[[{“value”:”Yes, there is a human capital crisis of sorts: We show the incidence of mental ill-health has been rising especially among the young in the years and especially so in Scotland. The incidence of mental ill-health among young men in particular, started rising in 2008 with the onset of the Great Recession and for young
The post Mental health trajectories in the UK appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.”}]]
Yes, there is a human capital crisis of sorts:
We show the incidence of mental ill-health has been rising especially among the young in the years and especially so in Scotland. The incidence of mental ill-health among young men in particular, started rising in 2008 with the onset of the Great Recession and for young women around 2012. The age profile of mental ill-health shifts to the left, over time, such that the peak of depression shifts from mid-life, when people are in their late 40s and early 50s, around the time of the Great Recession, to one’s early to mid-20s in 2023. These trends are much more pronounced if one drops the large number of proxy respondents in the UK Labour Force Surveys, indicating fellow family members understate the poor mental health of respondents, especially if those respondents are young. We report consistent evidence from the Scottish Health Surveys and UK samples from Eurobarometer surveys. Our findings are consistent with those for the United States and suggest that, although smartphone technologies may be closely correlated with a decline in young people’s mental health, increases in mental ill-health in the UK from the late 1990s suggest other factors must also be at play.
That is from a new NBER working paper by David G. Blanchflower, Alex Bryson, and David N.F. Bell. By the way, on the “smart phone causality” issue, here are some recent musings. And a response, and a response to that.
Note that in my rough, first-order human capital hypothesis, the variance is rising. So the top achievers are considerably more impressive, but that also means the number of problematic cases, toward the bottom of the distribution, is rising as well.
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Current Affairs, Data Source, Medicine, Uncategorized
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