Mental health, discussed

*    I saw some of Four Corners this Monday about the very troubling issue of eating disorders, primarily anorexia nervosa, and primarily about how it mainly affects young women.   I thought the show was OK, and felt terribly sorry for the people suffering from it (including, or perhaps especially, for the mothers who felt hopeless.  I mean, it's not easy for me to imagine myself not enjoying food, but I can imagine a parent feeling helpless in the face of an adult child who is not responding to treatment for a mental illness.)   But the way the show was put together also gave me a bit of an uncomfortable feeling that one participant was - how to put this in an inoffensive way - a tad performative in her participation?   This may be completely unfair, as it may well be the producers who encouraged this look, but it still gave me the sort of misgivings that most reality TV causes.   In any case, it would seem that there is a crying need for the public health system to step up much, much more with the availability of specialised treatment to help deal with it, as people do sometimes recover...

*   Speaking of reality TV, I find I can't warm to even the well intentioned versions, such as Love on the Spectrum, or more recently, Better Date Than Never.   I mean, these shows (about non average people still going out to try to find love and relationships) are clearly meant to be uplifting and positive, which puts them way, way above trash reality TV.   But ever since (God, this is going back a long way) Sylvania Waters,  I just can't stop thinking while watching them that "fly on the wall" documentary is intrusive and (to some degree) unavoidably fake.   How can people truly ignore being videoed and not have it influence them?

*  This column is free at New York Magazine for a limited time - so rush now to read it!   It's a fairly long pushback on the argument that American rates of depression and suicide have recently become worse because the world really is getting to be a worse place.   Here are parts:

Among online progressives, there is sometimes a tendency to view any acknowledgment of progress as an apology for the status quo. But I think this has more to do with social media’s negativity bias (i.e., negative information tends to be more physiologically stimulating and thus viral) than any objective truth about the political implications of touting positive developments. The fact that Americans enjoy higher incomes than virtually ever before makes our failure to abolish child poverty, invest adequately in social goods like child and elder care, and provide robust mental-health services to our suffering adolescent population all the more damning. At the same time, the fact that we have managed to expand social welfare and reduce myriad forms of social inequity over the past few decades gives us reason to believe in the possibility of progressive change.

Human existence has never been easy. And in some respects, life in 2023 may be more challenging than in the past. Contemporary teens are more likely than their predecessors to lack the existential comfort offered by religious faith or the sense of communal solidarity provided by in-person civic groups. But it simply is not the case that Zoomers’ material prospects are much worse than previous generations’ (or, for that matter, that a human being’s level of depression reliably reflects their objective economic well-being).

In a great many respects, the world has been getting better. But kids have been getting sadder. Even as life has improved in a wide variety of ways since the 1950s, the teen suicide rate has risen substantially since that era. Explaining that requires more than reciting the millennial left’s (generally well founded) complaints about contemporary American society.

By itself, the fact that a Washington Post columnist engaged in hyperbole on Twitter may not warrant comment. But I think Lorenz’s tweets reflect a broader tendency within the discourse to view novel social crises through a lens of ideological self-congratulation rather than intellectual curiosity. Among commentators, there is a strong incentive to abruptly enlist any new sign of social dysfunction into whatever fight you are already waging. I’ve surely done this myself, but it’s an impulse that should be resisted. We owe it to those suffering from any given social calamity to maintain curiosity about its causes. In failing to do so, we risk wielding tragedies as political props and seeing victims as metaphors instead of people.

I found this article via a Noah Smith post, and it is an argument that is very much in line with his views. His substack post on the same theme ("Don't be a Doomer") seems free to read.

Going back to the New York article, I thought this comment interesting and probably right:

The difference between male and female teenager's response to social media as reflected in depression and suicide is, IMHO, fairly obvious.

When they feel socially afflicted/marginalized, males on average tend to blame other people, and if they act out to do so against others, while females on average tend to blame themselves and harm themselves.

Whether this is learned behavior or not is an open question.

But note the overwhelming predominance of males as perpetrators of violent physical aggression.

Update:  Oh, I see via a rare, not objectionable, Hot Air post that Matthew Yglesias has also written on the topic, and it seems freely available.   

Update 2:  well, this is depressing news (for those of us with extremely limited interest in exercising, ha ha):   Exercise is even more effective than counselling or medication for depression. But how much do you need?