Just like people's incorrect perception of crime: that it seems like it's going up while we are at historic lows, I wonder how much of this perception is just that mental health problems are more visible now. Homelessness (correlated with mental health trouble) is much more visible and in your face now. Social media has given everyone a megaphone, so the few crazies can now be as loud as they want and algorithmically drown out sensibility. You can go browse r/PublicFreakout and other "crazy videos" subreddits and watch unhinged people for hours. Political rhetoric paints "the other side" as insane rather than simply as opponents with differing views. All this combines to give the perception of a crisis, just like endless, breathless reporting about crime gives the perception that criminality is out of control.
I take your point, but a lot of people are worn out from the pandemic, increasingly hopeless about climate change, and observing the decline of democracy in almost every influential country.
Those are all justifiable things to be more depressed about now than people were in the past. People are smarter, wealthier, and more educated now than they were in the past, and that causes them to think further into the future (which is depressing).
Even 10 years ago everything seemed to be "normal" in the sense that it's same old stuff, nothing too major. There's always going to be the political disagreements and all that. But things have shifted like crazy.
And I don't think it's just because of technology that we are able to read what more people are thinking right away and have more instant access to news. Although, it kind of is simply because we are able to see how insane more and more people are.. but it's more than that.
There has been a massive shift and divide in many countries and it's literally to the point that it impacts people on a daily basis. Seeing how so many people care so little about others has never been more apparent.
You had the US president trolling people every day on twitter for 4 years straight. And then seeing just how much of the population is OK with the utter insanity. Don't tell me that doesn't take a toll on people even if you try as much as you can to avoid it.
We also have rights we've had for generations being stripped away and threatened along with more recent hard-fought rights, we're living under the eye of a panopticon watching our every move and collecting data that is increasingly being used against us, a bad day or careless word can cause you to lose everything you have as mobs (online and offline) are foaming at the mouth to punish whatever they personally don't like, we're learning that many of the everyday products around us are poisoning us and our children like the PFAS in our clothes or the arsenic we've been spooning directly into our baby's mouths (https://apnews.com/b3e7bea244cdf68da3e0d91842fe3e87) and we're seeing our standard of living decline and our children struggle in ways we never had to while an increasing number of Americans can't reliably get the most basic services like electricity and drinkable water.
There is very little hope of any of this being fixed any time soon. You'd pretty much have to be crazy to not be having a mental health crisis right now.
As a 20-something, I see a lot of people my age that way, way overestimate the negative impacts of climate change, to the point where they admonish and make fun of people who want to have kids. I can’t help but think their media diet is somewhat to blame. Climate change is not going to be good, but there is good news on the technology front that you’d almost never hear if you got all your news from the big news outlets. For example, the IEA predictions for new solar additions have been terribly out of touch with reality for nearly a decade now [1], and before I saw this all I had seen was doom and gloom about how we could never scale up renewables fast enough. Seeing even the IEA be so wrong really makes me wonder what other good news I’m missing out on seeing.
I think it’s increasingly likely that technology change will not be fast enough to offset the worst effects of climate change due to the non-linearities in the process, including things like vicious cycles (melting permafrost causing massive methane leaks) and tipping points.
I also don’t think most people anticipate the political instability that will result from hundreds of millions of people needing to move.
It seems like people on the Internet have very short memories, or are just all somehow very young. The "past" goes back further than 2012. Bad times have happened before. Is this even worse than the late 80s/early 90s? We had much of the world still behind the Iron Curtain, the specter of nuclear holocaust, toxic waste dumps, acid rain, holes in the ozone layer, all things painted as much worse than climate change. I would rate the AIDS epidemic as quite a bit worse than Covid. There was a time not so long ago that it seemed a legitimate prospect that much of Africa just wasn't going to exist any more a few decades out.
If you go back to the 1930s and 1940s, now you're talking 25-50% unemployment globally, countries losing half their breeding age males to war, entire cities being wiped out in seconds due to nuclear explosions and not just the specter of them. Existentialism and post-modernism came out of that shit. We got Kafka and Sartre, things were so depressing.
Go back further and then what? Slavery? Post-industrial black lung? 8 year-olds working 100 hour weeks in factories?
When were things better than they are now other than some tiny blip of early 21st century techno-optimism?
As far as mental health is concerned, I guarantee you every male in my family that I ever knew going back to at least the 1920s suffered from severe undiagnosed depression. They all drank like crazy, beat the hell out of their kids, never smiled. The trauma they experienced was insane. My grandfather was ship-wrecked in the South Pacific by a kamikaze pilot and survived on driftwood for 6 weeks by drinking fish blood. I don't even want to imagine what those kinds of lives were like. Did it make it better that they didn't realize they were depressed and just thought that was what it meant to be a man?
(US specific) "Crime is at historic lows"—depends on how you figure. Compared to many decades ago: yes it is lower. Compared to 4 years ago: murder rates have risen greatly in most major US cities, and murder is the most consistently and accurately reported crime (as opposed to lesser offences, where if they become very common that could induce people to not bother reporting them, because what's the point).
Like crime, Mental Health is an umbrella term that covers a lot of different metrics.
With crime, you can look at some Bellwether metrics like murder and try to understand the trends from there. Murders have indeed gone down over time.
When it comes to Mental Health, you can also look at bellwether stats. In the United States, there is certainly a dramatic increase in suicide deaths. I would argue that suicides are a fairly objective metric unlike diagnosis. Suicides have gone up significantly for most populations. Someone could quibble that drug overdoses could fall into the suicide category and contribute to this, but I would counter that even drug overdoses deaths are themselves supportive of a mental health problem.
When you see something like a 50% increase in suicides for 15 to 24 year old within a decade, I think it should ring some alarm bells and spur discussion.
If we're talking about the US, then crime is up, especially murders (coinciding with large increase in gun purchases). It's still below all time highs, but the trend shifted around the pandemic. Anecdotally, I also have seen/see much more crime than I used to and had my house robbed for the first time in my life last year.
I think people advocating for increased funding for mental health services have started to define all social problems in terms of their impact on mental health, e.g. prejudice as a traumatic experience, the stresses of poverty, etc.
Increased funding for mental health services seems like a poor solution.
News outlets calling it a "mental health crisis" is just sleigh-of-hand, obscuring the root causes. It's natural to feel more stressed, anxious, or depressed if you're losing hope in life due to inflation, lagging pay, expensive healthcare, sky-high real estate costs, etc. Not to mention the general greedy nickel-and-diming that is present from most corporations, hedge funds, investors -- all of these small cuts and bruises add up to a very wounded animal.
> If someone is driving through a crowd, running people over, the smart move is not to declare an epidemic of people suffering from Got Run Over by a Car Syndrome and go searching for the underlying biological mechanism that must be causing it. You have to treat the very real suffering that is happening in the bodies of the people affected, obviously, but the key point is this: You’re going to have to stop the guy running over people with the car.
Unfortunately mental health services were gutted in the 1980s with little objection. There are few options for patients that require long term care. The community health services that were supposed to replace the asylums of old never materialized.
Mental health institutions were nightmares. They were the places that in the 1950/60s did lobotomies and were still doing electro shock treatment into the 80s. People were sold on a more humane community treatment model instead of holdover 1800s insane asylum style treatment but unfortunately the community side never happened.
The community mental health services movement actually started in the 60s, and coincided with a deinstitutionalization movement that you can tie to general social progressive policies during that time (civil rights etc).
The idea (rightly so imho) was to destigmatize mental health, and to move to a model of reintegration, and not route people into institutionalization where they couldn't get out.
This model declined during the 80s, and to a lesser extent 90s, for many many reasons. One is defunding, so you ended up in a situation where the institutions closed, but then as part of general government defunding (ala Reagan and post-Reagan trends), the community mental health services closed.
Another issue that's probably less apparent is the neo-Kraepelinian movement in psychiatry that started in the 70s and accelerated during the 80s kind of was at odds with with the community services model. It allowed for treatments (think antipsychotics) that allowed people to leave institutions, but I think boxed in thinking about psychiatric care during subsequent decades. "Psychopathology as a medical illness" when it works in extreme cases is good at getting people out of residential institutions, but then is bound to a hospital-patient model that the US isn't very good at getting out of.
So at the same time psychiatry was succeeding at getting people out of institutions through a biomedical model of psychiatry, it was kind of failing by neglecting the sociocultural side of psychiatry. So people get out of institutions because of effective medications, but then when they're out there, they're tied to hospitals for care and not community centers as they were originally envisioned.
Basically, community-based care works, but requires a certain amount of infrastructure like anything, and it's been neglected to some extent because of biases in the healthcare system. It's also difficult once you recognize that psychiatric difficulties are bound up in very big socioeconomic structural issues that require a lot of political will to change, and if you don't, it incentivizes a head-in-the-sand kind of reaction.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a return to interest in these kinds of decentralized care models for various reasons in the coming decades, but it's hard to say.
I think it's unfair to tie community mental health service trends to Reagan in particular, but I do think to the extent you attribute certain trends in public and government service funding to Reagan, it's accurate to say that Reagan-era trends were one contributor to problems.
It was the opposite of a "money grab" and liberals walked hand-in-hand to close mental health facilities, encouraged by the "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" film.
Everyone knew lockdowns would cause this situation. The big question is how to deal with it. If you were emperor of your country, ordering or making mental health support free may be a long term excellent choice but there isn't the ability to handle it. There are not enough professionals to handle the demand.
Even prior to covid, we had mental health awareness campaigns with significant consequences in convincing people they have mental health issues when they in reality did not. So the already scarce resource was already stretched beyond the limit.
> Everyone knew lockdowns would cause this situation.
Lockdowns didn't help, but they were just a small part of a very large collection of stressors covid brought the world which itself was just a small part of a larger ongoing breakdown of systems people have come to depend on for generations. Even if covid hadn't happened we'd be facing a mental health crisis right now.
Rather than focus on the correctness (or incorrectness) of what 90% of US adults say or think about this matter -- why not notice how unusual it is for this many US adults to share a viewpoint?
They might not be correct, but the fact that so many see it in the same way suggests to me that there is probably something worth examining more deeply.
That was my immediate thought as well. Most US adults are not experts on anyone’s mental health but their own and thus unsuited to comment on trends.
When did the gut feelings of individuals about such matters become a stand-in for news reporting?
I know journalists are also susceptible to writing about domains they don’t truly understand, but this kind of reporting is skipping right past the step of trying to engage with experts and proceeding to poll unqualified individuals about their gut feeling.
While I don't doubt many people are feeling this way, I can't shake the knee-jerk that these days we couldn't get 90% of US adults to agree the the sky is up.
As a consumer, there's no way in hell I'd do anything involving mental healthcare using an app or a start up. With every service handing our data over to 3rd parties, and failed companies selling off customer data to help offset their losses the last thing someone needs is having "struggles with mental health issues" ending up in their permanent record. You can't even call a crisis hotline without your wireless carrier selling that info to anyone willing to pay for it. If someone is struggling with their mental health they should speak with their doctor in person.
I don't think a mental health startup would be effective, revenue or no. Individual problems require customized help. Some things can only be addressed one person at a time.
There are several mental health startups which connect individual patients to therapists. They provide the technology platform for finding a compatible therapist, online therapy sessions, and billing.
"I like to think of the world-at-large as an Open Air Mental Institution. This helps me to see where I can be of assistance -- particularly to the other patients."
I hate stats like this. What is the baseline? Maybe 90% of adults have always said the US is experiencing a mental health crisis. I'm interpreting this as some kind of increase because of COVID and social media and cell phones, but maybe the number is always high.
I like how the nearly the same top comment, almost word-for-word, was posted in the recent thread called '50% of CEOs considering layoffs'... too many posts with numberspin lately.
I'd wager 90% of adults would say that at any point in history. There has never been a time and place where the average adult wouldn't go "everyone around me is crazy".
The US, along with the rest of the world has a capitalism crisis, the mental health issues are just a symptom of the root disease.
People broadly speaking, need connection and meaning in their lives, and the capitalist systems most of us are slaves to does not even come close to providing it. Heck it actively seeks to avoid providing those things, as if people had them they might not need / want to work so damn much.
When your choices are spend 60+ hours a week working at one or more jobs where you could be laid off at a moments notice to protect the "Profits" of the already wealthy, or you know just fucking starve, it's no wonder so many people are stressed and depressed.
The world these days for a heck of a lot of people is like an automatic hamster wheel that keeps spinning faster and faster, and if you can't keep up you die. Sounds like a surefire recipe for a "Mental health crisis" to me...
I think it is more of a consumerism crisis than a capitalism crisis. Like you said people need meaningful connections in their lives. This largely comes from interactions with your community. The average American watches 20 plus hours of television a week. I don't know how much doom scrolling and solitary gaming adds on top of this.
Imagine how much happier they would be if they spent this time building and maintaining relationships with other human beings.
If you look at the numbers for how many hours a week people work, they haven't really changed much over time. I think the big change is how people are spending their free time
