This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
But their point wasn't that exorcism numbers balance out mental illness numbers. Their point was that the formal part of a formal mental illness diagnosis is already strongly tribally coded, in the same way that a formal possession diagnosis is tribally coded. That is, therapy is integrated into Blue life in a way that it is not for Red life; it may be that Reds suffer mental illness at equivalent rates, but are simply vastly less likely to attempt to get treatment for it. Given the extremely questionable efficacy of therapy as a treatment, it's not obvious why what we see is not what we should expect to see, given an equivalent prevalence of mental illness: Crazy reds ignore it and cope as best they can, Crazy blues get "treatment" that largely does nothing, and then cope as best they can with roughly similar outcomes to the Reds.
This is not the way I would personally bet, as I think Blue Tribe has some legitimately fucked-up memes endemic in its environment that are in fact bad for the brain, but I would certainly not claim to be able to prove this at a population level. The replication crisis looms too large over the datasets, in my opinion.
Sûre, but every dataset available gives the same answer- blues have worse mental health.
Except men commit suicide more often and are more likely to be conservative. All that counting the number of people who say they have or are in treatment for mental health issues, can tell you is the number of known people, people who seek treatment or talk about it.
Men more often keep it in until they snap. Working class men specifically (who went about 63% for Trump) make up the majority of fatal drug overdoses, alcohol related deaths and suicides it appears. Self-medicating, coping and keeping it inside until you can't is the male strategy basically.
Blues have worse visible mental health is perhaps all we have the data to say. But I think there are enough signs that say that a lot of Red men particularly suffer what Blues would call mental health issues, they just don't talk about it and suffer through it in silence, until they drink/drug themselves to death slowly or kill themselves directly.
The truth may well be that Blue women particularly talk about it too much, and Red men particularly, don't talk about it enough. Which is going to confound any easy way to compare rates of mental health issues.
But how much this is confounded by the fact that the economic outlook for working class men in the Rust Belt is currently really bad? In 1975 you would have seen vastly higher amounts of fatal drug overdose rates in America’s ruined cities than out in the countryside. Now the situation is reversed.
Sure, that could be a cause. But the claim was that Blue mental health is worse than Red mental health because you hear about it more. That they might have different causes that vary over time isn't relevant to whether that is true or not. If Red mental health problems currently seem to manifest in different ways and thus are not as visible and thus not being counted as mental health issues at the rates at which they occur, that would be separate from what is causing them.
Why there are mental health issues is irrelevant as to whether we are measuring them accurately and if they appear at the same rates in the same ways in these different populations at any point in time. Conditions of course vary over time in both populations. If we were in 1975 then we'd also want to be seeing if those urban drug overdoses were hiding mental health issues, if we were doing the same comparison back then.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do we have a dataset that doesn't consist of a survey question asking some variation on "Do you have bad mental health?"
Rates of completed suicide would work, at least in the senses I'd care about. Link a voter file with death certificates.
Unfortunately, no one has done this yet, afaict. There are state-aggregate studies showing that people in conservative states have higher suicide rates than those in liberal states, but ecological fallacy. I'm also not sure how to correct for demographics--or, rather, whether it makes sense to, since many of the same factors that correlate with suicide also correlate with Republican party affiliation.
I would think that's just measuring effectiveness of method. Firearms lead to more bodies, pills lead to more look at me attempts.
...you just split suicides/suicides attempts into gendered groups, not political. Men tend to be more successful, women tend to attempt it more.
What I had one person point out that's always stuck with me, however, is that an 'attempted suicide' moment for a man is going to be different for a woman. 'Attempted suicide' in that case is going to involve a man taking out a loaded gun, staring at it for an hour, and then quietly putting it away.
The crux of the argument being, 'attempts' in this situation are going to be manifest differently and trying to measure them scientifically is going to be messy and lossy as the result.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link