Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
People are suffering from information and media overload...no down time for the brain. The whole GIGO business.
Suffering? Suffering? I'm enjoying it!
But seriously, I think humanity is going to have to find a new way to live. All our new technologies change the rules that our bodies and minds are adapted for. Either that or these technologies can't be sustained. We are fast approaching either total environmental burn-out or a new era of abundance... perhaps both at the same time. We are drowning in information, pollution, and choice. Most of human history has been a battle against starvation followed by a battle against ignorance followed by a battle for individual liberty.
It was easier to eliminate information scarcity. Water, food, power supply will be harder to fix. Abundance of each of these unleashes new problems. Abundance does not equate with quality.
[signature]
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."
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
How about 1959 when I started grade school. We were two itchy trigger fingers away from nuclear anhaillation. Terrorists? Pshaw, those of us who had "duck and cover" drills don't worry about terrorists. Nuclear war with thousands upon thousands of warheads going off is REAL terror.
Free Martian Whores!
The title should have read:
US Adults Have Serious Mental Health Issues and Poor Parenting Skills
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 couldn't agree more. Whenever I have moved to a new apartment/house there is always a 1-3 week period where I have no cable or internet. After I would get home from work my wife and I would pretty much make dinner read a book and go to bed. It was absolutely amazing how our stress levels went down and how much more recharged we were waking up after calm evenings like that.
Now of course like most people, once my cable and internet showed up, my tv was always on, I was checking my email and working in the evenings. Long story short, I think the mind really does need some time to relax.
Our bugs are smarter than your test scripts.
I don't think so, to me the "unrealistic optimism" speaks more to the sense of "entitlement" that people seem to have these days. Which is in contrast to what the "American Dream" was to me "Yes anything is possible but there will be a lot of work"
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
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Funny, I graduated in '91 and never felt that way at all back then. The Japan fears were over by the late 80s, computers were just starting to come on the scene in a big way. And given that I going to school for computers (which would never be outsourced like those lousy manufacturing jobs), I felt that my future was relatively secure. Twenty years later, I'm thinking it would be wise to have a healthy supply of food in hand, just in case of a sudden dollar collapse, and I'm taking side jobs to keep my options open. Make no mistake, we're not out of this by a long shot and the next 10 years will be substantially worse than the previous 10. Wait until our debt has grown so large that the world simply can't afford to keep buying it up anymore. That's when the real fireworks will start and you won't have to wait long to see it. The 90s were a freakin' golden age by comparison.
atheistic fanaticism
What is that? A "deafening silence" when teaching your kids about "creation science" or is it some other combination of oxymorons?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"able to read what the teacher is writing on the whiteboard."
How 'bout a touch of humor and nostalgia mixed together? When I was in school, we had blackboards. Mostly, they really were black - but sometimes they were a dark green, or a dark blue. But, we wrote on those blackboards with chalk - not some newfangled dry-wipe markers.
Anyway - at some point, I remember learning that we no longer had "blackboards", but "chalkboards". "Huh?" says I. "It's the same old blackboard it's always been!"
But, no, with the civil rights movement, it was somehow derogatory toward black PEOPLE to notice that a black BOARD was black.
Oh-key - here's the humor. I'm gonna sue people for calling a white board a white board.
I'm not even really white, but most people assume I'm white when they meet me, so that's close enough for my discrimination lawsuit!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
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.
Seriously though, I'd like to see what type of lifestyle changes people think contributed to this.
Culture of fear.
I grew up in the cold war and its very politically correct and proper to say we were all scared shitless about nuclear war, but lets me honest here, most of us never cared about it, or only thought about it for about 2 hours per decade, like while watching the movie "the day after" or being indoctrinated about it in school. I suppose children living on a missile base or in D.C. might have had a different outlook, but I'd say I'm pretty much correct on average. Remember you only hear the LOUD ones whom claim they cared, not the majority.
Now all "news" is nothing but terrorism. Be scared of this, be scared of that. All adults are out to molest all children. Everything causes cancer. Anyone you don't know is a criminal, and all family members are merely latent abusers. All "dual use" inanimate objects like guns, knives, etc, are inherently in and of themselves evil like its in their chemical makeup. If you don't understand it (and our education system will make certain of that) you must fear it. The TV says, that all forms of childhood recreation (other than watching TV, suspiciously) are too dangerous for kids. Ask for a slogan and you'll hear the words that we're not supposed to be cowards, look at the actions which are all the opposite.
Add in some strange cultural values about entertainment (violence is great, sex is evil) mix that with most peoples actual lifestyles (vaguely pacifist, sex all the time)...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
Atheist: someone who denies the existence of god
I noticed a couple of things, first off you didn't write "a god", you wrote "god" in a way that implies that you assume there is a specific god.
Secondly, an atheist is generally considered "one who believes that there is no deity" (from my dictionary and from what I can tell most dictionaries seem to agree with that definition) which would basically make fanatic atheism some form of fanatic disbelief.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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
dry erase board then if you will
> 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 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?
"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.
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!
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.
Yes there is.
The first time hate crime legislation was tested in the Supreme Court, the legislation was being used against a group of black men who beat up a white teenager. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_v._Mitchell
Something I wrote elsewhere:
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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?