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US Youth Have Serious Mental Health Issues
Ant writes "Google News carries a Canadian Press report that 'a new study has found that five times as many high school and college students in the United States are dealing with anxiety and other mental health issues than youth of the same age who were studied in the Great Depression era. ... Pulling together the data for the study was no small task. Led by [San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge], researchers at five universities analyzed the responses of 77,576 high school or college students who, from 1938 through 2007, took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI. The results will be published in a future issue of the Clinical Psychology Review. Overall, an average of five times as many students in 2007 surpassed thresholds in one or more mental health categories, compared with those who did so in 1938. A few individual categories increased at an even greater rate — with six times as many scoring high in two areas: 'hypomania,' a measure of anxiety and unrealistic optimism (from 5 per cent of students in 1938 to 31 per cent in 2007), and depression (from 1 per cent to 6 per cent).'"
Stop being a bunch of wussies!
Seriously, kids today have to wear helmets just to ride a bike, have some pediatrician putting them on powerful Autism medication if they don't start talking at just the right time, are diagnosed with Asperger's the second they show the least bit of shyness, are taught by teachers who scream "AHDHD--Drug him up!" the first time they act out in class, and come home to parents who think that a child molester is hanging out on ever street corner just waiting to kidnap their kid. *They're* not the ones who are screwed up, it's the adults around them that are screwed up.
JUST LET THEM BE KIDS, for Christ sake! Stop acting like there is something wrong with them because they're not perfect, or act differently than you expect, or make stupid mistakes. That's what makes them kids. Stop cocooning them like they're delicate eggs who will crack at the slightest risk or challenge. And, above all, stop drugging them up. A kid shouldn't be taking medication for anything less than a serious physical problem. You don't give a kid powerful psychotropic drugs just because they're rebellious or shy. They'll have plenty of time to dope themselves into a stupor and cry at a psychologist's office when they're adults.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Not every American boy or girl read Slashdot!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
They're calling you crazy. Are you going to let them get away with that?
I'd say a majority of adults I've met don't exactly lead healthy balanced lives either. Most of the stress and anxiety that I see in people I meet is due to their inability to deal with issues and conflicts in their every day lives in a logically and emotionally balanced way (intentionality).
A lot of people spend their entire lives without ever understanding the idea of being intentional, instead of a victim to what appears to be a random array of emotions.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
People are suffering from information and media overload...no down time for the brain. The whole GIGO business.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Back when women stayed in the kitchen, this kind of thing never happened!!
Seriously though, I'd like to see what type of lifestyle changes people think contributed to this. Is it the internet porn? Cell phone text messaging? Cell phone cameras in bathrooms? Air conditioning? What?
unrealistic optimism
Isn't that just "The American Dream"?
i'll take that over 1989 - 1992 when i went to high school. we were told the US was screwed, the japaneese were taking over, and we would never be able to find a job. for all the good memories of the 1990's, i don't think it was as good as people remember. high interest rates, higher average unemployment than this decade, crappy RE market made it hard to sell property.
With myself (sample size of one) I find that I have a near constant level of neurosis (which does thankfully decline overall as I get older). When things are going badly in some area, I can direct my dwelling towards real anxieties that actually exist. Dealing with relationship, earning a buck, dealing with family etc. When everything is going well I find some new unrealistic area to direct those anxieties.
I suspect in the good old days, people were too busy trying to feed themselves to worry about needless shit. In this age of relative abundance and leisure time, we have much more time to devote to our neurotic navel gazing. And our self survey results reflect that.
Related to Hypomania the children of the great depression certainly were not very optimistic about anything. The numbers of course are skewed by the time frame of the studies. I'm sure the numbers wouldn't be that remarkably different from the mid 80's if not even improved to a degree.
Well, what do they expect when they remove all competition from a kid's life? I've seen parents that refuse to let their kids participate in anything competitive, for fear that if they should lose their child's dreams will be permanently shattered. All this leads to is the kid thinking they really can do anything, when the actual fact is that everyone has limitations in some form, and in a competitive world, sometimes you lose. I assume this is what generates the majority of this "unrealistic optimism". Coddling children and not allowing them to experience real situations will not prepare them for the real world.
today is spelling optional day.
Though the study, released Monday, does not provide a definitive correlation, Twenge and mental health professionals speculate that a popular culture increasingly focused on the external - from wealth to looks and status - has contributed to the uptick in mental health issues.
And also:
The study is not without its skeptics, among them Richard Shadick, a psychologist who directs the counsellingcentre at Pace University in New York. He says, for instance, that the sample data weren't necessarily representative of all college students. (Many who answered the MMPI questionnaire were students in introductory psychology courses at four-year institutions.)
I have a cute anecdote about a friend who graduated with a psychology degree and left her job as an assistant to become a grade school teacher because most of the psychologists at the Manhattan practice had more psychological problems than their patients.
Emphasis mine. Now, another interesting thing about Jean Twenge is that the books she writes aren't universally accepted by her peers:
"Generation Me" inspired a slew of articles in the popular press with headlines like "It’s all about me," "Superflagilistic, Extra Egotistic" and "Big Babies: Think the Boomers are self-absorbed? Wait until you meet their kids."
Ms. Twenge is working on another book with W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, this one tentatively called "The Narcissism Epidemic."
However, some scholars argue that a spike in selfishness among young people is, like the story of Narcissus, a myth.
"It’s like a cottage industry of putting them down and complaining about them and whining about why they don’t grow up," said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist, referring to young Americans. Mr. Arnett, the author of "Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens through the Twenties" (2004, Oxford University Press), has written a critique of Ms. Twenge’s book, which is to be published in the American Journal of Psychology.
Granted you could claim that this is just one example of two camps infighting in a field that plagues even physics and hard sciences but I think it's important to realize that this study might be a little self serving. Personally I share two concerns. The first being similar to Shadick's in that I'm not sure how these two studies were normalized samples and the second questioning if we have any idea what the 'norm' is for these 'diseases.' How subjective is this test and would a variance of 1% to 6% for depression be unrealistic if we knew that it's been as high as 10% at other points in time between 1938 and 2007?
... but sometimes I encounter a youth who says, "My boyfriend just broke up with me and now I sit in my room and listen to depressing music." And they (or their over protective parents) think they need medication for that. They don't. Sounds to me like they need to be picking rock and bailing hay to help take their mind off that. We're overmedicated as it is. If Ms. Twenge continues to push this idea it might just get worse. How many people read news of this study and though "maybe my kid needs to see a psychologist for depression?" It's hard to look past this and assume the motives for this study are pure.
The curmudgeon in me wants to chalk this up to kids having it too good these days. No polio to worry about, no eight hour shifts to support the family and more information swarming them. A lot of today's youth have the luxury of being diagnosed with hypomania. Now I know that there are serious cases of depression and always have been
My work here is dung.
from wikipedia
"Classic symptoms of hypomania include mild euphoria, a flood of ideas, endless energy, and a desire and drive for success."
I'd attribute that to pharm parties, adderall and redbull.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
"anxiety and unrealistic optimism"
Congrats, psychologists. You've just defined the modern teenager.
FTFA:
Experts say such high expectations are a recipe for disappointment. Meanwhile, they also note some well-meaning but overprotective parents have left their children with few real-world coping skills, whether that means doing their own budget or confronting professors on their own.
So by bringing up our kids like wusses, we're creating wusses. That's not to say we need to go back to beating them "spare the rod spoil the child" BS, but giving them healthy limits and letting them screw up and pay the consequences.
That's were modern parents fail: they're either too strict and pushy or they're overly permissive and rescue the kid whenever they screw-up - even if it means getting them out of jail.
The above, of course, is in general. There are some wonderful parents out there.
Children today are encouraged to speak their feelings, to elaborate on their dreams and their worries, the technology and culture to do so are omnipresent.
Women didn't suddenly develop personal politics the instant the 19th amendment was passed, they were simply more allowed to exercise it.
Children are more deep, complex, disturbed, ADD, Autistic, sexual, etc etc, because they are allowed to communicate in a more meaningful way than they were before.
In a "Don't speak unless spoken to" culture, it takes a fool to wonder why nobody knew what children were thinking.
American youth today have it very easy.
When I grew up in Hungary in the 1950s, life was somewhat difficult. My family was lucky, as my father was a supervisor at a washing machine factory, and my mother was lucky to have a job as a seamstress. We at least had food, and did not go hungry like so many of our neighbors!
We had one neighbor, Piotr, who had several children. One of them died just after birth, and another drowned. His three remaining children grew to be adults. But when they were young, old Piotr did not have enough food to feed his entire family! He would provide the best nourishment to his children and wife, while during tough times he would eat grass, paper and sawdust.
But let me tell you, what the children ate was not so good compared to today's food! The bread, it was almost always stale. So it was used in horrid stews of left over meat and dirty water. On rare occasion there was chocolate (maybe once or twice a year). There were no Coca Colas! There were no potato chips! There were no McDonalds or Burger Kings!
When you have not any food, then social pressures become quite irrelevant. Success becomes defined by the meager foodstuffs in your pantry, not by the newness of your cellular telephone or the shine of your gold ganger jewelery or the brand name shirt with a stupid logo on it.
Between getting laid off then working a contract plus overtime with no benefits (most importaintly health insurance) and taking two code project heavy graduate classes my sanity has been on edge lately.
There is a lot of stress when you are competing to work towards the top levels of your fiel as you have to work very hard or be very smart to be noticed among a large group of very smart people.
I've read that there is less stress when you are just working what ever odd jobs come your way instead of pushing to be at a higher level. Is this true or are these articles (and as a result now me) talking out of their a$$.
(I am probably middle or upper middle class)
The original MMPI was developed in the 30's based on people in Minnesota who had psychological problems. Is the comparison even valid due to the present ways of thinking, greater blending of cultures, etc.?
This reminds me of some comments I've seen old people make. That things were better in the '50s because people didn't have "these problems" with mental health, minorities and whatnot. And how they act as if homosexuality was something invented in the '80s or '90s to shock and offend them. Forgetting or course that many of the mental health problems existed but were classified as demonic possession or something stupid, and people were generally less likely to seek assistance because of both societal disapproval, and lack of knowledge on their part. Also, obviously, so called "problems" like homosexuality have existed forever, it's only in recent decades that society has become tolerant enough that some people are no longer hiding it.
I didn't read the article and am in no way commenting on it. The writeup and headline just reminded me of my grandmother's husband.
I know that this data spanned several decades, but one has to wonder what the impact of "teen angst", complete with its own social class (Jock, Geek, "Emo") has now, against a survey like this?
Yes, large amounts of data through several decades is nice, but when it's now "popular" to act like a Tim Burton character or a "death for true love" torn "Vampire", I can't help but take this data with a grain of salt.
I'm sure that the increase in number of youth diagnosed with serious mental health issues has absolutely nothing to do with Big Pharma selling drugs that can cure any disease. Well, treat any disease. There's no money to be made in curing diseases, you want something like a nice vague mental disorder - with a completely subjective diagnosis - which you can sell pills to treat to people for the rest of their lives.
Welcome to the year 2000 (er, 2010) and meet your new friend Information Anxiety. I'm 30 years old and I feel it. I constantly feel like I need to keep up with news, this and that, hobbies and interests that are fueled by easy access to information on the internet, social networking, friends, internet friends, real life friends that I only really see on the internet these days. Now compound all of that into a teenager's mind along with high school pressures, school work, trying to find themselves, hormones and being awkward, the opposite sex (or even harder yet, maybe the same sex), etc.
100 years ago, our main concerns were food, shelter, and family. These are second thoughts for many these days. I recently quit social networking for half a year and it was one of the best things I've ever done for myself.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I think another weakness of this article is the fact that reporting is *much* better now than it was in the 30's. Like how the autism rates are shooting up. More and better reporting, not more afflicted people.
Life isn't very mentally healthy, in general.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Let's see; when you give kids a trophy for just showing up to the game, and high school kids make 'A' grades for minimal effort... kids today are conditioned to believe that life is easy, and they are 'super-duper'. This is the post accomplishment era we live in. Their actual test scores are among the lowest of civilized nations, yet their confidence levels are among the highest. What does this tell us? They don't know anything but they FEEL really good about it. This is what we get when the school system focuses on the importance of feeling rather than the importance of achieving. When kids discover that the real world doesn't care how you FEEL, it is rather anxiety inducing. The employer stance has necessarily become one of: I DON'T CARE how you feel, can you do the job or not?" Pay is based upon accomplishment and achievement, not on feelings.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Does anybody have the numbers for EU and Asia? For some reason I'm not seeing the same stories here in the EU. Personally I think that in the US there is a real drive to get everybody who shows a bit of a problem directly on heavy medication instead of dealing with it while they grow up.
When poorer kids in the 1930's started having problems in school, they were labeled as "stupid" or "lazy", given D's and F's, and that was it. Now, a school counselor is brought in and a much more specific and medically accurate label for their problem and recommend a treatment for them.
For wealthier kids, it seems to be partially a way of ensuring that their kid does well in school and other activities. A lot of these parents are going to start thinking something is medically wrong if the kid's grades start slipping into the B-/C range, and will find a counselor who will tell them just that and create a treatment. A diagnosed mental illness can turn a C student into a B+/A student due to extra time on exams, special help on projects, and so forth, as well as drugs that improve concentration (among other things).
The upside of this pattern is that more kids who do have real mental illnesses are getting treated properly and are able to handle their schoolwork better, rather than being simply dismissed as bad students. The downside is that you now have a large population of kids (and adults for that matter) who are wandering around drugged and a much narrower understanding of what behavior is "normal" enough to be *not* indicative of a mental illness.
I am officially gone from
Newsflash, when starvation is a concern then self-actualization and minor mental/behavioural issues are less of a concern.
The title should have read:
US Adults Have Serious Mental Health Issues and Poor Parenting Skills
Correlate the results against cheese consumption. No really!
Cheese is mostly the protein casein. And that is molecularly similar to... wait for it... morphine. As is gluten. So people are getting low level opiate hits when they eat cheese or wheat. There are stories of a gluten free, casein free diet helping people diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Cheese was pretty rare in the American diet in the 20s. But Velveeta introduced a shelf stable, consistent 'cheese' and made in-roads into the American diet. As refrigeration became more common, people started trying more kinds of cheese. Throw in a big advertizing budget and some cozy ties with the government, and cheese has been on the rise for years. I read the history of cheese in an "Invention and Technology" article a while back.
We just now have entire industries backed by science to prove it! Haha!
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
dealt with things like world war i, world war ii, the bubonic plague, the american revolution... etc.
all with less media resources, lower quality nutrition (we don't have lower quality nutrition these days, we have TOO MUCH nutrition), a worse set of ideologies, lower socioeconomic status, etc.
whatever stresses today's youth are going through, its fucking easy in comparison stresses previous generations have faced
get over it, grow the fuck up. sorry you're daily video game hours or facebook/ twitter diddling hours has been reduced. i think you'll find the ability to deal somewhere deep in your rich bounty of character. pffffffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'd agree, although the excessive narcissism is probably the more significant root cause.
Since the 1960s (Surprised? No.) the emphasis on social promotion, 'feeling good about yourself', rewards for non-achievement, and a slippery sort of moral relativism all have combined to leave our children emotionally retarded, and frankly incapable of dealing with reality.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and evolution is fucking painful. Deadly, in fact. Remove the pain from growing up, and you end up with emotionally undeveloped people, with no ability to cope with hardship, no capacity to comprehend the shitty things life is going to inevitably hand them, and (seemingly) very little resilience to survive.
Go back and read Generation X. His book describes the glimmerings of the future. I'm 42 - a real GenX'er (turned 13 in 1980, graduated from college in 1990), and I see the beginnings of it in myself and my demographic. Lack of ambition, ennui, a juvenile inability to focus, as well as a difficulty being happy with much of anything. I'd attribute it in myself to a lack of hardship and challenge, and believe me it's a bastard to cope with on a day to day basis.
And yes, I'm aware that I'm essentially yelling "Get off my lawn!" but when I look at teens today, it's terrifying how basically ignorant they are, and how amazingly short their attention spans are. They have a facility with electronics that amazes me, and I thought myself a fairly gadget-oriented guy. I regard them as "ignorant" because they don't know basic facts of geography, history, or culture - but then if one is permanently connected (as this twittering generation pretty much assumes) does one really need to store facts in their wetware? I think its necessary to have a basis of knowledge to understand the things going on around us, and to be usefully participatory adults, but then I'm old, I guess.
Oh, by the way, ROCK THE VOTE!! Ha ha ha /cry. And we thought we're screwed already....
-Styopa
It is spelled percent not "per cent".
are modern ailments
when you are deeply involved in making sure you simply have a meal to eat, you don't have the opportunity to dwell on the absence of a problem producing anxiety about having an absence of a problem
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...what about the euthanasia?
The stuff I quoted - today we have these what I call "meta-diagnoses". Some people might actually medically suffer from these, but they are also slapped around negligently with the basic message "something's wrong in you". It's increasingly hard to distinguish whether they really mean anything or not.
Same thing with the anti-depressants which are distributed like candy. Of course now that we've begun to call mental illness a "disease" it works great for the pharmaceutical companies to sell their crap. Medication for a disease, right. But mostly it's just a wrecked mental state, how can you call that disease?
Kids who were still in school or College during the depression were doing pretty fucking well. It typically meant there parents still had some kind of money, or it meant that there parent didn't need their help scraping together food money.
You mad
For the record, ADHD is aneurodevelopmental disorder. It can certainly _cause_ many mental health issues if left undiagnosed and untreated
Treatment, yes; medication, not immediately. I read grandparent as implying only that parents and teachers shouldn't knee-jerk to get a psychiatrist to prescribe controlled stimulants before trying other therapies. For example, failure to concentrate in school could come from not being able to read what the teacher is writing on the whiteboard.
I personally blame the self-esteem movement which encouraged the children of the 80's and 90's to feel invincible and that we hold the ability to do anything. This can be VERY overwhelming. On the other hand, a child, that grows up only knowing the career that his mother/father laid out for them, will be more content have no reason to set him/herself up for failure. Is happiness really worth the innovation? I think so. It's a pain of life that everyone has to go through eventually. If you can handle anxiety and depression, then how do you expect to leave college/high school?
Secondly, I also blame the public school system. Like always. Anyway, The United States public school system is built to be very broad and universal. Cookie cutter education. Meanwhile in Germany, students are tested in the 4th grade in order to decide, which type of career they would like to have. At the age of 9 or 10 they are already planning out their lives, without anxiety. This sets them on a track until they reach Secondary Education, which is separated into 4 different types of schools(Hauptschule, Realschule, Gesamtschule, and Gymnasium). Each with a different path. Hauptschule is considered the least academic, which you graduate in 9th grade. The Realschule requires a certain level of academic success, but only lasts until 10th grade. The Gesamtschule is considered to be situated between Hauptschule and Realschule, it requires no level, but can lead to college and the length of time varies. The Gymnasium is considered the high level education that precedes the University. It heavly prepares you for university, while also requiring certain academic marks to gain entry. It lasts until 13th grade, but can be cut short. Each level of school has a different diploma or Abschluss. Also, if a student finishes Gymnasium and passes his/her exit exam(Abitur), (s)he will be automatically accepted to any university at the cost of the government. To receive Abitur is a big accomplishment, which can only be compared to the International Baccalaureate Program.
This means that you could be 18 with 2 years of work experience already on your belt, while here in the states we are pressured to attend college. The university is where everyone is flocking. It's turning more into Baby Sitting than education. The University is miserable. It requires you to attend a class that you teaches you how to use charts. And they will label a business class. Really? I felt like I was in elementary school looking at the times tables. I was able to obtain a full-time career without a degree in the field that I love. I am a software developer. With maybe 2 years of college. And everything I learned there was practically useless. Even the classes that I loved are not helping me now. Currently, I am a PHP/MySQL developer, but my school only offers some simple database classes that I already learned in High School. Don't even try and find a PHP programming class.
...of how Obama got into the white house.
Rest comfortably tonight folks - with 1 eye open if you have a teenager in the house.
An interesting article from The Atlantic discusses a new view of children with genetic dispositions to "flawed" personality traits, such as ADHD. Much of it is based on a long-term study of a captive colony of rhesus monkeys.
In the barest of nutshells: while many children are like dandelions, and could survive and even prosper in any environment (poor, lousy parents, bad schools, etc.), others are like orchids. Raised in the wrong environment they become screw-ups. Raised in the right environment they thrive, and the traits that are considered flaws become strengths, even allowing them success beyond their dandelion brethren.
A good read even if you think they're wrong. One nice takeaway from the rhesus monkey study: in the long run, bullies never win.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Until the FDA is publicly funded again, the pharmaceutical industry will continue to abuse the entire medical industry.
For the first 86 years of FDA's existence, from 1906-1992, all of FDA's funding came through the U.S. Treasury. In other words, everyone -- industry, people -- paid their taxes, and FDA got appropriations out of the budget.
Starting in 1992, unfortunately, a law was passed that said for a large proportion of the work done by the FDA on new drug applications, the money's going to come directly, quid pro quo, from the industry. If they want a drug reviewed, they pay directly to the FDA to have the drug reviewed.
-Sidney Wolfe, Director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group
source
Perhaps if parents took the time to PARENT, got their kids off the venti mocha-latte-quad-shot-whipped-lookatmeI'msocool drinks, made them put down the cell phones and television, and taught them how to live like real actual people in the real actual world, this wouldn't be an issue.
No shit they have unrealistic optimism! In a world where you can't fail, where it's everyone else's responsibility to prop you up and deal with your shit, you are probably the most optimistic motherfucker on the planet! The problem is once it becomes everyone else's responsibility, it becomes nobody's responsibility, and we're left with a bunch of dysfunctional retards sitting there whining because mommy and daddy can't give them their lattes and tell them it's going to be OK.
These kids don't have anxiety, they have a lack of understanding of life. They're freaked out over what is quite honestly stupid, piddly things because they're not allowed to experience failure anymore. The answer, according to a bunch of "experts", is to drug them up so they stop caring about it and go back to being irrelevant little twats.
I've noticed that often children suffer at the hand of their parent projecting things that happened (or didn't happen) to them when they were growing up onto the child.
* Pageant parents
* Religious or atheistic fanaticism
* Overly protective parents
* Parents who don't discipline
* Parents who insist on treating their children the same as adults
* Overly pushy with sports/music/school (or any other subject)
* etc. etc. etc.
I've found that I've had to stop myself sometimes from projecting onto my own kids and remind myself that while I've had both positive experiences I want (and should) share/teach to my children and negative experiences I don't want them to have, I have to remember that they have their own personalities and desires and that that is what I should be fostering, not my own.
I bit that often if you sat down and talked with parents who go to extremes in parenting, the root of the problem could be found in something that happened or didn't happen to them in their childhood. Of course, there are kids who really are mentally ill and do need help. But that is a decision meant solely for a trained, competent medical physician, the parents, and the child.... NOT teachers who simply want a classroom that is easier to deal with.
On that note, if I have a teacher of my children come and tell me they have a mental disorder, I'll thank them for their feedback but then ask them to present their degree in medicine. When they can't I'll politely tell them to keep their mouth shut unless they are qualified to make such a diagnosis.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
neo-fascism at work, besides being screwed by own government now becoming cows of the farma-corporate - between others - that's the price you pay for living the brain-washing dream of the american life,
they wanted you as oxes - now they have you.
If you want more hardship in your life, go find it. Go join the army or something.
I consider my 'laziness' to be an adult realization that the 'go go go work till you drop' culture in this country is poisonous.
Blar.
I'm guessing spelling class.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
A lot of people here seem to be of the opinion that mental illness is something that is simply being overdiagnosed; people can "get over it," that medications are evil, and that kids should be kids. Obviously, these people have never been mentally ill.
Sure, it is true that today's kids' lives are nothing like the brutal, short, backbreaking existences that were lived by our predecessors, who in 1850 worked over 60 hours a week and barely managed to stay alive for 30 or 40 years. On the other hand, if you've ever had a manic or hypomanic episode, you will know that mania is not a positive state of mind. Mania is one of the worst possible states of existing, only barely better than death and far worse than depression. Imagine not being able to keep a thought in your head for more than 1 second at a time. Imagine how, one day you can go from being considered for a promotion at your office to being fired a month later because you can no longer comprehend programming concepts or remember what was going on a few minutes ago. Imagine it becoming impossible to function with people because you have lost the ability to determine what is the appropriate thing to say in social situations, and so as a result you say nothing.
Most importantly of all, imagine that nobody believes that anything is wrong, that doctor after doctor can't come up with any diagnosis for years, and when you try to get help for yourself people hang up on you because you can't follow the conversation to understand what's being talked about. Imagine that sometimes you are so unable to think that you have trouble determining whether someone is speaking to you or not. Imagine that the rest of the world just keeps going on while you see no reason to keep living through such hell if nobody can figure out what's wrong with you. So you just sit in front of the TV night after night while the images go by too fast to process. Mania is perhaps the most depressing thing that one can experience. This explanation of mania being a sense of extreme well-being is wrong and needs to be better communicated in the mainstream sources, who tend to simplify these diseases as some kind of "excess happiness." There is no happiness in mania.
Of course there is an increase in the incidence of these diseases among people living today. In the past, why would someone want to continue living if their new life was as a stupid and uncontrollable shell of their former selves? The only solution back then was suicide. While suicide is not a good choice today because there are many treatments available, it may be shocking to hear that death certainly would be better than living like that with no hope for a cure. Is it so far-fetched to say that the diseases were less widespread because people culled themselves?
Stating that kids should go off drugs because of the "evil pharmaceutical companies" is naive. The scientific literature does not adequately describe these diseases, and probably never could. Everyone has felt pain, so it's easy to describe the treatment for a headache. But while there are some very smart people here, those who are not ill are simply not able to comprehend what mental illness really is, and should not be offering comments about whether suffers should undergo treatment.
So what if kids have more disorders now? Is this a bad thing? Seems to me like they'll just be more interesting people than old farts from the 50s who always talk about the "good old days."
Pay is based on accomplishment and achievements...
No, it is not.
My investment banker counterpart earns about twice what an engineer does, and does even less work. True, the world does not care about your feelings, but the salary you receive is largely dependent on:
The first is usually a matter of education, the second, largely a matter of confidence.
One thing that negotiating a higher salary has taught me is that companies will always attempt to hire at the lowest possible salary. Being able to do a job 10 times better than the other guy doesn't mean a thing (wrt salary) if you don't exhibit confidence during the interview. Confidence goes a long way toward convincing an employer that you are worth more than the average guy.
I realize people *should* be paid in proportion to their ability and work ethic, but that's not how the real world works.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I've seen claims that mothers who have a Caesarean section give birth to kids who don' have the ability to handle stress. The theory goes something like: the final pains labor trigger the a release of hormones into the fetus that then give the child the ability to deal with stress. I would also assume that a woman too afraid to go natural might also have a genetic predisposition of an inability to handle stress, but that is my own conjecture.
Unfortunately all the articles I found to link to are behind a paywall. I did however find this about a possible asthma link
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
There have been a lot of mental diseases invented between 1938 and now.
My non professional opinion is that they are mostly all the same disease. It's called "the human condition".
Life sucks and everyone is different. When a common coping mechanism, which is viewed as negative, is found in lots of people BINGO! New disease, new drug created to treat it, $$$$! This is not exactly a good thing unless you own a drug company or get paid $200 an hour to be their friend.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Three years ago I would have had the same opinions on the topic as many others on this site. All spouting off with no personal experience. Until you live it like I have you know absolutely nothing about what it is like dealing with a child with mental health issues.
I can't explain why my 12 year old became anxiety-ridden, depressed, self-destructive, possibly even suicidal. I can tell you it was a horrible couple of years filled with a lot of experiences I thought would never happen to me and my family. There were times I thought my wife would lose it from the stress.
Whatever it was, he seems to be mostly past it now that he is close to 15. He's back in regular school, and is as pleasant as a typical teen. I hope he stays that way. But I've learned that a lot of things are completely out of my control.
there are already some decent criticism of the study already here (and some not-so-decent criticism). The closest is the criticism of normalizing the data, for reporting, presumably. But it seems to me, that there is a much larger proportion of youth in high school now to take part in the study that would not have been available to take it in 1938. And I don't mean in a there-are-a-lot-more-youth-today kind of way, but rather, a greater proportion would be on the farm or taking care of the local corner store or shining shoes, perhaps, than trying to make it in an adult society that expects study, but peers expect to take it easy (and sell on the street corner?).
Now, Yale is still a very prestigious school with a great deal of competition for entry, but anxiety over a place in society must be considerably less when amassed wealth is almost required for entry.
it does make for stunning political statements when one can say that youth in the country would appear to be more anxious about the future during a time of plenty (the study is from data collected in 2007) than at the tail end of the Great Depression, at the end of the Dust Bowl era, and even if I might agree (with other slashdot intelligentsia) that the kids now have it easy and they should get off my lawn, but i don't see how their data can possibly correct the discrepancies.
As a recently licensed psychologist, I have this to offer:
First, the study primarily used the MMPI (and presumably the MMPI-2) as its basis for symptom measurement. Any reasonable clinical psychologist would not use a single measure to outline a person's psychological profile. To do so would be unethical at best. Secondly, the MMPI-2 (and its precursor) has its share of validity questions. So the MMPI(-2) does not exactly provide the most accurate representation of symptom measurement. Another nitpicky detail: the MMPI-2 has not been validated for use with individuals under the age of 18. Thus the people represented are not exactly children any more.
Second, the study used a sample that consisted primarily of college students. Now if it had used a wider sample, including those from families who cannot afford to send their children to college, I would expect that the range and severity of psychological problems would be more pronounced. I work in a clinic that works primarily with children and families in an urban area where there are chronic concerns of unemployment, community violence, and child maltreatment (i.e., sexual abuse, physical abuse, exposure to domestic violence, neglect). Granted, this is an entirely different population than what the study addressed, but the notion of telling kids that they don't have problems and should stop being wussies shows a notion of that speaker being trapped inside his/her own bubble and not realizing a much broader world where someone can have a completely different life than him/herself.
I had a stepson that was on all that ADHD krud. When we got custody the first thing I did was ... started disciplining him when he needed it.
I'm VERY surprised
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Could it be due to lack of sleep? Recent studies suggest a link. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/child_health/article6916053.ece
Overall, an average of five times as many students in 2007 surpassed thresholds in one or more mental health categories, compared with those who did so in 1938.
Did they correct for dietary changes such as massive caffeine intake, and HFCS intake causing huge blood sugar level spikes and troughs, tending to exaggerate and encourage anxiety related incidents?
Also did they correct for illegal drug use? Not so much that illegal drugs "make you crazy", but they make it more difficult for borderline people to pretend that you're not crazy, lack of inhibition, strange new motivational factors, side effects of physical or psychological addiction, etc?
Finally, in the olden days, slightly "off" people were simply locked in the attic, more or less, and would probably not have been tested, but now they'd be mainstreamed into classrooms and tested, I hope they corrected for that.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
One of the things I find most annoying about Slashdot is the knee-jerk reflex some people have to respond to any unflattering comparison of the present day to some time in the past with, "Get off my lawn!" Yet strangely, when such mockery is genuinely appropriate in response to most of the comments here, it's nowhere to be seen.
I don't know what parallel universe most of the commenters are coming from -- whether most of them are childless or just get their version of reality from FOX News, I don't know -- but the environment in which my teenager finds herself is highly competitive, not remotely cocooning or coddling, and in many ways significantly more stressful than the one I grew up in. And I don't have her on any medication.
The thing that strikes me about today's kids is how obsessively schedule-driven they are. My daughter never seems to actually stop thinking about school or what she has to do next, and most of her friends are the same way. I suspect that this is at least partly responsible for the level of anxiety and depression in kids today. Far from lacking competition and discipline, the environment in which they move seems to have a surfeit of it, at least compared to my teenage experience in the 1980's, which was notoriously manic in its time but seems comparatively relaxed today.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Recently, I've taken a trip outside of North America to Cuba. A nation that receives some really bad vibes among the American capitalists, even today. While visiting Cuba we stayed at a 5 star resort which I have to say was one of the most beautiful resorts I have ever seen. The people work hard for what they have. They live in a socialist society there where everyone contributes back to the government which is suppose to equally disperse among the nation. People have literally nothing there for the most part. It intriqued me while driving from the airport to the resort watching people in the local villages so when I arrived at the resort I walked right back off of it and walked for 6 miles and I quickly realized that this simplistic "savage" life - as one British snob blond said, was actually a life that people appeared to be happy with. Life seemed very simple but pleasant among the children, youth, and adults. People obviously strive for more and there is more in a nation where the mega corporate empire above them has put down the movements of Cuba as a movement of the enemy. While I don't agree with the socialist movement in the way it was designed in Cuba, I can agree that the hungry mothers, with little or no processions, living in grass shacks with 6 kids appear less stressed than the imperialists soccer mom with 1 kid stressing over those SUV and $1 million dollar suburb payments. We need to reach a balance in North America where the chicken tastes great, the cellphones work well, and people live a little more simpler than we have been trying to do since WWII. Make a year of military school mandatory for all children, shut down the local grocery store for a day in a normal week, provide people with access to the land like we once had, stop encouraging everyone to live in NYC, and just maybe people will realize what they already have and appreciate it a little more and stop stressing over wanting more, more, more.
As other posters have noted, current social and cultural conditions in the USA not only allow hypomania to run unchecked, but in some cases actively promote it (eg. universal self-esteem campaigns). The general assumption so far seems to be that this a negative outcome, the result of decadent living and misguided parenting. But what if it's actually advantageous?
In the past, the flighty, risk-taking behavior that characterizes the condition had clear disadvantages; eg., spend all your money, and you might starve when times get bad. But it also has clear advantages; people with lots of energy, drive, and optimism tend to be more successful in modern social/business life.
The thing that's changed is that in our current society, it's almost impossible to starve to death unless you have addictions, psychosis, or other major obstacles to normal functioning. Simply put, there's always a way to get by, *especially* if you're energetic and positively motivated. Meanwhile, the advantages associated with hypomanic personality traits are as strong as ever. I would argue that things have moved to a point where the benefits of some mild degree of hypomania outweigh the risks.
Yes, the "self-esteem brigade" may be raising intolerably flighty, frivolous young adults, but in the end that may the best thing for them. (At least until TEOTWAWKI hits, and those young whipper-snappers are the first to get eaten by the zombies ;-)
As a college age student who was raised in a family that taught the value of working hard and doing well in school (without meds or coddling, thank you very much) I have seen the progression of my generation first hand. I think that causes of depression aren't so much that we expect things to go easily (though it maybe for other peers, I can only speak for myself), but that we're being forced to grow up in a world where the emphasis seems to be on the wrong things.
High school classes are aimed at getting good grades rather than learning.
Kids aren't taught to take responsibility for their actions, so for the few that do actually take responsibility it's hard to look around and see a bunch of jerks your age effing off, getting good grades regardless but uneducated.
We're sent off to college, start degrees and, only being able to pay for so many classes, are stuck with our one option - whether or not it's actually what's right.
It seems as if no one (or the school financial/scholarship system) will let it be acceptable to take off a year to work or to do a vocational skill (like being an electrician, a plumber, etc). For some reason the emphasis is on going through college as quickly as possible and working in your field right off the bat. I understand a parent's desire for their child to succeed, but how many top-level executives do we really need if kids are fine being lower level execs?
The people who are depressed are the ones who are actually seeing the bullshit that is going on around them and are trying to be serious about their education.
That aside, college is awkward. It's a time to grow up, usually the hard way. It's just that during the time it seems like you're the only person going through it. I'd say that most people in college go through at least one depressive stage - it's just that now we have a name for it.
If people would take a moment to step back and stop obsessing over the motions, would talk (in person, please) one-on-one and had a little faith in honesty, you wouldn't need shrinks and pills, you could actually talk to a friend/mentor and put things in perspective.
issues come from thinking a lot about something and caring a lot about "it". in todays world, we are soo in tune with everything and every issue that you need to pay attention to everything you do. and mental issues stem from worrying. so this is a natural effect of what happens to a society that keeps on "trying" correcting itself, in my opinion.
also, if you think about our population and whatever topic has a bell curve of opinions, it just means that the percentages stay the same on the outside of those whom have problems, but the numbers are always increasing because our population is increasing.
They make me drowsy and hungry. I asked for medical cannabis.
Oh, the ironing. It shirts.
All rites reversed 2010
How convenient to blame it on this abstract group, "parents", when you know very well that it is people like yourself who are the cause of these disorders.
America's children are spoiled rotten. Film at 11!
TRIPLE the nightly homework assignment !
That should keep them from ipodding and texting and so on and so forth.
No wonder the former U.S.A. is behind China on university education.
Yours In Perm,
Kilgore Trout
You can't compare "polls" or "studies" from the 1930's to 2010 because definitions and attitudes have changed so dramatically during that timeframe. For Christ's sake... LABATOMIES were still a standard and mainstream mental health practice at that time! Today pretty much anyone who's down in the dumps would say they feel "depressed", and anyone who is high-strung would say they experience "anxiety". Eighty years ago, however, they would simply say they feel "sad", or "nervous". It would be far less likely for them to REPORT such common feelings, and far less likely for the medical butchers of the time to label it as mental illness unless it were truly asylum-worthy.
It's preposterous to say that depression and anxiety are more prevalent today than during the Great Depression, and the worst war the planet has ever known. The only thing more prevalent today is our willingness to label those states of mind as such.
Society has done a tremendous job in assaulting youth with actions and ideas that lead to mental illness.
For example the neighborhood school and the idea of growing up with classmates from similar backgrounds, similar religions and similar race give children a more stress free way to grow up. Cultural diversity is not good news for everyone. The degree of stress caused by busing and mixing varies with regions and customs. Just spending a couple of hours a day on a school bus is in itself enough to disrupt normal development.
Then we have insulated our kids from reality to such a degree that functioning well in the real world isn't likely to occur. As an example picture a young fellow jumping from high school into the work environment. He has no reality at all in the notion that he is viewed like a shovel. He is simply a tool to use and exploit. Yet he has stepped out of a school system which no longer allows declarations of real worth. When the worst kid in the class is defined as our last, first place, scholar reality gets shattered.
People have not been trained to apply less than social modes of thought. We know that schools are designed to push people away from education. We know that simply because that is what they actually do. That eighth grade teacher may preach the loving doctrine of keeping kids in school but the reality is that we sort them and dump them as they progress. One way to do that is to have colleges that are expensive. That fact alone is sufficient to dump half of all potential college students before they even get started. Then we have the loans available to potential college students. They are enough to insure that most who take those loans will be beaten down financially for most if not all of their lives.
To get the 30% or 40% who do drop out of school prior to college the fastest way is to teach towards the dumbest in the class. Instead of insuring that the dumb and the lazy and the misbehaved are rapidly removed from schools we push teachers to save them which translates instantly into ignoring the better students in order to meet testing standards.
By the time these kids are old enough to confront reality they are so twisted that they can not cope. The idea that society is more than willing to throw them into endless wars, work them to death or put them in deadly positions such as convenience store clerks in bad neighborhoods overwhelms them. Dope and booze will usually finish them off as anything more than redeemed wrecks who can somehow get by in low level situations until they die.
The biggest problem with the MMPI is that it is easy to abuse. The test itself is a disturbing set of True/False questions. Google MMPI to see some samples. They aren't joking, those are real questions.
One's answers are profiled against scales composed of how other groups answer the questions, including groups diagnosed with mental illnesses. A quick way to generate a scholarly article is to propose a new category, profile that group with MMPI and show statistical differences. A friend of mine did her entire dissertation on profiling gang members with the MMPI, and developing a index for one's liklihood to join a gang.
The MMPI is easy to administer, but difficult to interpret correctly. It requires trained professionals. Often novices end up over-classifying someone as mentally ill. In some states the administration of the MMPI is limited by law, since one can misuse it so easily. So while it takes a lot of training to use the MMPI correctly, it takes very little to create a pop-psychology article with MMPI results.
Given changes in society over time, the MMPI norms do shift. As a famous example, after the sexual revolution in the 70's the whole gender identification and sexual preference scales had to be completely re-worked.
Today, I know that there are people in the world who would like to kill me (Al Queda). I do hear sometimes voices in the room that only I can hear (when I'm using my cell phone). I do know more job than my boss does.(He's a people manager; I'm an IT architect). I do feel that something is going on right now that I should know about. My friends and family are often not happy with my career. (Because the job market is bad and they worry about me.)
Am I hypo-manic paranoid, with a touch of megalomania? Maybe that's just the way most people would answer a particular set MMPI questions today. We have devices to spread information much faster, and different expectations about the immediacy of knowledge than in 1938. So feeling the need for more information now is common, and not an indication of mental illness.
(And no, my bowels are not black and tarry, why do you keep asking, MMPI?)
Is all the relentless old man posturing going on. There is quite a bit of "kids these days have it so easy, back in World War I / The Depression / The Stone Age" etc. going on.
Sorry if I find it hard to believe that any number of Slashdot users actually lived through the first or second world wars, or the great depression, or any other number of extremely trying times in our countries history, most of which happened long before the average slashdot user was born.
Yes, you have a legitimate point about not treating the children like porcelain dolls, but don't act all high and mighty about it. We all read the same history textbooks / wikipedia articles you did. None of us have experienced the kind of difficulty people are referencing in this thread.
Stop trivializing the challenges and difficulties of an entire generation just for mod points. You have NO idea how these people lived, and your ridiculous posturing overt second hand information is embarassing.
Anyone who has watched Jerry Springer knows that, and you know where we got it? We inherited it from our parents.
This is just my idea why more children exhibit issues with anxiety and other mental issues.
I believe it's because of the overparenting kids have had in the last 20-30 years. Kids don't learn disappointment, they don't learn failure. We tell them that they are all special. These kids are growing up so afraid to fail and take risks that when they inevitably fail; their ego, psyche, whatever just crashes. Their just so overloaded with these emotions that would have been dealt with if they had failed before. They've grown up with their parents/government/teachers/anyone elder caring for them to the point where they can't do anything for themselves. There are lucky ones who reject this over coddling but they are the exception.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
(stuffing face with Twinkies) I donfrt haf any idea wfut your talking abouftr.
Hypomania and depression - looks like two opposite forces. Or more like two sides of the same coin. Although I live in Russia, I have a feeling this tendency apply to this country as well. What I write below is only my personal opinion on what's happening.
I think that society is dividing again, like in the Industrialization period, although this time it's not about wealth or power. It's about "spirit", if you pardon me this unscientific word. I can see two groups emerging (but it doesn't mean that these groups form all the generation).
One consists of super confident, narcissistic, healthy, social, hyper optimistic, sometimes ignorant and impudent people. In fact, optimism is their meaning of life, keep optimism at all costs. If something gives (or should give) you positive emotions - this is it, this is life. Share it with your community, the more "positiv" (Russian word) you share, the more valuable you become. If something is sad, disturbing or just complicated - filter it, censor it, ignore it or become an exile. Their motto could be: the world is yours to play, you’re the best.
The second group represents highly unconfident, depressed, unhealthy, society avoiding, sometimes violent and reluctant people. They feel they cannot live to modern standards. They think something is seriously wrong with them and they are obsessed with finding what is wrong with them instead of living. The world is hostile, they believe they have to strain themselves and plan everything ahead in order to survive. But the more they tighten their grip and the more planning they do, the less control they have, becoming like broken robots.
I have no idea what reasons might be leading to this.
I am currently studying the phenomenon of spirit possession. I know it is designated as crazy on this newsgroup but I take the risk of a least writing about it. From my readings, I would say that most young people today are likely to be owned by one or more bodies of deceased persons. The fact that religion and interest in what happens after death is rejected as a whole since the 40-50 could explain a large mass of people died since the last 15-20 years, with no or little spiritual cue, come back to haunt consciously or not the spirit of young people who are easy prey.
The solution is therapies based on hypnosis and regression.
dungeons and dragons and twilight have ruined society.
Conditions such as hypomania were poorly, if at all, defined during the great depression and diagnoses of such conditions would assumedly be relatively low as compared to today. Don't sensationalize the results, look at what context the data are in.
I think a lot of the problematic aspects of kids' lives that may be responsible for this effect come down to the fast-foodization of everything. If you define fast food as the instantaneous satisfying of urges without satisfying the underlying reasons for those urges using shit we understand to be worthless.
Constant connectedness provides the information that we crave, but so much of it and so cheaply that we don't place much value on much of it, including the stuff that actually affects us - how many people know more about international goings-on than local?
Social media sites allow us a steady supply of the gossip and egotism we crave without the meaningful social relationships that we really need. So many human relationships are now plagued by irony and an utter lack of sincerity
Hours and hours of television and movies act similarly, quenching our interest in humankind and stories, but often in a eye-candy-filled, superficial way.
Prescription and non-prescription drugs for absolutely every condition one can name, even conditions that are simply human nature.
And obviously, fast foods (including junk food) please our taste buds but offer next to nothing in terms of nutrition. The list goes on, ad nausem. Good food, good (that are ideally physically present) friends, something challenging to labour on earnestly (while improving a skill or two), and a little relaxation does miracles.
Hey mate, spare a sig?
Several factions benefit from people becoming perpetual victims of some perceived illness. First are the so-called victims themselves whom qualify for remedy programs and government disability. Second are the venders of these programs like psychiatrists and drug companies. Third are politician who leverage these slights to further these careers.
Dis-ease. You really don't get how a "wrecked mental state" would be dis-ease?
There is "powerful autism medication"? What is it and how can I get some prescribed? Funny thing is that I believe that some of the problem with today's kids is that there are far too many parents who refuse to medicate their kids. Anyone with a kid who honestly is attention deficit knows the difference between kid with and kid without medication. There are far too many kids today that go without medication causing problems. I don't think that it is so much an instance of more mental health problems today as it is the problems were there all along, but the understanding and diagnostic tools were either poor or non-existent. There is a whole lot of busybody parenting these days, and there needs to be more of the so-called "free range parent" philosophy, but I think there could be a whole lot more properly diagnosed and medicated conditions.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
The trilogy of always on instant gratification erodes young minds at an alarming rate. Turn off the electricity, take away the smart phone, plant a garden, go camping, go to the library, don't treat them like quail eggs, and your kids will rebound at a very brisk, healthy rate. Been there, done that with my kids. No more anxiety, no more cutting - presto chango.
In this day and age if somebody "important" does something out of the ordinary (Governor Blank has a taco instead of a hotdog with lunch) then within hours of the "event"
1 40% chance somebody will have cell phone footage of the "event" on Youtube within 2 hours
2 traditional media will pick it up and have "coverage" on the five o'clock news
3 by ten o'clock some outlet will have 2 talking heads analyzing his choice of toppings
4 the next week will have various segments about how unpatriotic Governor Blank is and the calls for him to be removed from office
(it used to be that even if we found out we would not care [and the truth was the hotdog guy was sick that day])
yeah being in london and having to worry which kind of irish that guy is was a bit of a bad scene
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar2.htm
"Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get" - Jerry Avins
i actually thought SARS was going to be our grim reaper on the order of bubonic plague, and was shocked and pleasantly surprised at our ability to transcend petty international squabbles and monetary concerns to nip that killer in the bud
AIDS has been a slow burn killer, but even that is manageable
the bubonic plague meanwhile, occurred in the days before international media, hygiene, modern science, etc. if the bubonic plague happened today (actually, it DOES happen today, a dozen or so cases every year), it would be nipped in the bud like SARS
what i really fear is the QUICK pandemic. the one that overwhelms our ability to isolate it and adapt to it and get ahead of it with efficient countermeasures
if physics teaches us that mother nature abhors a vacuum, biology teaches is that mother nature abhors large monoclonal populations. humanity is hugely overpopulated, and somewhere, in the stew of microbes and viruses out there, is brewing our comeuppance. could be tomorrow, could be in 50 years, but its coming: some grim reaper is going to come and swing its scythe across the world population and hit it at 10-25% dead. i really think its inevitable. biological history says so
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Divorce's are far to easy to get,we must fear the law in order to discipline our children,strangers are raising our kids because both parents MUST work to get by.Pornography/nudity is only a key touch away.Parents fear for the childrens lives so much they are not allowed outside by themselfs for fear of being taken by a child murder, Its no wonder our children are going crazy,were forcing them to be adults long before there time.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I am serious. I left the United States in my early 20's for good, and all my mental health problems started going away. I am happy, healthy, less stressed, sleeping good, eating proper food, more successful, and most importantly less paranoid about every little frigen thing around me. It has take years however to repair the damage caused by living in the U.S., but I continue to see it in Americans that leave the United States for good all the time vs. those that are just on vacation. They go through a decompression process that progressively that typically takes at least a couple of years for them to "normalize" when they are adults. When kids move out before the teenage years are over, they are well adjusted, happy, more engaged in the World around them.
American culture is really really one of the sickest cultures I have seen anywhere in the World, and most of the damage is done in the teenage years. Any parent that sends their kids to a U.S. school, should be arrested for child abuse.
Living in Chile
Several posters have pointed out that many adults are screwed up, so we shouldn't worry so much about kids. Of course, the reason adults are screwed up is because of what happened when they were children.
Also, don't tell me how your parents treated you badly in the 70s, and you're better off for it. Looking at the world around me, it's quite obvious that it is not full of happy, well-adjusted adults.
The food that most kids eat often contains flavor enhancers such as aspartame, sucralose, splenda, and MSG (aka 'autolyzed plant protein,' 'hydrolyzed plant protein') that have powerful neurological effects (that's why they are effective in stimulating the tongue nerve cells). Unfortunately, though, many of these substances also have toxic effects on nerve cells due to overstimulation or other means. Other neurotoxins in widespread use (compared with 1938) include solvents, lead, cell phone radiation, mercury, drugs, and high blood sugar (diabetes and pre-diabetes are much more widespread due in part to increased sugar consumption). It's likely that the increased environmental exposure of children to neurotoxins since 1938 has caused much of the increase in mental illness.
I'm sure that it's nothing a couple of tours in the Armed Forces can't cure. It's not like there's room for them in the economy, anyway.
Anybody posted the http://www.theonion.com/content/news/more_u_s_children_being_diagnosed - youthful tendency disorder link yet ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Psychological test have two fails:
One is that the subjects may dissimulate their true condition, so a trend may simply result from people being more sincere.
The other is that tests are too long. Anyone who checks the correct 200 of 1000 checkboxes and doesn't go dull and unattentive after the first 50 clearly has some condition of being differently motivated.
Angelyne!
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
> Old Piotr did not have enough food to feed his entire family!
Gee, I wonder why. Maybe having five children when he couldn't even afford to feed himself had something to do with that. The poor with a brood of children have no one to blame for their poverty except their penises.
I was scared to death of my parents. Today, the parents are the ones that are afraid. My brother, who was in one of the first groups of school kids to be preached to about "their rights" and "spanking is abuse" has no respect or fear for my parents and tells them off all the time (even now, as an adult). I believe the lack of the element of fear is why the kids are so screwed up today. Injuries are prevented with ridiculous amounts of protective gear, there is no repercussion for illegal activities (in Canada at least, I may not be speaking for everywhere) due to the Young Offenders Act (I know a kid that defrauded a bank and had no charges pressed because the legal fees would have cost the bank too much money, if I defrauded the bank I would have gotten locked up) and on top of all that parents are afraid to discipline their children because they believe that Social Services will take their kids away. I got the belt on the arse or the bare hand if the belt was too far away. Bring back corporal punishment, at least in the home if not in the schools as well.
This story has been carried verbatim by (at least) two dozen big news outlets. But I really, really wish the study was made available when the researchers decided to speak to the press; what this story amounts to is an ad for the upcoming issue of Clinical Psychology Review. It might be important to, y'know, take a look at the data and methodology of the study before discussing its conclusions all over the Web. What good is RTFA when the primary source is currently unpublished?
Anyone else wanna see scholarly print journals replaced with something like arXiv?
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
This simply reflects the flaws in the liberal concept of everybody wins, nobody loses, as well as the concept of not being responsible for your own actions. Back in that time period, people realized that if you screwed up, you would pay the price. They also knew that "you win some, you lose some". Children of a great many countries have never had to face these facts. It may also be due to the fact that they can see that the powers that be have sold them down the river, considering them no more than fodder for their personal gain. In short, they have been broken, to the will of the power elite. Orwell saw this coming as far back as the 1940s. Most kids can't even form an opinion of their own because they can't. They have been "dumbed down", and therefore lack the mental acuity, and indeed the tools to do so. Mental health? I would call it despair.
I think you good a good point. I think I have a good counterpoint. I also think the best point is somewhere in between: figuring out where your point applies, where mine applies, and where some compromise or alternative applies.
Stop being a bunch of wussies!
Agreed---to the extent that this is the right solution. Some people need to stop being wussies.
A kid shouldn't be taking medication for anything less than a serious physical problem. You don't give a kid powerful psychotropic drugs just because they're rebellious or shy.
That's an interesting opinion. Is that based on any evidence regarding the safety and effectiveness of the "null" treatment plan? Does it depend on what the psychiatric diagnosis is?
In any case, on to what I think people may want to think about:
Some people really need help!
It may very well be that people are being overdiagnosed. But some people are being diagnosed correctly.
Imagine being bullied every day; each day someone makes fun of you for no reason. They criticize your clothing, your hair, your way of speech, anything, everything. Nobody helps you, even when you cry for help. Nobody comes and talks to you. Nobody tries to be your friend.
Might you start to get the impression that nobody likes you? Or that nobody will ever like you? Nobody will ever love you?
Will that make you shy away from trying to make friends? From asking girls out on a date? Will your subsequent loneliness and lack of affection, love and sex throw you into a depression? Will it make you commit suicide?
If there's a person in this situation, do you think they deserve help? If they could be made less shy, could be taught to approach people and say "Hi, I see you're into ${interest} too. Want to hang out and ${interest} some time?" or "Would you go out with me?" (and have someone answer yes), and that makes said person happy and have a normal (if modest) social and romantic life, isn't that an improvement?
Granted, just because someone calls you ugly and you feel unhappy about it for a few days doesn't mean you should be doped up and talk to a shrink. But if you get into a negative spiral, you should be pulled out.
They'll have plenty of time to dope themselves into a stupor and cry at a psychologist's office when they're adults.
Why not intervene early? If you have poor social skills which causes rejection which causes fewer opportunities to practice your social skills which causes poor social skills---and so forth in a negative spiral---wouldn't you want to be pulled out of it sooner rather than later?
For those who really need help, what you're suggesting is postponing treatment until the condition has worsened and the patient has suffered a very unhappy childhood and adolescence.
You don't want that to happen to anyone, do you?
99.99% more U.S. adolescents in 2009 believe it's 2009 than the same age group in the depression era...
"kids today" also have an incredibly diverse environment of bioaccumulative toxins and endocrine disrupters found in millions of household products they use everyday. everything from the gel in their hair to the shoes on their feet include a myriad of complex polymers and synthetics known for everything from cellular level mutagenic interaction to neurologic damage and reproductive harm. Every pot and pan theyve used since birth has likely been frosted with a thick coating of teflon as well. to simply assume this scientific study implies kids are whiny is bordering on criminally irresponsible. I'll presume youve concluded climate change is bogus science, and the product of and over-reactive, conspiratorial scientific community as well?
We are slowly poisoning ourselves, and indirect scientific research of component ingredients in most of the average household chemicals and products we use every day seems to substantiate this hypothesis from the scientific community. As corporations like dupont and dow chemical are loathe to provide any specifics whatsoever on some of their most complex and unstudied chemical compounds, we will likely continue to see an increase in pharmaceuticals designed to combat the symptons many of these chemicals induce.
Foreign manufacturers arent to be excluded from this claim either. third-world and developing nations have played their fair share in ensuring flagrantly toxic chemical compounds such as cadmium, lead, arsenic, and melamine are found in a swath of everyday low-priced value-centric family-oriented products at your local big box store.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I was in my room and I was just like staring at the wall thinking about everything, but then again I was thinking about nothing. And then my mom came in, and I didn't even know she was there. She called my name and I didn't hear her and then she started screaming "Mike, Mike!" And I go "what? Whats the matter?" She goes "whats the matter with you?" I go "theres nothing wrong, mom." Shes all "don't tell me that! You're on drugs!" I go "no mom I'm not on drugs. I'm ok, I'm just thinking, you know? Why don't you get me a Pepsi?" She goes "No! You're on drugs!" I go "mom, I'm ok. I'm just thinking." She goes "No! You're not thinking, you're on drugs! Normal people don't be acting that way!" I go "mom, just get me a Pepsi! Please, all I want is a Pepsi!" And she wouldn't give it to me! All I wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to me! Just a Pepsi!
Once we diagnose 51 percent of them with something, doesn't that just make it "normal"?
It only takes two words to frame the result with intelligence, yet so few reporters surpass this easy threshold. A gem of a sentence. I'm rendered completely unable to snark.
They need to spend less time in Church worrying about the rapture, and more time enjoying life.
It just so happens I recently looked into the emerging childhood rickets epidemic here in the US. My wife and I just had our first child, and an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (my wife is a physician and subscriber) caught our attention. The emerging rickets epidemic is due to the lack of vitamin D, as well as other fat soluble vitamins, in breast milk. Women are breastfeeding longer, and parents are prolonging introduction of solid foods until later, and further infants are sheltered from the sun. At around 6 months an infants pre-birth stores of vitamin D become depleted and they begin to develop a deficiency. If you have any credible evidence that there are a significant number of malnourished obese children in the US, lets see it.
46 & 2
Ok I have had enough of the knee jerk reaction comments here let me tell you a little story about myself .
I am 22 I am pretty much part of this generation that has the higher mental illness rate and I believe every fucking word of it. The environment kids have to go to everyday is truly depressing you have enormous amounts of social pressure to conform, I know because I was different and payed for it in the form of social death. I moved to where I live now when I was 7 I moved from an all Italian neighborhood where I couldn't walk 5 feet without bumping in to a friend/family member to a northeast suburb where I could walk a mile without meeting anyone my own age and when I went to my new school I met with a hugely different environment in which no matter how hard I tried to make friends no one wanted to be mine because I had an imagination and was therefore "weird". So now I am about 9 to 10 years old with no friends because if you talked to me you were "uncool" (which is the end all be all in this place) wondering why this is all happening and that's when I start feeling angry, not just "pissed in my cheerios" angry but extreme uncontrollable rage angry, naturally my grade's started falling and my teachers noticed I wasn't doing my homework anymore and if they tried to talk to me about it it wouldn't even seem like I was listening because I wasn't. School transformed for me it became a place of daily torture that was to be endured because I "had to go" and there was no fucking way I was taking it home with me in the form of homework or school projects. around the 6th and 7th grade my parents were seeing a trend in me the whole not doing homework and increased outbursts at school weren't going away so my parents decide to take my to a psychologist fast forward about 2 years and 3 suicide attempts later and im getting out of grade school getting ready to enter highschool working 14 hours a day 7 days a week for no pay (we had a kitchen were running at a local pool club that wasn't bringing in any money) at this point I am "cured" and I say "cured" because you never really are truly cured of the injuries I received you just learn how to cope with it. I go into highschool have a great time and for the first time in a very long time I was happy (straight A's btw for all of those who like to call the kids of this generation lazy/stupid) , but when I got to college I encountered a highly social environment but I found myself unable to get close enough to anyone to be friends or more because I still had an irrational fear of people from when I was in grade school so I drop out after the first semester and go into a deep depression and start seeing my psychologist again fast forward about another three years and that brings us to present day where I have had a few jobs (all of which have terrible pay and no benefits) am once again "cured", doing the best I can and looking for a girl who understands me ( I met one quite by accident but due to a truly tragic set of circumstances I didnt have chance to date her but that's another sad story) and I am once again approaching that state we all call Happiness.
Thats where the story ends for now but its not over I still have to carry with me the scars I received as a child I have few friends but I keep close those that I have, I have fallen in love and been heartbroken(which btw was worse than any other emotional pain I have experienced before). I am the nicest guy in the world these days I am friendly but quiet and will help anyone out with almost anything they ask of me, which is needless to say a far cry from what I once was.
Every now and then I'll see specials on TV trying to get to the root cause of why these kids going into schools and public places with assault rifles and explosives and I laugh because I know EXACTLY why they do it, and when you get lucky and get a guy or girl that doesn't shoot themselves at the end and people ask them why they did it, the response is invariably either an vicious insult or a "I had to do it" but no one understands. Yes the
School systems today are more or less prisons. Every moment there you have to worry about being bullied. Given the overcrowding and overly apathetic teachers and school administrators it's no wonder anxiety is such a problem. I remember every day walking home I had to wonder if I was going to be attacked or harassed by one of the gangs.
We've seen an increase in children being over mothered and even the government becoming more of a nanny state while women have gained more power.
Coincidence? I think not.
"We had one neighbor, Piotr, who had several children." If he was poor, why did he have "several" if any children? People who have children and cannot afford them create their own circumstances. Was Piotr unable to do basic math?
Attention, moderators. This man is posting a piece of flamebait to try to get a troll to get the parent poster to troll. Please watch out for log0n!
"Do you have P.A.D.? Nearly eleventy billion Americans have this potentially deadly disorder. Why have you never heard of this before? We at the *cough*bristolmeyerssquibb*cough* P.A.D. Coalition are trying to get the word out about P.A.D. now that we found that Plavix can be used to treat it! Call your doctor *now*... you may already be dying of something no one has ever heard of before last year!"
That pretty much summarizes the TV commercial I saw last week. Wag the dog, indeed.
>Overall, an average of five times as many students in 2007 surpassed thresholds in one or more mental health categories, compared with those who did so in 1938
We also have 5 times more population you gnit. No one ever factors time into their equation.
Same as with Avatar....wow the biggest grossing movie, the biggest expenditure, etc...etc...
You can't even compare this to 10 years ago to Titanic for christ's sake. We don't pay the same anymore to go see a movie!
As well, the cost of making the props or the film or paying the actors has gone up...so of course it costs more today then yesterday!
Today's kids are medicated more than any other generation in history, and yet, by high school, they have worse mental health than any other generation in history! Obviously, we're not giving these kids enough drugs!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
And now you have created a world view where being tough and succeeding is all that matters.... small wonder that the 2nd generation is a trifle stressed even in the midst of seeming plenty. I dare say if conditions get that tough again they'd either "harden the fuck you", or die... or fall back on alcoholism and the "gin and valium" of your forgotten peers.
Blaming the problem on one thing is Limbaugh-esque simplemindedness. Kids don't need overprotective parents to make them think something's wrong with them. Modern advertising hammers that message home hundreds of times a day, because telling people they're okay the way they are doesn't sell products. The whole structure of our society today is different from 1938. Kids whose original parents are still together are in the minority. Large families were the norm in 1938, but today most kids have at most one sibling to emulate, learn from and commiserate with. The majority of today's moms work outside of the home, whereas they didn't in 1938. People make and do far fewer things for themselves today, from food preparation to car maintenance. Solitary activities like web surfing and computer games have replaced most family time. Parents seem to have plenty of time for their careers and very little for their kids. Maybe the preoccupation with child safety is an attempt to compensate for that. But what do I know? Do I look like a psychiatrist? Get off my lawn!
I dont know if anyone wondered whether a test used 1938 would be relevant in 2010? For eg: If a kid was question about being gay in 1938 and if he thought that being gay was OK, he would have been judged abnormal...I would guess? This question does not make much sense in the world today
When a thief sees a saint, all he sees are his pockets!
I suffer from diabetes. One of the side effects of diabetes is depression. So my doctor gave my fluoxetine (Prozac) for depression. One of the side effects of fluoxetine, in addition to the diarrhea, dehydration, sweats, and flushing (all of which I've been experiencing lately) is that it... (wait for it!)... raises your blood sugar! No, really... the drug given to combat the side effect of diabetes makes the diabetes worse!
Then of course there is this study, which shows that the effects of most major "antidepressants" are indistinguishable from that of placebos!
Now I'm really depressed!
Kids today get emo and suicidal because they have been given everything
I strongly disagree. I was extremely fortunate and had an excellent childhood. Certainly I never wanted for the essentials and had plenty of toys, games etc. However, growing up the the UK of the 70's and 80's, I also had limits. If I messed around at school I got into trouble with the teachers, if I got unruly at home I got into trouble with my parents. The problem I see today is that kids actions have no real consequences: somehow it is never their fault its a "syndrome" or a mental health problem or whatever.
If your actions never have consequences then is it any wonder people lose the will to live and develop mental health issues? After all life is all about interacting with society and changing things. Of course having consequences also means that sometimes you are wrongly punished: someone will lie about what you did, you won't be believed etc. but, while you obviously want to minimize this (so no crazy "zero tolerance" policies), I really believe that this is a good thing in the end because it gives kids a practical lesson in WHY they need to behave e.g. make sure that you behave honestly so that people will believe you when it really matters, always treat people fairly because it makes you really mad when you are not treated fairly etc. The problem is that nowadays this is hard to implement because kids parents call in the lawyers and you end up with judges applying laws intended to deal with adult crimes and not with kids misbehaving at school or in public.
The adult-children will simply ask their parents to hire a lawyer to sue the college into awarding them a 4.0 and a diploma simply for enrolling.
...We are paying the mistakes of the previous generations. The #1 cause of "messed up individuals" is bad parenting.
When I was a child, my mother physically abused me until she broke her own hands. Then she swapped to tactics of power-mongering and psychological abuse that still keeps to this day. Any mistake or anything she saw as a offense (not as a "wrong thing", she doesn't care about education), it meant to sleep on the street for days. She suffers a form of autism and paranoid behavoir inherited from her family branch.
That person suffered 2 or 3 years of her life and made sure my brother's and my life was a mess. We got no basic education or "street wisdom" at all. I had absolute prohibition to go out or hang out with friends, so I turned distant. Fuck, when my brother was like 7 she made him swallow soap to "cleanse him up".
Every single mistake is punished harshly with insults, and any new info she obtains on you is used as a weapon immediately.
This person doesn't leave home anymore except for groceries, and has one of those phobias to bacteries and stuff, wearing gloves to do any single action. My brother eventually followed her steps, and is now unable to leave home out of paranoia and "following her example". I live with them as I can't afford an apartment with my low salary.
My father divorced her when I was a kid, it was relatively new back then. I didn't care much but we lived without moneys for some years, which was hard. He also is the most distant person ever, being extremely friendly on presence but never remembering about his offspring otherwise. No birthdays or holidays, he's totally oblivious.
Sounds like "I just need to do things right", but it's easy to say when I don't know how the hell the right way is. I can have an idea but I don't know for certain, only theories, and there are things I am still realizing at this point, realizing how non-existent my education was. I was forcefully isolated and shaped to the whims of a mentally unstable person, and it took me several years to realize what the fuck was going on. At this point I might still carry her fucking stigma without realizing. It's hard to undo bad parenting even knowing the problem. Every week I had to heard how I was a failure in a condom, and taunts that are more out of a verbal fight than any attempt at education.
All of this caused a large number of mental diseases, most importantly Narcolepsy (falling asleep anywhere without notice except at bed. I can even fall asleep walking, on the bus, at work...) and Irritable Bowel Syndrome from the lack of sleep, which only allows one meal a day under risk of severe diarrhea and pain. I can only medicate the second because I get funky side effects from the benzodiazepamines I was prescripted for narcolepsy, and that helps getting a relatively normal life. Still, no one will ever recognize it as a handicap, they will just think of a day they didn't sleep well and consider it a minor thing...but I have had accidents for falling asleep without noticing, with multiple injuries. Also the lack of energy and willpower and depressions triggered by lacking sleep.
Anyway I digress. Everyone I know who is miserable even with money and survival means, has parents that shouldn't have been allowed to bear children, simply. I regard my mother as garbage, for being such an evil, arrogant and energy-draining bitch, and for not doing what she had to do. I know that when I can hold myself without taking care of those close-ins (rentals here are way more expensive than the US with lower minimum wage), I am not seeing her again. Maybe my brother...he was made a subhuman by her actions but he kicked ass when he was a kid.
Don't blame youth, blame who made them whiny, diseased bitches. You will find the one that gave them life is the reason that life is miserable, more often than not.
Hey, at least no one in that shitwad of a family I have gets drunk, it's a definite plus.
Give me a break. I am 23 years old. I was born in the 80's and went to college in the latter half of the 2000's. I just completed my Bachelor's degree a year and a half ago. Most of my friends are still in college or are just now graduating. I am a part of this generation that the study seems to declare as having serious mental health problems. I call bullshit. But, as another poster pointed out, some other psychologists have also called bullshit on this study and it seems, at best, to be a semi-accurate or maybe best guess look at the mental faculties of my generation.
So, instead of wasting my time typing a rebuke to study created by self-reported statistics, I am going to waste my time rebuking half of the old crotchety wanks that have declared my generation, my peers, to be a bunch of narcissistic, incompetent, entitled, whiny brats. To each and every one of you old fogies that are so convinced that everything wrong with our generation comes from bad parenting and a lack of hardship and what not, let me ask you, "How many folk below the age of 25 or so do you spend time with on a daily basis? As a peer?"
Honestly, to all of you who are bemoaning my generation, answer me that question. I would wager that very few of you actually work on a daily basis with folk my age or younger. I, personally, hang out with people my age and younger every day. I don't spend time with them trying to teach them. I don't spend time with them judging them. I spend time hanging out with them, meeting them, getting to know them, laughing, crying, fighting, and working together with them. And you know what? My anecdote says that we are a pretty damned impressive lot of individuals. We face difficult challenges every day, for instance: "Should I continue working on this paper that is due in four hours or should I eat? Well, I haven't eaten since yesterday, but if I don't finish this paper and crash my grade, it will cost me another semester of school and another $15,000. Yeah, I can skip meals for another day, I am not starving yet."
Or my favorite one. For those of us that are competent and happy and fed and living peacefully, how about all of the in-your-face, "What are you doing to save these starving children in Abu Dhabi? Or save those dogs that are being beaten to death by drug peddling masters? Or, why aren't you trying to save the world from Global Warming, Darfur evil people, zombie H1N1 flu, etc etc etc.?" In other words, even when kids in my generation get to the point where they are comfortable and supporting themselves, we are not allowed any peace. Rather we are guilted into thinking that unless we are saving the world every waking minute, we are horribly corrupt evil bastards that deserve fire and brimstone. Yup, that's easy to cope with, just stop sleeping and enjoying any free time, then you will be a good person.
Of course that's not all. We also have to face the constant question as to whether or not our genitals, and any attention we give them, will be our black ticket to hell for eternity. And don't think that question remains in the realm of the church goers. No, now those zealous asshats are on the streets telling me that I am a sinner and will burn a fiery death for looking at the blonde walking by. So what do I do? Should I punch the doofus in the face for being an asshole? Nah, then I get arrested for assault, labeled as a felony committer for life, and raped for the next 3-5 in prison.
This leads me to my next point. Even if we see something wrong with our environment, there is a legitimate chance that whatever we do to workaround said concern will come with punishments like unpayable financial burdens or a few years of getting our asses beat up and down the cell block because we just had to deal with some business. Yup, that's fair, create a world in which 90% of the stuff that is the most 'in-your-face' sucks, and then punish us for trying to change anything.
So what am I getting at? Am I just whining that oh we have it so much harder than anyone seems to
You expressed my thoughts much more eloquently than I ever could. Thank you very much---it was important for me to see you express my ideas the way I meant them.
Also, good luck getting that radio in your head tuned into where it needs to be.
Consider that the Piotr in question was apparently an impoverished resident of 1950s Hungary (i.e. just-post-WW2 europe, near to poland and austria)... and that of his five offspring, which one cannot assume he had simultaneously, one died in infancy and another drowned in childhood. Consider also the links between subsistence living, mortality and birth rates, etcetera. Do I need to explain further?
Isn't it more likely that rather than their being more youth's with mental problems, that there are simply more diagnosed cases due to better diagnosis, or in some people's view, over diagnosis?
A lot of psychologists have the view that there are the same amount of children with aspergers now then there were 40 years ago, however diagnosed cases have gone up, simply because it is better recognised now then it was in the past. You don't see the same amount of aspergers as adults because people with aspergers improve their social skills as they age (More so than non-aspergers, who usually plane out some time in their 20's), My dad reckons he had aspergers as a kid, but the diagnosis wasn't there because he never did quite understand social norms, and yet each year of his life, continuing right to this day he gradually improved his social skills, and reckons that he didn't get rid of it to a degree or no one noticing until mid 20's. I meet a lot of people every day who when you delve into their childhood talk about having some form of undiagnosed psychological problems like aspergers, or depression. However today it's a lot more common for a child to be diagnosed at the drop of a hat.
My point is basically that diagnosis for psychological problems was definitely not what it was nowadays. How can you compare the times?
Had this been real science you'd have been instructed to turn to page 1 of a psychological science methodology text. Now follow along as we point out the problems that occur when clinicians conduct "studies" unsupervised. And you clinicians, use your finger so you don't lose your place.
What's first? The title. "Have" implies proven validity. There is none. "Serious" implies something more than mild. But the text states "surpassed threshhold" which means the measures were as low as the absolute minimum. When you can start an article biopsy with the title, you can expect many more such morsels to enjoy. And on.
The article, like the test, convolves the concepts of personality and clinical manifestations of psychopathology. The latter as tacked on after the original construction.
TFA is using entirely self-report data, the worst source. Current versions of MMPI have scales built in to detect falsification of answers, although those scales are criticized. The original version, used through most of the time frame of this study, had no internal validity testing.
Between the greater acceptability of admitting problems on one hand, and the victim/disease sufferer mentality towards any problems, it is not surprising that recent test takers would admit to having problems. In fact this result should be expected because of these. More people today are more aware of more kinds of problems and the symptoms that go with them. They're more likely to recognize the problem if they have it. They're also more likely to think they have the problem if they think they recognize some of the symptoms in themselves (in training we call it 'symptomitis'). In 1938 most students didn't know squat about mental health and disorder and so wouldn't recognize them as this.
In 1938 and for some time after (the Great Depression being still fresh in their minds), there was great emphasis on self-reliance and of being of help or use to others, with de-emphasis on relying on others. If one is to stand on ones' own feet and especially if one is to support others, then one does not admit to a weakness (as mental problems were considered then). If you had problems, then that was the hand you were dealt and you played it, and you accepted that, rather than asking someone else to come along and make things OK for you. Nowdays it's far more acceptable, and in many situations expected, for one to admit problems and seek help. And all this is exactly how people would answer questions about these things.
The scales looked at in TFA were the clinical scales. The scales themselves are of questionable validity, as are the concepts on which they were supposedly based. For instance, hyster-ia, a throwback all the way to ancient Greece and carried forward all the way into the 20th century, with the original construct being this is a common malady among women, for which the only real solution (until Freud's 'talking cure', which never worked) was a hyster-ectomy. Just to remind you, the data go all the way to 2007. Try to find hysteria in any insurance company's coverage descriptions or any diagnostic manuals.
As cultural definitions change, psychological definitions change. Hopefully for the better, but at least keeping up with culture's changes. The culture of 1938 put several things into the primary diagnostic tool (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the APA) which were later removed. Homosexuality for example. In any case, these change, making any attempt at valid correlations wrong to some degree in every case.
The entire clinical scale section is so out of date and invalidated that it's being completely rewritten and replaced. So what does that say for previous data? How far back is it invalid, and/or how old does it have to be in order to be any good? And with the advances made in the last 70 years, how many of the originals that were accepted then have been found to have been incorrect, and thus the related data worthless?
From TFA: "the clinical scales were derived by selecting items that were endorsed
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
"You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy." On a more serious note, I think a big part of the issues isn't that they are being more crazy then there is just a bigger list of mental issues to choose from, and people wanting to pidgin hole any personality quirk as some form of mental disorder. A child isn't just full of energy anymore, they've got a form of ADD. They aren't exhausted or felt put upon by impossibly high expectations, they are depressed or suffering from some other disorder. This is further made into problems with so many drug company's hawking a pill to cure whatever ails your child. A form of Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' with everyone taking a pill, but instead of it being the single pill Soma it's a more type of 'personalized' pill to as one song put it "A pill to make you numb, ..., a pill to make you anybody else'.
We are reaching a point that if you or your parents don't like you for who you are with negative personality issues then they can almost trade the core of who you are for a prescription to making you someone else. Tired a lot? Take a stimulate to make your child a more active one. How about too much energy? Are they too much for you to control and distracting you from doing whatever else you want to do? Try something like Ritalin so you can go back to whatever you want to do. Parents are given offers to help make raising a child more of a state of existance then a process done over time without thought to what it will cause in the future, but then again when those new problems happen there are some OTHER pills to help with those problems too.
And lets not forget options of a form of mental illness hypochondriac within the child because mommy and daddy told them too many times that this is truly what they have and this is what they've been told it does and even though it's not the child's fault that they have these issues, they still believe deep down they do since mommy and daddy said it was and promised me the problem quirks would go away if I just keep taking those pills.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
...how illnesses, mental, physical, or otherwise, were classified and measured has changed since 1938. More than demonstrating that today's youth might be mentally out of kilter is that the article demonstrates that the classification of what constituted a mental illness has changed between 1938 and now. Should this seem a shock to us, remember that prior to the early 1940s, eugenics still held considerable influence in both scientific and non-scientific circles.
Do I need to explain further?
Only if you aren't yet tired of banging your head against a brick wall.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I worked on a contract at a university for a psychology dept. The OCD prof suffered from it himself, the former gambler taught about addictions. The woman prof who taught early child development couldn't have kids of her own, etc etc.
Between immense changes in diet, the radical changes in culture, degradation of the quality of the air they've grown up breathing, (in the last 20 years, versus 80-100 years ago,) the near non-potability of most American municipal water supplies, all manner of heavy metals making it into their brains from aluminum leaching out of their soda cans, to fugitive dust containing toxic, carcinogenic, and even occasionally radioactive materials, it's a wonder their turning out as well as they are.
I've read a lot of posts here on /. under this heading that suggests kids today are whiny, bitchy, spoiled brats, who should not exhibit signs of mental illness, implying being susceptible to such problems as a weakness, or form of character flaw -- as if they're doing this on purpose. To those of you who think that, before you call kids today 'pussies' for having all manner of mental problems, consider there may be other possible causes beyond their individual or collective control.
Per my subject-line above: It's an industry, & like ANY OTHER INDUSTRY OUT THERE? The psych field seeks growth, for profit... how to do that? Well, that which you stated...
Who really pays, & in far more than just monetary terms?
Those paying for the "treatments" of course, AND, those being made victims from the drugs taken (which later they find out have MASSIVE BAD SIDE-EFFECTS (or, isn't prozac indicative of that, & the psychotic rages those who took it underwent)).
APK
P.S.=> I watched a film called "EQUILIBRIUM" the other night, and it really "got to me" (for those who have NOT seen it? DO! It's about an entire society in the future of humanity in a dystopian future, where all emotion is "stomped out" by PROZIUM, the drug used to do so in that view of a horrible future imo)...
Yes - It made me sad (especially the part where Cleric John Preston's (Christian Bale's) colleagues as "Tetragrammaton Clerics" were gunning down dogs! Man, & I personally have a "soft-spot" for those animals, because if you want a LOYAL FRIEND? A dog is your BEST bet, by far (& imo, largely + unfortunately? I say this a lot & mean it -> "Dogs are BETTER PEOPLE THAN PEOPLE" many/most times... which is why, in my estimation @ least, they are SO HIGHLY ESTEEMED BY HUMAN BEINGS IN OUR CULTURES WORLDWIDE usually as companions)).
This outright indiscriminate & totally non-judicious use of mind altering drugs, especially on kids? BAD!
The psych industry is an INFACT and attempting to quantify the human psyche... good luck to THAT - there are so many "shades of gray" to human beings, it's not funny (& we are ALL "wired differently" mentally too, of course, due to both genetics and also environments we are shaped by as well)...
Especially considering that the stats I have heard are the 1/5 people out there are on some sort of mind-altering chemical proscribed by some shrink. Now, people lately are calling Tom Cruise nuts, but, he also is HIGHLY AGAINST the use of these chemicals (ala prozac which I noted above), & I have to agree on that account - or, is what happened with prozac to the unwitting people that took it just a joke? I think not... apk
I blame AFI and the rest of the wimp-ass wrist cutters, not the economy.
How many children should one have - simultaneously or consecutively - if one is so poor they are eating stale bread and dirty water soup!? I don't think the year effects the answer...
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The year affects the answer, because it helps define the context, and the context is 1950s Hungary - so you need to replace all occurrences of "one" in your question with "everyone".
If that doesn't help - are you asking me as a biologist, an economist, a spiritualist, a historian, or in some other framework?
Biologically, there were only five offspring, and two died before maturity, so that's an achievement of positive population growth despite adverse environmental conditions.
Economically, he was able to maintain and even increase his assets in the long-term despite limited income, periods of debt, and two collapsed ventures, whilst operating in a severely depressed location.
Spiritually, he had the moral strength to risk his own health so that his wife and children could eat enough to survive (we presume the infant death and the drowned child were beyond his control) rather than resort to robbery or worse, setting a good example of how people should act in times of adversity.
Historically, the country was *systemically* poor (as what WW2 didn't ruin, Soviet occupation post-WW2 did). If the "poor" shouldn't have children, and "everyone" is poor... well, math doesn't get much more basic than that.
OK - let me make it simple...
a) Having children is a choice.
b) Parents are responsible for their children before anyone else. The choice should not be made lightly.
c) If one is so poor that they are eating stale bread and eating dirty water they are too poor to have any children. Simultaneously or consecutively. If one bears children in these circumstances, then they are abusing the children willfully and intentionally.
d) This applies in the US or Hungary. In 2010 or 1950.
If your point is simply these are the general persuasive conditions of 1950s Hungry then why should I care or have any sympathy!? Your analogy amounts to "Bob, stop complaining its hot in California - I, Gill, was born on the Sun..."
We are talking about change relative to our own culture. Hungary has always been at a different stage of economic and social development - never at the same stage as the US. Pulling some conditions abstractly out of time and location is a ridiculous argument. There will always be better or worse condition somewhere else.
In regards to children: People need to start being responsible for their actions and choices. I don't care where or when the live.
a) True (mostly; e.g. infertility, lack of education; pedantry, I know)
b) True
c1) Ah. The OP notes that Piotr "would provide the best nourishment to his children and wife, while during tough times he would eat grass, paper and sawdust." Piotr chose that *he* would eat the worst, giving his children the best.
c2) Poverty vs Abuse - is it better for a child to be happy and hungry or sad and fed? At what points in the emotional/nutritional space would you draw a line, if any, and how thickly, if so?
d etc) I am uncertain - that reads like you are suggesting we should have no sympathy for those who lived in 1950s Hungary?
Your statement that the use of Hungary wrt US is pointlessly abstract - would comparing the US in the 1930s be of value? The OP was using comparative analogy; your approach appears to rely on absolutes?
In regards to your last line: you and me both. Trouble is, some don't care what anyone else thinks. What then?