The US is also exporting talented people. I know a lot who are leaving, mainly for Europe, though a few are (in my view, foolishly) going to Dubai.

I’m pretty sure the anxiety the U.S. is spreading might involve teenagers, but doesn’t involve anyone under 18 and you didn’t have to speak English to get the crippling anxiety from learning about it on the first Wednesday in November.

If smartphone use is global, why is the strongest evidence of surging teen anxiety mostly in English-speaking countries and not in their less-English-speaking neighbors?

My answer is that although mental illness is global, the experience of mental illness cannot be separated from culture. If there is a surge of Anglospheric gloom among teenagers, we have to study the culture that young people are consuming with their technology. In the past generation, the English-speaking world, led by the U.S., has experimented with a novel approach to mental health that has expanded the ranks of the “worried well,” while social media has surrounded young people with reminders to obsess over their anxieties and traumas, just as U.S. news media have inundated audiences with negativity to capture their fleeting attention.

As an American citizen living in Europe since July of 2022 and maintaining dual residency, I posit that “quiet desperation is the English way”, but we Americans do it “loud and proud”.

Today’s kids are so weak. Not me, I work a 60 hr week and drink a 12 pack a night. That’s it. Maybe grill on the 4th.

Who the hell wants to buy anxiety?

No, seriously. I stand to make a lot of money selling this shit. I produce way more than I need.

Does anybody actually read t he articles?

If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them … they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens,” Foulkes and Andrews wrote. This can create a self-fulfilling spiral: More anxiety diagnoses lead to more hypervigilance among young people about their anxiety, which leads to more withdrawal from everyday activities, which creates actual anxiety and depression, which leads to more diagnoses, and so on.

Exactly. The vast majority of people who are either formally diagnosed or self-diagnosed as mentally ill are only mildly so or not at all. And for people like this the last thing they want to do is spend a ton of time ruminating about whatever your condition is, watching influencers talk about it, etc. It’ll only make it (if it even existed) worse.

Let me take a second to clarify what I mean when I say they may not actually be mentally ill or their condition may not exist. We have pathologized vast swathes of the normal human spectrum. The article goes into this. Every has anxiety, for example. Dwelling on mild anxiety makes it worse.

Negativity inflation is super bad too, which is why I find a lot of current events news and discourse around it, terrible.

Luckily this is within many people’s abilities to fix, with better news and discourse hygiene.

I thought it was crippling depression. https://youtu.be/ysmLA5TqbIY?si=S6TH8pV2zdgnywMC