Schizophrenic gene code, Youth Risk Behavior

Patrick Tracey, author of Stalking Irish Madness: “I had to go to Ireland to find the roots of the disease and also to discover that Irish researchers are actually leading us out of the darkness. It was an Irish research team that first cracked the schizophrenic gene code, an enormous discovery. A DNA stew was cooking in the west of Ireland and it had to do with suffering. You can drive people into insanity. Anecdotally, visitors to Ireland in the 19th century wrote of the high levels of madness inflicting the nation. They were often stunned by its prevalence.  The rates of schizophrenia fluctuate in populations but the Irish levels red lined in the 19 century. Schizophrenia is not a case of snapping back and forth between different personalities — a common misconception. Schizophrenia is the hearing of voices, but the hallucinations can be seen, felt, and smelled as well as heard. It's fright night for life for many, an all-consuming terror that never ends.”

The Banshees of Inisherin is really about the heart of classic Irish culture. The absurd pride that has led to several civil wars, revolutions, and attempts at sedition in the last century. About how they’d like to have been home to the next Mozart, but would gladly cut off any ability for that to happen if such a situation required compromise. They’d like to think of themselves as nice folks, but that niceness is really just naivety and is destroyed by alcohol or honesty. The more sane Irish seem to leave for better options elsewhere, as Padraic’s sister does. It’s a fascinating movie because it uses cultural assumptions to tell a story about self-hate, especially masculine self-hate, that’s both sympathetic and disgusting. Source: medium.com

Derek Thompson has been writing on this subject for the Atlantic. His take on the latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), published earlier this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “American teenagers — especially girls and kids who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning — are ‘engulfed’ in historic rates of anxiety and sadness.” For Thompson, the best explanations are “the decline of physical-world interactions due to the prevalence of social-media use; the decline of time spent with friends; a more stressful world of mass-shooting events and existential crises such as global warming; and changes in parenting that might be reducing kids’ mental resilience.” The Covid-19 pandemic made an already bad trend worse. Jonathan Haidt of New York University has made similar arguments. According to Haidt, there has never been a generation as “depressed, anxious and fragile” as Generation Z, Americans born between 1997 and 2012. They have “extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” By most objective measures, such as disposable income or access to entertainment, America’s teenagers and 20-somethings are better off than their parents and grandparents were at the same stage in life. According to the non-profit advocacy group Mental Health America’s 2023 report that 11.5% of American kids aged from 12 to 17 are “experiencing depression that is severely impairing their ability to function,” while 16.4% report “suffering from at least one major depressive episode in the past year.” 

This is a problem that is getting worse over time. According to Office Practicum, there was “a 27% increase in anxiety and a 24% increase in depression between 2016 and 2019” in this teenage group. Amazingly, 1 in 6 US children aged between 2 and 8 has been diagnosed with a mental, behavioral or developmental disorder. Here, too, the trend looks terrible. The share of children aged 6 to 17 who have ever been diagnosed with either anxiety or depression has been rising since the early 2000s. Between 2011 and 2021, the percentage of high school students who experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness rose from 28% to 42%; of those who seriously considered attempting suicide, from 16% to 22%; of those who made a suicide plan, from 13% to 18%; of those who attempted suicide, from 8% to 10%. “In 2021, 12% of high school students had ever taken prescription pain medicine without a doctor’s prescription or differently than how a doctor told them to use it.” According to Tanz et al. (2022), the number of overdose deaths among Americans aged 14 to 18 rose 94% from 2019 to 2020, and 20% from 2020 to 2021. True, the vast majority of these deaths were due to opioids and illicitly manufactured fentanyl, so this could just be a story of more potent drugs and more tragic mistakes, as opposed to deaths of despair. Two-thirds of those who died from overdoses were male, whereas the survey evidence points to a crisis of female mental health. 41% of teenage overdose victims had evidence of mental health conditions or treatment.

There’s only one glitch with this harrowing narrative: The reality is that there is a mental illness epidemic throughout the population. It’s not just the kids who are not all right. In 2019-2020, according to Mental Health America, 20.8% of adults were experiencing a mental illness, equivalent to more than 50 million Americans. Admittedly, the percentage of adults reporting serious thoughts of suicide is 4.8%, a quarter of the YRBS figure for high schoolers.  However, according to MHA, the rate of substance-use disorder is 15.4% for adults, whereas it is only 6.4% for young people. A staggering 32.6 million people have an alcohol use disorder in the US, nearly all of them adults. Of these, at most 50% overcome their addiction and achieve sustained abstinence, according to Sliedrecht et al. (2019). Most of the estimated 108,000 drug overdose deaths in 2021 were of adults. Contagion is the key concept if we are to understand our modern malaise, and you cannot understand contagion until you understand the structure of networks. 

In my 2017 book The Square and the Tower, I quoted Stanford University biology professor Deborah M. Gordon’s argument that online social networks were replicating on a vast scale many of the more insidious features of friendship circles in a middle school. I also cited research by Holly Shakya and Nicholas Christakis, who used data from 5,208 adults over two years, to argue that “the more you use Facebook, the worse you feel.” I even quoted Facebook’s own research, which came to similar conclusions about the effects of the overuse of social media by students. All that research has since been reinforced by studies such as Allcott et al. (2020), which concluded that using social media was a form of addictive behavior. The issue remains a battleground for social scientists, but I remain firmly persuaded that the creation of vast online networks greatly increased our vulnerability to contagions of the mind, including “mind viruses” of all kinds. Into this hyper-networked world came SARS-CoV-2, a genuine virus spread through the air rather than online and capable of causing severe illness or death. To a truly unprecedented extent, social life came to halt. Large proportions of the population were confined to their homes in what resembled mass house-arrest. The enduring mental health cost is being borne by sufferers of long Covid, an umbrella term for a variety of the lasting “sequelae” that afflict a significant minority of people infected by the virus. These include cognitive impairments such as memory loss, concentration problems — all colloquially known to patients as “brain fog.” Douaud et al. (2022) even found evidence that Covid infection was associated with changes in brain structure.

There is, however, another possibility that cannot be ruled out. With the number of therapists growing faster in the US than average for all occupations—and with mental health services booming in college campuses—young Americans surely have more access to psychotherapy than any previous generation of teenagers and twenty-somethings. At the same time, from my Baby Boomer vantage point, they seem to have a lot less of what we used to think of as fun. This is the part of the latest YRBS that attracted less comment. “Sexual behaviors,” the report states, “have been improving for all students, but especially for Black and Hispanic students.” The percentage of high schoolers who have ever had sex fell from 47% in 2011 to 30% in 2021. The share who have had four or more sexual partners was down from 15% to 6%; the share who were currently sexually active was down from 34% to 21%. 

In America today, the peer group pressure among teenagers is to get counseling rather than to get crazee. I feel sorry for Generation Z. Compared with being a teenager in the 1970s, being a teenager in the 2020s seems like no fun at all. But can there really have been as many suicide attempts by high schoolers in 2021 as the YRBS implies — which would be around 2.5 million? When I was seven years old, London was 86.2% White. Half a century of migration has reduced that share to 36.8%. You will look in vain for the race riots prophesied by Enoch Powell in his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968. The big mental health pandemic of our time is the one that is driving tens of millions of adults to shorten their lives by suicide or by an addictive intake of alcohol and drugs that amounts to slow suicide. These are the unhappy people who took Slade literally. They just attract less media coverage than the Instagram-induced angst of Generation Z. Source: www.bloomberg.com