Anecdotally the percentage of my friends who I would describe as unhappy has been increasing over time. In my early 20's at most 10% of my friends would be unhappy at any given moment, now in my 30's I feel like a solid 25% of my friends are noticeably unhappy and god knows how many are good at putting on a brave face. I don't know how much of this is just due to getting older or something specific to how our society is operating at this current point in history.
When I talk to people from my parents generation I get the feeling that on average every year of their life was better than the last up until about 40, whereas it feels like the opposite is true for people today.
I too am worried about the increasing scope of what determines a mental illness, but at the same time if your environment can cause you to get Pneumonia, it makes sense that your environment can cause you to experience clinical depression.
You've got less time on the planet, I've got a wife and three kids to support now, career options are vastly more limited, incurred massive debt to buy a house. But hey, things are going comparatively well for me relative to many of my peers.
It seems really hard to compare between generations. Things are so different, but if mental health is towards the top of the pile of concerns now we should probably address it regardless of whether it's really a bigger issue than today than it was previously.
For instance, I can compare the experience of my cousin raising two young kids on the east coast of the US with my girlfriend's sister in the same situation in Italy.
In my cousin's case, she had to go back to work almost immediately in order to pay the high rents where she lives, and money's a constant stress because of the price of a decent daycare/preschool. Family's far away, so essentially all the childcare responsibilities fall on her and her husband.
In contrast, my girlfriend's sister had 9 months of paid maternity leave with which she could stay home with the baby without undue financial stress. When she returned to work part time, she didn't have to rely on commercial childcare because her large extended family is close by to share the burden. In general that makes her and her husband's life more relaxed, because if they want to go away for the odd weekend they can leave the kids with grandma.
If you ask me, the work culture is deeply pathological in places like the US and UK. With the rise in technology and automation there's no reason we couldn't live in societies which prioritize our human needs more highly.
It's one of the reasons why I haven't moved to Silicon Valley after all these years, because I don't want to leave my familial and friend support network behind. It's resulted in much lower income for me, but that's the trade off.
Although it doesn't have to be necessarily. For example in my case, I could possibly find a well-paying remote job. I'm already working remotely currently, albeit for a company that's local and doesn't pay anywhere near as well.
Anecdotal evidence is a fallacy.
It's equivalent to saying that "smoking a pack each day doesn't kill you because my grandfather smoked until he was 97." As ridiculous as that sounds compared to what you're saying, they are nonetheless equal in terms of evidence.
To say something is possible, all it takes is one result, in which an anecdote is fine. Someone providing an anecdote doesn't guarantee a fallacy in all cases.
It's a choice for people to move away from their safety nets (unless bad things happen to their families, and I certainly know some people who have grown up in broken homes. I dated a few people in that situation). It's not always a good choice, or the best choice, but it's still a choice.
The parent only provided a single anecdote to "show" how things worked in Italy as well. I was just showing how his anecdote wasn't enough evidence to prove his point that things work differently in Italy compared to the US.
Some lucky person might get the local job that matches their skills, but the 10 other people looking for the same job will be forced to move.
I realize it can be extra difficult in some markets. I'm at least near a metropolitan area, so there's some jobs (hardly any that excite me, but there are some). I've worked plenty of shitty jobs in my life and nowhere near the software dev world in order to stay in my hometown . Unless the job market completely dries up in your town, it's a choice that can be made.
It's similar to all the people who get majors in humanities or psychology or marketing and then end up working as a barista at Starbucks once they graduate. It's far from ideal, but sometimes people really don't want to move across the country for their jobs (or can't).
Again, I'm not saying it's a great choice, or the right choice to stay near your support network necessarily. I haven't lived away from them so I don't have any idea firsthand. But I think it's a bit myopic to think you are forced to always go wherever the maximum amount of jobs or money to be made is, support network be damned.
Do you feel that the sacrifice you have made to stay near your support network is worth the value of your support network? By which I mean, if you had a child, is your support network wealthy enough to provide the resources to help you raise that child? For many people, their support network is itself getting squeezed. What do you do if your friends and relatives themselves have to work 60 hours a week and aren't available to help watch your baby while you work?
I also don't know how I'd be able to afford buying a house if I moved to somewhere like Silicon Valley, whereas I've bought a home here, and I'd rather not go back to renting if I can help it.
Also, one of my professional hobbies is board game design and I have built up a pretty good local network for playtesting and have gotten to know several designers and publishers in the area (even got my first game signed), plus I am within driving distance of the two of the biggest game conventions in the US, where I can network even further, so that's another factor keeping me away from the west coast.
So there are other unrelated factors that are influencing the decision, it's not a total black and white affair. Although I was still making the decision to stick around even before these were a thing.
I do agree with you that people's support networks are probably getting squeezed more than in the past (income inequality is on the rise, tuition, health expenses, etc are skyrocketing, so everyone is getting squeezed). I did say it's not necessarily the best decision for someone to make. It might not even be the best decision for me to make. But I'm still doing it, and I see tons of people do it every day, especially once they have families. I also see tons of people choose to move away from their networks, and again that may be the best thing to do, I just don't think sticking around should be assumed to be the wrong decision in pretty much all cases for the country as a whole, which seemed to be the assumption that was made.
> Except for the long period of paid maternity leave, there's no reason someone in the US couldn't have what the Italian woman has. I know several parents that live close to their extended family and get help watching and raising their kids all the time.
This is the part about which we disagree. You are generalizing from several people you know to say there is no reason someone else can't do it. The reason is that not everyone is lucky enough to know the kind of people you do. When you say "someone" it sounds like you really mean just yourself.
But for the sake of argument, I don't know to what extent Italians move great distances compared to the US, but I would imagine that most people tend to want to stay stick within their culture if they can get away with it. At least their primary spoken language.
The US provides a large landmass full of pretty much the same culture, same language, etc, somewhat divided between rural vs urban or conservative vs liberal, whereas Italians wanting to speak Italian and live among mostly Italians are going to have fewer options in the EU to choose from.
And I have no idea where the centers of industry are in Europe in general or Italy in specific, so I could not venture a guess as to how far apart they are. But if someone in Italy wants to stay in Italy and work in Italy, they have to go somewhere. And the furthest they can go is about the same distance as the state of California.
The caveat IMO is that having children is an incredibly selfish decision, and that decision shouldn't be publicly subsidized. It should come out of your discretionary spending. If we each get $2000/month and a kid costs you $1000/month, then you have to live off $1000/month, which means not living in overpriced areas.
You can have anything you want in life, but you can't have everything.
It also seems that government that invest in children tend to have future generations of better educated, better adjusted, and better contributing members of society, which I feel is worth at least some investment.
A generation ago, people retired in their 50s and opened up jobs to the next generation, then died 10 years later and left family money to the next generation that could be used for housing.
I don't have a single friend in my peer group who can afford housing, let alone has the income to raise children, if they don't have family money. Upward mobility into the well paying jobs is non existent, with 20 years of people in between them and executive level careers.
People aren't going to stop having kids. It's too engrained in our society and genes. But with automation and an increasingly elderly workforce, job prospects are bad now and will continue to get worse for kids born in the last 10 years.
Ah, ha! The top 1% are already on it.. they're pumping fortunes into defeating mortality as we speak.
For those of us who can't afford it, I'm sure they'll be happy to extend our lives in return for some kind of "temporary" employment unto them, at least until we've repaid our debt...
/s
I believe the increased level of physical activity, combined with greater in-person socialization/community of our forefathers allowed them greater mental health (and with it, greater resiliency) than people of today.
It's easy to pay attention to only one (a definition shift would be social/communication), but all three matter.
These illnesses are failure modes at a mid level in the most complex information processing device in the universe. There's a lot going on - it's not so much definition shift, as this is complex, and yes it is a communal cry for help in part.
You cut out sugar from your diet and you will feel better. We consume an insane amount in western societies and it's not good physically or mentally.
You can't just focus on mental health without the physical health because they are so dependent. I feel like we're deeply missing that point today.
I've seen many articles lately on the relationship between what's in our gut and our mental health. Their source escapes me at the moment, but here's a paper on the relationship between diet and mental health: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4167107/
I can have poor physical health without having a specific disease. I can have poor mental health without having a specific mental illness.
Poor mental health probably means poor mental health.
Though your underlying point is observably valid. People can get into a state where it's hard for them to improve their well being without outside intervention.
Pill may have effect, yet the hypothesis may still be nonsense. Chemical imbalance hypothesis is really old, and doesn't account for a lot of new information since last 50-60 years.
It's in principle the same problem as when psychotherapists/clinicians try to develop a theory of mind. The result is that we have several major contradictory theories of mind/schools of psychotherapy, and all of them work/are helpful. Yet the usefulness can not be used to validate the underlying theories of mind the methods are based on, because that would mean that all of those theories are valid.
There are two questions here, I think.
One is whether we're confusing regular moods with larger conditions, and the answer is generally no. Conditions like anxiety have time thresholds of persistent symptoms to avoid this issue, and other conditions like panic disorders describe things that many people never experience.
The second is whether the scope of what's diagnosable is broadening on any axis. And there, we can say: yes, consciously so. The US standards for diagnosing mental illness (the DSM definitions) have been steadily moving away from attempts to determine who has a 'real' mental illness in favor of symptoms-based diagnoses. The standard for e.g. anxiety excludes anxiety from drugs (legal or not) and physical health problems, but says nothing about whether the long-term anxiety is 'justified' or a reasonable reaction to circumstances.
It's partly an acknowledgement that lots of appraisals are made quickly and on circumstantial evidence, so we might as well issue circumstantial decisions instead of assigning grand theories that might not apply. And it's partly about the fact that many treatments are circumstance-agnostic; absent other options, someone who's constantly anxious because they have high debt and a stressful job will see basically the same benefits from CBT or medications as someone without circumstantial issues.
But it's also a concession to just how little we understand a lot of mental illnesses. There's no particular sign that anxiety-the-disorder is anything but high activity from the system everyone has, and we're not sure why it seems to be so much more active in certain people, so there's no objective test to run. Which means either relying on a clinician's judgement about what's 'justified' anxiety, with all the cultural biases and doctor-shopping that invites, or admitting that it's an unclear question and bypassing it.
(This looks a bit different when we do understand the biological mechanisms of a disorder, or at least know that certain treatments are conditional. As an example, nicotine helps decrease the symptom intensity of schizophrenia, but doesn't for most other hallucinatory or delusional disorders. And other conditions like ASPD or ADHD have foggy partial understandings that leave them in the middle.)
One way of framing this is that we're pathologizing normal reactions. But another is that we have a system built to treat certain unpleasant conditions, and we're recognizing that it can operate on more pain than we'd previously realized. A lot of historical support mechanisms have ceased to support most people, both formal (priests running confessionals and doing relationship mediation) and informal (the death of the 'third place', fraternal organization membership, etc.) If the problem is "many people are sad and stressed by their work", assigning the care of those feelings to our sadness-and-stress support framework makes sense. Ideally we might change people's work circumstances instead, but this looks like at worst a return to the historical approach.
What does treating this systemically mean? We are increasingly treating mental health as systemic/epidemic problems via the medical systems. However, this generally means doing more diagnosing and treating of mental health in the same way.
There isn't really an embodied "we" that makes decisions and takes actions at a cultural level. That is, no way of changing how people interact with eachother individuals doing it.
A religious society might have a church that could do this. A local cleric could (for example) try and relieve loneliness in her community.
I don't know of any body that could really affect how work culture works.
Some things just develop in societies and "we" just don't act as a non-metaphorical "we." Cultural change works this way, mostly.
If we're talking about a "we" that's me, you and a few other people, then we could definitely do a lot about mental health for some people.
But otherwise, since this topic interests me greatly, I would definitely love to hear why you might think poor mental health may be due to something like culture and politics? Possible solutions?
* reflexive impotence, in which people know that things are bad and that they can't do anything about it, leading to a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy en masse
* depressive hedonia, in which people are depressed, but instead of being unable to seek pleasure, they basically can't do anything except seek pleasure (to consume more, faster, etc.)
He also has another book, Ghosts of My Life, in which he talks about how we're essentially collectively "haunted" by the possible futures that failed to materialize. I've yet to read it, but I've heard it's fascinating.
I too am not an original thinker and I often synthesize ideas on this matter incoherently. But how is it that it is not universally accepted that the structure of employment, even in its most compassionate incarnation, is a structure that is designed to humiliate and strip the dignity of the employee? And then we have the modern employment contract that explicitly forbids talent to be shared with other employers, or for allegiance to be enunciated in corporate culture slogans drummed to death as though attempting to wash away the employee's identity.
Maybe things are different in different cultures vis-a-vis the structure of employment. Japan for example where Salary Man choose to willingly marry his corporation for a lifetime.
Japan is an interesting place. I want to think of Japanese corporate employment as basically equivalent to citizenship in other countries. For example they have very little social insurance programs, instead relying on corporations to provide such benefits (社会保険). For better or for worse, in the neoliberal era, this idea of corporate employment as the new citizenship might be being exported overseas.
Fuck! He took his own life. :-(
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/mental-health-psychiatry-clas...
'The rise of psychiatry was funded by America’s Gilded Age industrialists. Their aim: to cast society’s ills as problems of individual "mental health."'
A middle class teenager expected to focus on math and prepare for a desk job is inappropriately diagnosed with something, when they might have been a tallented athlete.
A clever, responsible man with a comfortable life suddenly hears voices that tell him his lifelong friends are poisoning him, and is incapable of seeing that this is a delusion, so he kills them.
The first doesn't preclude the other, and I don't think the second one is merely 'behaviors that don't fit the current societal norms'.
Sometimes brains go wrong. If you don't believe me, take a bunch of acid.
Dunno where you live but over here we stopped doing that fucking years ago. This is why things like IAPT (Improved access to psychotherapy, a short course of normally cognitive behavioural therapy) has been the recommended frontline treatment for many mild to moderate mental ill health problems for years. In the UK psychologists are important members of multidisciplinary teams, and psychological therapies are strongly recommended in NICE guidance for a wide range of problems.
To clarify, I think that this issue is so obviously overdetermined that we need to tackle all of the causes, not just any one.
That last bit seems like you may be extrapolating from a very small sample size. Hating on some of the Agile culture, sure, but are there really that many people wanting more stress? Most of the Agile reaction I’ve seen seems like the opposite direction with people wanting to improve work-life balance, or drop the parts of consultant-driven Agile which are just adding ceremony without benefit.