The Upstream Cause of the Youth Mental Health Crisis Is the Loss of Community

One big change I've noticed between growing up in a small town and now where I'm in my mid 40s in a big metro city in India is increased "transactional" nature of interactions of my daily life.

Back then we had a deeper ties with all those who served us by which I mean vegetable vendor, carpenter, doctor, knife sharpener, cloth shop, grocer, baker and so on. Whenever we interacted with them it would be a small chit-chat, exchange small updates (how's your son doing, is he married yet?) and then finally do the actual purchase.

It was to an extent that the carpenter would come by and just hand over a big dining table just because he thought our house deserved/needed it. He wouldn't ask for immediate payment either and also in instalments. Some other times he would come by and borrow some money.

All of that is now gone. Every single interaction I have now with vendors is 100% transactional. I don't even know their names nor they mine.

It means that I'm now connected only with my immediate family, that's it. It also means that the generation now growing up know only transactional way of interaction with non family/friends. I guess these things eventually add up to the loss of community.

I've noticed an uptick recently of large brands to start referring to themselves as "The [Brand] Community". The author pointed out Youtube here (who in an Orwellian manner calls their ToS "community guidelines") but I've also seen it with many other multi-million dollar companies such as Reddit, Twitter, etc. Young people today are reaching out for real support structures, but only receiving manipulation from corporations that want them to watch ads, while occasionally arguing with pseudo-anonymous internet strangers.

About 9 years ago I traveled to the US from India for education. Smartphones were still not very common in India cause data was not as cheap as it is today. When I was in the bus commuting everyone’s head was buried in their phones. I thought to myself this is such a sad thing. Look outside talk to each other but the every single person had an iPhone and was doing something on the phone.

Fast forward to 2024 and every person home here in India is constantly on their phones. In the gym, in the car, at work, everywhere. Naturally kids are also getting hooked on devices.

How can you talk to someone when they aren’t even looking at you or paying attention ? Communities and real physical social interaction keep people mentally healthy. All these apps and devices are doing is keeping people away from each other instead.

Of course no one wants to admit this but people are addicted to devices and distractions. The sooner they dissociate, the better.

I've personally noticed that my own value of autonomy has often contributed to a reduction in social activity and community integration. I used to be very selective of what I did with others. If I had an invite from friends and the activity didn't seem immediately interesting to me, I'd decline. I've since learned to say yes more (but not always) to invites and particularly consider ones that are more outside my comfort zone. This does however require a sacrifice of my individualism that is so heavily prized in western culture.

Just a data point: In Valencia, Spain, in the 80s, children played in the street with no much supervision from parents. Occasionally we would stop the football match to let a car drive by. Forgetting your keys at home was no issue, you could get a glass of milk in ten different places while you wait for other (more attentive) members of your family.

Nowadays there is hardly a place to park your car. Parents don't allow kids to play in the street. And the ones that interact with each other are the ones who lived there in that period. It's very difficult for newcomers to integrate.

What are the reasons for this? My take: cars and lack of stay at home mums. They built the social network at that time. They took care of each other children, the were there to help each other. Nowadays households have both adults working (so nobody even asks for salt to the neighbor, all order a pizza instead).

I’m so glad it’s finally happening but also it’s wild to me this conversation feels like it’s just beginning. The Anxious Generation book seems to have been what was needed for people to see what, to me anyways, was common sense and actually question their silly iPad at 6months old parenting styles.

As it’s picking up steam, I’ve been hearing stories recently about how our local “school district decided to ban phones from classrooms” and just yesterday it was “the school will no longer allow food delivery services to drop off food”. Like, educators, WTF, why was that ever an option? In my days long ago, 80s-90s primary school, there was a zero tolerance policy for this stuff. Why was it ever deemed allowable? I can see letting kids keep their phone in their locker or create some storage solution for it. For emergency purposes. But in emergencies, the parent should be able to call the office and they can fetch the kid. It worked just fine in the days of landlines.

It’s hard for me to understand the parenting styles that demanded and allowed this stuff to take place, because I’m sure it was parent driven. But there’s so much else to the parenting styles that are contributing to all this stuff. Banning outdoor play and independence is why they’re online so much and why the arcades and third places all disappeared.

I say all this as a parent of an almost 6 year old boy, doing everything I can to shield him from the wacky parenting style that seems to be the norm and provide him places of community and activities away from screens. He won’t have a phone until he drives, or maybe just a basic flip phone if we think we need a communication line to reach him when he’s a bit older.

Second comment. Sorry if excessive but it's relevant. I'm a computer teacher for elementary and intermediate school grades. You know what drives kids absolutely insane and agitated? The schools IT guy turning their laptops and Mac desktops into locked down consumption devices.

The kids aren't even permitted to change their wallpaper. Those in tech with authority need to loosen up on control of systems, hardware and services if they want kids to be less agitated.

The books the authors cite are great and worth reading.

Some personal observations:

- The USA lacks a unified cultural identity now. There are lots of reasons for this. But, it's considered taboo to express a love of the USA - which hurts our community + culture.

- People put a lot of effort into work, and work is becoming more transactional. No more "life-long employment with the buddies" kind of situation.

- America went from poor to rich, but still behaves like a developing economy. Public healthcare + public education + low-income housing availability are poor, while there's a big class of people who can afford private education + private healthcare + McMansions. I think this deteriorates the idea of "we're all in this together" because there's such unequal opportunity.

- Wars used to be a way to unify a country, but we're in the era of proxy wars - which don't have the same aligning effect.

When I grew up in China, students in a school were divided into fixed classes. Those classes formed great communities, as we spent hours every day for at least three years and some for 6 years. Each class had a head teacher, who fostered the sense of community too. No one would mock people for geeking out. No one would mock people for not being good at sports. No one would mock those who struggled at academics. At least not openly. We loved each other and still do. Our bond was so strong that we had regular reunions every few years, and most of my classmates would make it. We had multiple couples who were high-school sweat hearts, even though dating in high school was a taboo in China then. The concepts like nerds, like queen bees, like sports jockeys, like that those who can get drugs and drinks are popular... They were all new and parts of the culture shock to me when I moved to the US.

I recently joined my local Elks club and the experience has been amazing.

Being social is effortless. I just show up at the lodge and people I know will be there.

As a parent I can let the kids run wild with other kids within the safe confines of the lodge and have adult conversations.

If I don’t have plans, I don’t need to sit home reading the internet. I go to the lodge.

It’s weird that groups like the Elks have declined so much in recent decades, because it feels they really are the solution to a problem everyone complains about.

Some things to keep in mind:

(1) A 'youth mental health crisis' may or may not actually exist. Consider the 'chronic pain crisis' marketing that preceded the opiate epidemic in the USA, and the concomittant boom in opiate drug prescriptions, sales and profits. Similarly the 'attention deficit crisis' was very profitable for the makers of amphetamines and their derivatives, from Ritalin to Adderall to Desoxyn. Here's CDC on opiate prescriptions in the USA, 2006-2015:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6626a4.htm

(2) A 'youth mental health crisis' may actually be a 'youth are looking at the dystopian world besest by war and climate chaos and not feeling good about their future prospects' - which means their mental health is probably fine and their views are entirely rational. See the famous "this koala is having a mental crisis' cartoon:

https://www.reddit.com/r/lostgeneration/comments/avf6kh/this...

I have to assume that people leaving their home towns to work elsewhere is a huge driving factor of all of this.

What a load. See https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/22/jonathan-haidts-book-the...

Kids don't even play video games together in the same room any more. LAN parties were a thing in the 90s but everyone was in the same room(ish). Even when playing console games people don't game together in the same room or home.

That's kinda odd. Online gaming is cool but my favorite gaming memories are playing with the person sitting next to me.

I miss those days, and wish kids knew what it was like to play games together as a physical experience AND a digital one.

I'm surprised that the definition of 'community' he uses here so strongly revolves around a shared identity and activity, and that what is shared is what defines a community.

For one, I don't really think communities where people share the same interests or ritual really does the trick, otherwise so-called YouTube 'communities' or Twitch stream 'communities' or even strangers you play games with online would be all that's needed. In those cases, whether it happens in real life or online wouldn't really matter. I think some people can tick all the boxes he has here with an online group and still feel lonely from it. Some people still feel lonely going to church every Sunday.

There certainly needs to be a common thread--that's what you get out of place-based communities, for example: we all experience the same weather--but what I feel really combats loneliness and creates belonging is having to connect with people that are different you and, importantly, to witness and connect with people because of their difference, and that these connections are made because you have no choice. The richness and complexity of life and all of the kinds of sorrows and joys that you get to see and relate to yourself and relate to others is what is sorely missing from incidental, emergent, real-life community. I suppose I'm basically just describing the Breakfast Club experience.

Like kids don't feel lonely because there isn't an authority figure around that can boss them around. That makes for a more ... socially conditioned ...? person, and maybe a wiser, more carefully-guided person, but not necessarily a less lonely person. It's not the bossing around that makes them feel like they're in a community, it's the fact that there is someone with a different experience with whom they share some connection, and it's a coincidence that it's an authoratative one.

No, absolutely not. Young people are more connected than they have ever been before, just now they are connected in some of the most unhealthy and detrimental manners possible. Instead of connecting with friends in real life, they form communities on social media, in discord channels, in video games, etc. The consequences are just barely starting to show themselves.

As for the why, I think they are many reasons. The Internet is obviously an attractive and addictive place, but cities have gotten so much worse as well. Where I live the playgrounds I used to go to as a child are now full of drug dealers...

Hot take:

The upstream cause of this is, essentially, "the rent is too damn high". Not necessarily in a sense of housing prices, but -

In order to have a community, that community needs a space. (The early 'net was interesting in that "space" was cheap/nearly free - IRC, forums, etc, which might be one reason it took over as a social space to begin with)

Extremely consistently, I see efforts at forming communities fail simply due to a lack of regular space in which to have them, and from what little I know talking to organizers, it pretty much always comes down to the cost of the space - the rent. This remains true even if the space itself wants to be cheap/free - it has to pay it's own rent, which means it needs dollars from everyone using it.

AFAIK, religious institutions get around this through (1) advantageous tax laws and (2) long-term ownership.

The articles thesis on loss of community plays a role but has always existed in some context depending upon the individuals location.

The primary cause (in my opinion) of the youth mental health crisis and falling happiness rates was the introduction of the smart phone. Blaming social media is a clever cop out, it's the actual device and inability of people to stop looking at it.

Totally abnormal to human life. Will we adapt to it over time? Possible, but many people will be lost along the way.

I think it's less the lack of community, and more the lack of the ability to feel like you matter.

Before the world was globalized, anybody could do something that would stand out in their community.

On a global scale, virtually no one is good or big enough for anyone to care about.

It doesn't matter anymore if you're the best soprano in the choir or the best basketball player on your team. You need to be one of the best in the world. And that's not realistic.

Who knew utterly destroying cities and replacing them with gated communities with no accommodations for children whatsoever, and borderline criminalizing any activity which isn't closely supervised would have knock-on effects.

My controversial take on this is that we are in the mid-curve of this tech, i.e., smartphones/social media are not quite there to replace IRL experiences and are even further off from real community...BUT instead of going back, we need to move forward to the right side of the curve where full VR / network states can solve a lot of these problems.

I'm very bullish on IRL experiences. Community building is more complex, with various ripple effects to consider, but realistically we are heading in that direction whether we like it or not. I find it more compelling to explore how we can reclaim and enhance these lost aspects in our modern world rather than going on "back in my day" nostalgia trips.

The lack of religion is a big factor. I'd argue as much as the internet.

Religious activity--putting aside the well-documented negatives--gives group identity, belonging, a welcoming atmosphere, an in-person place to socialise, associated group events and a connection to your geographic community.

The rush to abandon religion never replaced the essential in-person community it offered its adherents.

Personally I'm more positive about the impact of online communities than the author is.

But you for sure need offline friends and experiences, alongside the online ones, to keep yourself grounded in reality; the online experience has loads of biases, some obvious and others very subtle, and only by keeping one eye on the real world can you know when you're encountering them.

Also you're not going to meet your future wife or husband through HN.

The further upstream of that is large super structures of human social web cannot exist. There is no monoculture anymore and that has both pros and cons.

Is the "youth mental health crisis" confirmed? I remember reading there was a bit of back and forth in that topic. Some unhappiness was also concentrated among young progressive girls etc.

It fits nicely with the pessimistic vibes that everything gets worse, but I wonder to what extent it's media bias and that actually things are normal or even good.

>I moved to my current neighborhood, Kemp Mill, just north of Washington, D.C., 12 years ago

The unspoken truth here is that geographic community requires that you can stay in one spot long enough to make the massive investment in building or becoming involved in a local community.

Recently I was thinking that I should become involved in local initiatives, or perhaps even local government, until I realised that as a renter not only would I not be here im a few years time, but any actual success I had in improving the local area would just mean a likely rent increase as it became more desirable and gentrified.

The fact that I'm shocked and feel blessed that I'm living at the same address for 4 years in a row now makes it obvious how bad an investment trying to becime part of the local community seems to someone like me.

In the age of homeownership haves and have-nots, it's natural for local community to break down.

HN readers of any age who felt alone at some point and found community - what worked for you?

The cause is having a tiny computer in your hand all day. It's so glaringly obvious.

"In it, he argued that to restore the play-based childhood, we must first rebuild strong in-person local communities." Churches! It is perfect, gives community, hope and a purpose. And the Christian way to live and be is a very good model.

I find that community depends alot on culture. My experience of Western culture (the culture I grew up in, although not born into) is mostly Anglo-spherical, which in the beginning felt like this was Western culture, but travelling through Europe I realised that there's far more to Western culture than just Anglo practices/preferences. I have found the US to be far more diverse in its Western cultural roots compared to NZ and Australia. This might be due the fact that the US received significant immigration from non-Anglo Western cultures early on compared to Australia/NZ. Anyway my point is that what constitutes "community" and whether you fit into that community depends alot on whether you can fit into that culture, and whether that culture can accept you. If there's a match, then you end up finding community easily. If there's no match, then community can be difficult, and this I believe explains why there's so many ethnic enclaves in Sydney and I believe elsewhere too. So that's why unlike the "melting pot idea", Australia tends to be multi-cultural society. This is especially difficult for people who are neither there nor here, a sort of inbetween. It takes alot of grace and self-reflection to integrate opposing cultural norms and bridge communities...

Or, conversely, there's a reporting and over-reporting bias at work today that previously didn't exist due to much smaller exposure to notions of perceived and real mental health disorders among (admittedly often suggestible) young people. "Community" is not only a generic term, it's also a somewhat ambiguously dangerous one that captures many very biased notions of a supposedly ideal community that have little to do with a healthy reality. Many people complain about a lack of community specifically because their own preferred idea of how it should be isn't what's popular. This hardly makes them reliable sources for arguments about its lack.

Few things about today's world of easier communication and more easily than ever being able to find others who share your interests makes it especially hard for any given person of any age to find what they're comfortable calling a community for themselves. It's certainly easier than it was decades ago when you either had to physically go somewhere or make a serious effort of some kind to find wider communities you might like. Either that or settle for whatever sort of fit the bill in your home town. These things are much easier to avoid today.

Is there a difference between 'cause' and 'upstream cause'? I though the whole up/downstream language was just a synonym for causation.

I have recently started traveling and working remote at "co-living" hotels. And I must say, this is the ideal way I wish to live my life in my 20s-30s.

Community makes life fun.

Someone needs to import co-living to the US. And I don't mean these "co-living" apartment complexes that exist in our major cities. I mean like, actual communities with character and life.

> the teens that appear least impacted by the mental health crisis tend to be religious, conservative, and live in less individualistic cultures

Weird how fast the other two factors from the linked essay got dropped only to focus on individualism, aint it? Doesnt matter tho doesnt seem neither cite sources, methodology and data

Christopher Alexander & co. have a site "Building Living Neighborhoods" about doing just that with his Pattern Language:

> The tools offered are intended for the use of ordinary people, families, communities, developers, planners, architects, designers and builders; public officials, local representatives, and neighbors; business owners and people who have commercial interests. The processes here are expressed in the belief that the common-sense, plain truth about laying out a neighborhood, or repairing one, is equally valid for all comers, amateurs and professionals. They help people build or rebuild neighborhoods in ways that contribute something to their lives.

https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm

The loss of community, sadly, does not affect only the youth, but all people that have grown with the internet. This now includes older millennials like me.

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I have a silly dream that has been calling me for years now, and I don't know where to start [1]. We're all knowledge workers now, right? We basically just need electricity, a laptop and an internet connection to contribute to society.

Is this not the time to start a movement away from the big chaotic cities, back into the calmer and more peaceful rural villages? I envision a future where "nature life" does not mean hippy living like the 1800s, but we can leverage our modern high technology to make natural life even better for us. For example, solar panels, low-energy devices and appliances, automated greenhouses/hydroponics, etc.

Natural life also means community life. We are tribal animals, we enjoy being productive members of groups of < 50 people, where everybody knows each other, they have their own "culture" and way of doing things in harmony. In 2024, this doesn't have to mean warring with each other with rocks. Modern "tribes" are no more than communal and self-contained living and social arrangements.

Basically, I have this unbearable call to settle in the middle of nowhere, with other people that have the luxury to live free of the shackles of modern society, to live like humans are meant to live: in the sun, in the grass, in a community but also with running water, fibre internet and green energy.

I know some of us are starting to have the same need and we are at a point in civilisation where this is possible, so here's my shot in the dark, hoping to talk with and hear from the other unreasonable, uncivilised ones that just want to abandon the idea that we are meant to live in chaotic cities socialising mostly through the hellish babel that is social media.

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1: actually, I know where to start. I am moving back to Italy within the next few months, and will seriously look into a place to settle and to make this a reality just for myself.

Yes, ever since Robert Putnam wrote his book "bowling alone", the problem has been growing. And now, Big Tech has exacerbated it.

Would like to get the feedback of people here. Journalists love to write about problems, but very few write about solutions. (It's just one of those things in the news media, it's like writing about good news and helping old ladies across the road.)

I have spent 12 years building an open-source platform that will hopefully unite our communities and restore public health. LA Weekly recently wrote about it:

https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

As a member of generation Z I would like to add that one of the many enshittification reasons leading to the loss of community is an aging population. Many of the same neighborhoods that our parents used to roam and play are now a majority old or childless families. The kids are there, just not dense enough to form small tight knit play groups anymore. This applies to suburbs specifically

This article needs more comparison between countries. Where is this not happening?

How do astronauts train for this when preparing for long missions without much company?

I want to share what I imagine would be a controversial data point but one that I hope has value to this conversation - I recently decided to join a church just to reconnect with faith that I had pushed aside back in 2016, and with the church, a small group. It's working for me. I am making older friends for the first time in my life, and despite me generally not aligning with people politically, I'm just biting my tongue and not letting that define who I will spend time talking to the same way I used to.

I'm not advocating religion specifically as a solution for others, just saying it works for myself. But my question is - why aren't there secular alternatives to religious community where people could just go bite their tongues and get along despite maybe some of our superficial cultural differences? Why can't there be larger weekly meetings for people, with smaller breakout groups, and a general sense of bringing people together in a community? Why is church the only place I can find that? I don't think the "fraternal clubs" are the solution here as they give off a certain "old mans club" perception that I can't get past (and the lack of windows on their buildings has been noted). But maybe somebody here could put one together and see what happens.

Seth Kaplan, professor at Johns Hopkins University and frequent contributor to UN and World Bank efforts to shore up community in difficult countries has written a book called Fragile Neighborhoods that I highly recommend.

Well, yes, we've doubled down on mediating social interactions through economic relationships. Most of the interactions adults have in their lives are with or in the framing of economic relations. Homes, are being invaded with tablets and mobile devices which bring along with them framing interactions as economic relations through ad and consumer frames. Workplaces are inherently settings of economic relations, and third places outside of the consumer setting are becoming extinct because they are non-monetizable.

This last category, non-consumer third places are formerly the domain of kid-friendly community-building activities. When we talk about creating more of these and the response is, "they aren't economically viable," it's exactly the kind of economic calculus framing that I'm talking about.

The spike in young Asian and white male suicides is the discrimination against them. See here where only 15% of them who are in the academic top ten percent are admitted vs 57% of black students in the top ten percent. https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti...

End all racism.

What a shocker, community ceases to exist when people living in a economic zone have literally nothing in common, other than being bipedal humanoids that are enslaved to banks.

This guy seems to think his city is special by not allowing kids to have phones in school but the thing is I've heard this claim of special status from a lot of places lately and in my own city kids have never been allowed to have phones at school so I am starting to think this is actually just a widespread and quite obvious practice.

Every group is cultish nowadays. God forbid if you have your own opinion anymore.

Mental health problems are the result of taking animals (humans) out of their natural environments and giving them phones with addictive apps and telling them that they should work instead of having children and growing their families.

Cooperations eat,prey and consist of isolated individuals integrating into a artificiql "subsetsociety" which is why individual progressive society is the colon of the filter feeder beast.

As in most spheres, the ruthless pursuit of 'efficiency' in social interactions has led to a less resilient society.

I think quality of the community matters here. There are a lot of "not real" people in our society.

There are so many candidates for causes here. Thinking about and watching climate change can't be good for, say, a teenager imagining their future. Of course, that teenager is also watching the world not coming together to solve this problem so you could say the situation is connected to "loss of community" in a way.

And what are the causes for the loss of community ?

This is just repeating Positive Psychology correct?

It's not just youths.....

We lack the moral courage to be honest about why real world community disintegrated and are therefore doomed to suffer these pedantic lectures that miss the point and point in random directions.

Yet Apple will continue to push iPhones , sometimes I think the iPhone is worse than Facebook

The internet was a bad idea.

In the end your friend will be an AI that tries to sell you shit all day long.

Heh, come on. It's the breakup of the family unit by the woke plague. It's time to face the music and let children be children.

I believe a lot of people intuitively agree with this. I certainly do.

Not everything can/should be solved with technology, but would it be possible to get that sense of community back using e.g. VR and perhaps AI?

(Research might also be useful for space missions)