In a supposedly very conservative red state, Arkansas, the recent TV ad message run by the GOP candidate was “young men who are gaming at home and eating Cheetos all day are why we had to implement work requirements for welfare”; it was a very negative ad that made young men look like slackers, layabouts etc.

Of course, only about one percent of welfare recipients are young men; single moms in middle age are the ones who are a large percentage of those receiving the benefits, for very different reasons than Cheetos consumption.

But it shows how attacking young men when they aren’t even the crux of the problem is en vogue.

BTW House Speaker Johnson has said the same thing on TV about young men.

The job market has collapsed, graduates are moving back in with their parents, dating is a non-starter for most, nobody born after the 2000s can afford homes, the future looks bleak

> Oliffe said that in the last decade, there has been "low government investment in men's mental health."

When has it ever been otherwise? Was there some past time I've forgotten about where government spending on men's mental health was high?

I'm just not convinced by this article. Male teens are moody and anxious? Seems pretty normal. That was me in the 1980s for sure. We had no idea what the future held, other than we'd probably all be nuked at some point pretty soon.

One thing I've noticed: the amount of gambling ads targeted towards young males; kinda wild. I'm glad that I'm not growing up in this era.

Reading your comment has just brought to mind the sheer amount of betting and stock trading ads I get on YouTube currently. I’m in my late 30s so a little out of the “young males” category.

Seems like ads for sporting events and sports podcasts annd jersey sponsors are asymptotically approaching 100%.

It's like the VCs are trying to make the AfD win.

"Data from the Canadian Medical Association Journal shows a huge rise in young men calling helplines with gambling addictions. (Health Canada reports men are three times more likely than women to have a gambling problem.)

Canada legalized single-event sports betting in 2021. In 2022, Ontario became the first province to allow private companies to operate alongside government-regulated industry."

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We've come to recognize "young men" (males aged 15-24) as a "useful" demographic in the sense that they are impulsive, easily coerced, and have access to financial capital. The same things that make this demographic good for fighting wars makes them exploitable by gambling sites and influencers, and their entry into the work-force during this window gives them access to money without the experience needed to hang onto it.

Being specifically targeted by peddlers of scams and addiction is probably about as good for your mental health as being viewed as expendable manpower for war and industry. The fact that there are helplines and young men are actually reaching out to them is a good sign. Perhaps we're finally breaking down the tradition of stoic silence. However, we still need to take steps to protect young people from those who are deliberately exploiting them.

Sports betting and online gambling need to be strictly regulated, and their ads banned. That's something concrete that would leave young men (and some women) with one less problem at absolutely no cost to the rest of society.

I'm actually writin an article about youth mental health for my substack. I'll post it on HN when it's done, but the tl;dr is that the evidence for the youth mental health crisis is very thin at best. Despite what this article says, the youth suicide rate in Canada is near its all-time low. Self-reported youth distress is up, but our only 2 datapoints are 2012 and 2022 (middle of the pandemic). Every group has also reported worsening mental health, and the adult suicide rate is (and always has been) much worse than the youth suicide rate. I don't think mental health isn't a serious concern, but I don't buy the idea that young people specifically have some major crisis while everybody else is doing fine.

I also quickly thought of bias when I read this, and that concern was reinforced by the bit about substance abuse rates in male-predominant fields of work. I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that has been the case for a very long time.

Another way to interpret the data might be, "When interviewed by researchers, men talked more openly about their feelings than they did a decade ago."

> I don't think mental health isn't a serious concern

Double negative makes this hard to read

It may be easier to read that line as "I'm not saying mental health is totally fine"

I appreciate your critical analysis of the topic, even if you turn out to be incorrect in the end! I'll definitely read your article when it's posted, if I can remember (or if perhaps I can subscribe?)

Is it just the young men whose mental health is declining? I'd go a generation earlier and see how things start to get pretty bad. A lot of kids these days don't hang out in person, they are hanging out virtually while laying down in their beds or in comfortable chairs in front of their consoles or computers playing video games online. This is quite unealthy way to grow up. A lot of teenagers, male or female are also undetachable from their cellphones and social media too. This is also a very unhealthy way to grow up.

"experts warn"

It's because they're rational. The American dream is dead, and the Canadian one is too. You can work your entire life with nothing to show for it. Never escaping a landlord. No time or money or third places to have a life. Women don't want children in this environment. The worst people are leading and in control of society. The insatiable greed of billionaires ruined whatever was good about the social compact. Families torn apart by the lies shown to them by Zuckerberg and co. No time for friends. Can't even build a PC because Sam Altman bought all of the compute.

Kind of hilarious to see the downvotes without comment. Guess you got your nvidia stock early. Everything is fine!

This is my understanding. A big part of the decline of mental health is simply a decline of the state of the things we value in Western society, and people observing the delta.

I mean, yes, there are some explicit attacks on mental health: Social media, gambling, etc. And yes, we are not investing enough in mental health directly. But frankly, the notion that those are what's driving the crisis is just ignoring the obvious, presumably because the obvious problems are intractable unless we have some conversations that are very scary for leaders.