspective is correct?

I think you're missing a piece. Lockdowns are mostly triggered to control the impact of COVID on hospitals.

If hospitals become overwhelmed by COVID cases, the impact is far beyond any additional COVID cases that can't then get treatment - it then spreads the impact to people with heart attacks, strokes, and many otheer acute life-threatening conditions. It also likely impacts care of people with cancer... and people with appointments for important elective surgery. And so on.

This seems to be a fundamental schism: between people who understand/acknowledge that our collective behaviour impacts many other people in direct and indirect ways, and people who are more focussed on individual autonomy and freedom - who maybe don't see (or care less about?) the subsequent impact of their actions on others.

This is how people choosing not to be vaccinated harms everyone else, and risks measures like lockdowns. Because there's a inverse correlation between vaccination and severity of COVID infections, it therefore follows that not being vaccinated (on a wider scale) increases the risk of hospitals being overwhelmed - and so increases the risk of lockdowns being necessary, and 'innocent' people with other conditions requiring hospital care being caught in the middle.

Lol in the span of covid, there would maybe be 200k deaths from the flu over two years. We’re almost at a million (that we know of). Everyone who says this is anything akin to the flu either knows their lying or is woefully ignorant of the situation.

The flu has had decades to kill those susceptible

The best way to compare if covid is more deadly than the flu is by analyzing the impact on young children where they haven’t been exposed to either before.

> A different point of view is this is comparable to bad flu year, and all hysteria is caused by msm.

That is not point of view. That is a lie.

Point of view is different interpretation of same facts or different values attributing to them. Some things however are just lies.

> this is comparable to bad flu year

Maybe he means the Spanish flu /s

> Researchers, though, cautioned against drawing direct lines between these spikes and conditions brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, which disrupted nearly every aspect of U.S. life starting in the middle of last March.

> A heightened appreciation about mental health in 2020 might have prompted parents to get their children mental health treatment, they said.

> “Conversely, by spending more time at home together with young persons, adults might have become more aware of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and thus been more likely to take their children to the ED," according to the report.

Happy to see a correlation != causation disclaimer.

What a classic HN response.

Humans are social creatures. How are lockdowns and social distancing not causal? There's a reason long distance relationships fail and solitary confinement is an ultimate punishment.

Add to this doomsday news on loop, confusing messaging on vaccines.

I also have too, too much anecdata to counter this.

I spent time helping families during the COVID crisis. The amount of confusion and uncertainty generated by the pandemic hit many families hard especially in states with strict lockdown regimes.

I have friends who work as RCs at a top university: they are swamped with students devastated by the pandemic who are uncertain of what their futures hold given the gap.

I have friends whose four year old has began pulling her hair out for no reason early on in the pandemic. They started taking her to a private prek that was opened. It stopped.

A ton of things happened to many kids during the pandemic.

0) Physically away from school 1) Poor learning experience 2) Spending more time with parents 3) Relatives getting sick and dying 4) Dire medical news everywhere 5) Dire political news everywhere 6) Dire environmental news everywhere 7) Many parents lost jobs 8) Many parents lost income 9) Children pressured to (not) take vaccines 10) People (not) wearing masks / Kids pressured to (not) wear masks 11) Away from friends 12) Evictions 13) Excessive drug use 14) Excessive social media use 15) Affected by evolving social justice issues

So there could well be some causation there, but which things are causing what is not immediately clear.

I think the poster's point was about general data reporting, not specific to the situation. If you're going to use data to argue something, you need to be careful not to overstate what the data says. And the worst misuses of stats are when they fit intuition or anecdotal experience. The vaccine-autism argument that won't die is not the result of a bad study, but of autism symptoms typically arising right at vaccination age. Then people did a study looking for this commonly-believed "causation" and misused the data they got to make a case they wanted.

They could be causal, but the effect the parent described is real that messes up the data. Mental health has become a thing that’s allowed to be talked about and taken seriously in literally the last few years. It’s a massive and extremely positive societal shift that shines a light on how absolutely awful school is even in non-pandemic times. I had severe depression in my teens and it wasn’t until I tried to take my own life that the adults in my life at the time even acknowledged it. I had friends at school who were cutting themselves, emotionally dependent on weed, drinking themselves to blackout every weekend, starving themselves to death, throwing up in the bathroom, and studying/working themselves to physical illness because of lack of sleep. Nobody cared.

There is no doubt that that the pandemic is making things so so much worse but there’s also a danger in scapegoating it and then being collectively “shocked” when it doesn’t get better when things go back to normal.

> There's a reason long distance relationships fail

???

“ Research has even shown that long distance couples tend to have the same or more satisfaction in their relationships than couples who are geographically close, and higher levels of dedication to their relationships and less feelings of being trapped.”

https://time.com/5316307/best-long-distance-relationship-tip...

Survivorship bias. Most fail quickly, the only ones that make it are the super dedicated couples.

I was looking at a variety of discussions on age-gapped relationships and have noticed the same, people blame the relationship failing on the age gap and the younger persons own admissions about how they look at it differently, instead of the general distribution of all relationships failing

People basically get what they want tk hear out of it, instead of checking whether the same standard yields different results elsewhere

One could just as easily draw the conclusion that spending time with parents was the cause of the extra stress.

I wonder if there is any chance of actual actionable data being teased out.

Parents who were also trying to hold down jobs. At the time, my partner and I had a 1 year old and were both working. It was incredibly difficult, stressful, and 100% not sustainable. We cracked after a few weeks. We also strongly believe that just putting young children in front of screens for hours at a time is detrimental to their development, and did not do that like so many other parents (who all justified it because they "had to" to keep working. That is another whole debate - I am sure that not many people would have gone to the effort we did during lockdowns and restrictions to shield our kids from the poor parenting practices that are now widespread).

Also, having young children is incredibly isolating, and already something like a lockdown in itself. Humans in that position are supposed to go out and see as many people as they can, usually in the form of meeting other parents at their houses, cafes, parks, etc. All of that was illegal, at least where I lived. My blood still boils thinking of how horribly harmful that was.

Of course nothing that happened before the pandemic could have contributed at all to any feelings of hopelessness. The absolute despair required to want to "end it all" just suddenly happened because of this one situation. The constant 24/7 barrage of "doom and gloom" and just general insanity in the news and "social" media couldn't have laid any groundwork for anyone to feel like there's just no point in even trying to live anymore…

In regards to the media, parents could be more dismissive of the doom and gloom. Instead I watch parents repeat in front of their children that corporations are evil, sea level will rise by 10's of feet soon, racism everywhere, reverse racism everywhere, the China Communists will take over the world, that the U.S. doesn't manufacture anything, etc.

I recall one adult in my entire childhood that laughed off a doom and gloom discussion and one other that said "relax you'll be fine". It immediately paused my chronic anxiety as calm is contagious.

There is a book called “Simplicity Parenting” which I highly recommend. Basically, you’re right. Parents can cause PTSD in their children by fretting about current events. I’m my opinion, it is our job to insulate them until they are of an age where it’s appropriate to begin such exposure.

Hi, one of those parents here.

I have on occasion reminded my daughter that the world she’ll grow up in will not be as abundantly beautiful as it is today. Just as it isn’t for me compared to when I was younger.

I’ve also, at those times, reminded her that she has the power and responsibility to be a good steward of the world because nothing is writ in stone.

Just reminding you that cautionary tales aren’t always simply doom and gloom. As an adult who grew up with parents who were dismissive of the worlds problems, I felt sheltered and out of touch when I finally learned about some of the problems we would be facing as humans on this planet.

I have no desire to set up my kids like that. People like my parents took our world and shit on it for all of the generations that follow. They felt it was more important to be positive than face consequences. If we have another boomer generation, we _are_ goners.

With all respect, the claim you are framing these stories as "cautionary tales" is questionable given certain tone of your writing.

Also the PP had examples where the counter example is simply demonstrated. That's what parents should do instead of repeating them with implied certainty. Of most concern, I can't recall a single doom story from my childhood that came true or that I could work on by the time I was an adult(e.g., we'll be out of oil in 25 years, the Russians will drop a bomb on us any day now, the Japanese will own the US soon, world population growth will lead to world wide famine, collapse of the USD, Social Security will end in 10 years, etc.). My childhood years (and possibly most of my life) were lost to depression, negative rumination, anxiety, and hopelessness. It was only until I limited interaction with doom-sayers that I finally have a clear, calm, and focused mind and that is a prerequisite for solving meaningful problems.

> I have on occasion reminded my daughter that the world she’ll grow up in will not be as abundantly beautiful as it is today.

You have to know you're almost certainly wrong though? The world has been marching forward and forward every year to assume this next "catastrophe" is the one we can't solve is honestly ridiculous.

This sounds horrendous. The worst thing that you could say about your parent’s approach was that you felt “out of touch”. What do you think your child will say about you?

The idea that if people would stop talking how the world is so bad the world wouldn't be so bad is one of the strangest patterns of thinking I've seen pop up here more recently.

The world is in a state of decline, climate change being just one of many stressors on society. Pretending this is not the case doesn't make it go away, and if anything the media is aggressively downplaying the current situation we are in.

Anxiety and despair don't have to be the only reactions to decline, but we certainly won't get past those as long as people keep pretending everything is fine.

The world is not in decline. We do not live on a "spaceship earth" because of the potential for astroid/moon mining and space based solar panels. Technological progress continues to outstrip our environmental damage done in it's persuit, and ultimately only technological solutions will get us out of the current issues with climate change. That, and a healthy amount of climate adaptation.

Apocalyptic rhtoric is both wrong and a mind virus that cripples meaningful policy discussions.

I have my problems with Steven Pinker but this is one issue where he is so correct on it's not even funny.

I don't understand why people try to blame mental health effects on our mitigation attempts and not the horror of covid itself. It's like blaming seasonal depression on wearing coats and staying inside instead of the fact that it's cold and dark outside.

The fact that there's an extremely contagious disease that has a good chance of maiming you and has killed 800,000 Americans is enough to make you depressed all on its own.

What hope did we offer the youth that their lives will be livable anyway. For many their financial future is basically debt serfdom. With asset price bubbles, hidden inflation, and wage suppression I don’t know how an ordinary person could hope to live middle class life and I only expect it to get worse.

This was also trending before covid; no wonder millennials have such distain for the generation in power.

I think one thing that will make the history books is how little innovation or adaptation there was in educational technology, rendering a truly depressing set of prospects for learning over the pandemic. A lot of companies have made a LOT of money in edutech going back to the 90s CDROM days and what do students get when the system escapes these companies's grasp and students need some real imagination put to the matter? A grid of Facetimes and draconian activity surveillance.

The entire concept of our "education" system is bankrupt. The very idea of keeping an entire age of children in lockstep across multiple subjects regardless of ability stifles actually solving any issues. Why would you expect the very people who perpetuate this injustice to even conceive of a solution let alone implement it?

Why is this being downvoted?

Are our kids not beautiful snowflakes on the spectrum of intelligence or is it just gender?

What were they supposed to do? They had about two weeks to go from fully in-classroom to fully-remote with no warning, in the middle of the school year. I don't care what kind of technology you have, that is going to be a clusterfuck.

The problem was this clusterfuck lasted for far too long and public guidance was and still is a complete mess.

We panicked everyone instead of having a level-headed policy where we stratified risk by age and health condition.

> no warning

We're in the third year of a global pandemic and nothing that is happening now is something that wasn't predicted as a serious possibility.

Pretending everything is fine doesn't make it fine. Acknowledging the situation we're in, and having plan for "rapidly spreading variant that starts impacting kids more" is something that would be an obvious thing for schools to do.

We concretely knew in November this was coming. Again, many people tried to pretend this wasn't happening and brush it off, but there was plenty of time to foresee this situation and plan for it.

The vast majority of people, on all sides of the political spectrum, have aggressively been trying not to see what is happening in front of their eyes. To try to force things to be "normal". If we accepted that we're in a pandemic, and that sometimes we'll have to change our life a bit, we could have easily prepared for this case.

>They had about two weeks to go from fully in-classroom to fully-remote

Yeah, and then they had 2 years to rethink it

But it is now two years in. I wouldn't have expected something in 2 weeks, but in 2 months? Thought that something would have been built.

What were they suppposed to do? Of course they had to limp along for a bit, but it's been almost two years now and as far as I've heard (I don't have children), it's status quo where they aren't trying to force kids back into the classroom. Try to remember the first time you heard the term "distance learning." I think it's been at least 10 years for me.

Having started an edtech startup & had many friends do the same

I promise you, it is not the companies who are failing to deliver innovative in education

They cannot survive the way schools decide how to buy software - I.e. district level admins are the only ones with decision making power.

So, I can see that being a problem for kick starting the business, but what about private schools?

It seems like there are tons of them with tons of money managed at the single-school level of scale. Do they just have better software than the public schools? Are they not enough to support edtech companies growing to the size where they can compete for the government contracts? Something else?

What, are there innovations that are gathering dust because of the decision style of a bureaucracy? I find that hard to believe, that new ideas wouldn't have leaked out to the startups in this space (Coursera, etc.). Obviously even the Ubers of Learning aren't doing anythnig different than 5 years ago or we would be seeing Super Bowl ads from them, because the effect and implications would be seismic. Imagine if suddenly classes were able to be as effective as anybody has been wanting, which is to say "noticeably more effective." What if it wasn't a grid of facetimes anymore? I think that would probably be a big deal.

I would like to point out a subtle distinction:

There was a lot of strong pivots in education. It's just that all (most?) of them were bad ideas.

My point is, you can still innovate and adapt while finding 1000 wrong ways to do something

Are those bad ideas documented anywhere?

Did suicide go up or just attempts?

Using methods unlikely to work and with the added safety of having people in the house all the time I could imagine that many of the new attempts were not intended to succeed

This is a fair question. Especially because the increase was almost entirely among girls. They have a much higher attempt rate but a much lower completion rate than boys. [1]

It is possible that these attempts are more about distress than true attempts to end life. Still a problem, but not as much if the suicide rates did not also go up.

1: https://www.verywellmind.com/gender-differences-in-suicide-m...

Youth suicide is a very scary thing. I can’t imagine the grief it brings on the parents who are already suffering so much at the hands of this terrible situation. And let’s not forget about those who are single and the social isolation issues among other things.

This thing has wrought havoc on so many of our lives. So much of the world is suffering.

We thought there was light of the end of the tunnel, then omicron. It’s possible omicron won’t even be the last.

Please take an extra moment to show a little bit extra patience, understanding, compassion, empathy, for everyone, as many of us are suffering, actively or passively, in some way, as a result of the collective trauma on our society.

The medication debate, on this forum of smart and reasonable people, comes out as one side yelling 1+1=2 at a crowd who's yelling back that 2+2=4.

Yes, staying on strong mood-neutralizing antidepressants forever isn't a full life and it's probably bad for your liver. Yes, when you are laying in bed and can't do anything, those external factors that are making you hate your life will get worse until something, including a chemical that's bad for your kidneys, gets you up and walking. They are both true at the same time.

I never thought I’d be the victim of this pandemic but consider myself a victim now.

My mental health has deteriorated to a point where it’s difficult to juggle work and family responsibilities. I put family first and work second. But the people I work with don’t know or care that I can’t work on something because I’m home stuck taking care of family trapped in quarantine hell. When I do tell them some change their tone.

I’m suffering from the fact that when I work, I give it 100%. Any less and I feel like a failure. I’ve had blips at work where I’ve threatened to my boss that I can’t work there anymore because I can’t give it 100%. I don’t want to put myself in a situation where I get fired. I’d rather leave on my own terms and let someone who can do my job at their 100% in.

It’s not my job’s fault for my home arrangement. They’ve gone above and beyond to give me support and work with me. At the same time there’s no support from our government to help me with assistance should I decide I can’t work anymore.

Our government has failed on a lot and it doesn’t matter if it’s Trump or Biden. There’s too much red tape and too much looking out for big businesses and not enough to help people.

You need to start seeing yourself as a survivor of all this even if you're not over it yet. I was bummed the fuck out when I got covid but the truth is made it out ok and circa 50 million people didn't, that's a memento mori if there is one.

Taking pride in your work is a good thing. However, consider that it's all relative... your 50% effort is probably another person's 100% effort. You are totally allowed to dial it back and focus more on yourself and your family. In fact most people probably would not even notice if you did so.

The first few years of my career, I worked as hard as possible and started feeling deeply ill. I realized the need to put forth my maximum effort was all self-imposed, totally in my head. Now I personally try to do as little work as possible, and I am still highly regarded at my job.

Had there been a pandemic in my youth, had I had to endure my parents 24/7 without escape for almost 2 years (and counting), I would have killed myself too.

It would be truly fascinating to compare this increase in suicide to any changes in suicide for children in China or other countries which weathered the pandemic much better than the US. If it really is the case that harsh lockdowns create more suicides then surely China and its much more swift and drastic entire lockdowns of million person cities would generate more of them per capita, no?

I suspect though that we'd see there's not much increase or change at all for suicides in countries that handled the pandemic better than the US. People want to blame lockdowns, remote schooling or specific actions in the US when in reality the incredibly horrific response and deaths of nearly a million Americans is horrifying enough on its own.

Frankly this reads like a take by someone who is never around kids.

Kids need social interaction. I know multiple kids who have basically been checked out of society and told they’ll kill their family if they socialize.

Lockdowns and covid hysteria have certainly contributed to this.

Lock down for a short time with a reopening vs prolonged ok and off lock downs might be different.

Also, China data probably isn’t trustworthy on a topic like this, right?

I wouldn't trust such numbers from China. Their death rate has looked like this [1] [2] since April 2020. Coincidentally, that is when covid cases began to take off in the west. China stopped adding to their death toll after they revised their numbers upwards exactly 50% (1290/2579) [3].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/SnwqNsd.png

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/china

[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/17/chinas-wuhan-revise...

Looking at China for numerical statistics of any sort is a fool’s errand. Nothing they report is accurate, especially with regards to COVID or the mental health of their populace.

Per capita COVID deaths in the US were similar to those in the EU.

This partisan left-wing reaction to this news, which is implicitly about absolving the massive violation of the entire population's civil and economic liberties of blame for the socioeconomic and non-COVID health deteriorations seen during the COVID era, is the real problem.

There are obvious cultural differences that needs to be taken into account.

If all you know is being told what to do for generations it won't feel the same.

I'm pretty sure that once we sum this up, the interventions will be proven to have caused WAY more damage than any virus ever could.

It's a wombo combo. Pandemic traps you at home with nothing to do, so you spend more time on social media, where the products are known to drive kids to depression.

The research paper[1] in the Lancet from Feb. 2020, on the psychological effects of quarantine predicted this.

I think while the first quarantine / lock-down could not be avoided, the current situation could be avoided if we were able to battle the misinformation and reach 90% vaccination in every country.

This pandemic is more severe than it has to be because it's also a mental health crisis. The people engaging in anti-vaxx conspiracies sound out of touch and deluded, but I think this is their way to cope. (believing in magic, wishful thinking, denial, are all pretty common with disease/health issues or in the face of uncertainty). Like an ostrich sticking their head into the sand it's probably how they deal with many other challenges in life too.

Question really is how to go forward. Those who say "let it rip" might have an agenda to kill as many people as possible on the planet (out of spite but probably because they're themselves deeply depressed or isolated).

One proposal that many hate but could stop the pandemic is to allow exception for certain cases prescribed by a doctor, but for everybody else vaccination has to be mandatory. We did it with measles and smallpox, so why not with covid?

______

[1]

Summary:

We did a Review of the psychological impact of quarantine using three electronic databases. Of 3166 papers found, 24 are included in this Review. Most reviewed studies reported negative psychological effects including post-traumatic stress symptoms, confusion, and anger. Stressors included longer quarantine duration, infection fears, frustration, boredom, inadequate supplies, inadequate information, financial loss, and stigma. Some researchers have suggested long-lasting effects. In situations where quarantine is deemed necessary, officials should quarantine individuals for no longer than required, provide clear rationale for quarantine and information about protocols, and ensure sufficient supplies are provided. Appeals to altruism by reminding the public about the benefits of quarantine to wider society can be favourable.

"The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence" https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Vaccination cannot solve this. Herd immunity cannot be established with the current crop of COVID-19 vaccines, due to high transmissibity amongst the vaccinated.

The problem is misinformation, but not the kind you refer to. The misinformation is in the impression given that COVID-19 is a much more dangerous virus than it is really is, especially for the non-elderly.

Most of the public over-estimates the risk of COVID, by 10 to 100 times:

https://archive.fo/wciQp

As much as I hate anti vaxxers, global vaccination is simply not possible in any ammount of time that would have stopped the pandemic. It will be a routine vaccine worldwide only after the virus went endemic anyway.

> Conversely, by spending more time at home together with young persons, adults might have become more aware of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and thus been more likely to take their children to the ED

Is ED the emergency department? Or something else?

Yup. Emergency Department.

I work with sex addicts. I've been very surprised (and skeptical) that suicide and various psychological breakdowns weren't being reported as being higher since covid hit.

At least in my little bubble the emotional and psychological struggle has escalated greatly in these covid times of increased anxiety, destroyed routines, and much deeper isolation.

Everyone's trying to cope, one way or another. It's hard to watch.

I personally keep trying to shake the jadedness, getting sucked into technical work for the numbing blanket of my mind, I want to look my family members in the eyes. To be present with them.

It's... kind of working.

Not to be reductive of a complex issue, but when I first discovered feelings wheel,I kept the tab open, and at various points in the day, I would attempt to pinpoint my exact emotional state and sort it into a category. If you don't have the categories, you can't sort things out. A house cannot be clean unless there is a place for everything.

Finland:

         suicides
    2019      746
    2020      717

https://findikaattori.fi/fi/10 https://findikaattori.fi/fi/table/10

The statistics shown in the news is "Emergency Department Visits for Suspected Suicide Attempts" which is different than death by suicides.

Also, I wonder if Scandinavian countries can cope better in lockdowns as they often have to stay inside for extended periods of cold temperature.

I don't have any hard numbers as I don't think we measure children suicide very closely here in Argentina, but we had one of the longest lockdowns with remote learning and it seems to be children did ok. I posit existential dread and deaths of dispair, the modern anomie and so on, have something to do with advanced economic development.

I would say this is another way in which the covid measures did more harm than good. Together with irresponsible mainstream media doom reporting. Why do why I need to ear, every day, that there are X more covid deaths and Y cases?

Reduced social interaction, more social media can easily wrongly portray the real world. Even I noticed that as soon as you leave home, tv/computer, and be with friends everything seems less dooming

But more than that, I remember being very affected in the 1999/2000, world end prophecies, millennium bug that was going to stop all computers and everyone is going to die. As a child, without internet, it was just TV programs and news reporting, very lightweight and simple, around the family, nothing like the current pandemic or climate doom. Still before going to bed I would be very sad that the world was going to end, everyone was going to die

How much of this is just young women spending more time on social media during covid? If social media was the cause of rising young female suicide pre-covid, then that could be it.

It’s pretty sad to read all the handwaving about how we shouldn’t be so quick and blame this on lockdowns. When a leaf turns and it can be used as an argument for lockdowns, it’s immediately justified and if it later turns out false, how could we have known?

But if a lot children kill themselves it shouldn’t be used as an argument against lockdowns.

Lockdowns have become a very dangerous religion.

Can't talk about this yet still in various countries. And frankly other countries have denied this and just label deaths such as this as "excess non covid deaths" which is horribly disingenuous and insulting...

How long until someone (in the mainstream media) counts human life days saved vs human life days lost due to mismanagement and bad policies.

I'll join the chorus of the other sibling commenters here by expressing skepticism that any medication will at all help with anything.

Psychiatric medication often simply numbs your brain so it stops being worried about things that legitimately and truly torment it. It reduces your sensitivity, it knocks off your normal brain chemicals balance, and it turns you into a robot. I've had a family member go through this a long time ago. It was soul-crushing watching them when I visited. They were almost turned to vegetables with chemical means.

Doing all this does NOT solve the underlying problems that make people reach for suicide. Those problems are societal and very deeply ingrained at this point.

We must look for the reasons that younger people start attempting suicides more than before and try and cure the illness, not the symptoms.

I even started finding it offensive when I see people offering medication. It comes across as: "Here ya go champ, let's again deceive your brain that everything's alright when it really isn't, now off ya go and be a good worker bee, and oh by the way that'll be $2000 for the 10 minutes session". Could it be that we just treat people worse and worse with time? I say yes, yes we do.

But judging by a lot of other replies in this thread, I'd venture to say that many people are not ready to hear it, sadly, and are still in denial, and will shout anybody thinking otherwise away from their platforms (whichever they might be, virtual or in the meat space). And until that changes, the problem will only deepen.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29859909.

The point of medication is not to always numb your brain but temporary ease the pain until you can stand on your own feet again. When life goes so wrong for some people and their brain pain signal is so high that you can't even get out of bed, those medications help. It helps them to sleep and think less until they start to think correctly.

The issue today, is that people are expected to be productive all the time despite the isolation, low wages, lack of ownership, purpose, meaning and the raising inequality. And it is often those who are perceptive enough that tend to suffer more. If you don't want medications, then people need to have enough safety net to be unproductive for at least 3 to 6 months with some basic care, and this is luxury few people have.

More pontification and intellectualization of matters that people have no first-hand experience of, as is HN's wont.

As someone with over 20 years of mental health issues who refused medication for exactly the same reasons - "sucking it up," trying to address root causes, meditation, spirituality, exercise...

... none of it worked. You could easily spend a lifetime trying to "root cause" the source of your malady and return empty handed, as I have. When the bills need to get paid, and your options are psychological collapse or some chemical attenuation of your mental state, I think the choice is clear.

I agree that it's sort of twisted that modern society is structured such that we need to constantly medicate ourselves to cope with day to day existence.

Alas.

I really used to think this way as well, and was dead set against psychiatric medication.

Unfortunately I have had multiple family members recently deal with crippling and harmful bouts of depression and extreme anxiety.

They tried many things, but ultimately it was medication (not to remove the feelings, but just to help manage them) and long term counselling that helped things get better.

The medication alone is not going to help. But when someone can’t even get out of bed, or ,eave the house, or is so sad that everything becomes a dark fog, I disagree that medication is not required.

I’m now extremely grateful that I am in a position where I am able to afford it.

> Doing all this does NOT solve the underlying problems that make people reach for suicide.

But it gives you time to teach teens coping skills, ingrain healthy habits, and get them through some of the tough teenage years, so you can then back down on meds when they are in a better place, with a better toolkit, to create adults who want to live.

I agree the meds are not the best answer in all cases. And there is nothing wrong with discussing their negative aspects. But that doesn't mean they don't serve a purpose in some cases.

Especially cases where it truly is a chemical imbalance causing the depression. Which may be more cases than you realize.

I did a zoom call with a psychiatrist and got Prozac and propranolol within an hour. Amazed at how easy the process is now with telemedicine and how helpful the right medications are.

I wish I hadn’t tried to “tough it out” for so long and being scared away from medication after hearing things like they would numb you or make you feel like a robot. I don’t feel that way at all now that I’ve experienced a number of these medications firsthand.

Literally your entire brain functions on trading of chemicals. There is no such thing as “a thought” without the chemicals in your brain producing it. What you describe as “numbness” seems to be your discomfort with a person’s personality changing in front of you… _for their benefit_.

As someone who’s long differed from anxiety and depression, I had your mindset at one point. It wasn’t until I started trying medication that I could start evaluating my life in a more objective manner, without the chemicals in my brain discoloring every thought. Now I don’t even need medication, but I am certainly a different person. Medication helped me choose a better life for myself.

I find it offensive when I see people assume that the only reason anybody takes psychoactive medication is to deceive themselves. I know people whose lives are much better on medication (and who see the world much more accurately than without it), I know people whose lives are worse. Are you so confident that you can decide for everybody else which group they fall into? The world and the people in it don’t exist to make clean narratives for others, whether you’re a drug company rep or anti-psychiatry.

That’s just a bunch of kitchen psychology not even on the level of 19th century Freudian psychoanalysis.

You’re starting from a very specific worldview—the puritanical tradition where those upholding a certain set of virtues (industriousness, tolerance to pain, etc) will be richly rewarded (on earth or later) and, conversely, any suffering can be traced back to individual faults.

That mindset cannot survive contact with even trace amounts of actual data where, time and time again, medication does make a difference, although that difference remains frustratingly smaller than for other diseases. But it isn’t ‘numbing” of “fake” any more than antibiotics are.

You seem to believe antidepressants are like uppers or downers where you chuck a handful and ten minutes later you feel a wave of happiness roll over you. Here’s a secret: take a few of those pills and you will feel… absolutely nothing. Anti-depressants do not produce a “high” in any sense of the word. Changes in mood take months to appear and are usually not even recognized by the patient. It’s their friends who tend to notice it first.

Are you a psychiatrist, psychologist, or mental health expert? The "shouting away" may be caused by non-experts such as yourself thinking your notions are worth more than MDs, who have trained an additional 7+ years than you to become experts in treatment of suicidality.

To offer some explanation in defense of this, though I can't cite it right now:

There's two major tests for the efficacy of depression-treating drugs that I am aware of. One is a "willpower" test, which in one incarnation is attempting to drown a mouse. A compound more likely to be efficacious in humans if it makes a mouse attempt to swim longer before ultimately succumbing to exhaustion. Taken by itself this test seems promising, though one could argue it might blunt whatever mechanism makes you give up and try a different approach.

The second is a bit worse, and done in humans. A compound more likely to be efficacious in humans at treating depression also seems to be effective at disrupting short and long term memory. So, they give the sample and a short term memory test and see how you do. If you do worse it is likely to treat depression.

You will see, if you go back through past threads, people stating that their ADHD diagnosis was comorbid with or developed after a diagnosis of depression. It is extremely likely that they developed focus problems due to being treated with SSRIs.

> Luckily, all my friends are fellow techies who are upper-middle class, and can afford medication and therapy (and in one case, out-of-state long-term hospitalization.) But even with insurance, they're looking at many thousands of dollars of treatment.

Please understand that I am not anti-psychiatry at all. Your kid and their friends are best doing intensive therapy, and if necessary, sessions twice per week, outpatient. That is their best bet, health-wise. Because of taking Pristiq (desvenlafaxine) [SNRI] and Rexulti (brexpiprazole) for severe depression, I literally have suffered the worst thing imaginable, a drug side effect known as *akathisia*. In no exaggeration, it is worse than death. You have to move constantly, but it does not relieve the terror that you go through. You cannot physically relax at all. Your mind can only think haunting and terrorizing thoughts. It feels like you have been doused in gasoline, lit on fire, and you have been locked in a coffin. You literally survive moment-by-moment not to kill yourself. By the way, it is gruesomely painful from a perceptual standpoint. One time, when I was extremely sick, I went to the hospital and I had no idea whatsoever when I went to the emergency room that I was in sepsis along with diabetic ketoacidosis, due to being in the throes of akathisia. If you have it severely, it can cause violence and suicide. I had it severely and it lasted for about a year. I have 2 rare immune-mediated neurological disease plus type 1 diabetes (autoimmune and insulin-dependent). I have been through really terrible things in my life due to my health but akathisia by far takes the cake. It is in no exaggeration worse than death.

Watch this video, this is what it is like every single day you suffer with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_iiy8ISvdY

This is a public PSA about akathisia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgvhAilA070

This is excerpts from Jordan Peterson (whom I do not agree with from a political standpoint) who is a psychologist who suffered from it due to benzodiazepines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIfllfH0k3I

My story has a lot of parallels to this story: https://www.madinamerica.com/2021/06/boy-interrupted-a-story...

> It's past time the West reckons with our mental health crisis. Why is it that we're the wealthiest nations in the world, yet our kids are more stressed and depressed than kids in third-world countries? I think society will only become more and more unstable until we spend time seriously addressing that question and adjust our culture accordingly.

Like what? Do what Russia (along with the entire USSR) along with former Yugoslavia did to political dissidents?

Did you know that they used to put political dissidents in 4-point restraints and inject them repeatedly with Haldol, in order to induce severe akathisia as a torture method? If you did not appear "crazy" before coming in to some place like the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, you would appear absolutely "crazy" afterwards whenever you came out of there.

Have a read: https://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/soviet-psychiatric-dr...

Also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_...

And just FYI, this effectively happened to me in America (although clearly I was not a political dissident). I got picked up by the police due to severe akathisia. I was forced to go to a medical hospital for "observation". I told the nurses that I could not have antipsychotics (which they give for agitation--although akathisia makes you extremely agitated) due to it invoking the akathisia and making it worse. About a week prior to this happening, I had just been diagnosed with akathisia. My world-renowned neurologist in movement disorders put a bunch of allergies in my medical record, including Haldol which he noted the reaction as "Akathisia". However, this particular hospital did not have access to my medical records (thank you "free market"). The nurses said that it was just an "adverse reaction" and therefore I was to receive it. They forced drugged me with antipsychotics and I had to move nonstop and I went really crazy. I was put in 4 point restraints and I was going so crazy that now I even know how to get those things off when they tie them extremely tightly.

Anyways, that was the last straw for me when it came to staying in the United States. I am a Croatian (European Union) citizen so I can live abroad in Europe. Nothing will convince me to live in the United States, even though I have been an American citizen my entire life. It is no longer my homeland. And just FYI, Russia Today did a whole propaganda documentary about people who ended up with akathisia (pretty much all of the people profiled in the documentary had it) consisting of Americans taking a bunch of pills. It is called OverPill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5722_XclQkY

You can't claim to be pro-science and then false-ly claim that psychiatric medication does nothing.

Depression and ADHD are _extremely_ treatable through medication, just as examples. There are many studies around this topic, it is way more treatable than certain physical conditions.

"Knocks off your normal brain chemicals" have you considered that some people's normal brain chemicals are not set up normally? Would you claim someone who is anemic taking iron supplements should stop cuz they're messing with that?

Naturalistic arguments like this lead to many people having way too much skepticism for things that are easily treatable. It leads to people dying. You should be ashamed of spreading this kind of nonsense.

EDIT: ADHD medication, when the right medication is given, has like 70% success rate at treating symptoms, and there's like 30% of people who express not just having symptoms reach manageable level, but total removal of all symptoms for their cases!

Imagine if we had magical robot prosthetics indistinguishable from actual human limbs. That is what we have for certain mental illnesses, for some set of people.

Ironically it is this sort of arm chair anti science bullshit that increase suicide risk among the mentally ill y contributing to a stigma of being medicated for a mental health condition.

Maybe not exactly relevant but I’m early 30s and Ive had breakout schizoaffective disorder for a year. It’s bipolar disorder and schizophrenia at the same time. And I have almost come to the point where I can’t live with it anymore in the past few weeks because the symptoms evolve over time. I just wanted to leave this here in case I do die soon. The hardest symptoms to deal with are the depression and anxiety. But the depression I have experienced is absolutely black. I thought I knew what depression was before but I didn’t know and I think very few people do know. It is difficult just to look at an object because there’s nothing in the object. Usually there are emotions and implications and ideas but you don’t know there can be nothing until you experience nothing. And that is such a huge lesson is that you are experiencing intense emotions all the time but you just don’t realize it until they are gone. When you sit back on the couch and have a feeling like you want to continue to exist, this is actually an intense form of contentment because it’s absence is an intense form of depression/anxiety. I am now to see these things clearly now because due to the nature of my disease the depression/anxiety come and go full force many times per day. And this is the ultimate lesson that I want to spread: nothing is depressing or sad. There is a dial in the brain that makes you content or depressed and the position of this dial is purely and completely independent of everything else including the circumstances of your life. There is a correlation between your circumstances and your mood but my point is that I know this absolutely to be true: if you could just stick that dial to contentment then everything would be awesome and it wouldn’t impair your ability to live your life fully or grieve properly or whatever. People think that depression is a necessary part of life. This is completely wrong and you could never know it unless you have experienced the literal insanity that I have experienced

Ever hear of the "Living Well with Schizophrenia" [1] channel on YouTube? Lauren there's got schizoaffective disorder too. She really helped a friend of mine feel less alone with her own schizophrenia.

1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCENqBB_xNax3mLX_WGLf2Lg

Please talk to someone about this, friend, parent, doctor. Consider all options including psilocybin.

> during pandemic

The lockdowns are what has caused soaring mental health issues across whole sections of the population.

Not just lockdowns, but the cancellation of physical activity programs. This has disproportionately affected lower-income populations as well. Many of the community and activity centers have closed throughout the pandemic, while wealthier private programs have remained open.

Cherchez les unjustifiéd lockdowns, cher Talleyrand!

Is this a reference to the quote "cherchez la femme" being attributed to Talleyrand? I found that claim here[0], but it doesn't seem to be correct; this source[1] attributes it to Dumas. Talleyrand may have said « La politique, c’est les femmes » [2] but I couldn't find a clear source for that either.

[0] https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/cherchez_la_femme#%C3%89tymol...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherchez_la_femme#Origin_of_th...

[2] https://www.20minutes.fr/politique/1705183-20151008-anne-gra...

Well, these kids have basically been grounded for 2 years with no end in sight (lack of hope), and probably feel that it's BS or they're being gaslit given that the risks for their age group are low. Especially since their age group is prone to risk taking and have higher risk activities like learning to drive.

Imagine growing up in a war zone or Palestine or something like that.

In a report published in July 2020, the British government's SAGE group predicted that lockdowns and social distancing would result in more suicides with the following reasoning[1]:

> The lockdown is likely to impact most determinants of good mental health, such as engagement in usual activities, social interactions, physical exercise, and financial stability. A Lancet study of the psychological impacts of quarantines, reviewing 24 academic papers, found that quarantined individuals experience severe psychological symptoms including post-traumatic stress, confusion, and anger. Stressors included longer quarantine duration, infection fears, frustration, boredom, inadequate supplies, inadequate information, financial loss, and stigma. The review showed that most of the effects come from a restriction of liberty through stricter quarantine measures, and that voluntary quarantine is associated with less distress and fewer long-term complications.

[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

I feel that report is way too old to be relevant today.

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