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Comment by BryantD | Hacker News Reader

That’s interesting data. I wonder: is there any possibility that part of the change is because we’re telling kids that it’s okay to admit to depression? I.e., are we just reporting more accurately now?

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That also raises the question of whether increased focus on these issues can negatively affect at least a subset of people.

We know that severe mental (and even physical) symptoms can "spread" in social groups (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness), particularly among young women who are now experiencing the sharpest rises in mental illness. There is also strong evidence that affective states (e.g. happiness or depression) spread socially, with even next-door neighbors of depressed people being significantly more likely to be depressed than those on the same block but not next-door (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830455/).

While the TikTok Tourette's phenomenon is clearly an extreme example, it seems possible that something similar could be happening to kids constantly hearing about anxiety and depressive disorders as an immutable trait that everyone around them seems to have.

There is also a feedback cycle - people open up about it more, reach a larger audience who sees this modeled/discussed, making it more likely for them to A) be aware in their own life and B) mirror and amplify.

Bad metaphor - if we think of ideas spreading between people like neurons, we have increased the interconnectedness (social reach) and decreased the activation energy (removed stigma/provided language/triggered introspection).

Yeah, this doesn’t seem totally implausible, although postulating it doesn’t mean it’s happening. More generally, there’s no doubt that we’ve vastly increased communication bandwidth and that could easily have effects. For a few years now I’ve been thinking about gatekeepers in old media as damping rods that prevented new ideas from spreading quickly. There are both positive and negative ramifications to removing those damping rods.

It is kind of depressing to realize we all inevitably will die, our world will turn to dust, the sun will expire and everything will freeze into a profound and eternal coldness. So, maybe it's Wikipedia's fault?[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_univers...

The authors address that by looking at hospitalizations for self harm.

That’s a powerful part of the narrative for sure. But … ugh, I need to be less lazy and dig into the supporting material, actually, some of my questions may be answered there.

The big one is “does that mean there’s more self-harm, or does that mean parents are more willing to ask for emergency help?”

If the latter then it'd affect boys and girls equally. The simplest explanation here is likely the right one i.e. the increase in mental disorders is real.

I don’t think that’s true at all. There are real differences between how we treat men and women. And the actual effect we’re seeing isn’t even addressed — if it’s because college campuses won’t tolerate dissent, why wouldn’t that affect men?

Yes, women are treated much better in general especially at that age. Not sure where you got the college campus thing. The article is about teenagers. They mostly haven't gone to college yet.

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