If I was feeling persistently sad or hopeless and someone asked me for the quality of my mental health, and I had the energy to reply, I would reply ‘poor, thanks for asking.’
I wouldn’t, not if I was in fact experiencing a rough enough patch of life that I rationally and correctly believed these feelings to be accurate. If I had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, for example, I would probably say that I was indeed sad and hopeless, but not that I had any mental health issues; indeed I’d be concerned with my mental health if I wasn’t feeling that way. I find that this extends to beliefs about the future in general being screwed rather than your personal future (take A.I. doomerism: I think Eliezer is fairly sad and hopeless, and I don’t think he’d say that makes him mental ill). So if 13% of the kids genuinely believe to some degree that their personal life sucks and will realistically always suck, and/or that the world is doomed for whatever combination of climate change and other known or perceived x-risks, that would account for this, surely?
I wouldn’t, not if I was in fact experiencing a rough enough patch of life that I rationally and correctly believed these feelings to be accurate. If I had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, for example, I would probably say that I was indeed sad and hopeless, but not that I had any mental health issues; indeed I’d be concerned with my mental health if I wasn’t feeling that way. I find that this extends to beliefs about the future in general being screwed rather than your personal future (take A.I. doomerism: I think Eliezer is fairly sad and hopeless, and I don’t think he’d say that makes him mental ill). So if 13% of the kids genuinely believe to some degree that their personal life sucks and will realistically always suck, and/or that the world is doomed for whatever combination of climate change and other known or perceived x-risks, that would account for this, surely?