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2022-07-30 -Signs, Portents, and the Weather-

[Spectator] The youth aren’t doing well — not in America, at least. Even before Covid, experts were ringing the alarm bells about a decade-or-so-long trend of American teens and tweens experiencing a steady uptick in anxiety, depression and self-harm symptoms.

Late last year, US surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy published an official advisory attempting to raise awareness of this issue. As the accompanying press release explained, "from 2009 to 2019, the share of high school students who reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40 percent, to more than one in three students. Suicidal behaviors among high school students also increased during the decade preceding Covid, with 19 percent seriously considering attempting suicide, a 36 percent increase from 2009 to 2019, and about 16 percent having made a suicide plan in the prior year, a 44 percent increase from 2009 to 2019." Murthy described the situation as a "dual crisis" — the terrible impact of Covid layered atop an already dire youth-mental-health landscape.

The most viscerally upsetting presentation of the stats I’ve seen is a graphic representation of CDC data for emergency room visits for self-inflicted injuries among 10- to 19-year-olds. It shows a truly jarring and sudden uptick that started in 2009 — a terrifyingly steep line shooting up toward the heavens.

Both sexes are suffering, but the pain hasn’t been distributed equally between them. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has written at length about this phenomenon, put it in testimony he submitted to a congressional subcommittee, "the base rate for mood disorders is always higher for girls than boys, particularly after puberty, which means that a doubling of the rate produces far more additional sick girls than boys... [and] there are some disorders and age groups for which girls are up far more, especially for self-harm, which is a much more common way of manifesting anxiety in girls than in boys."

What’s going on, exactly? The short answer is that no one knows for sure. One possibility is that the 2008 financial crisis, a genuinely world-historical event, had some medium- and long-term effects. Think of the millions of kids raised in households hit with a sudden jolt of genuine, novel precarity — whether from a home foreclosure forcing a move, a parent losing a job or other factors — and then having to live with the aftermath. Researchers have believed for a long time that traumatic events suffered at a young age have a particularly brutal impact on young people’s wellbeing. It makes sound theoretical sense that the recession would leave an impact on the children hit hardest by it, and that the effects would linger for years. (Of course it left an impact on adults as well — by one 2013 estimate published in the British Medical Journal, the largest suicide rate increase in the Americas occurred among men aged 45-64, a group hard hit by layoffs and foreclosures.)

And not long after the recession, another world-historical development: the explosive rise of social media on mobile devices. Facebook accessed via a shared clunker of a desktop computer in the family room on dial-up is one thing; Facebook on a smartphone is quite another. Starting around 2010, teenagers were able to mainline information about their classmates, and to communicate with them 24/7, in a manner never before possible.

Posted by M. Murcek 2022-07-30 10:32|| || Front Page|| [11134 views ] Top

#1 maybe it's the parents coddling the shit out of them and trying to be their friends. I have 2 at this age, 1 pays all his own bills and works all the time. The other is starting UGA this year while working on getting a real estate license in the mean time. Pay attention to what your kids are doing instead of making fucking tik tok vids with them.

Posted by Chris 2022-07-30 15:49|| 2022-07-30 15:49|| Front Page Top

#2 Maybe the white ones are depressed because they are being told they are the cause of all of the worlds problems. The kids of color are depressed because they are being told everything is rigged against them.

Posted by ruprecht 2022-07-30 16:37|| 2022-07-30 16:37|| Front Page Top

#3 2009 is when Barack Obama moved into the White House... and political correctness exploded.

I don’t see why the recession should have anything to do with it — we’ve had recessions before without it destroying the kids who grew up during it.

Posted by trailing wife 2022-07-30 23:17|| 2022-07-30 23:17|| Front Page Top

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