The teen mental illness epidemic began around 2012
This is a good piece, with the author consciously examining their own biases and assumptions. I do think underdiagnosis is <i>an</i> issue; when I sought mental health treatment in an earlier period, there was a veritable line of people telling me I couldn&#x27;t be mentally ill because my clothes were clean and my sentences coherent.<p>I think the author errs in not projecting his data far back enough into the past and looking for correlations with previous rises or falls. I agree that social media is probably a main driver; the ability to <i>receive</i> mass communication at scale is not something the brain evolved for, and there&#x27;s a lot of maladaptive online behavior that doesn&#x27;t show in these statistics but is nonetheless problematic. I&#x27;m honestly appalled by the pervasive tendency to rely on repetition of cliches in favor of original communication, for example.<p>But I think there are other factors in play, like the 24-7 news cycle and deep political polarizations, both of which have a huge impact on adult behavior and create an unhealthy psychological environment in which kids have to operate.