[HN Gopher] CDC warns of a steep decline in teen mental health ___________________________________________________________________ CDC warns of a steep decline in teen mental health Author : walterbell Score : 169 points Date : 2022-04-03 08:11 UTC (14 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com) | WaxedChewbacca wrote: | Lammy wrote: | > "When you make schools less toxic for the most vulnerable | students, all students benefit -- and the converse is also true," | Ethier said. | | Who is making schools more toxic for the least vulnerable | students? I need a hit, baby, give me it. | eganist wrote: | I'm not sure the pandemic is solely or even largely responsible. | | Zoomers are the first generation with nearly unrestricted access | to social media essentially from birth (access that probably | should've been restricted early on, but that's water under the | bridge). Couple that early and frequent exposure with artificial | echo chambers created by apps to boost engagement, and | impressionable minds end up soaked in endlessly-amplified | negative perspectives. | | The test case for this was 4chan incubating incel/redpill culture | and Reddit later amplifying it among late-millennials. Today, | EDs, ideation of self harm, etc are all mercilessly reflected | back at people on just about every social media platform rather | than just the niche ones. The pandemic only made it worse by | preventing people from spending time with each other in person, | but kids are glued to their phones anyway. | | $1 Bet: millennial parents will probably learn from this with | their own kids. Or if not, legislators probably will. Late Gen-a | and the generation that follows will hopefully see a rebound from | these trends with parenting habits that benefit from these | learnings. | ClumsyPilot wrote: | Kids have less freedom today than they eve did - my parents | roamed the city freely, i only walked to school by myself, kids | today hardly leave the house alone | a9h74j wrote: | I can't find a contour plot to reference, but I saw one once | to this effect: | | Every few decades in the US, the roaming range for kids | decreasing by a factor of three or more IIRC -- over | generations. | | My father as a kid was setting animal traps all over the | county, and for him a rifle, technologically speaking, was | his PC. | spookthesunset wrote: | > kids are glued to their phones anyway. | | In many places this was actively encouraged during the last two | years. Virtually every other activity was banished. | Playgrounds, schools, extracurricular activities, pools, | museums, you name it... closed. In many places you literally | couldn't go outside without some kind of government issued | hall-pass. | | We absolutely, shamefully fucked over kids the last two years. | And so many people cheered it on despite kids being the lowest | risk group out there. | version_five wrote: | > I'm not sure the pandemic is solely or even largely | responsible | | I agree that the pandemic is probably not a root cause: I think | the global reaction to the pandemic could have a related root | cause (social media, outrage / attention culture, the breakdown | of normal human discourse, polarization) as the mental health | problems. Blaming "the pandemic" fails to acknowledge that | covid was as much or more about our collective reaction as it | was about the actual virus. It's the "powder keg" thing - the | conditions were there, and inevitably something would come | along to set it off. | quickthrowman wrote: | > I agree that the pandemic is probably not a root cause: I | think the global reaction to the pandemic could have a | related root cause | | I keep seeing the argument that the pandemic and the response | to it are distinctly separate phenomenon. They are not. | | The pandemic response is explicitly part and parcel of the | pandemic, you don't have a pandemic without a response, and | there's no response without a pandemic. | | This is not hard to grasp. | version_five wrote: | > This is not hard to grasp | | It must be for me, can you rephrase your point please, I | can't understand what your comment means | briHass wrote: | I'd add 'collective overreaction', at least from a fear | perspective. I know plenty of adults that lost their rational | minds during the pandemic: believing all the media-driven | fear porn that never once honestly explained the true risk to | the < 70 year-old crowd. Older children/teens watched those | same news programs and also picked up on their parents' fear, | and they had even less wisdom and ability to think clearly | than the parents. | throw93232 wrote: | Most kids I know, think social media are lame. They use it | complement for their hobbies and activities. It was pandemic | that glued them to their phones, not the other way around. | | But _must protect meh narrative_!! | easrng wrote: | Here, have an anecdote: I always spent a lot of my time | online (I got Discord at 12 or 13 I think, I never got | Twitter or any FB/Meta apps, but now I'm on the fediverse | which is nice) and the pandemic didn't really change much | other than me not having to leave the house to go to school. | bee_rider wrote: | The undergrads I work with don't seem to ever mention | Facebook, but Discord seems pretty popular. Social media is | like everything else: There's the "bad" product which has | been ruined by old people and the "good" product that the hip | young crowd likes. This treadmill will continue as people | join networks, settle in to their preferences, and then age. | [deleted] | twoxproblematic wrote: | akira2501 wrote: | I'm always entertained by the idea that 4chan did something to | people as opposed to it revealing what was always there. We're | social animals, we're more defined by our environment than we'd | like to believe; but similarly, we have the capability to | generate and manipulate that environment ourselves. | | I would suggest that the basic human feedback loop just got | more tightly coupled and that mass personal communication was | always going to lead to this. | MisterBastahrd wrote: | It gave them a positive feedback loop and gave them a safe | space to become more extreme and weaponize their own | stupidity. | | You can easily see this to a lesser extend by going to any | sports team subreddit and then going to the subreddit of the | league that team plays in. The voices will be much more | uniform and arguments more minor in the team subreddit for | the most part... and views that are freely expressed and | thought to be factual in the team subreddit may not be at all | popular in the league subreddit. | csallen wrote: | Kids have been exposed to multiple consecutive years of social | isolation due to the pandemic. They haven't been going to | school or seeing their peers in person. That's kind of the | obvious hypothesis. To just completely write that off, you | _really_ have to have axe to grind against social media. | | As you said, "kids are glued to their phones anyway." That was | already true before the pandemic. Which, again, suggests to me | that the extreme factor here is the isolation, not the phones. | | Not that social media is good or healthy. But the way it's | scapegoated reminds me of the way television and video games | were demonized when I was a child growing up in the 90s. It was | over the top. | vkou wrote: | > They haven't been going to school or seeing their peers in | person. | | I'm not sure there's a single family in the continental | United States that has spent the entirety of the past two | years keeping their children locked up in their basement. | | Even when school is closed, nobody has been stopping children | from seeing their peers in person outside of school. | | And if our society can't figure out a way to make that a | priority, then _that_ may be the problem with it, not the | school closures. | formerkrogeremp wrote: | Anecdotally, yes, some children do get abused and | neglected. Some are still locked up for years. | Aerroon wrote: | > _Even when school is closed, nobody has been stopping | children from seeing their peers in person outside of | school._ | | Why do people always treat friction as something that is | irrelevant? | | Shutdowns and kids being unable to hang out when they | choose to creates a situation where they just lose touch | with one another. You can't just deliberately flip a switch | to turn it all back on. Social connections don't work like | that. Social connections involve a whole series of | spontaneous events. If those events don't happen, then | social connections fall away. Adults have a hard time | making friends, because they have a lot fewer opportunities | for those spontaneous events that create friendships. | | Rolling the dice less often will give you fewer successes. | Some amount of those successes is required for upkeep of a | friendship. | throwaway0a5e wrote: | ericd wrote: | Well that's an extreme overreaction to human nature. | jimmydorry wrote: | You may have missed the fact that many countries / | localities in fact did do lockdowns on and off for the last | two years that did prevent childrend from seeing their | peers in person outside of school. Couple that with the | non-stop fearmongering by the media, and it's not an | unreasonable assumption to make that many kids were | probably kept at home and away from their peers, even | between lockdowns. | spookthesunset wrote: | I dunno why this is downvoted. I know several people who | intentionally isolated their kids for at least a year. | These kids couldn't even go outside... | | Instead of telling people to remain calm, these fucking | "experts" intentionally scared the living daylights out | of people. And for many people in my particularly liberal | region, they took it all to heart and went well above and | beyond what these "experts" were demanding. | vkou wrote: | In the US, those on and off lockdowns[1] lasted for about | a month per locale, and weren't even enforced during that | time. | | What about the other 23 months? | | [1] 'Lockdown' is a completely inappropriate word to | describe a world where the greatest practical impediment | to your freedom is that you can't go to the theatre, the | bar, or to Hawai'i. Or host a wedding. | ryandrake wrote: | Everything is exaggerated nowadays. "Unenforced | suggestions to stay at home" = lockdown. "A minor | inconvenience" = torture. "Sensible public health policy" | = tyranny. | | No US state implemented anything close to what a | reasonable, sane person could describe as lockdown. | Nobody was locked into their homes. Stay at home was | routinely broken with zero consequences. Business | closures went unenforced outside of a handful of urban | areas. Calling it "lockdown" is clown world logic. | germinalphrase wrote: | I'm a high school English teacher. What you're saying seems | mostly right - but, anecdotally of course, the trend has been | made more severe. Their ability to engage with in-person | socialization is very obviously impaired, and their pre- | existing tendency to snack on social media is compulsive for | a whole bunch of them. | | At a much higher level than I've ever seen, kids will choose | swiping over talking with their friends _who are sitting | right next to them_. | | It's getting better, but - man - it was _bad_ when we first | returned from distance learning. | [deleted] | ccbccccbbcccbb wrote: | When CDC warns about society as a whole being subjected to total | and deliberate menticide and discloses all means towards that | end, it is only then that there will finally arrive some | substance to discuss. | | Otherwise it sounds like researching the swaying of trees without | ever mentioning the wind. | barry-cotter wrote: | > Regardless of any internet-level understanding or resentment, | the millennial/zoomer understanding of mental health is | completely destroying people's lives. | | > I work and have worked in mental health for my entire adult | life (late 20s now). I have my own mental health diagnoses. I was | diagnosed with severe OCD when I was 11. Since then I've gone | through periods of generalized anxiety, agoraphobia, panic | disorder, you name it. It has destroyed my life once every three | or four years without fail. Losing jobs, friendships, my grades | in college, everything. Just utter ineptitude and catatonic | inability to take care of myself. I have been blessed with the | most supportive family anyone could ask for. I do not fail to see | the differences between myself and those who I now serve. But | there is an intense illness that is permeating through our | younger generations that is destroying the possibility of | recovery for these people suffering through legitimate mental | health issues. | | > I have met and helped and treated numerous individuals now who | are my peers in age - anything from 18-early 30s. And so many | have internalized a generational "understanding" of mental | illness that is toxic and worthless beyond condemnation. Our | youngest generations' understanding of mental health enables, | encourages, and at worst glorifies mental illness. I can not | understate the number of times I've met a young woman who has | made being mentally ill, and polysexual, and queer, and autistic, | et cetera, their identity. | | https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/a-broken-model-of-broke... | gilrain wrote: | Whoa, I was with that until the huge hit of bigotry at the end. | Being queer or polysex is not at all a mental illness. | replygirl wrote: | gilrain wrote: | > Queer is an identity for diletantes who want to be | treated like they're gay without being gay | | I'll thank you not to insult my partner to my face. The | rules of this forum prevent me from saying what I think of | bigots like you. | replygirl wrote: | This is a really personal opinion that comes based on a | decade of life as gay and trans so if emotivism is your | moral framework you really shouldn't try to tell me | anything on this | | Best to just make statements instead of validating mine | against your power ranking | throwanem wrote: | replygirl wrote: | throwanem wrote: | You're adorable, is what you are. Try not to embarrass | yourself too much before you grow out of it - no one else | will remember, but maybe you can save yourself a little | cringe five years or so from now. | replygirl wrote: | my woke era was the embarrassing one | p10_user wrote: | Not sure what OPs original meaning was, but I think a | legitimate statement can be made stating that being | queer/polysex (or any other non "standard" sexual identity) | comes with a higher probability for mental illness due to | discrimination. | coolso wrote: | Or, at least, perceived discrimination via an ever present | victim mentality. | JaimeThompson wrote: | A major political part in the US at the time I write this | has had in their national platform the removal of rights | from such people including, but not limited to, the | removal of their ability to marry who they want to so it | is a bit more than "perceived discrimination". | coolso wrote: | Yes but gay marriage has been legal for a while, and so | now we see the invention of new things to be offended | about, like they/them pronouns, and pretending that we | don't actually know the definition of a man or a woman or | that all that makes a man or a woman is which one they'd | like to "present" as that day. | | I do recall one of the arguments against gay marriage | being that once gay marriage was allowed, they'd move to | something else. "They literally just want to get married" | was the common retort to that argument, but lo and | behold, it is becoming clearer day by day that the "give | them an inch" slippery slope argument may have applied | here. (I support gay marriage, FWIW.) | | Regardless, everyone has been discriminated against at | some point in their lives, but evidently, certain groups | handle it differently than others. | JaimeThompson wrote: | Said political party is fighting to get that reversed and | has begun to make noise that states should be able to ban | birth control because they think that Griswold v. | Connecticut was wrongly decided [1] | | [1] https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy- | kaffer/... | germinalphrase wrote: | "I can not understate the number of times I've met a young | woman who has made being mentally ill, and polysexual, and | queer, and autistic, et cetera, their identity." | | One of these is not like the others. | alexb_ wrote: | Can we stop pretending like being fashionably ill is a new | problem plaguing our youth? This is a phenomenon that has | happened before in history - Tuberculosis was seen as crazy | fashionable during the romantic period, and could be part of | the reason that things like pale skin, thin bodies, and | fragility are STILL seen as fashionable to this day[1]. Maybe | we're seeing something similar happen here? | | [1] https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/tuberculosis-a- | fashionable... | jt2190 wrote: | The data for the CDC Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey | (ABES) are here: | | https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/abes/tables/index.htm | | The survey was conducted in the first half of 2021 | dadjoker wrote: | I'm not sure what you expect when you instill constant fear of | simply getting sick, take away all of their social structure, and | isolate them in front of a screen, all for a virus that doesn't | affect kids barely at all. Per the CDC there is a 0.003% chance | of someone under age 20 dying from COVID; they have greater risk | driving to school. | | It's no wonder their mental health is so poor, even if the trend | was starting before the pandemic. | aedocw wrote: | The point was to limit the spread of the virus throughout the | entire population, and an attempt to prevent hospitals from | being overwhelmed by the infected. | vinyl7 wrote: | Whatever helps you rationalize that we basically destroyed | the younger generation in hopes of saving the old/dying | generation | spookthesunset wrote: | Too bad you'll never really know if any of it worked. Kinda | would have been nice to stick with proven mitigations we had | planned out for decades instead of chuck it all out of the | window in search of a miracle cure. If you read pre-covid | pandemic planning, virtually everything they suggestion you | _dont do_ society decided to do. Everything they suggested | you should do, we ignored. | Apocryphon wrote: | Sweden's low-restrictions approach exists as an alternative | case study: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden | spookthesunset wrote: | It disgusts me to see this downvoted. There isn't anything | false about what you said. What we have done to children the | last two years is absolutely disgusting. The fact so many | people seem to cheer it on makes it even worse--especially how | so many of the "pro-education" crowd cheers it on too. | | We _fucked_ kids the last two years and it requires some | serious mental gymnastics to rationalize it away. | standardUser wrote: | "all for a virus that doesn't affect kids barely at all" | | It's downvoted because the above line is either a willful | misrepresentation in service of a political gripe or, less | likely, a genuine ignorance that should not be promoted. | spookthesunset wrote: | In what way are kids at risk? We have two years of data to | show otherwise. | kurofune wrote: | Blaming it all on the pandemic is an absolutely hilarious | misdiagnosis. Everything seems to be on the brink of collapse all | the time, housing prices are absolutely bonkers in most cities | and wages are, in the best scenario imaginable, same they were 20 | years ago for your average professional who lives paycheck to | paycheck. Politicians have no vision, they are just parasitic | entities that benefit electorally from violent asinine | confrontation between voters on pointless cultural issues that | never find any satisfactory or permanent resolution. Mass media | are fully immersed in a two decades long psychic war against the | general public that only seems to be accelerating. | | There are too many structural weakness in our society to point | out without having to write a full essay, but this mental health | decline is the direct result of our failing political and | economic systems and our apparent impossibility to challenge them | in any productive way. | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | > Everything seems to be on the brink of collapse all the time, | housing prices are absolutely bonkers in most cities and wages | are, in the best scenario imaginable, same they were 20 years | ago for your average professional who lives paycheck to | paycheck. | | Personal income per Capita went from ~$30k to ~$63k in the last | 20 years [1]. REAL weekly earnings are at an all time high [2]. | | Debt service reached an all-time low during the pandemic [3]. | Even for new buyers with house prices at their peak, with | interest rates where they WERE, mortgage payments were | historically quite low. | | Now that interest rates have gone up, payments are ~20% higher. | But unsurprisingly, the insatiable demand has also dried up. | | [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A792RC0A052NBEA | | [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q | | [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP | | I honestly feel sorry for all the people like you who can't see | how manipulated prices are and realize that it's a good deal. | The market shouldn't be this manipulated (by our government) | and confusing. It's screwing over so many people who think | common sense still applies. | yobbo wrote: | You yourself actually linked to the relevant plot "Employed | full time: Median usual weekly real earnings". If you want to | make credible arguments, look for _median_ income. | | Q3 2001: $338, Q3 2021: $367, so that's an 8% increase, | claimed to be CPI adjusted. | | CPI measures price changes for things such as flip flops, | snickers bars, and TVs - things you find in Walmarts. What | people complain about is the price of housing. | [deleted] | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | The price of housing is irrelevant. It's a debt market. The | debt service of housing (and property tax and insurance) is | what matters. | Aeolun wrote: | I really don't understand what you are trying to say. | | Are you arguing the buying a home is within reach of the | average man anywhere outside of the middle of nowhere? | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | It WAS within reach everywhere beside the most desirable | parts of the most desirable cities. | | You only need to put 3.5% down. When interest rates were at | 2.75% and PMI is only .5% for 3 years - the median HH could | EASILY afford the median house. | | At 2.75% - almost 40% of your mortgage payment is principal | - even in the first year. | | This made the true cost of your housing absurdly cheaper | than rent. | sjg007 wrote: | Uh no, not in the Bay Area... or any place that requires | a jumbo loan. | Der_Einzige wrote: | Owning a house is so much better than renting in Portland | and you need jumbo loans here. | | It's only places like the bay and other ultra hcol | locations where renting is cheaper. I specifically bought | my house to escape renting in the bay area when my job | went remote. I do not want to rent anywhere near | Portland. More than Half the rent price for a third of | the home prices... | sjg007 wrote: | Right but you can't do that with 3.5% down. | disambiguation wrote: | > Personal income per Capita went from ~$30k to ~$63k in the | last 20 years | | At an inflation rate of 3%, the value of money decreases by | half every 25 years. | notacoward wrote: | It depends on what you count as part of the pandemic. At its | core there's just the disease itself and the risk of catching | it. Then there's the chance of knowing someone who has been | severely ill from it, and the precautions taken to mitigate | that risk. A few kids were fine with remote learning; for many | more it _absolutely sucked_. Then there 's the fact that those | precautions have precluded many other activities, leaving even | more time to read all the doom and gloom online. For high- | school seniors (like my daughter) there's the college-admission | situation which is an absolute mess right now due to two years | of pandemic-related issues. Stressed out parents, cabin fever, | contentious battles with friends and neighbors over vaccines | and masks ... the list goes on and on. | | If you interpret "the pandemic" as just that core, maybe it's a | misdiagnosis. If you include all of the secondary and tertiary | effects, the case is much stronger. | missedthecue wrote: | Why would the price of a single family home make a 13 year old | depressed? They've easily got a decade and a half until they | need to worry about that. | disambiguation wrote: | because it makes the future seem hopeless | | "if the adults can't figure it out, what chance do i have?" | manuelabeledo wrote: | Because the pressure it puts on their parents and the | consequences of it? I think this one is pretty obvious. | kurofune wrote: | Off-topic, but love to see a galician surname. Greetings | from an asturian neighbour. | manuelabeledo wrote: | We are everywhere, brother :) | Valgrim wrote: | Because even if it's their parents that pay for the mortgage, | they are still affected by the consequences of high housing | prices (longer travel times, less disposable income, lack of | space, bad neighborhood, lack of social mobility, etc...) | mescaline wrote: | 13 year olds don't worry about houses, they worry about | things shared online by their peers. That's on Silicon | Valley, folks. Denial of our own hand in this is real. | kurofune wrote: | Are you sure you can't imagine why the terrible economic | situation a family is living in could impact the mental | health of a 13yo? We love problem solvers in this site. | missedthecue wrote: | The economy is not in terrible shape though. And even in | horrible economies like Venezuela, we don't see a teenage | depression trend that follows GDP chart. I just don't think | there is a meaningful correlation. | | As a matter of fact, I would hazard a guess that there is | _more_ teenage depression in America 's wealthiest suburb | (Loudoun County, VA) than in inner-city Detroit. | infiniteL0Op wrote: | cudgy wrote: | True. The economy is great ... if your wealthy and | own/trade bubbling assets. The other 80-90% of people are | not fairing better given the scenario described so aptly | by an above post. Flat real wages (adjusted for | inflation) and soaring fundamental expenses like housing, | medical care, education, and now everything else | including food and transportation do not bode well for | most people. Basic math. | lumb63 wrote: | It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the | pandemic is not a notable component of this. I agree that social | media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic | conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental | health. However, to propose that forcing (or, at the least, very | strongly encouraging) an entire populace into self-isolation | would not have negative impacts for a group in one of the most | social and formative times of life, is absurd. | | Imagine you spent half the time you were in high school, alone. I | cannot imagine any rational person is capable of believing this | to not be a major factor to their mental health. | | Anecdotally, I am a reasonably strong introvert, and I switched | teams at my job during the pandemic after nine months of work | from home because it did not feel healthy to my mental state to | not have interacted with anyone in so long. I felt that my social | abilities had atrophied, and that I had lost sight of a lot of | the important things in life that derive from social interaction. | I can only imagine that the impact is far greater to someone who | can't choose to change their life to obtain the social | interaction they are missing, and who (I am generalizing a bit | here) probably requires mental/emotional guidance and support | from their peers, elders, etc. | tablespoon wrote: | > It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the | pandemic is not a notable component of this. I agree that | social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, | economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on | teenage mental health. However, to propose that forcing (or, at | the least, very strongly encouraging) an entire populace into | self-isolation would not have negative impacts for a group in | one of the most social and formative times of life, is absurd. | | It shouldn't be so astonishing. People who wanted to take a | laissez faire approach to COVID (especially pre-vaccine) would | often _incoherently_ throw literally every idea they could | think of against all the mitigation measures, including various | mental health arguments. Of course, that approach didn 't | change a thing except 1) lead to more polarization, 2) harden | people against those arguments forever. | | COVID was a serious problem, and it's rare that serious | problems can be addressed without cost. | mindslight wrote: | Does it make sense to specifically focus on Covid response | here? By which I mean, is this not really just the same problem | of an overbearing system continuing to turn the screws, and now | the system input contains the additional stressor of Covid? | Some of the response is seemingly necessary, and ignoring the | issue is certainly not the answer. But administrators craft | obtuse top-down policies, announce "Mission Accomplished", and | don't particularly examine their effectiveness from the | perspective of those on the receiving end of their blunt tools. | | It's the same exact dynamic as how the media scares everyone | with sensationalized school shootings, and then schools respond | by making kids go through metal detectors and draconian zero | tolerance policies and the like (also horrible for kids' mental | health). We've built this no-win bureaucracy where the primary | dynamic is avoiding any blame. Because if the blame does come, | it will itself be merciless and unempathetic, despite how | reasonable or well-intentioned an administrator's motive was. | henrikschroder wrote: | Not just the isolation, there are so many crazy covidian rules | that some schools have pushed on the kids to uphold the safety | theatre. | | In California, it was absolutely forbidden for anyone to be | indoors without a mask for more than 15 minutes, but you still | have to serve school lunch to kids. | | Some schools solved this by moving lunch outside. No matter the | temperature. | | Some schools solved this by giving the kids a 14 minute lunch | break. | | No talking, no socializing, no enjoying the meal together in | peace. This is how you give kids eating disorders. | legulere wrote: | It also astonishes me that people put all blame of the | pandemic's effects on the counter-measures and none on the | pandemic itself. Having seen the situation in Wuhan or Bergamo, | fearing about loved ones also puts a lot of stress on kids. | onos wrote: | I agree with you: fundamentally a bad thing happened. | Mitigating the harm may have been possible to some degree but | perhaps a more significant degree of freedom was simply | choosing which form the negative consequences would take: | more deaths or more isolation / economic problems. Since they | are in different units, I'd say it's subjective how to decide | what's optimal there. | ranger_danger wrote: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30895642 | PathOfEclipse wrote: | People may rationalize these things because the alternative is | to admit that one may have been wrong and/or caused harm to | others in the process. People would rather downplay the harms | caused by the pandemic to avoid guilt. | giraffe_lady wrote: | Acknowledging the damage done by isolation doesn't mean you | have to believe it was the wrong choice. In my country _a | million people_ have died of covid even with the isolations. | | Was it "worth it"? I don't fucking know and I don't believe | anyone else does either. Would it have been better to just | let it rip and hope for the best? How many more would have | died that way, and would our mental health be better for it? | If it was, could we even live with that? If there was a | button that would cure my depression and kill a stranger, I | wouldn't push it. | | EDIT: ok yeah I get it consensus is we should have pushed the | button you can stop telling me now. | laurent92 wrote: | Would they have died anyway, or did they die _with_ Covid? | It's the repeated question, together with "Didn't the flu | cause as many deaths", and even if it was actual death, | it's a transfer of years of life from the young to the | elderly. | lumost wrote: | Curiously the elderly seem to feel the most robbed. In my | family, the young locked down while the elderly went | about as normal. | | Discussing this today, the predominant feeling amongst | the over 70 cohort was that they had at best a few more | years of health with everyone and didn't want to spend | that in lockdown. | incrudible wrote: | In the beginning, it was widely accepted that the virus | would spread and ultimately infect most people. Yet, two | weeks to flatten the curve somehow turned into two years of | flailing about aimlessly with ineffective measures. | tablespoon wrote: | > Yet, two weeks to flatten the curve somehow turned into | two years of flailing about aimlessly with ineffective | measures. | | 1) Whenever someone mentions "flatten the curve" in that | way, the implication always seems to be the CDC et. al | should have had this _novel_ disease figured out from day | one, but that 's an unreasonable expectation. | | 2) A big reason those measures were as not as effective | as they could have been was that people were actively | undermining them pretty much from day one. | tylersmith wrote: | They didn't need to have it figured it out, just | recognized that they didn't know what they're doing, were | unable of being any help, and stayed quiet instead of | blindly making things up. | spookthesunset wrote: | > people were actively undermining them pretty much from | day one. | | As they should. I didn't sign up for two years of this | nonsense. We didn't know any of it would work but we knew | it could cause serious harm to society yet we choose to | it anyway. I'm not some lab-rat who is forced into | participating in an uncontrolled experiment performed by | a few cherry picked "experts" and their political | backers. | | Most people are absolutely not at risk of serious covid | issues. We knew this even in the first month or two of | this adventure but it was taboo to discuss. You'd | actively be shamed, mocked and humiliated if you ever | discussed actual public data showing covid isn't the | monster the media and self-appointed "experts" made it | out to be. | | It scares the crap out of me how many people willingly | played along for two years. Do people not question | anything? | tablespoon wrote: | >> people were actively undermining them pretty much from | day one. | | > As they should. | | And we can thank _those people_ for giving us one of the | worse outcomes. | | > I didn't sign up for two years of this nonsense. | | Hate to break it to you, but that's just not how the | world works. You don't get to chose if you participate or | not. | spookthesunset wrote: | > And we can thank those people for giving us one of the | worse outcomes. | | It takes a lot of hubris to suggest these mitigations did | a damn thing. And it takes a lot of mental gymnastics and | rationalization to completely ignore their very | significant costs to society. We fucked kids, fucked | small business owners, fucked hospitals, fucked the poor | and working class, enriched the wealthy and old while | stealing from the poor and young. | | Life is too short to obey the orders of a handful of | unelected, cherry-picked "experts". None of them could | ever say the crap they had us do would work. We still | can't say any of it worked in a meaningful way. | | People flushed two years of their short fucking lives | down the toilet to participate in an uncontrolled | experiment... naw... I'll opt out, thanks. | giraffe_lady wrote: | No they are right, you can't opt out. You can only act. | And others are free to label your actions selfish, cruel, | or evil as they judge them. | dahfizz wrote: | > Whenever someone mentions "flatten the curve" in that | way, the implication always seems to be the CDC et. al | should have had this novel disease figured out from day | one, but that's an unreasonable expectation. | | Then they shouldn't act like they have all the answers if | they have no idea what is going on. This is exactly what | all the "conspiracy theorists" expected, and it's exactly | how it played out. | | The CDC has seriously destroyed public faith in the | government generally by pushing "two weeks to flatten the | curve" and "100% effective vaccines" when, in reality, | they did not have a handle on the situation. | detaro wrote: | Health authorities pretty much everywhere have been quite | clear about data and conclusions constantly evolving, but | people just don't read or process that far. Or only read | the "CDC recommends XYZ" headline and then complain that | nobody told them that this isn't 100% valid-forever | fundamental laws. It's been staggering to see how many | people will claim "but they never said this might change" | while you can just go back and look at what actually was | written at the time and see that it was of course said | that things can and will be adjusted as the situation | changes. | incrudible wrote: | I am not implying that. The expectation was that there | would be a pandemic and that, unfortunately, a lot of | people would die. The idea was to avoid preventable | deaths stemming from an overwhelmed healthcare system. It | then somehow turned into full blown moral panic, | attempting to minimize deaths from _infections_ at almost | any cost - something that we never did, and still do not | do, with any other disease. | giraffe_lady wrote: | > attempting to minimize deaths from infections at almost | any cost - something that we never did, and still do not | do, with any other disease. | | So first off no, not "at almost any cost." The largest, | most effective mitigations were never on the table: wind | down the entire global economy into "safe mode" and focus | only on life-making activities; send all workers home | except the _truly_ necessary. Instead we sent home office | workers while labeling as essential the food, delivery, | and retail workers we forced to continue to serve them. | | Second, "we never did, and still do not do, with any | other disease" well we fucking should. Every single | preventable death is a tragedy of cosmic magnitude, and | much disruption is justified in avoiding even one. | erdos4d wrote: | > people were actively undermining them pretty much from | day one. | | This is what actually fucked the US and led to the | million deaths there. I live in Ecuador and we had a bad | go in the first few months of the pandemic, with near | total lockdown and many deaths. Afterwards though, we | went very hard with masks and reasonable restrictions on | numbers of people in buildings at once and the | cases/deaths have been very steady and controlled since | then. Yes, masks really do work, if everyone actually | wears them, our numbers have proven this. The biggest | restriction has been that schools have shut or gone | remote during the entire pandemic and only recently have | in-person classes started back up. The US seems to have | had it much much worse and it seems to be entirely self | inflicted. I personally don't understand why the US | didn't just give up after a few months once it was | obvious that people wouldn't really do what it takes for | success. It looks like the US has stayed on a path that | everyone hates, but keeps getting no benefit from. | spookthesunset wrote: | > People would rather downplay the harms caused by the | pandemic to avoid guilt. | | The pandemic had nothing to do with keeping kids out of | school for more than a year. That was all humans doing. The | virus didn't wake up some morning and tell us to shut down | down schools. | | Lockdowns and government caused virtually all of the lasting | side-effects from the last two years. | | It is my strong opinion that history will not look kindly to | almost every single thing humanity did the last two years. | They were humans at their absolute worst... Making knee jerk | decisions based on fear and panic never end up well... | Gigachad wrote: | My state in Australia had a lockdown where for a while it | was not permitted to go outside for fitness by yourself. I | can't imagine the physical and mental health damage this | caused. | onphonenow wrote: | What a load of crock. My elderly father, terminal illness, | was hit by the lockdown days before coming to visit us. He | DOES NOT CARE about covid. He is dying anyways. | | Then they wouldn't let our young son go play with friends or | play on beach. This is lifetime impact stuff at 2-3. | | When I wore an N95 mask I was told over and over it didn't | help. Hello, it's an airborne disease, why wouldn't my mask | help? | | So we can't wear an N95, we CAN go to crowded grocery stores, | we CAN'T go outside to the beach (huge volume of onshore | fresh air and sunshine) and school is remote only (for a 2 | year old this is TERRIBLE). | | Worst of all, despite the talk of being "science driven" they | have not been releasing age banded fatality rates by variant | and a timely basis so folks can make informed decisions. | | That makes me wonder, what IS the fatality rate for 5 year | olds. Seriously give me a table. Is it lower than just random | accidents per 100? | rjh29 wrote: | I've used that argument and the counter is: depression due to | lockdown can heal once lockdown is over. People dying because | hospitals filled up and cases climbed is permanent. | henrikschroder wrote: | Suicidal ideation among kids in the US is up 100%, suicide | attempts are up 50%, actual suicides are up 20%. | | Dead kids are also pretty &$?#&%#!" permanent. | | And this is the thing that's been missing for the past two | years: A sensible cost/benefit discussion. Hell, we haven't | even acknowledged that every single pandemic rule and | restriction and measure has a cost in human life. Instead, | we've been getting shitty platitudes about how "kids are | resilient", or "it's just two weeks", or "your surgery is | non-essential and therefore postponed". | tablespoon wrote: | >> [Column A] People dying because hospitals filled up | and cases climbed is permanent. | | > [Column B] Dead kids are also pretty &$?#&%#!" | permanent. | | > And this is the thing that's been missing for the past | two years: A sensible cost/benefit discussion. | | So, which is higher: Column A or Column B? I haven't | checked the numbers, but I'd be astounded if there wasn't | at least and order of magnitude more COVID deaths during | this pandemic than _total_ number of teen suicides (i.e. | all of them, not just the increase due to the pandemic). | incrudible wrote: | These children will never fully recover their formative | years. Also, what impact, if any, did the treatment of | young people have on the ultimate death toll from this | virus? We will never know, but I am afraid if we could, we | would not like the answer. | ravel-bar-foo wrote: | Closig schools has been the core of the US pandemic | influenza control strategy since the second Bush | administration. There were detailed simulations showing | that shutting schools is the only single intervention | that can significantly affect R: schools are the best | place for spreading influenza due to the very small | spacing between seats in classrooms, the number of | students who pack into schoolbusses daily, etc. (However, | the studies were done before masking everyone was a | possibility.) | sillysaurusx wrote: | _Imagine you spent half the time you were in high school, | alone._ | | I don't speak for anyone but myself, and I am an extreme | outlier. But I would have been delighted. Alone, I could spend | my time how I want, learn what I want, and associate with who I | wish. There is also a much larger pool of love interests online | than offline, especially in small town Missouri. | | People just feel differently. | sva_ wrote: | There was a discussion on here, about how the Covid pandemic | may have been one of the, or even _the_ biggest transfers of | wealth from "the poor" to "the rich" in the history of our | civilization. Somebody remarked, that it has also been the | biggest transfer of lifetime from the young to the old, as the | lockdowns were mostly to protect the old. The measures taken | against the pandemic undoubtedly had a huge impact on young | people's mental health, but the effects of it will only really | unfold in the coming years, and are probably not measurable. | People who deny this must be willfully ignorant. | radicalbyte wrote: | If we didn't do the lockdowns then we would have seen a huge | increase in mortality over all age groups as hospitals where | overwhelmed. | | Also, Long Covid is very much a thing. | | I get it though: teenagers are growing up during a once in a | century pandemic in the middle of an existential climate | crisis which the old leaders (all 70+ in the US!) are not | addressing. | spookthesunset wrote: | > If we didn't do the lockdowns then we would have seen a | huge increase in mortality over all age groups as hospitals | where overwhelmed. | | This is just wishful thinking. There is no real way to know | if lockdowns had any material impact on hospital capacity. | And besides, we had field hospitals set up in the early | days... though they were all closed because they didn't get | used. Hmmmmm.... | jeromegv wrote: | Canada had field hospitals. And they were used. | | Here's an example. Sunnybrook hospital in toronto. One of | the leading trauma hospital in the country. They also | brought military to help. | | https://beta.ctvnews.ca/local/toronto/2021/4/30/1_5409214 | .ht... | | Just one example among many. | spookthesunset wrote: | "That happened on Monday when the first patient arrived. | There are now six patients there and another two are | expected by the end of Friday." | | In a province with 14.7 million people... Society has to | grind to a halt for a few hundred people... how does that | make any sense? | Lammy wrote: | > as hospitals where overwhelmed. | | Nobody seemed to mind very much during all those other | years: | | https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle:hospitals+intitle:o | v... | | https://www.google.com/search?q=intitle:hospitals+intitle:% | 2... | sva_ wrote: | > once in a century pandemic | | That's pretty optimistic. I hope you're right. | dgeiser13 wrote: | We will have another one within 10 years. | alsetmusic wrote: | > [...] but the effects of it will only really unfold in the | coming years[...] | | I believe that we'll see studies for the rest of our lives on | the effects of the pandemic / lockdown among different age | groups. Young people will likely be the most affected | longterm. This will be the new "lead paint" for a generation. | lumb63 wrote: | It's certainly a difficult cost/benefit analysis, preserving | the lives of the elderly, at the expense of quality of life | for a younger generation, versus the opposite. The effects | are, as you said, probably not measurable, and so the | calculus is near-impossible. However, the answer has | seemingly been to not even try, and to "stop covid" at all | costs, laying waste to any holistic arguments that perhaps | prioritizing societal wellbeing was a better route than | declaring war against a virus. | | In my opinion, the vast majority of the world lost its cool | in the pandemic, and in our panic, we may have made mistakes. | Or maybe not. The long term results remain to be seen. | Certainly, however, we as a society did not act with a level | head and think things through rationally before acting. | phkahler wrote: | >> However, the answer has seemingly been to not even try, | and to "stop covid" at all costs, laying waste to any | holistic arguments that perhaps prioritizing societal | wellbeing was a better route than declaring war against a | virus. | | Stop Covid at all costs is what they said, but not what | they did. HCQ was shot down without investigation even as | doctors were reporting success. Most things were simply | shot down as "not an FDA approved treatment for covid19" | even though there were no such treatments for the first | year. I had covid so my immunity is better than the | vaccinated, but I was still supposed to get vaxed because | it helps a bit more and we needed to do everything | possible. OK vitamins D was thought to help and has since | been proven to help, so why are there not ads pushing that? | It's never been about doing (certainly not trying) | everything possible. Its always been "do as I say" from the | government. | hotpotamus wrote: | When you try to mix human morbidity and mortality with | market economics, basically you just piss everyone off. I | mean, if I want to be crass about it, I could ask you who's | life you value more - your father or your son, your aunt or | your niece? And how much money are you willing to pay to | extend the life of any of these people. We are hesitant to | ask these questions for good reason. | CWuestefeld wrote: | As the song goes, "if you choose not to decide, you still | have made a choice". The fact that we've steadfastly | refused to verbalize the implicit choices that have been | made doesn't change anything about what was actually | done. | makomk wrote: | The NHS in the UK - whose low, low costs certain US | political activists point to as proof public healthcare | is not just better but cheaper - literally does this. | There's a fixed amount they're willing to spend per | expected year of healthy life saved, adjusted for quality | of life during that time, and treatments that are | expected to cost more than that aren't available on the | NHS. This is surprisingly uncontroversial, possibly | because the NHS as an institution is basically beyond | questioning. However, the same reasoning was not applied | in the UK over Covid; the mainstream consensus was that | anyone who prioritised the economy over stopping Covid | was an evil murderer, and every single Covid death that | happened was caused by our government not stopping it. | david38 wrote: | This is the way. Hand waving morality and preciousness of | life leads to a very few getting all the treatment. (The | first part) | hotpotamus wrote: | Yes, any public healthcare system will obviously make | these calculations. Private insurers also do this in the | US however they are more limited in what they can do to | control costs. | | I suspect that because there is one universal system, | people accept that they're all more or less bound by the | same rules (I'm aware there is private care in the UK | too), whereas in the US it can be pretty arbitrary as to | who gets healthcare; obviously money helps but there are | multiple single payer systems (lol) that some belong to | also. | Gigachad wrote: | The government already has these answers. There is a | value assigned to life per year it could be extended. For | some reason that was thrown out the window for covid. | hotpotamus wrote: | Where do they publish the numbers? I'm curious what I'm | worth. | 317070 wrote: | In the UK, this might be a good place to start: | https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/valuation-of- | risk... | | https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/valuation-of- | risk... | | tl;dr, if memory serves correctly, it's about 60k GBP per | full health year left. So 2 years at 50% health is 1 full | health year, with formulas to tell you what 50% health | means exactly. | | I don't know of other countries that make this | calculation so explicitly. | phkahler wrote: | Google for SVM statistical value of human life. If I | recall correctly. | moralestapia wrote: | >that it has also been the biggest transfer of lifetime from | the young to the old, as the lockdowns were mostly to protect | the old | | Holy crap, never thought about it that way. Add to the | equation that it was the generation that gave us climate | abuse, debt and pretty much loaned themselves out of our | future (I'm in my 30s ...) and I don't think that's fair, at | all. | Gigachad wrote: | Few major effects. Young people mostly work service or part | time jobs which were completely destroyed. Very few were | able to work from home. Property values across the planet | exploded, further benefiting those who already had them. | Cost of living and inflation exploded without any bump to | wages on these low end jobs. | | If you don't work in tech, are an exec, or own significant | assets, your life has been ruined by covid restrictions. | moralestapia wrote: | Absolutely agree, I am lucky enough to own an apartment, | have plenty of disposable income, and I was working from | home already, so COVID was meh for me. But, I am not | indifferent to my peers, and | | >life has been ruined by covid restrictions | | this is completely true for a large swath of people, and | it wasn't fair for them. | after_care wrote: | From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about | managing hospital capacity. While this might | disproportionally benefited older folks, hospitals are a | service anyone could need at any time for a wide range of | reasons. | spookthesunset wrote: | > From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about | managing hospital capacity | | And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at | risk. We should have relaxed our approach to all this when | cities across the country were closing their unused field | hospitals. Instead of celebrating the fact that covid | wasn't nearly as lethal as the earliest models predicted, | governors across the country doubled down on their covid | restrictions. Two years later, they are finally almost | gone. | | Did any of these restrictions provide enough benefit to | justify their immense social cost? It will probably take | much cooler heads to find out. It troubles me that we went | into this mess with little understanding if the measures | even worked. In effect, we took millions and millions of | people and had them partake in a massive uncontrolled | experiment without anybody's consent. | kevinventullo wrote: | _there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk_ | | I know several people who had to delay surgeries and | other medical procedures because of hospital capacity due | to COVID. | treeman79 wrote: | I had to delay and miss many appointments because | everything was shutdown due to pandemic. Nearly died from | it. Many others did die because they stopped getting | routine care. | spookthesunset wrote: | Nope. It was due to hospitals being on edge and delaying | elective surgery "just in case". COVID didn't cause | capacity issues at hospitals, humans reaction to covid | did. | clysm wrote: | Do you have a source on that? | | I know multiple nurses and doctors who were re-assigned | to help with COVID patients, or came out of retirement to | help with staffing shortages. | Lammy wrote: | A person in my family had to delay a major procedure too, | but the excuse was that it "wasn't safe" like they were | being done a favor :/ | CWuestefeld wrote: | AFAIK, this happened, but was consistently due to | proactive closures in expectation of overcrowding that | nearly ever came to pass. Although a lot of ink was | spilled on the potential for hospitals being overrun, | there were vanishingly few cases in which it actually | happened. | hh3k0 wrote: | > And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at | risk. | | What? Omicron absolutely crushed U.S. hospitals -- with | some having to set up temporary emergency rooms in their | parking structures. Many U.S. hospitals had to put off | essential procedures and ran out of practically | _everything_ (syringes, saline products, blood, etc.) | during the last wave. | theli0nheart wrote: | > _Omicron absolutely crushed U.S. hospitals -- with some | having to set up temporary emergency rooms in their | parking structures. Many U.S. hospitals had to put off | essential procedures and ran out of practically | _everything_ (syringes, saline products, blood, etc.) | during the last wave._ | | I don't recall this happening. Can you provide a source | for this? | spookthesunset wrote: | They can't. You'll just get links to some NYT article | whose main content suggests "we are preparing for a | surge" or something of that nature. | | I've yet to see any kind of actual study that compares | hospital capacity during these "surges" vs hospital | capacity in the "before times". Also I strongly suspect | future research will show that most of the hospital | issues were self-inflicted wounds. We tested everybody | who came into the hospital and invoked crazy high- | overhead processes for positive results irregardless of | symptoms. | | The entire two years of this I've been waiting for a | single instance of an overflowing hospital with | stretchers of people out the door... never seen one yet. | There has never been a real issue of hospital capacity-- | at least in the US anyway. | hh3k0 wrote: | > The entire two years of this I've been waiting for a | single instance of an overflowing hospital with | stretchers of people out the door... never seen one yet. | | I mean, I don't know about you but I certainly do not | consider this normal: | https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/01/13/er_slammed- | getty... | | Image caption is: "A nurse walks inside a temporary | emergency room, built into a parking garage at Providence | Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center in Tarzana, Calif., | on Jan. 3, 2021. Since Thanksgiving, cases have risen to | the point where 80% of the hospital is filled with | patients with COVID-19 and 90% of the ICU is filled with | COVID-19." | | Taken from: https://www.npr.org/sections/health- | shots/2022/01/13/1072902... | theli0nheart wrote: | > _Since Thanksgiving, cases have risen to the point | where 80% of the hospital is filled with patients with | COVID-19 and 90% of the ICU is filled with COVID-19. "_ | | The confounding factor here is that this includes | patients hospitalized for reasons other than COVID. A | patient that had a positive test might not be in the | hospital _because_ of COVID, but good luck to anyone | trying to tease out that data. | Apocryphon wrote: | > The entire two years of this I've been waiting for a | single instance of an overflowing hospital with | stretchers of people out the door... never seen one yet. | | Your following sentence refers to the U.S., but as for | this one- this is exactly what's happening in Hong Kong | right now: | | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/09/hong- | kong-co... | [deleted] | alsetmusic wrote: | My father was taken to a hospital for a broken hip in | December. There were no beds available. He had a | procedure and was sent home. I have no news article to | provide, only this anecdotal account. This is something | that I can't imagine happening prior to 2020 unless a | natural disaster (hurricane, flood, tornado) had | occurred. | Jon_Lowtek wrote: | >> (January 13th) _" We are being absolutely crushed," | says Dr. Gabor Kelen, chair of emergency medicine at the | Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland._ | | https://knpr.org/npr/2022-01/ers-are-overwhelmed-omicron- | con... | theli0nheart wrote: | Thanks. This supports that there were some hospitals that | ran out of beds but not that any ran out of supplies. | Apocryphon wrote: | Story on supply shortages | | https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/public-global- | health/5... | 30367286 wrote: | >I don't recall this happening. Can you provide a source | for this? | | https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/USA/2020/111 | 9/O... | hh3k0 wrote: | Here you go: | | > Omicron absolutely crushed U.S. hospitals -- with some | having to set up temporary emergency rooms in their | parking structures. | | ERs are overwhelmed as omicron continues to flood them | with patients: https://www.npr.org/sections/health- | shots/2022/01/13/1072902... | | Why omicron is crushing hospitals -- even though cases | are often milder than delta: | https://www.npr.org/sections/health- | shots/2022/01/29/1075871... | | > Many U.S. hospitals had to put off essential procedures | and ran out of practically _everything_ (syringes, saline | products, blood, etc.) during the last wave. | | Americans get sicker as omicron stalls everything from | heart surgeries to cancer care: | https://www.npr.org/sections/health- | shots/2022/02/04/1078029... | | US hospitals struggle as Omicron Covid surge delays other | treatments: | https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/22/us- | hospitals-o... | ravel-bar-foo wrote: | Korea is currently rationing hospital care in the middle | of an Omicron wave. Covid-related patient care | (previously unlimited, with a small fraction of patients | hospitalized for four to six weeks) is now provided on | NHS for only seven days, after which point the patient | must pay out-of-pocket and/or find their own hospital | bed. When this policy was introduced (the limit used to | be two weeks), there was a minor uproar, with doctors | accusing the government of killing patients. | 30367286 wrote: | > And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at | risk | | Are you suggesting that this story is inaccurate? Your | claim is baffling in the face of... well, all the stories | I've been reading the past two years. | | https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw- | coronavirus... | tallytarik wrote: | > In effect, we took millions and millions of people and | had them partake in a massive uncontrolled experiment | without anybody's consent. | | But then... doesn't this cover all government decisions | and legislation? | | If presented with this hypothetical situation in advance, | perhaps we'd have preferred our governments did X, Y and | Z differently. | | But the 'consent' was given when our generation, or our | parents' or grandparents', voted in the governments which | passed the laws to allow for this. | | With hindsight, I suspect many will not vote for the same | governments again. But some will. Perhaps even the | majority will. | | In fact, during the pandemic, many governments who | enacted what you call 'experiments' were re-elected in | landslides. | | In that case, I'd say that many people have given | consent. | | That said, I agree with your suggestion that we should | try to figure out the cost/benefit of these measures. I | think that's a critical step over the next few years. | joaogui1 wrote: | Wasn't there a reduction in suicides? Not that that's the only | factor when it comes to mental health, but it's probably | something to take into account when you talk about the mental | health toll of the past 2 years | thr0wawayf00 wrote: | You're absolutely right, and I've heard firsthand accounts of | this. | | My sister-in-law is a middle school counselor at a large | midwest US public school system and her stories about kids | dealing with the pandemic are heartbreaking, the mental health | support system in some US schools is completely falling apart | due to the workload. | | She's never seen a mental health crisis on this scale in | schools in her entire career. She remarks that kids really | weren't able to learn much during the pandemic due to remote | learning and in many cases are now playing catch-up to get back | on track. The school system she works for basically didn't hold | anyone back for a year because they had no real way of knowing | who progressed as her school district cancelled standardized | testing. | | Anyone who believes that the pandemic wasn't a serious setback | for many kids developmentally is woefully out of touch with | reality. | WalterBright wrote: | > they had no real way of knowing who progressed as her | school district cancelled standardized testing. | | The schools want to remove all evidence that would contradict | their claims of doing a great job. | thr0wawayf00 wrote: | ...or they lacked the resources and infrastructure to | accurately assess students as nobody had been prepared to | move the entire public education system online for an | extended period of time. | WalterBright wrote: | The drive to eliminate all standardized testing has been | going on for many years. | mensetmanusman wrote: | These trends have been happening for decades and it tracks quite | well the gradual breakdown of stable family structures. | Psychologically for example, kids experience their parent's | divorce as worse than a parent's death. | barry-cotter wrote: | If you compare children of divorce with children who have a | parent die the children of divorce look worse on basically | every measure, sure. That doesn't mean divorce is worse for | children than the death of a parent. Divorce is a choice. The | king of person who gets divorced is different from the kind who | doesn't. By way of example Asian-Americanc college graduates | who get married in their 30s have a divorce rate around ~2%. | Most people who get divorced remarry. The kind of person who | marries a divorcee is not the same king of person as those who | don't. | | Correlation isn't causation. | Cpoll wrote: | I've read some takes that divorce can be positive for a child. | The theory was: parents having time away from their child gave | them a break, and also helped them value their time with the | child more. There are also theories that living in a divorced | family is better than living in an unhappily married one. | | AFAIR there are studies looking at families with different | cultural stances on divorce (but good luck controlling for | other factors there). Also they tend to measure more easily | measurable outcomes in the child than mental health, such as | grades, which don't necessarily correlate. | SalmoShalazar wrote: | Do you have a source for that claim? It sounds like nonsense. | My parents divorced when I was 6 or 7 years old, and I'm pretty | sure it would be unimaginably more traumatic if one of them had | died instead. | replygirl wrote: | Just anecdotally, my parents divorced and one of my parents | took their own life, the divorce was harder | h2odragon wrote: | Surely this can be fixed by lowering the standards, like for | speech development, right? | Friday_ wrote: | sdoering wrote: | The quality of the discussion is in parts abysmal. Assertions are | thrown into the world without even mentioning a source. | | A substantive discussion is therefore not possible. It is just | 'opinion porn' imho. | | Regardless of whether the pandemic, social media, (real) porn, | industrial food, excessive demands at school, any combination | thereof or other anecdotes are used as the cause. Nothing is | substantiated by linking sources. Or at least naming them. | | Whatever is claimed can only be questioned, not refuted, as there | is no substantive point of attack. | | Thus, in the end, everyone feels good because they were able to | express an opinion. But unfortunately we have learned nothing. | mlyle wrote: | You know, opinions are valuable here for hypothesis generation. | | No one knows and there is no consensus why this is happening. I | have a few opinions as a middle-and-high school teacher. But | talking about this is important to help wrap our heads around | it. | | If a definitive understanding or reason were easy to acquire, | we'd have done it already. So, the toil continues: for | researchers, policymakers, laymen... and those of us in the | trenches trying to do something about it with not enough | information. | sdoering wrote: | There are for quite some time already studies happening so I | doubt that random people on the internet sharing opinions | help much in generating valid (or interesting) hypotheses. | Also how would you validate those? | | Just examples: | | - https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/6/E136.short - | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34406494/ - | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34333404/ | mlyle wrote: | A few observational studies are fairly meaningless-- they | don't establish causation, etc. Your meta-analysis | highlights as such. | | Discussion, speculation, and reasoning about problems are | valuable-- even if the process does often lead us astray. | | Do you ever talk about things that you are not an expert on | or that aren't settled? E.g. You made some comments about | team culture a few days ago-- ignoring the massive body of | literature about conflict in teams and engaging in | speculation based upon personal opinion. | | I'm a teacher at a school where neither COVID "lockdown" | nor excessive social media use would be a great explanation | for poor student mental health, but still there has been a | significant increase in problems in the past few years. | Should I just ignore the problem and hope research pins it | down and solves it? I need to make reasonable guesses and | act upon them. | paulcole wrote: | > It is just 'opinion porn' imho | | Leader in the clubhouse for the 2022 Accidental HN Slogan | Contest. | juanani wrote: | ck2 wrote: | Before 2000 or so, every stupid thing you did as a kid wasn't | recorded on a phone or online somewhere permanently that you | could forget it. | | Maybe at school but bullying wasn't possible 24/7 online like | now. | | You had no idea what the latest news or political drama was as a | kid before 2000 because it wasn't in your hand 12+ hours a day. | No twitter/facebook or whatever they are using now. | | Now being a kid is as depressing as being an adult and you are | wired-in to a world that's overwhelming you. Sure they don't have | jobs or rents to pay but everything still feels fatalistic to | them, like they can't escape the world defines them, not the | other way around. | tsoukase wrote: | Solid and deep points. At era around 2000 things-culture | started to decline. No coincidence global IQ and many qualities | (eg music, education, human relations) started to decline at | that time too | frankohn wrote: | This situation if the result of the destruction of the social | network of relations due to the modern lifestyle. To have | meaningful social relations with our peers is extremely important | for humans and even more so for teenagers I guess. | | First the modern lifestyle mostly destroyed the small communities | where people know each other and spend a lot of time together. | People began to stay in their house all the time with no contacts | with a community. | | At this first stage, as the local community was eliminated, the | remaining pillars of social relations were school, for young | people, and work for adults. I some case adults were able to | maintain some degree of additional social life by having some | friends and inviting them regularly to create the opportunity to | meet. | | Later it come all the smartphones, tablets, computers, social | networks that captivated all the attention, especially of young | people so even more so people were pushed to stay more at home | and meet less people further increasing the social isolation. | | The final blow came from the COVID-19 confinement were people | were forced to stay at home reducing social contacts only to the | close family members. This situation created an unsustainable | isolation raising serious mental health problem especially for | teenagers but also for adult people. | | Modern society got it all wrong. We think having more goods and | entertainment to consume make us happier but this is not how it | works. Not if the social life and the social network around us is | poor or non-existent. | | Scientific thought that they know all and can say people what to | do and they give us instruction just to avoid that people dies. | The problem is that people doesn't just need to stay physically | alive, we need to be also happy and fulfilled by our life. | | We need to radically change modern lifestyle and stop with all | the bullshit coming from politicians. | everforward wrote: | I agree with a lot of this, but I think the effect has more | complex roots. | | I think there's an economic component to this as well. Housing | prices are rising, meaning a lot of people are pushed out of | their existing community, or that they perceive their community | is temporary (until they all get pushed out). It starts to feel | pointless to build a community of renters when you don't think | it will exist in 5 years. | | A lot of local shops have been overtaken by corporations, who | exist in the community but aren't really part of it. | Walmart/Target/Dick's/etc isn't sponsoring the local little | league, or throwing a potluck, or creating any kind of space or | events to build a community around. | | Religious service attendance is also down, which is another way | people used to build communities, and I haven't seen a lot of | secular replacements (not a criticism of anyone, I don't attend | myself). I think a lot of people replaced religion with | politics, which has created communities more focused on things | outside themselves (laws and public opinion) than within | themselves. | | I don't even know that social media is the cause of loss of | community. It seems to me that social media was the market | responding to the loss of in-person communities; it was | responding to an already-established need. It might have | accelerated the decline, but I think healthy communities could | have withstood social media. We just didn't have many healthy | communities left. | rakejake wrote: | The problem with community is everyone (or at least most | people in the sample space) has to buy-in for it to work. | Sometime in the last 15 years, it slowly started shifting | online and then beyond a critical threshold, it began to | snowball. And now you have generations that play together on | minecraft and roblox. And how exactly do you fight that when | it is mostly frictionless and requires much less social | energy? You can't. | | Hmm, when we decided religion was bad and decided to phase it | out of our lives, did we perhaps throw the baby out with the | bathwater? | tsol wrote: | Anecdotally I've seen much less damage among those who are | deeply religious that I know(Muslims). Social networks are | strong so they were preserved even among the pandemic. Say what | you want about the problems that come with religion, but it is | great at solving a lot of the issues that humans have dealt | with for thousands of years. Those problems are ones modern | society has done little to solve | Aeolun wrote: | Not sure I agree with everything you say, but having social | contact is absolutely gratifying. | | The lack of community in current times is absolutely a | negative. | t0bia_s wrote: | Yet we still collectively prefer conformity behavior shaped | by media and politics. | | Decentralisation and community is future. | hammyhavoc wrote: | Not like the adults are doing much better. | sebow wrote: | "We" as adults at least have the mostly-capable ability to | discern good from bad, whereas a child until the age of 14-18 | (depending on the topic at hand) does not have the sense of | responsibility, especially about the crucial aspect which is | his/her own health. Therefore you could expect an adult to be | able to take care of him/her-self after the ~age of adulthood, | whereas a children is very rarely expected to do so, because | most of the times they're not even fully aware of it | (consciously speaking, not talking about almost instinctive | reactions). | manuelabeledo wrote: | > "We" as adults at least have the mostly-capable ability to | discern good from bad | | Do we? | | Suicide rate among adults in all age ranges is way higher | than in teens and pre-teens. | | Anecdotally, there are plenty of day to day examples of | adults not having their crap together. The historical state | of the world is one of them. | bawolff wrote: | > Therefore you could expect an adult to be able to take care | of him/her-self after the ~age of adulthood | | I used to believe that as a kid... then i became an adult and | met other adults who do not remotely have their shit | together. | CPLX wrote: | > "We" as adults at least have the mostly-capable ability to | discern good from bad | | You're going to be shocked when you find out what Facebook | did to the Boomer generation. | Animats wrote: | Note the date: "survey of a nationally representative sample of | 7,700 teens conducted in the first six months of 2021." | evocatus wrote: | I've already walked this path of self-isolation. The pandemic, | quarantine, none of it are new to me. This was my life for years. | | I feel for this upcoming generation, in the most real way | possible. | | They are fucked. | aaomidi wrote: | Global warming | | Economic forecasts being shit | | Social media | | Realizing the injustice in the world and seeing adults do nothing | about it | | Hyper competitive schooling | | Lack of support during the pandemic | | Yeah all of this has an impact. | oh_sigh wrote: | I think the biggest problem with these things is not that they | are actually shit, but some section of adults have convinced | kids that these problems will be the death of everyone. I'm | thinking of Greta Thunberg crying about not being able to have | a family or kids of her own because of global warming. That's a | bit melodramatic, especially for someone coming from Europe. | prepend wrote: | > Economic forecasts being shit | | Aren't we in the longest economic boon ever? This might be the | first bear market in over 10 years. | | Schools didn't require sats and other exams and were actually | easier to get into during the pandemic. The past two years were | like a glorious time for school admission. | JaimeThompson wrote: | The distribution of "rewards" from this economic boom has | been a bit one sided taking all factors into account. | prepend wrote: | I don't think so. Low home interest rates have helped first | time home buyers. | | Stocks benefit pensions and 401k. | | Low interest rates help for credit card debt, auto loans, | etc. | | Lowest unemployment in the history of the stat helps with | all job seekers. | | Of course it helps billionaires more because they have more | stocks. But bull economies are pretty good for everyone and | there's a whole generation pretty much that's never | experienced a down year of s&p. | mellavora wrote: | > Low home interest rates have helped first time home | buyers. | | I hear it is almost impossible to buy a house in the US | these days, what with private equity firms bidding cash | for everything. | | > Stocks benefit pensions and 401k. | | nice if you have them, but it is hard to invest if rent | is 50% of your take-home (and not because you are living | large, but because that's all that was available) | beeboop wrote: | Food and housing and education and healthcare are all more | expensive than ever. I work in tech making six figures and | can't afford a single family home. My employer pays $700 a | month for my insurance. I spent $1000 a month on groceries. | thenerdhead wrote: | Sure the pandemic may have accelerated or been the catalyst, but | let's be honest here. TV/Internet/Video game addiction is a | serious thing that nobody is paying attention to. I struggled | with this personally for the last 25 years of my life and I'm 30. | I now have two kids and have to ensure I moderate their usage in | responsible ways as they grow up. | | I was a generation before the iPad, but the current teenagers | struggling have likely had a smart device from as early as 2. My | smart device was a TV and nintendo. The guidelines the CDC even | has for responsible device usage is reasonable, but nobody | follows it. Most people are picking up their devices up to a | hundred times a day or every 10 minutes. The average screen time | is close to 3 hours. That's an average by the way... | | We need to bring awareness to this problem like Nicholas Carr did | over a decade ago. We can't let big tech companies convince us | this isn't a problem with their sponsored studies to control a | narrative. | pcarolan wrote: | I am helping a family member recently diagnosed with ADHD during | the pandemic. I looked up this google trend and my jaw dropped. | Clearly the world has yet to come to terms with the social, | emotional and psychological effects of this pandemic. If anyone | here knows anything about what's causing the rise in adhd | specifically, I'd love to hear about it: | https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... | elcritch wrote: | You don't really "get" ADHD as it's generally lifelong. | Symptoms can wax and wane over time though and can be | exacerbated. Combine that with diagnosis getting better, | especially for women and non-hyperactive subtypes. | pcarolan wrote: | Right, so why did the trend explode during the pandemic? | superfrank wrote: | I don't have an answer or even a guess really, but I want to | bring up that "autism" shows a strikingly similar trend in | google searches and searches for "depression" kind of go down | starting at the same time. | Apocryphon wrote: | Search terms for ADHD doesn't necessarily mean that ADHD | prevalence is increasing. ADHD awareness is increasing, which | can be anecdotally observed everywhere from HN to TikTok. | Thorentis wrote: | Social media and pornography are the two biggest enemies of | teenage mental health, and both of them have been available for | almost the entire Gen-Z person's life, delivered straight to | their bedroom via high speed internet, and follows them | everywhere they go on their smartphones. | [deleted] | infiniteL0Op wrote: | yobbo wrote: | It's not smartphones or "straight to the bedroom". Online | communities for teenagers have been around in some form since | the 80s. | | Now everyone is expected to be on social media and it is _the | main_ community for a teenager, not an escape for nerds. If you | 're not successful there, you're also an outcast in reality. | prepend wrote: | This exposure wasn't mainstream until the early-mid 10s when | every high schooler got a phone and social media. Before | then, it was computer and game system based and that changes. | | I don't know real screen time data, but the use of phones | probably added an extra 4-10 hours of screentime per day. And | the type of activity is very different with notifications and | pickups being top of mind. | sdoering wrote: | Do you have any scientific sources for those claims? Any | qualitative good studies? | mensetmanusman wrote: | This is according to the teens themselves, but people still are | hesitant to listen... | kar5pt wrote: | Porn was around long before 2009 so this doesn't make sense. | jeltz wrote: | Social media has been around since the early 2000s, over 20 | years, and easily accessible porn has been around slightly | longer. So, no, I am not convinced this is it. Smartphones on | the other hand is a possible culprit. | treis wrote: | Social media wasn't ubiquitous and certainly not mobile. What | was there was an extension of your meat space life. It wasn't | until the late 00s early 10s that social media blew up and | took on a life of it's own. | Aerroon wrote: | I don't see how you can blame this on porn. | | The people who grew up with east to access online porn are now | in their 30s. In the early 2000s it was harder to escape porn | online, because you'd see it in ads and people would trick each | other with (eg the content of downloads were swapped out). | | > _Between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported | having "persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness" rose | from 26 percent to 37 percent._ | | The starting figure from 2009 would consider teens who grew up | with easy access to porn. But it fell from there. | trinovantes wrote: | It makes me feel pretty lucky to be born in the last generation | where those aren't part of my life till I'm almost out of my | teenage years. I didn't even get a smartphone until I started | university and that was considered early adopter for my group | of friends. | sylens wrote: | I wish tech had frozen at like the 2005-2006 era; good enough | for wireless routers in homes and some Web 2.0 capabilities | but before everything was aggressively targeted towards an | always connected phone in your pocket at all times | loceng wrote: | Add very unhealthy inflammatory diets/low quality food | (processed etc), pharmaceuticals, and multi-generational dis- | ease progression to that list; your parents' health, society's | health as a whole and how they interact with you, much more | greatly affects a culture than is talked about - most of | society has lost the ancient traditions and understanding of | health, and the body-mind-spirit. | dijonman2 wrote: | Where did pornography come from? | | I'd argue social media is far more damaging, especially Twitter | and the advent of outrage culture. It breeds hatred and | intolerance, two thought patterns that will send us back 30 | years. | marginalia_nu wrote: | Both social media (in some form) and porn has been around for | far longer than this has been a problem. I'm a card carrying | "Starcraft and DeusEx defined my teenage years"-millennial, and | these things have been around most of my formative years as | well. I think I was like ten when a friend showed me you could | type "boobs" into altavista and get whitehouse.com, which back | then was a porn site alluding to Clinton's affair with Monica | Lewinsky. | | I think the big difference now is smartphones, and being always | online. It's much easier to have your entire world view | informed by the Internet now than it was twenty years ago. It's | a stark contrast. If you look on twitter and reddit, everything | is always burning, the sky is falling every day for a hundred | different reasons, the bees are dying, the Russians are about | to trigger a nuclear apocalypse, there's indignant outrage and | injustice everywhere. | | If you look out the window, there's literally none of that | going on. Like it's almost all speculation, or happening | somewhere else. Twenty years ago, a lot of bad things were | happening as well, but they weren't up in your face in nearly | the same way. For some things, you had the dotcom bubble, 9/11, | the invasion of Iraq. While they made a prominent impact on the | news, the news was only on while you watched them. They didn't | follow you around everywhere you went like they do today. | riedel wrote: | The problem is IMHO not that things change, but that parents | and teachers have difficulty adapting to that change and | prepare their offspring for life. We are trying to establish | a protected physical world that does not really teach you | much about that "other" life and helps kids to develop | resilience. | marginalia_nu wrote: | Maybe. I do think this parallel reality you get from | primarily interacting with the world through social media | is deeply problematic. It may not be a learning-to-relate | issue as much as needing-to-change-the-medium issue. | | Social media is probably the 2000s' tobacco industry. The | are likewise big vested interests pushing back against any | report that it's harmful. | riedel wrote: | I guess the point about the tabacco industry is really | resonating with me in the sense that the possibility to | generate life long revenue by advertising to minors | really is a problem. In the end it is about getting | children to use drugs. | CPLX wrote: | Arguable. I'm in my mid 40s and the internet as we know it | didn't really exist at all until I was a college graduate. | | The speed with which things have changed is staggering on a | cultural and generational timescale. | [deleted] | wedn3sday wrote: | I strongly agree with you. Social media, if it was used | through a computer, isnt the problem, its instant access to | everything all the time via smartphones. I feel like Bo | Burnams "Inside" struck a chord with me and has been living | in the back of my head for a year and a half now as I slowly | digest it. | | See a man beheaded, Get offended, see a shrink, Show us | pictures of your children, Tell us every thought you think, | Start a rumor, buy a broom, Or send a death threat to a | boomer, Or DM a girl and groom her, Do a Zoom or find a | tumor, Here's a healthy breakfast option, You should kill | your mom, Here's why women never fuck you, Here's how you can | build a bomb, Which Power Ranger are you? Take this quirky | quiz, Obama sent the immigrants to vaccinate your kids, | | Could I interest you in everything? All of the time? A little | bit of everything, All of the time, Apathy's a tragedy, And | boredom is a crime, Anything and everything, All of the time | sylens wrote: | That song is a masterpiece | rossdavidh wrote: | 1) how am I missing the link to the actual CDC study? or did WaPo | not even post the link to the survey results they were | discussing? | | 2) disappointing not to see any comparison to other advanced | economies. Is this happening everywhere with high internet usage? | Did the severity correlate at all to how severe the pandemic was | or what the responses were? Does it correlate to income levels or | political polarization or religiosity or any of the other things | that vary (at least somewhat) between different advanced | economies? Maybe the CDC study looked at this, but if so WaPo | said nothing about it. Hard to know what to do with this | information with nothing but a WaPo text wall talking about it. | rossdavidh wrote: | Found the CDC link, at least: | https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/index.htm | tzs wrote: | That seems to just cover 2009-2019. The article is talking | about a study from a survey conducted in the first half of | 2021. | indymike wrote: | This coincides with about seven months of going back to school. | | My kids did so much better when they were not in school. They got | plenty of time with other kids, but none of the toxic middle | school culture. | sammalloy wrote: | > Although young people were spared the brunt of the virus -- | falling ill and dying at much lower rates than older people -- | they might still pay a steep price for the pandemic, having come | of age while weathering isolation, uncertainty, economic turmoil | and, for many, grief. | | The honest truth that most people don't want to face is that | there is a direct relationship between economic turmoil and | mental health. Instead, we will get politicians and community | leaders blaming everything else for the problem, when all you | have to do to address it is to pay people a living wage and | provide an adequate social net to fall back upon. Our leaders | will never admit this. | notacoward wrote: | If you really want to see how bad it has gotten, try finding a | therapist for a teen. Even in communities where supply is high | and demand is (relatively) low, they're all absolutely | overwhelmed. When I went looking, ~75% of them were explicitly | not taking new clients. Working through the rest, through | multiple directories and services, I was denied or simply ghosted | ~20 times before I finally found someone. Naturally it was the | newest, youngest member of a large practice. She has been great, | but the struggle to find her was a real eye opener. | xwdv wrote: | Another factor may be that many people that teens look up to | today talk openly about mental health problems, to the point that | now it seems almost trendy to struggle with mental health. | Perhaps this encourages teens to let their mental health | deteriorate for attention, which is the social currency of | today's society. Remember they are not entirely rational beings. | standardUser wrote: | Or if we want to be less mind-blowingly cynical about it, we | could simply assume that the increased openness to discussing | mental health is itself helping previously unnoticed mental | health issues to come to light. | johnold wrote: | As a high school teacher(14-18 year olds) who actually spends a | lot of time trying to interact with students and get to know | them, I keep hearing this kind of statement: | | There is no room for mistakes. | | Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not | achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc... | | And then you combine this with many adults in their lives telling | them, I got into UCLA, why can't you? Just work harder, or just | not caring about their mental health. | | They see this never ending cycle of | | turn the assignments in and then go to sports practice(where | again the competition is at such a high level) and also, get a | job, because they want or need money. | | Many are going to bed after midnight every night. | | Something has to give. | | This is really disturbing to me. | | How are they doing living up to this? Many are living up to it | but the cost is substantial, and the others that have no hope of | being this are giving up. | holoduke wrote: | I am glad this is not the case in Europe (with the exception of | the UK). Here we do not only look to performance and pride and | you need to win everything. Individual development is very | important. Hope it will remain like that. | [deleted] | chrisseaton wrote: | > Individual development is very important. | | Not sure if you've misread the thread - the whole problem is | too much importance on individual development and the | pressure this brings. | toxik wrote: | This is a funny reply because "individual development" | isn't something you schedule in European eyes. You just | hang around with friends and learn to be a good person, and | specifically not a tight wound asshole. | chrisseaton wrote: | Nobody does anything like learn an instrument or play a | sport in Europe? That's what we're talking about. | vladvasiliu wrote: | They do, but the point is that you don't have to be | better than everybody else at it to get into university. | You just do it for yourself. | | I'm not the in US, so my knowledge of the educational | system comes only from what I read, but it's my | understanding that "extracurriculars" are an important | part of college admissions, which is different from | Europe. | blahyawnblah wrote: | > I'm not the in US, so my knowledge of the educational | system comes only from what I read, but it's my | understanding that "extracurriculars" are an important | part of college admissions, which is different from | Europe. | | That's really only a thing for the private universities | and those don't make up a large percentage | chrisseaton wrote: | > the point is that you don't have to be better than | everybody else | | The person I was replying to was saying how they're 'very | important' in Europe though. | vladvasiliu wrote: | I think it's a question of "important for what" and how | society goes about teaching kids those things. As in: | | In Europe, it's important that kids learn self- | development, so we let them do it. And they do it by | hanging out with friends, learning an instrument, etc. | They're not pushed to do those things because colleges | don't take these into account for admissions. | | In the US, it's important that kids learn self- | development, so we have them learn an instrument, or | participate in sports. They are pushed to do those things | because colleges take those into account for admissions. | nynx wrote: | I'm a senior in university now, but it did really feel like | this when I was in high-school. And it still feels like this in | university, though I'm now much more capable of reasoning of | whether it's true or if I just feel that it's true. | | I think this is a consistent theme throughout the entirety of | the United States. There's so little leeway. Fail a class -> | you might have to go into an extra 20k of debt. Lose your job | -> Homeless, foodless, insuranceless. | | Something will eventually give. | ZhangSWEFAANG wrote: | There are homeless shelters and food stamps. | JaimeThompson wrote: | You haven't every been poor in the US have you? If you had | then you would know that those services aren't the best and | border on the useless. | giraffe_lady wrote: | you know those two are mostly incompatible? snap won't get | you ready to eat food and homeless shelters won't give you | access to a kitchen. | | just as like, a small minor indicator of how poorly you | understand these systems and how cruel suggesting this is | in that context. | Animats wrote: | Flunking out today doesn't mean being drafted into the Army. | That may come back, especially in Europe. It's shaping up to | be a long war. | thr0wawayf00 wrote: | Flunking out wouldn't mean getting drafted into the army in | the US anyway, the waiting list to join has been setting | records for a few years now[0] | | https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-army-waiting-list- | record-... | Animats wrote: | (2010) | Lammy wrote: | It's even worse if you look at what types of recruits | they target | https://newrepublic.com/article/156131/military-views- | poor-k... (https://archive.ph/9lYDQ) (2020) | | > This week, Anthony Clark, an Air Force veteran and | Democratic congressional candidate in Illinois, noted how | deeply embedded this trend is in American military | service, detailing how he, his brother, father, and | grandfather were all drafted or enlisted because "poverty | is the draft." | after_care wrote: | Flunking out of college did mean getting drafted during | the Vietnam and Korea wars. | thr0wawayf00 wrote: | ...which were 50+ years ago. Much of the world was very | different back then. | oneoff786 wrote: | I don't see any evidence it's shaping up to be a long war. | Russia has effectively abandoned their western front. | They're focusing on the east and somewhat the south. | | The Russian army's performance has been pathetic and | wouldn't last long at all vs. nato. Nukes are a thing, but | not a long war thing. | supercanuck wrote: | This isn't true. There is evidence they are regrouping | and the approval rating of Putin in Russia is increasing. | JaimeThompson wrote: | >the approval rating of Putin in Russia is increasing | | If you lived in Russia would you give an honest answer to | those running the polls not knowing if they would report | you to the government? | oneoff786 wrote: | There is no evidence they are regrouping. There is strong | evidence of vehicles being trained back out of Ukraine | via Belorussian rail. To attack kyiv again would be | starting from scratch. | | Putin's approval rating is irrelevant. | | Russia has managed to lose the battle of kyiv, and among | other blundering failures, has repeatedly failed to | establish air superiority. The extent to which they would | be utterly slaughtered given actual western air support | is hard to exaggerate. | | At least to the extent of arbitrary Europeans needing to | worry about a draft. | jseliger wrote: | _Many are going to bed after midnight every night._ | | Tell them to look at their Screen Time or Digital Life | applications: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/05/26/why- | technology-will-never... and ask about their weekly time usage. | It's often over four hours a day. I commonly see six and seven | hours a day. | | That observation doesn't obviate some of the other points-- | there seems to be an "excellent sheep" problem: | https://jakeseliger.com/2015/11/30/briefly-noted-excellent-s... | most people who claim to be busy, but show many hours a day on | their phones, will privately admit that perhaps there's | something else going on than purely being "busy." | hettygreen wrote: | It's like you're completely ignoring the fact that phones and | apps are designed to be addictive. | | Growing up in a world where tech companies have been given | free reign to psychologically manipulate users to increase | screen time is yet another pressure facing that generation, | it shouldn't be thrown in their face. | [deleted] | laurent92 wrote: | > admit that perhaps there's something else going on than | purely being "busy." | | - Snapchat is essential to some youth friendships nowadays, | unfortunately, | | - People dwell in dopamine hits, notably because their social | life is broken. It's a self-reinforcing problem, true, but | initially their social life was broken. You don't get into | drugs when all is good, or at least you can resist. | ben_w wrote: | Second link is broken. | | School pupils having even 8 hours a day of screen time would | not even remotely surprising during the pandemic -- what else | are they going to be doing? My (UK) school day routine was | get up at 07:30, breakfast, leave the house at about 08:00 | either for the bus or just (once I realised I could do the | 3-ish mile walk fast enough) go direct on foot, 09:00-15:30 | was the actual school day. | | Initially I got home by 16:15, then watched a lot of TV; | later, the school got an ISDN line and I stayed until 16:30 | -- memories of downloading and printing pictures from an | artist called The Werewolf and getting home at 17:30 -- but | again followed by TV. Possibly video games on a Commodore 64, | followed by a BBC model B, followed by a Performa 5200. | | Actual homework? Bus, lunchtime, whenever; I had no interest | in the tasks we had to do. | | Of course, now I'm a "responsible adult" or something. Screen | Time is reporting 6h 28m average per day over the last week, | yet despite that, this is what I get done in a typical week: | | * Normal office job | | * 49 Duolingo lessons covering German, Esperanto, Greek, | Dutch, Spanish, and Arabic | | * 7-14k XP on Clozemaster (for learning German) | | * Daily practice in at least one other German language app | | * A complete audiobook | | * A bunch of educational, technical, or popsci podcasts, | YouTube vids, WWDC, etc. | | * 7 quizzes from Brilliant.org | | * I cook almost all the meals in our household | notacoward wrote: | > adults in their lives telling them, I got into UCLA, why | can't you | | Not just adults. This is a difference even compared to students | who graduated in 2019, which would include siblings and other | near-peers. We're in the middle of the college selection | process for the HS class of 2022 right now. Many colleges are | getting record numbers of applications, because of all the | deferrals and transfers from the last two years. That | intensifies the competition for this year's kids, leading to a | lot of waitlisting and outright denials even from schools that | would have been fairly safe bets any other year. Just about | every kid has had to lower their sights an extra notch, and | some who didn't apply to enough safeties are facing unexpected | gap years. | | > Many are going to bed after midnight every night. | | Some aren't? Between extracurriculars and homework loads for | the more advanced classes, any kid who hopes to get into a | first- or even second-tier college doesn't have much time to | socialize or play games etc. any earlier. | ceeplusplus wrote: | Don't forget affirmative action (sorry, reverse racism). If | you are Asian (or for some schools, male), the standards are | substantially higher than if you are black or Latino. | Animats wrote: | That's the super high achieving group. I saw that some decades | back when I kept a horse at the barn on the Stanford campus and | met some of the local teens. These were kids with very high | powered parents, and were pressured to keep up. These teens | knew the ones who committed suicide at Gunn and Paly high | schools.[1] | | Notes from then: | | - Saw a group of high-schoolers discussing grades. Asked | "What's considered a good grade point average today?" Reply, in | a bleak voice, "4.5". | | - Teen shows up at the barn with her arm in a sling. Asked | "What happened, did you get dumped?" (Meaning, off a horse.) | "No, I fell off the cheerleader pyramid. And now I'm letting | the swim team down." | | - One of the less bright ones, worried that she can't keep up, | saying how hard it was. "Less bright" here means "can't get | into Stanford/Harvard, will do fine at a lower tier college. | | This is real, but it's not the typical teen experience. | | [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the- | sil... | nvarsj wrote: | It's because, fundamentally, the middle class is shrinking. The | barrier for staying in the middle class is getting higher and | higher every day. And this is happening before our eyes at a | rapid pace over the last 10-20 years. | | Who knows what will happen. I think the mass control of people | has basically been perfected, so revolution feels really | unlikely. Instead we'll see a police state and quality of life | continues to go down for the plebs. Throw global warming on top | of that and I think 50 years from now is going to be a pretty | dire time. Better get that job at Evil Corp. | prepend wrote: | > Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not | achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc... | | As someone close to a high school student, I'm actually | surprised how much "make up" is allowed. All missed assignments | can be done any time during a semester for no penalty. Two | exams can be retaken for a max grade of 80. | | When I was in high school there were no retakes at all. | HollywoodZero wrote: | +1. My oldest is in high school now and even in her honors | classes there's the ability to turn on some things late and | even some re-takes are allowed. | | I don't know where these ZERO mistakes-type of mentality is | coming from. | prepend wrote: | These are honors and ap classes. There's also unlimited | turins for higher grades. Each class is 20-50% assignments | so if you just turn in your homework you're kind of | guaranteed a B. | | I think this is because of hyper competitive college prep | where everyone wants to get straight As. | alphakilo wrote: | not my experience... is this a board/school policy or a | specific teacher? | | never seen teaches let exams be retaken | after_care wrote: | I think it's more common than you would expect. It's a | configurable option in many online learning solutions | (Canvas, BlackBoard). InQuisitive allows you to keep | answering questions until you reach 100% grade, and often | represent 10%-30% of a course's entire grade. | prepend wrote: | It seems the district or at least the school because it's | every class and was similar in middle school. | karmanyaahm wrote: | Most of my school's core subjects allow retakes for a | limited grade (not in AP classes though). Just one data | point fwiw | armchairhacker wrote: | Back in the day, getting a C was fine but getting an A was | really hard, most students got Bs or Cs. | | Now, getting an A isn't so hard but a C is seen as a | terrible, because most students are getting As. | | Lots of schools have policies like yours but they're not | removing the pressure, they're just shifting what's | "acceptable". Sometimes they actually make it worse because | now near-perfect scores are the norm, and if you mess up | there's no way to do extra somewhere else to bring you back | to average. | sudosysgen wrote: | There were none of these when I was in high school only a few | years ago, and they still aren't a thing from the high | schoolers I know. | | The system is still the same - every day you miss the | assignment is one fewer grade, except for some, where you | automatically get zero. You cannot retake an exam without | cause. | | It's just selection bias. | ryandrake wrote: | I mean, all these things are true. The middle class is | disappearing, and society is quickly bifurcating into a few | haves and the rest have-nots. When I was a kid, you could get | B's or C's and have a good job after high school. Now you're | competing with the smartest of the ~50M other kids your age | globally for one of the few tickets out of poverty. And you can | bet if you miss that one homework assignment or get that one B, | you're way behind the kids who are doing everything to 100% | perfection. I can understand how it is a pressure cooker of | stress! | lordloki wrote: | globalization doing it's thing, equalizing to the mean. | refurb wrote: | "Idle hands are the devil's workshop" | | I couldn't think of a worse situation than being isolated from | classmates and friends, cooped up at home, having extra time on | my hands and unlimited access to social media. | wccrawford wrote: | And parents that think it's someone else's job to raise their | kids. | lookalike74 wrote: | The influence of this cannot be overstated. George Carlin | said it best... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u-ryuJDTpEc | vkou wrote: | It's always been someone else's job, it's just that 'someone | else' used to be called 'grandma'. | | In the nuclear family of 2022, grandma no longer lives with | you - or within half a mile of you - so she's no longer an | option. | | We've built our society such that it's impossible to go | anywhere without a car, and then we wonder why children don't | get enough socialization, or why the only caretakers they | have access to are their direct parents, and their teachers. | refurb wrote: | We haven't really built that society, that was just the | trade off people made. | | I have several friends who made the trade off the other | way. They live with extended family, kids can wonder around | and explore the neighborhood on their own. | spookthesunset wrote: | It takes more than somebody's parents to raise a kid. It | takes a community to raise a kid. | drno123 wrote: | CDC isolates teens for two years, CDC keeps them in fear for two | years, and CDC is now surprised. | ImaCake wrote: | A lot of people would, and did, isolate even without being told | too until they were vaccinated. They would have done so out of | fear. All that governments really did by mandating lockdowns | was enforce it on the part of the population that wouldn't do | it with the hope that it would stop the spread of COVID. In | some countries it worked, in others it didn't. | | All this is to say there is no causal relationship between the | government lockdowns (mandated at the state level in the USA, | no?) and the CDC reporting on mental health. Both occured | independently. There are however plenty of plausible arguments | to make for lockdowns being causal on mental health though. | spookthesunset wrote: | > In some countries it worked, in others it didn't. | | You cannot say this for certain. It will take much calmer | heads before anybody can say these restrictions were worth | their incredible costs. | | > Both occured independently. There are however plenty of | plausible arguments to make for lockdowns being causal on | mental health though. | | Kids were not allowed to go to school for more than a year. | You don't need any research to suggest that isn't good for | kids. Seriously. Claiming these lockdowns and restrictions | didn't have a significant impact on children is being | willfully ignorant. | standardUser wrote: | The only teens who have been "isolated" for two years are maybe | some of those at very high risk (or the unfortunate children of | hyper-paranoid parents). No need to exaggerate. | qiskit wrote: | Makes me wonder what the CDC's recommendation will be. More | medication? More pills? Isn't that their answer for everything. | We are already the most medicated society on earth. I guess a | little bit more won't hurt. | [deleted] | trhway wrote: | As I said to my psychologist at the beginning of the pandemic - | what is done to the children as supposed pandemic fighting | measures will generate as much work for him for many decades to | come as he can take as naturally nobody cares about long term. | stakkur wrote: | My wife's a middle school teacher for over 22 years. If you want | an unvarnished view into just how bad things have gotten since | the pandemic begain--for mental health, school engagement, and | all things related--talk to a teacher. It's unprecedented, and | the long tail of the damage will take decades to understand. | tomohawk wrote: | It's not like the CDC wasn't warned that their policies would be | harmful. Oh, wait, they were! | | Unfortunately, the CDC policies were captive to the teacher's | unions, who are anti-child and anti-parent. | | https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/teachers-union-collaborated-wi... | JaimeThompson wrote: | How are they "anti-parent"? | manuelabeledo wrote: | They are "anti-parent" only if they are viewed as | babysitters. | | I think that this idea has been pushed by right wing media as | part of their "open for business" rhetoric. They claim to be | concerned about children wellbeing, when the actual goal is | to get kids out of their homes and parents back to the | offices. | manuelabeledo wrote: | So a teacher's union pushed to protect teachers during a | pandemic. Shocking, especially after ~1000 teachers died from | COVID-19. | tomohawk wrote: | Thanks for agreeing that the teacher's union pursued an | agenda contrary to the needs of our children. | | It won't be shocking given this activity to undermine our | children's health that parents will work to re-orient the | teacher's union to a mission that is actually useful to | society. | manuelabeledo wrote: | > Thanks for agreeing that the teacher's union pursued an | agenda contrary to the needs of our children. | | That's the (far) reaching conclusion from the NYP, that not | going to school made kids depressed. | | The reality is that the only obvious consequence was that | schools were closed during the pandemic for health reasons. | | Now, children mental health treatment have been on the rise | for the past 30 years or so. Teen suicide grew by 60% | between 2007 and 2018. I doubt that you can blame that to | the pandemic too. | | > It won't be shocking given this activity to undermine our | children's health that parents will work to re-orient the | teacher's union to a mission that is actually useful to | society. | | Here's the thing: teachers didn't sign up to be expendable | babysitters. They are supposed to teach, not to risk their | lives or keep your kids under supervision. If you would | like that, schools may be as well served by the National | Guard. | hotpotamus wrote: | Perhaps we should have a children's union. Maybe then | someone will think of the children. | spookthesunset wrote: | Somehow grocery stores managed to stay open. So did tire | repair centers, auto shops, home depots, uber drivers, pot | shop employees, pharmacy employees... what makes teachers so | damn special? | | Adults sacrifice for children. Asking children, none of whom | are at risk, to sacrifice for more than a year for a bunch of | frightened adults... it is so disgustingly immoral I can't | even. | | If teachers were scared, they should have quit and let | somebody else teach the kids. Covid isn't and never was some | modern black plague. The median age of death was higher than | the average life expectancy of a human. | manuelabeledo wrote: | > what makes teachers so damn special? | | Ridiculous. None of those jobs can be performed remotely. | | > Adults sacrifice for children [...] If teachers were | scared, they should have quit and let somebody else teach | the kids. | | So you recognise the need for teachers, but not their right | to live? Laughable. Also, there is a teacher shortage in | the US. It's not like there are people queuing up to become | teachers, so your point is moot. | | > The median age of death was higher than the average life | expectancy of a human. | | Disregarding the fact that comparing medians and averages | makes no sense, what does this matter? Lung cancer | disproportionally kills more old than young people, does | that mean that youngsters should be allowed to work in an | asbestos infested environment? | | Regardless, the average age of teachers in the US is 42 | years, and ~20% of them are 55 years or older [1]. COVID-19 | deaths are 4% in the 40-49 age range, and 19% in the 50-64 | age range [2]. On top of that, 60% of Americans have one or | more comorbidities that increase COVID-19 risk [3], and | long term COVID-19 is definitely a thing [4]. In | comparison, if we were to accept that not going to school | made children suicidal, which is quite a leap, still puts | suicide rates hundreds of times below COVID-19 mortality | rate. | | So what exactly is your standing here? That we need | healthier teachers? More reckless ones? That teachers | should be trained to disregard their own safety in order to | satisfy your demands? What exactly are the risks in | children development that would justify all this, by the | way? | | [1] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ntps/tables/ntps1718_fltabl | e02_t... | | [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported- | deaths-... | | [3] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/60-percent-of- | america... | | [4] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases- | conditions/coronavirus/i... | spookthesunset wrote: | Your own data doesn't say Covid deaths are 4% for that | age bracket. The IFR for that bracket is orders of | magnitude better. | | That research says that 4% of all deaths came out of that | age bracket... | | Your own data says teachers aren't the largest risk | group. | | Do any of all the pro-lockdown people even look at the | data? | Proven wrote: ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-03 23:00 UTC)