[wdewind]

There is a wide difference in the prevalence, severity of condition and extremity of treatment in some of these conditions.

Poor eyesight afflicts a large portion of the population, but the severity of the issue and the extremity of the treatment are not high. It doesn't impact your ability to maintain social relationships, for instance, and the treatment is very well understood and has low/no side effects.

Color blindness, partial deafness etc., are readily and inexpensively treated, but they do not afflict 5-10% of the young and healthy population.

The issue comes in when we start saying 5-10% of the population has an extreme condition (ie: impacts ability to maintain work, social relationships etc.) with a relatively severe (ie: fairly large % of users experiencing side effects) treatment necessary. When you put that in the context of our massively volatile understanding of mental illness over the last 50 years, as well as the massive incentives for pharmaceutical companies to push a specific narrative, it is difficult for me not to see a red flag.

[Izkata]

> Color blindness, partial deafness etc., are readily and inexpensively treated, but they do not afflict 5-10% of the young and healthy population.

Isn't color blindness in men right in that range?

[wdewind]

Off hand I have no idea, but it's also the severity aspect here that is different. Color blind people do not have problems with executive function, maintaining social relationships, depression etc.

[axiometry]

"...massively volatile understanding of mental illness over the last 50 years...": The sort of volatility you undertake on a path toward drastic improvement.

[wdewind]

And yet by many measures mental health issues are increasing not decreasing so where is all this drastic improvement?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-changing-culture/20...

[mjburgess]

Improvement is in treating.

Don't false equivocate. If we were to open more mines than there were in 1900 we may well see more broken legs. However we're far better at treating a broken leg.

Though it is not at all clear that "mental health" is deteriorating. It may be that some forms of mental health issues are more prevalent today (eg. anxiety and depression). But that is no where near the whole picture.

An entire generation of people were traumatized by WW1 and WW2, and by the generation of parents who through that traumatization, traumatized their children.

Extreme disorders of the personality, PTSD, etc. simply were seen as normal then because they were so overwhelmingly common. PTSD didnt exist as a diagnosis till 70s, and yet it would characterize a generation of people under war.

If I were to speculate, I would say that we are overwhelmingly better in our general mental health.

That we recognise it as an issue suggest a profound advancement.

[wdewind]

> If I were to speculate, I would say that we are overwhelmingly better in our general mental health.

By what measure? Because I just posted a bunch of studies that show the opposite, and they actually address a lot of the issues you brought up.

[mjburgess]

> By what measure?

Did you even read my reply?

I looked at those studies. They do not at all address issues like PTSD, personality disorders, trauma and other mental health issues which, for example, would certainly characterize huge numbers of people in the interwar and post-war period. Yet, where as these numbers?

PTSD didnt exist at the time. Trauma wasnt even considered, in part, because it was so wide spread.

Domestic violence, murder, rape, assault, theft, etc. were crazy high only 30 years ago.

Western societies were incredibly violent and predatory placeo, and this gets significantly worse the further you go back. At the beginning of the 20th C. 1 in 20 women were dying in childbirth, murder was 10-a-penny, almost everyone was impoverished. Children routinely went hungry.

But oh year. Now we're a bit more depressed.

THe 20th C. was a century of trauma. Child abuse was institutionalized. Domestic violence was how families worked. WW1, WW2, Vietnam (and many other wars) left a generation of men absolutely traumatized.

The studies have no reliable data to work with, as there was no empirical psychology for the bulk of the 20th C. collecting societal-level information on mental health.

Subjective "happiness" reporting has not much to do with mental health. A financially secure person who was routinely sexually assaulted as a child may well report being happier in 1985 than a poorer, less economically stable person today with otherwise excellent mental health.

For several decades economic securiyt has been decreasing in the west causing people to feel less "happy" (ie., to be more often worrying). This has an impact on their mental health, but I'm sceptical it comes close to the impact of the vietnam war.

The 20th C. was horrific and a horror for everyone. Any "psychologist" nostalgic for the 20th C. either knows nothing of psychology, nothing of history or both.

[wdewind]

Hi, FWIW I did not downvote you and don't agree whoever did.

> I looked at those studies. They do not at all address issues like PTSD, personality disorders, trauma and other mental health issues which, for example, would certainly characterize huge numbers of people in the interwar and post-war period. Yet, where as these numbers?

Exactly, we don't have them. But I don't see any measures of any kind of mental health improving, with the exception of teen suicide rates in the early 90s. I do see quite a bit of data going back that shows depression, for instance, getting worse, and specifically comparing post WW2 generations to millenials: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2648043

So I repeat my question, how are you so sure things are getting better when there is very little or no data saying that, and a fair amount saying the opposite? Wouldn't you expect depression to also be a symptom of experiencing intense trauma and thus a fairly good proxy for PTSD?

> For several decades economic securiyt has been decreasing in the west causing people to feel less "happy" (ie., to be more often worrying). This has an impact on their mental health, but I'm sceptical it comes close to the impact of the vietnam war. The 20th C. was horrific and a horror for everyone. Any "psychologist" nostalgic for the 20th C. either knows nothing of psychology, nothing of history or both.

So this is exactly why it's important to consider this with data instead of logical models. By all means the events of the early 20th century were so horrific that there should be some fairly obvious measurement of mental health that upticks by the end of the 20th century. But we don't see that anywhere, afaict. So that's what I'm hoping you can provide.