On this point, anecdotally, one major source of stress for young people is seeing how completely unwilling adults are to protect them from gun violence. We’ve had two local mass shootings in the last few years, one of which killed my cousin’s cousin, and living with the threat of random violence like that is probably a lot like living with terrorism. I think the media inflates the sense of danger to the average school kid, but either way it does a number on these kids’ psyches. I remember when Columbine happened, which AFAIK was the first widely publicized school shooting. The only place I had left that was safe was suddenly unsafe. I was so stressed out I developed a hernia in my esophagus. It hurt like hell.
When you take kids with already fragile mental health and expose them to the possibility of random murder, without doing anything meaningful to protect them, they are going to break.
It’s a real problem, because a lot of that self-disclosure is very private. Take for example the science fiction short story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” by Isabel Fall. There was so much backlash to that piece that she was forced to out herself as trans. In another case, a white woman wrote a novel about a teen’s relationship with an older teacher, and a Latina woman started up a huge smear campaign saying she ripped off the idea from her book, characterizing her as another white woman profiting from cultural appropriation. Eventually the white author was pressured into disclosing that the novel was based on personal experience (it didn’t stop the attacks, but I think it appeased her publishers.) I know a lot of literary examples but this attitude is everywhere. Don’t even get me started on YA Twitter.
There’s a phenomenon I like to call Schrödinger’s Offense referring to any statement that is simultaneously offensive and beneign. Once we learn the identity of the person who made the statement, it will suddenly be clear whether it was offensive or beneign.
I also wonder how strong is the correlation between increased ER visits and the degree of depression in particular demographics.
It’s the same thing with divorces and the question of how happy are marriages. Divorce rates in America are considerably higher than in Japan, but that isn’t an indication of the relative degree of happy marriages in the two countries.
There are many factors why more people tend to stay in unhappy marriages in Japan. More women leave the workforce after having children. It’s usually difficult for single mothers to have careers which allow them to be self-sufficient. It’s harder to force fathers to pay child support. These and other reasons often factor into the decision to not get a divorce, despite being unhappy.
I’m not denying that there are groups of people who are very depressed. I just wonder if there are other factors which also contribute to the rate of suicides and ER visits now compared to previous generations.
It seems to be that this is a very complicated situation and I don’t know if there are easy answers.
I think that’s totally accurate and that “geek social fallacies” article is a great example. Everyone (or a lot of people) has their little niche subcultures which they then identify with, isolate themselves in, and then just reinforce so the can continue to gain acceptance (i.e I’m geekier / more lesbian / more neuroatypical / more tech bro / whatever than thou).
The problem is the real world doesn’t work like online and you can’t spend your entire life on the Internet (or at least you shouldn’t). So what I think happens is that without actual face to face interactions with people who look and act and think differently, people don’t really learn to get along, cooperate, resolve conflicts, and al the other “living in the real world” stuff I grew up with as a kid.
If by “geeks” we mean "people who are typically highly intelligent with esoteric interests and are often poorly socialized, those geek social fallacies are not only a good example, but I think they are symptomatic of that phenomenon. Lacking an ability to interact with people outside their interest group and being very used to having created a world where they control, the people described in the article can become “off” with respect to things like social boundaries, personal space, fear of abandonment, control, and possessiveness. Because in the internet (as you know) there is never any compromise. Just people railing against some perceived slight and retreating to their echo chamber.
There was that thread a while back along the lines of “Why don’t Republicans defend what they believe online” or something similar to that which I read and didn’t participate in. Because to me the answer was obvious in that there’s no value in doing so. All they would do is waste time and effort yelling into a void. Same goes the other way if you switch the sides. And then you have got plenty of people in the middle saying “Don’t like the far left, don’t like the far right, don’t like this completely binary thinking and demands that I accept everything you say with no questions” and so they drop out as well. So what you get are people who have found their safe space and zealously defend it, those who haven’t burned out yet, and yes those who live entirely online because the real world would take too much work.
When you’re 20, especially if you’ve found this safe space online and haven’t burned out yet, it’s easy to do exactly what you’ve described. When you’re 40, it’s easier to disengage from such spaces and especially such people and try to realize none of it really matters and nothing will change from getting mad on the Internet.
I’m on a metacognitive therapy kick and found this article. It speaks to what I was talking about earlier about the link between depression and rumination in young people.
Personally my life is being transformed by this simple idea. I’m not surprised it can help kids, too.
Oh GOSH. I just saw this – thank you for this article! I noticed long ago that I did this rumination thing and through trial and error eventually figured out ways to deal with it (now that I’m middle-aged, lol). I am now noticing that my child (the one on the spectrum) does it too, even more than I do – she has been known to lose multiple days to ruminating about That Thing She Did Wrong. I have tried to tell her about my methods for dealing with it, but with not that much success.
I just downloaded the kindle sample of Watkin’s book on RF-CBT and will check it out. Have you read it?
I haven’t read that one - I just finished one called Worrying is Optional by Eckstein & Coyne. It is transdiagnostic (applies to all anxiety disorders) and uses methodology from CBT, Inference-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, ACT, metacognitive therapy and Exposure and Response Prevention, all evidence-based interventions for anxiety. It is a good summary of interventions for anxiety for anyone who is interested.
What got me on the “stopping rumination” kick was this podcast on Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg.
Perseveration (fixating on the same thing over and over and over) is really common among autistic kids. I think stopping rumination might really help them, if they were willing to try it!
Oh this is great. Older Child definitely has a lot of anxiety going on as well (as you know, very much comorbid with ASD), so yeah. Thank you! I’ll look that up right now.