← Back to context

Comment by Gormo

4 days ago

Are children actually experiencing mental health disorders at a higher rate, or are we just classifying pre-existing variations in personality as behavior as mental health disorders at a higher rate?

6 comments

Gormo

Reply
stevenAthompson  4 days ago

The DSM used to break mental health disorders down into what it called the multi-axial system. Axis 1 being the least impacting diseases, and axis 5 the most severe. At some point we had so many disorders that more than 50% of the population was seen to have Axis 1 or higher mental health disorders. This meant that more of the population was regarded as mentally ill than were considered "healthy."

Rather than accept that >50% of the population being classified as mentally ill might be a sign we were thinking about things in a backwards way they just got rid of the multi-axial system in DSM 5.

Problem solved.

aqme28  4 days ago

I agree with your skepticism on this, but youth suicide rates have been steadily climbing. Unless we were misclassifying suicide, it seems like there is a rising mental health crisis.

  • llm_nerd  4 days ago

    Teen suicide rates have been falling in Europe and most of the world. North America has edged back up to 1990 levels, and it's largely alone in that trend.

    Europe and the rest of the world has social media as well. And of course 1990 didn't have social media.

    There are a lot of reasons teens can feel hopeless, and I think the hyper-partisan political atmosphere / circus, coupled with the existential crisis and very real career crisis caused by AI, at least in the common understanding, the rapid heating of the Earth, etc. I would attribute all of those as dramatically more likely to lead a child to seek an out more than social media, even if the latter is much easier to blame.

  • Gormo  4 days ago

    What skepticism did I express? There are two possible explanations for the value of a metric changing: either the thing being measured has changed, or the methodology of conducting the measurement has changed. I honestly do not know which is the case here.