I read the posted paper. Please point out where the authors factor in improvements to how we elicit, diagnose, and catalog mental health problems today. I was specifically looking for it and couldn't find it. The paper mentions the historical increase in 1.2 and 1.3 but offers no context or mitigation for long-term improvements in mental health reporting. Their NYTimes source in that section only goes back one decade and starts right off with an exploding upward trend. That could absolutely be attributed to improved reporting standards when the problem got attention, but the authors don't acknowledge any impact of reporting improvements.

My parent comment was based on my experience as a teenager, compared to the very different way my teenage children are monitored and evaluated for mental health. It's night and day.

“1.2. The crisis is not a result of changes in the willingness of young people to self-diagnose, nor in the willingness of clinicians to expand terms or over-diagnose. We know this because the same trends occurred, at the same time, and in roughly the same magnitudes, in behavioral manifestations of depression and anxiety, including hospital admissions for self-harm, and completed suicides.”

Look up the video where the researcher summarizes his research to congress (I think it's congress), there he explicitly goes into this point.

Mental health being a thing probably does though. I'm 31, and even when I was a kid, mental health issues were very stigmatized. Nowadays, they're not. Why wouldn't you expect more mental health issues?

The point is not that there isn't more willingness to report mental health issues, the point is that the research already accounted for that effect, and it doesn't change the conclusion.