I looked at those studies. They do not at all address issues like PTSD, personality disorders, trauma and other mental health issues which, for example, would certainly characterize huge numbers of people in the interwar and post-war period. Yet, where as these numbers?
PTSD didnt exist at the time. Trauma wasnt even considered, in part, because it was so wide spread.
Domestic violence, murder, rape, assault, theft, etc. were crazy high only 30 years ago.
Western societies were incredibly violent and predatory placeo, and this gets significantly worse the further you go back. At the beginning of the 20th C. 1 in 20 women were dying in childbirth, murder was 10-a-penny, almost everyone was impoverished. Children routinely went hungry.
But oh year. Now we're a bit more depressed.
THe 20th C. was a century of trauma. Child abuse was institutionalized. Domestic violence was how families worked. WW1, WW2, Vietnam (and many other wars) left a generation of men absolutely traumatized.
The studies have no reliable data to work with, as there was no empirical psychology for the bulk of the 20th C. collecting societal-level information on mental health.
Subjective "happiness" reporting has not much to do with mental health. A financially secure person who was routinely sexually assaulted as a child may well report being happier in 1985 than a poorer, less economically stable person today with otherwise excellent mental health.
For several decades economic securiyt has been decreasing in the west causing people to feel less "happy" (ie., to be more often worrying). This has an impact on their mental health, but I'm sceptical it comes close to the impact of the vietnam war.
The 20th C. was horrific and a horror for everyone. Any "psychologist" nostalgic for the 20th C. either knows nothing of psychology, nothing of history or both.
Hi, FWIW I did not downvote you and don't agree whoever did.
> I looked at those studies. They do not at all address issues like PTSD, personality disorders, trauma and other mental health issues which, for example, would certainly characterize huge numbers of people in the interwar and post-war period. Yet, where as these numbers?
Exactly, we don't have them. But I don't see any measures of any kind of mental health improving, with the exception of teen suicide rates in the early 90s. I do see quite a bit of data going back that shows depression, for instance, getting worse, and specifically comparing post WW2 generations to millenials:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2648043
So I repeat my question, how are you so sure things are getting better when there is very little or no data saying that, and a fair amount saying the opposite? Wouldn't you expect depression to also be a symptom of experiencing intense trauma and thus a fairly good proxy for PTSD?
> For several decades economic securiyt has been decreasing in the west causing people to feel less "happy" (ie., to be more often worrying). This has an impact on their mental health, but I'm sceptical it comes close to the impact of the vietnam war. The 20th C. was horrific and a horror for everyone. Any "psychologist" nostalgic for the 20th C. either knows nothing of psychology, nothing of history or both.
So this is exactly why it's important to consider this with data instead of logical models. By all means the events of the early 20th century were so horrific that there should be some fairly obvious measurement of mental health that upticks by the end of the 20th century. But we don't see that anywhere, afaict. So that's what I'm hoping you can provide.
By what measure? Because I just posted a bunch of studies that show the opposite, and they actually address a lot of the issues you brought up.