Two from Scott Siskind, first a link to a study I already referenced:
Study: teaching dialectical behavioral therapy (a set of emotional regulation skills) in school leads to worse outcomes (although most of these dissipate quickly). I think this fits nicely with other evidence that making healthy people too aware of their mental health is potentially bad.
Second, from this book review:
I was more interested in a sort of sub-thesis that kept recurring under the surface: does naming and pointing to a mental health problem make it worse? This was clearest in Hong Kong, where a seemingly very low base rate of anorexia exploded as soon as people started launching mental health awareness campaigns saying that it was a common and important disease (as had apparently happened before in Victorian Europe and 70s/80s America). But it also showed up in the section on how increasing awareness of PTSD seems to be associated with more PTSD, and how debriefing trauma victims about how they might get PTSD makes them more likely to get it. And it was clearest in the short aside about the epidemic of neurasthenia in Japan after experts suggested that having neurasthenia might be cool, which remitted once those experts said it was actually cringe. A full treatment of this theory would go through the bizarre history of conversion disorder, multiple personality disorder, and various mass hysterias, tying it into some of the fad diagnoses of our own day. I might write this at some point.
Of course, the null hypothesis is that there are lots of people suffering in silence until people raise awareness of and destigmatize a mental illness, after which they break their silence, admit they have a problem, and seek treatment. I am slightly skeptical of this, because a lot of mental health problems are hard to suffer in silence - if nothing else, anorexia results in hospitalizations once a patient’s body weight becomes incompatible with healthy life. Still, this is an important counterargument, and one that I hope people do more research into.
All of this points to a potential explanation for the poor mental health of young Americans, because our whole society, and social media in particular, are full to the brim with talk about mental illness.
3 comments:
Even though Siskind nods respectfully to the argument from suffering-in-silence, it would seem that I am wrong.
The things is, regardless, I don't want to live in a culture of stoic reticence. I positively like complaining and listening to others complain, expressing self-doubt and hearing others', and all the rest. So I'll drink to the last thirty years, which, from Seinfeld on, have been very good to me.
Very important phrasing here: "This was clearest in Hong Kong, where a ~seemingly~ very low base rate of anorexia exploded as soon as people started launching mental health awareness campaigns saying that it was a common and important disease (as had apparently happened before in Victorian Europe and 70s/80s America)."
Honestly ask yourself which seems more likely - that a bunch of otherwise perfectly healthy people all suddenly developed anorexia out of the blue simply by encountering an awareness campaign? Or that a bunch of people who were already anorexic but didn't realize it suddenly developed the awareness to be able to start reporting themselves as suffering from it?
This is Hong Kong, we're talking about - a highly commercial, intensely competitive society with a long tradition of unrealistic beauty standards for women, which draws from both traditional Chinese values AND modern Western consumerism.
Conforming to unrealistic beauty standards is a way to boost one's personal odds of gaining and keeping highly-competed-over jobs, particularly ones in service industries; it's also a way to attract a wealthy or influential partner for marriage, in a society where many marriages are still done out of convenience and to gain station; and beyond even that, many women aren't even the ones making these decisions - family members pressure them into conforming, and many women aren't allowed their own personal autonomy.
You can imagine, then, how once an awareness campaign for anorexia was conducted, a great many women might suddenly realize that the extreme pressures they've faced to lose weight in order to meet unrealistic beauty standards was, in fact, not "normal" - they they were actually being made sick, either by themselves or others, in the pursuit of an idealized body form, which is absurd and immoral. Awareness of the illness gives such women the power to push back against external pressures - a diagnosis allows them to call out their family and society in a coherent way, and refuse to continue treating their situation as unremarkable and unobjectionable.
@Verloren
I appreciate your courage in maintaining the argument. The scenario you sketch out is certainly plausible to me.
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