I wonder if this has always been the case and we've just not had the technology or willpower to detect it until recently

The findings are based on the views and experiences of 2,866 young people aged above six.

Their responses to an online survey, and those of younger children's parents, in April 2022, were used to assess different aspects of mental health, including:

emotional problems behaviour relationships concentration

The children and young people were then classified by how likely they were to have a mental disorder - unlikely, possible or probable - without being seen or diagnosed by a mental-health specialist

It used to be called "teenagers are moody" and "it's just a phase".

It very well might just be, but maybe now we will be able to help them to grow in better functioning adults.

In my opinion 85% of the world probably has mental issues.

Social issues that correlate with mental illness have skyrocketed over the last 40 years.

>The findings are based on the views and experiences of 2,866 young people aged above six.

So above 6, and the highest age I saw was 24. Quick math says that's about 160 individuals for each year, assuming an even distribution. Not exactly bad for statistics assuming they actually got a random sample. But honestly it's not great either. For example, one third of my graduating class could have been surveyed to account for all of the 18 year olds.

COVID brought a lot of it forward. But yet countries like the US still don’t see it an issue. Slowly it’s becoming destigmatized. From a male prospective we are still looked at extremely funny if we say we have mental health issues. Same with males who are abused. We should just toughen up.

Good news; they appear to be mostly tiktok, twitter, and reddit users.

What? That 12 year old who hasn't reached puberty thinks it is the opposite sex?

The problem is that it’s one thing to remove the stigma and allow people to get the treatment they need and a whole different thing to embrace and celebrate it, which is what seems to be happening right now.

It hasn’t always been the case. Teens are very hormonal and strong disruptions to their environments can cause a lot of harm. The world isn’t in a great spot right now, society has changed a lot in the past 20 odd years, and young people are being pushed off the rails by this.

It’s easy to shit on them and one might even be able to justify it because to be fair teens aren’t exactly the most pleasant people around to begin with, but in the end there’s a reason why they’re fucked up and the fault isn’t really all theirs.

as long as companies are making record profits and elected officials are getting their palms greased, nothing will change.

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I have an issue with individuals being classified at "probable" without any evaluation by a specialist.

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It was probably true before COVID. Mental health is something that we've only recently started taking seriously

Actually, I'm pretty sure I'm the only sane one... the whole rest of the planet is fucked.

Yeah but no but yeah...

>It used to be called "teenagers are moody" and "it's just a phase"

that is soooooo unfair!!

Guess what?! You might have been joking, but this is not very far off the mark.

There are a few things that need to be understood in order to make this clear.

Neuroses exist on a spectrum (not an on-off switch), and almost everyone exhibits neurotic behavior to some extent. Who exhibits observable neurosis and who does not is decided by the interplay of two factors: psychological resistance to neuroses (stress tolerance, established by both nature and nurture), and the amount of stress a person is dealing with.

So, for example, a person with an extremely high tolerance for stress can still become observably neurotic if placed in a horrific situation. Likewise, a person with a very low tolerance for stress can become apparently normal if placed in an extremely safe situation.

In psychology, the tendency to attribute a person's actions to their internal character rather than the situation they are in is called the primary attribution error. It's the most common mistake.

Almost everyone is crazy if the world is crazy enough to make them that way. But, yeah, there is a good ~15% who are resilient AF.

They seem proud of it too. Even going as far as to seek out additional mental issues to brag about.

I'd say 95%.

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Well half of 17-19 year olds are teen girls so it’s a surprisingly low number.

The “people have always been this depressed, it’s just that now we’re more aware of it” theory doesn’t seem to hold up in my opinion. I’m not a psychologist so take this with a grain of salt, but the mental health epidemic we’re seeing now seems to be caused by social conditions unique to the 21st century.

I still to this day get looked at funny and “not as manly” when I tell people I have ADHD, I’m bipolar, my tourettes, OCD, whatever. They don’t believe me when I tell them, and its ESPECIALLY awkward when I talk about my feelings regarding my “conditions” or my feelings about life and its circumstances.

So much fucking stigma.

Agreed. “I NEED A QUICK FIX TO ALL OF MY PROBLEMS NOW!!! OMG I HAVE ADHD TIKTOK SAID I DO NOW I CAN GET MEDS TO FIX MYSELF!”

I was a little worried about the structure of the study given how shit a lot of social studies are (this coming from someone with a social related degree and still somehow learned statistics), but clicking through and reading the setup of having multiple interviews including an initial in-person one makes me feel a lot better than "an online survey", which would not be representative.

>In psychology, the tendency to attribute a person's actions to their internal character rather than the situation they are in is called the primary attribution error. It's the most common mistake.

It's also the #1 tactic in politics, and coincidentally is the #1 worst thing about politics.

That’s not what I was saying at all. The increase in mental health disorders is 100% real and measurable. The people who suffer from these disorders aren’t weak or “faking it”. I’m saying that the lives people live in the modern world CAUSE depression, ADHD, anxiety, etc. People are suffering more and in different ways than they would have a generation or two ago.

Oh totally agree with you, I was more or less tailgating off of your post unintentionally I guess.

While I believe there has most certainly been a spike in the amount of people diagnosed with mental health disorders (due to 21st century problems I could whole-heartedly with you there) I also feel that another issue we face in society today is , generally, people want a fix or repair for everything, and FAST (a different take on our modern day problems). Modern technology has spoiled us. I would be hard pressed to find that 100% of these cases are valid, when you may have a teenager/young adult hop into a telemedicine appointment telling the doctor that they cant focus and are having a hard time in school, however what isn’t disclosed is that they’re eating junk food every day and getting 4 hours of sleep. Boom, “ADHD” diagnosis and some meds, neeeeext.

Not trying to argue, totally agree with you, just wanted to express myself.

For the record I didn’t mean 100% of cases are valid. I meant that the trend of worsening mental health at the societal level is 100% factual. But yeah I completely agree with everything you said.