As I mentioned: even if this turns out to be factor – and I'm not sure it even is – then I don't think this accounts for 100% of the increase. I don't profess this is the full explanation, merely a possible factor, out of several.

I'm also reminded by my uncle, who was born with a serious and debilitating heart condition; he always said that if he had listened to his doctors he'd be a "victim" in a wheelchair inside all day. Of course he did need serious medical attention, including a heart transplant, and he did end up dying from his condition at the age of 51, but overall he led a "good life" and just carried on with things without seeing himself as too much of a victim. It probably would have been a different life if he did. Mental feedback loops can be pretty powerful.

It's also worth pointing out the charts look a bit less drastic if you zoom out to the 70s; in fact, suicide for boys especially was a lot higher in the 80s than it is now. The author does address that briefly at the bottom, and provides a link with more detail (which is too much to quote here, but tl;dr is that they believe it's correlated to lead exposure and crime rates – this link also contains the longer timeframe charts).

That being said, I don't think this is a strong enough phenomenon that it explains the rather large trends upwards in self harm/mental health. I think a good control is the graph that shows Schizophrenia - a 67% uptick shows that the diagnosis rates are probably a lot higher than the early 2000s, since I doubt that schizophrenia is really becoming more common due to social media.

The times in my life when I've been the most anxious or unwell have been when I'm questioning my mental health. And I think that the society we live in does encourage people to open up more. But if you have ADHD / obsessive compulsive tendencies, and your brain works like mine, that opening up can just look like obsessing over why you aren't feeling 100%. Then it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

Really flimsy, I am not an expert but... fits a bit the idea that just looping around yourself self introspecting how much of a failure YOU are might not help.

I forget where I heard this, but I believe a significant number of people committing suicide have a high correlation with other issues like chronic pain (e.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24916035/) or addiction. I'm suspicious that those white people have the kinds of problems you're referring to because I suspect their peers are less likely to be successful or affluent, as people with chronic pain issues probably are more working class, performing physical labor that results in their issues.

(Granted, I suppose there is probably a racial element that would account for why, if this is the case, more white people with chronic pain issues kill themselves vs. black people with chronic pain issues.)

This is obviously speculation, but so is your comment. I find both to be potentially likely. The scenario you came up with seems more likely for younger people (probably not experiencing chronic pain), and the scenario I came up with is potentially more likely for older people. But we're just spitballing some hypotheses here.

Tell kids that they are unhappy due to choices made in day to day life and they might change those choices, tell them it's due to a incurable but maybe treatable issue with their brain and some will chose suicide.

The problem may be classifying typical human misery as incurable illness.

The first category contains illnesses like schizophrenia, with schizophrenia you can induce symptoms of the illness in healthy people by giving them medicine used to treat parkinsons. We can point to specific structures and chemical reactions in the brain as a cause for the illness, it may not be perfectly understood but we have a good understanding of what is going on.

The second contains things like personality disorders. It's not clear these are actually related to physical defects, at least in the same way the first category is. For example people who meet diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder often report no symptoms and are successful in day to day life, some even thrive. Borderline personality types are often distraught over the state of interpersonal reletionships, that is the primary source of their suffering, however they behave in ways that destroy those reletionships. These behaviors aren't accidental, they involve sophisticated thinking, borderlines spin complex webs of lies to justify and hide these behaviors.

The third are things that are normal human suffering. Most people feel anxiety for a big date or a job interview. Most people feel sad when they lose a loved one. Negative emotions are a part of life. It's hard to draw a line on what is normal but a nonzero number of people are medicated for having normal human emotions.

It may not be helpful for the second and third category to be enabled in the way they have been.

For the second group, as the root of their strife is generally interpersonal, and only changing day to day behavior, over a lengthy period of time will have any effect in alevating the true symptoms of the illness. We can pretend the problem "isn't their fault" but essentially all their issues can be tied directly to their own behavior, it may not be their fault but it's certainly their problem.

For the third it isn't clear that they need to be treated at all, if you are too sad to go to work because your son died a month ago, nothing is wrong with you. Perhaps people are sad in society in general because the society in general sucks, medicating them in mass lowers the collective motivation to fix the society, what's the end game there?

Your problem now has a name and it's not your fault. Having a name opens up a lot of support and treatment options. This gives you hope that your suffering isn't endless and infinite.

You may not be able to be cured, but you can have a much better life.

This ultimately results in you feeling miserable powerless and see no hope.

I think that the framing around this is very important. I had a teacher that constantly used the phrase "Don't let your reasons become excuses." Knowing there is an issue can bring relief and be helpful only if it empowers one to act.

An example I have seen in my life is two people that have anxiety, one started using it as a reason to avoid interacting with people, to avoid school, and to basically hide in her room and read books all the time, to the point they would have a breakdown when forced to talk to a grocery store clerk, her sibling had a similar struggle but forced themselves through it, to learn how to interact, to push themselves to be in difficult and uncomfortable situations, and eventually although still struggles with social anxiety presents a pretty passable facade of being able to function in society.

In addition, many diagnoses in mental health aren't really tangible or helpful to think about as a layperson, they're just a vague description of a symptom (this applies across a lot of medicine, see IBS, etc.).

The thing you are trying to say isn't really true, though.

Tell some kids that it is all their fault, and some kids will commit suicide. Some of the kids already think this way and someone telling them this stuff is just going to intensify it.

Especially considering that getting treatment isn't such a stigma now, a lot of the folks being told that it is the cause of the disease will feel relieved and certainly not choose suicide even if they refuse medication.

So no, that probably isn't the issue.

I have several friends with very deep seated issues. The only ones that seem to somewhat regularly contemplate suicide (even into their 40s for gods sake) are the ones who have some weird aversion to taking medication for their issues.

Physical condition is an excellent analogy. Many obese people are told that any physical complaint is caused by their weight and told to go exercise. This includes people who are later correctly diagnosed with asthma, broken bones, hormone deficiencies and appendicitis. How do you think they feel to be told that they are causing their own problems and should stop doing that?

I swear so many doctors treat medical diagnosis like it’s a game of spot the difference between you and the reference 25 year old white man.

We might be able to revise society/expectations to address this, separately to how we diagnose/label problems.

Also ultimately suicide by definition is based on most harmful decision of life event rather than what a doctor is probably optimizing for which is best day-to-day ability to function. These are two different optimizations that can be at odds. Almost nobody would choose to feel worse 99.9% of the time to reduce the risk in that 0.1% of the time they're suicidal.

I don't necessarily agree with the grandparent poster's point of view, as I do think there are big societal changes leading to decreased mental health that are unrelated to the way we treat mental illness...but I do think the increase in usage of psychiatric drugs is a big problem, and may at least partly explain the increased suicide rates.

The prevailing wisdom on this is that many people suffering major depression won’t even have the motivation to go through with suicide. Once the depression has begun to be treated, certain executive functions start to amplify giving sufferers newfound task salience and resolve to go through with it. The problem is that all the symptoms of depression take far longer to subside with consistent SSRI/SNRI usage as prescribed. These drugs take on average 90 days to reach their full effectiveness but not everything happens at once during this adjustment. Along the way, you do reach a strange state of: “well I’m still depressed but I feel empowered to do something about it now.”

Practically you are saying that pedagogy and psychology are wrong and harmful on a fundamental level.

Either you are in denial or a whole field of science is wrong.

In my specific case it didn't help and was more harmful than helpful. For other people it is helpful. n=1 but I'm probably not a very special individual, so situations similar to mine probably apply to other people as well, although I have no idea how many exactly, or if this number has been increasing or decreasing.

Not to mention the huge bias involved when someone claims "bad thing happened to me and look I'm perfectly ok".

The value of the advice to "man up," is that there exists a good way to be and you have to make some basic effort to help yourself before others will help you.

The field in question is psychology and its appendant body, psychiatry, who you may remember from such treatments as trepanation, lobotomy, chemical castration, solitary confinement, valium, re-parenting, diagnoses like hysteria, and the APA's most recent forfeit of any remaining credibility with "toxic masculinity" - to say nothing of what it is doing to actual children in the last decade.

To be clear, psychology isn't a science, it's a critical theory of mind. It uses drugs, dresses itself up in some limited statistics from "social science" and prances in front of the mirror saying it's doing chemistry and biology. Therapy and drugs help some people by reducing their suffering, but it's a pretext, not an empirical inquiry into the nature of matter.

I am so incredibly unconvinced that labelling a bunch of people as mentally ill is "better" because the more we're diagnosed people as mentally ill, the more things like suicide have increased. Now obviously that can be due to an underlying increase in mental illness driving suicide, the thing is the diagnosis itself and the resulting differential treatment of society and your self-perception of yourself can be the cause of that mental illness.

So far the increase in diagnosis over time has completely failed to actually improve peoples mental health. I am constantly perplexed at why nobody is worried about this. It seems how we diagnose people is totally unconnected from any empirical data on if a culture more willing to diagnose people is making people healthier on a population-wide level. To me it seems like most evidence points to the population-wide trend getting worse and the increase in diagnosis being a failure, and I can't help but also notice many of those who advocate that the increase in diagnosis is a great thing have a conflict of interest and financially benefit from more people being labelled ill.

Labelling wouldn't be a problem if we could actually help everybody with the diagnosis, but they're too often stuck with a "ehh. maybe this pill" approach.

Speaking of an absence of empirical data: People are being told by doctors that their brain has a "chemical imbalance" which medication can fix, despite those doctors not performing any chemical tests on the patient's brain at all. Supposed "chemical imbalances" for which the science of chemistry can produce no empirical data. My brother lost years of his life in a drug-induced haze before he questioned the wisdom of doctors, got off the psyche drugs, and saw a massive improvement in his outlook on life all around. Turns out he had real problems to address and the drugs were only helping him to ignore those problems instead of actually confronting them. He never needed drugs, he needed a mature mentor.

This is the real crisis, and I don't think we've peaked yet.

For the first time in history there is psychological space to care about mental health and social issues en mass. So, of course, there's going to be an explosion of diagnosis.

Maintenance of “safety needs” is part and parcel of finding love and belonging in the first place. If we’re offloading that all together, then yeah I can see how more and more get depressed and suicidal. They don’t have anything to live for when you get down to it.

Moving up means those needs are being met satisfactorily and can be maintained without prolonged attention. And if a lower level stops being met, your level will fall to that level until it is met again.

I.e., if you're hungry and don't know when your next meal is, then who the hell cares if you're anxious, angry, or happy? You have more pressing concerns.

But it’s useful and, in my opinion, captures the most basic relationship which is that some needs have higher priority than others and will drive those other needs to the recesses.

What about that do you disagree with?

1: That the mental health system is actively harmful or 2: That the mental health field is impotent to address mental health issues

The latter case means that the mental health field could be helping, but at the very least, the mental health system is a distraction from the bigger issue of mental health. I believe declines in mental health are driven by things like increasing inequality, scarcity, competitiveness, loneliness, and so on which we can't nessecarily solve by telling people you are disordered with such and such so live in such and such a way and you can maybe be better adapted to a society which has their collective mental health in freefall.

P.S. I specifically resent the label of "disorder" in general and think that label is part of the problem, because no matter how you spin it, somebody saying you are "disordered" is an insult, and as we call more and more of the population disordered I think the adjective will become untenable to keep using. I'm more keen on the concept of neurotypes, because neurotypes CAN be negative, and CAN require accommodation, and CAN require treatment, but none of those things are NECESSARILY true. If you discover your "neurotype" you can try tools and techniques that helped others with that same neurotype. Whereas the word "disorder" sort of has an intrinsically negative connotation, and I don't think it's medically necessary for psychiatrists to regularly insult their patients.

The mental health system is so fundamentally condescending and some of the shitty things they do don't really get examined or critically looked at that much. Like why don't we ask, is telling millions of people they are "disordered" likely to improve their mental health and confidence and self-esteem? Probably not and it's also probably totally avoidable but I don't think people ask if mental health itself so things carry on.

Except maybe shizoids who can count on being aloof to any bad interaction instead of being uncontrollably dragged around by them, but miss me with the anhedonia thing please.

While non-gender conforming people need special protections, it's deeply sad that the industry wasn't able to recognize this itself... they just keep doing it with other people.

As always with these issues, no one stopped to think at a high level about labeling people's personality as a disorder that must be fixed. They just said, "we have to stop doing this to trans people"... "we'll make an exception for them"

I think this explains a lot of it, in particular in regard to rising rates of autism. Doctors are looking for symptoms, hence more people will be diagnosed.

It's something I've found really difficult because I was never personally convinced they were mentally ill in the first place and in many cases these drugs have really nasty side effects. I don't think it's going too far to say part of that child dies when they're given high doses of depressants, anxiety and ADHD meds.

Imo we probably need to stop telling kids they're mentally ill and giving them medication, while also finding a way to be compassionate about their struggles. I'm constantly trying to convince one teenage girl in my family at the moment that it's okay to be shy and anxious sometimes. That she doesn't need medication and there's nothing wrong with her. But it's a hard argument to make when certain teachers and family members are telling her she possibly does in an attempt to be compassionate.

Well, _I_ think it's going too far. Way too far.

Myself, for example, I had raging ADHD throughout my life and only recently in my 40s started to get treatment. And incidentally, treatment isn't _just_ drugs, it's also counseling, to help identify coping mechanisms, work through trauma, identify strategies to help you to become effective despite working differently from how neurotypical people work. I'm in a good place now, but it is largely due to luck. It took a lot of work for me to not feel grief over how my life could have been different if I had been diagnosed earlier, if I had had the level of treatment available now, back then.

And I don't want to get too far into it because it's not my story to tell, but I have friends who are way worse off. They dealt with far more than I ever had to, in terms of depression, anxiety, etc, and they did it by themselves, with no or limited medical and psychiatric support, while suffering the stigma of a society that did not respect what they were going through at all, with friends and family who could only suggest that they "toughen up". Many of them I'm not in contact with any more, for reasons related and unrelated, but overall though, I _wish_ they had the options and respect for their conditions that kids today have. I can't even imagine the difference it could have made.

That shit is way to real.

In the last several years since getting diagnosed I have done a lot of reading on the brain, trauma, mental illness etc. I've come to learn that actually a surprisingly large number of people have something going on, and whatever that something happens to be is complex enough that laypeople aren't in a position to understand it very well or at all.

I think I have a different perspective on things.

I'm far from normal. I'm prone to depression and anxiety. I'm autistic and anti-social. Most people would suggest there is at least one or two things "wrong" with me.

And sure, I clearly have issues and I'm not "normal", but I suppose I don't seek to be normal either.

I think our increased fixation on being as neurologically normal as possible is half the problem we're having with the increase in mental illness today. And it's possibly being over diagnosed.

You could make an extremely good case for me needing anti-depressants and how they would make me functionally closer to what we consider "normal". Similarly, with the anxious teen I was talking about in my prior comment – anti-anxiety meds would probably make her more "normal" too. But the assumption in both cases would be that normal is always better, which I don't agree with.

Growing up I was taught to hate myself for being different. In my early twenties I went through a bit of a crisis where for the first time I realised how much harder employment was going to be for me as an anti-social autistic weirdo. I hated myself more than ever – why I am autistic, why can't I be normal – I'd ask. But there's only something wrong with me from the perspective of others. I have no problem with myself apart from the fact I struggle to satisfy the preferences of those around me.

It was going down that route where for the first time in my life I actually started to question whether I was the one with the problem or if the world had a problem with me that finally gave me a much healthier outlook on things. The reality is there are just certain people who won't get me and will refuse to try to understand me.

This is a lesser problem today, but I suppose I had this also with my sexuality growing up. There was such an obsession with being hetrosexual that if you were anything but it was easy to hate yourself for being different and wish there was a drug you could take to be normal. Again, it's not that being gay (or whatever else) is an issue to you as an individual, it's that being gay is an issue to others which drives self-hatred.

My whole life I've had to try to get along with happy, extrovert neurotypicals, and rarely will they do the same in return. Instead these people suggest I need to drug myself so I'm more like them – "normal". So screw them.

These days I just embrace myself. I'm awkward as hell. But if you have a problem with that, then piss off – I'll find people who are okay with me as I am.

But what I find funny is that my girlfriend suffers the exact opposite problem to me. She's unable to see the negative side of anything. She's constantly happy and chirpy to the point of often being delusional. But she's seen as normal... But we work because I accept her and she accepts me, and we balance each other out. I'm the one who worries how we're going to address everything that might go wrong in our lives and she keeps us focused on the positive outcomes we're working towards.

Over time I've come to realise there's strength in the vast majority of these "mental illnesses" if we're able to accept them. I can only speak for myself here, and obviously others need to do what's right for them, but my depression and anxiety is no simply longer a problem in the way it used to be because of how I view it and allow it today.

So I guess I don't even understand why you would view ADHD as an issue? Why weren't you able embrace that side of yourself? My understanding is that people who have ADHD are super creative and tend to be less mentally restricted than people like myself? Did you have a problem with your ADHD because the world had a problem with you?