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Just as a simple sanity check, all the arguments you're making comparing people in 1900 to people today, would apply just as much to people in 1800 to 1900, and 1700 to 1800, and 1600 to 1700, no? If life was so much worse a hundred years ago, shouldn't it be even worse than that the further back you go? At what point, shouldn't the misery become unsurvivable? And yet people clearly survived, and even thrived to the point of producing rich cultures of beauty that we enjoy to this day. Do you not see a contradiction here?
Psychology mostly didn't exist a century ago, but given that Psychology is fake as fuck, it's unclear to me why that is supposed to be a problem. I see absolutely zero reason to believe that the "common factors" giving rise to the Dodo Bird Verdict should be supposed to have been a recent discovery, and not achievable through previous religious and spiritual traditions the world over.
We can't cure most serious mental illness now, and for all the criticisms of Bedlam, it is not obvious to me that our current method of allowing the mentally-ill to kill themselves on the streets with meth and heroin is in any way an improvement
Based on your personal experience, presumably? I mean, we have writing and records from quite a ways back, stories, songs, plays, art, personal journals; why speculate, when we could look at their thoughts directly? None of these depict an unmitigated hellscape. On the contrary, most people seem to have been reasonably happy and healthy, even in times of considerable duress. Heck, why not compare suicide rates? That's an objective measure, right? Or maybe marriage rates, given the overwhelming correlation between long-term marriage and a whole host of positive outcomes? Or average numbers of close friends?
What you're doing here is comparing every bad thing you can imagine about the past against every good thing you can imagine about the present. Shockingly, this results in the present being the apparent best of all possible worlds. Your explanation ignores the concept of the hedonic treadmill, the way peoples psychology adjusts itself to both prosperity and hardship, such that the former does not simply satisfy, and the later does not simply crush. People are more complicated than that.
It gets worse the further back you go, yes. There are ups and downs, but there is a secular trend of living standards getting better throughout the past few millennia. However, this improvement is not linear. Things were getting better slowly for most of history before the rate of improvement increased in the past couple of centuries. The period after WWII is the second half of the chessboard.
Mental health care includes applied psychology, i.e. counselling, therapy (CBT is supposedly an evidence-based intervention; I haven't really looked into it very much), etc., but it also includes psychiatry, a field that has seen immense progress in the past century. When the first antipsychotics were introduced shortly after World War II, they were seen as miracle drugs. Newer antipsychotics have only improved treatment since then. I don't know if we can cure most serious mental illnesses, but we can certainly treat many effectively and enable the patients to live a more-or-less normal life. Contrast this with a hundred years ago, when the only option for someone with schizophrenia was being confined to a lunatic asylum.
I know a substantial portion of homeless drug addicts are mentally ill, but I'm not sure if a substantial portion of people with severe mental illness are homeless drug addicts. Presumably these are only the most severe cases, or people who haven't been treated at all due to lack of access to health care in the US. Poor health care and mass overdoses, along with the drug markets and homeless camps mentioned in the original comment I was replying to, are a primarily American phenomenon and they could be solved if the political will existed. But I guess you could argue that the fact that politicians have accepted this is part of the supposed social decline.
The "rich cultures" were created by an elite minority who lived in relative luxury. The vast majority of people until relatively recently were illiterate farmers and pastoralists.
Even so, the stories I have read do in fact depict the many horrors the plebs were subjected to. Ever read Dickens? And if we go further back in history, you have stories featuring abusive feudal lords, marauding armies, and so on. The horrors of everyday life – lack of sanitation and running water, entire families sharing a single tiny bedroom, mothers dying in childbirth – don't get mentioned very much because they were unremarkable.
The honest answer is "because I tried and I couldn't find good data on historical suicide rates, and my post was already getting long". If you have the data, please do post it. It should be noted when comparing suicide rates that culture is a major factor. There is significant variation between developed countries today that is not explained by objective economic circumstances.
The correlation is only recorded in modern times, as far as I know. There could well be a confounder, e.g. people with higher conscientiousness or people who are already doing well mentally also have a higher chance of having a successful marriage. In a time when people didn't have to work for a marriage because society made sure that everyone got married, there would have been no such correlation.
My interpretation of the hedonic treadmill is that people will eventually adapt to an objectively higher or lower standard of living, such that the difference eventually won't be as great as might be expected, but it would still exist. I do sincerely believe that people in the past were often horribly traumatized by modern standards, and no one cared because it was so widespread and nothing could be done about it anyway.
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Proves too much. Using your 'hedonic threadmill' and 'unsurvivable misery' argument, you can't discriminate between a cherrypicked absolute worst society of the past (say, glorifying human sacrifice, slavery and war) and your personal favourites.
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I'd say worseness plateaus at some point. The difference in the standard of life in 1000 AC and 1000 BC would be indistinguishable to me, probably. But I'm no historian.
You can argue of whether going as far back as pre-agriculture would be a drop or a rise relative to agriculture, but either way I prefer the modern era.
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