The reason you look at suicide and violent crime is that they're clear indicators. Diagnosis of mental illness is not: definitions, diagnostic techniques, and access to diagnoses have changed radically over the last 100 years. It's similar (though less rigorous, for several reasons) to homicide being the gold standard crime statistic.
I'm not making a claim that mental health doesn't matter if it doesn't result in suicide or incarceration. I'm saying: those are two sets of numbers you can find going back to the intervention (the sanitization of fairy tales) and trace since then.
The story those numbers tells doesn't match the just-so story the comment provides. Maybe there's more going on than those numbers represents! But I think you'll have a tough time supporting that argument with facts. For instance: the claim was made across the thread that suicide levels were artificially suppressed in 1900 because of religious norms, which works against the story; moreover: you can see in the actual charts what suicide tracks with (it's not a smooth line).
Suicide does not have stable reporting rates. It was very stigmatized in the past, and so investigators would notoriously report suicides as "unknown cause of death" if they could.
Violent crime, on the other hand, is much more correlated with things like poverty than with mental health.
I think it's quite obviously the case that there are no clear indicators about what "mental health" looked like 100 years ago and there. Any projections into the past will involve a lot of extrapolation and have all sorts of biases.
> I'm not making a claim that mental health doesn't matter if it doesn't result in suicide or incarceration. I'm saying: those are two sets of numbers you can find going back to the intervention (the sanitization of fairy tales) and trace since then.
That's like the drunk searching for his keys under the streetlamp because that's where the light is! Yes, those are the numbers we have, but do they reliably measure the things we care about?
(Are you denying that the millennial mental health crisis exists at all? The fact that it doesn't show up in your preferred statistics is completely independent of any discussion of what the causes may be)
No, that doesn't hold. I'm not addressing that at all. For the previous commenter to be correct, the trend should start with the intervention, which occurred in/around 1900.
I've already hinted at why that's not a very strong prediction either. Sanitizing fairy tales are only one part of a broader trend toward sheltering children in general, which, to my knowledge at least, did not start at exactly the same time. The changes in mental health would track with the intensity of the broader trend, with a time lag of around 20 years. Yes, these are both very difficult to measure. Truth is hard.
But if the clear indicators are only tenuously linked to the question you're interested in, then you may just have to accept that you can't answer the question, neither proving it nor resoundingly falsifying it as you attempted.
I'm not making a claim that mental health doesn't matter if it doesn't result in suicide or incarceration. I'm saying: those are two sets of numbers you can find going back to the intervention (the sanitization of fairy tales) and trace since then.
The story those numbers tells doesn't match the just-so story the comment provides. Maybe there's more going on than those numbers represents! But I think you'll have a tough time supporting that argument with facts. For instance: the claim was made across the thread that suicide levels were artificially suppressed in 1900 because of religious norms, which works against the story; moreover: you can see in the actual charts what suicide tracks with (it's not a smooth line).