"The weakening of the family unit" sounds like a dog whistle but if you have concrete examples of what you think we could otherwise be doing then I'm genuinely keen to hear about it.

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mothballed 5 days ago | parent [-]

We saw big jumps in deaths of kids by firearm[0] (+~50% in 2 years) and poisoning[1] around mid 2020 to 2021.

The biggest thing I know of that happened around the time that a lot of these deaths started jumping up, is we started isolating kids. From family, from grandma, from friends, from school, and from nature. Even when many of these isolating policies or attitudes were reversed, we forgot that kids and teenagers started to learn that as their only reality. For this kid, trusting a suicidal ideation positive feedback loop brought into fruition by Valley tech-bros was seen as his selected option in front of him in term of options of how to navigate his teenage challenges. I hope we can reverse that.

Edit: Concrete facts regarding this particular case

- Kicked off basketball team

- Went through isolation period of pandemic as he experienced puberty

- Switched to remote school

- Does remote school at night when presumably family members would likely be sleeping

- Does not get normal "wake up" routine kids going to school get, during which they normally see a parent and possibly eat breakfast together before they both go off to school/work

- Closer with ChatGPT in terms of options to share suicidal ideation with, than any of the alternatives.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2023...

[1] https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/images/mtfwcaption-...

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AlecSchueler 5 days ago | parent [-]

You've misunderstood. I'm asking how you suggest we go about strengthening the family unit or what other steps you believe we could take that would place the responsibility for societal improvement on the right shoulders.

	▲	mothballed 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		In this particular case, as crazy as it sounds, I think early attempts by both the parent and school to make reasonable accommodation for in-person students with IBS to take a lot of extra bathroom breaks would have at least tilted the scales a little bit. It looks like the kid was shifted to remote school after he got IBS and some people at school weren't understanding of his situation. This put him on the path where he was staying up all night "doing remote school" but also had a nearly full-worknight amount of unfettered time with suicide-AI for months on end with no daytime obligations, sleeping in and not seeing his parents in the morning, and losing contact with peers. Of course this is a hindsight analysis, but there's not much evidence that more contact with family and peers would make the situation worse. I think from my prior comment it's obvious I'd like to prevent a lot of isolating policies on low-risk groups from happening again during another pandemic, so I don't think I need to go over that again. For broader society, I suppose the concrete action item is if you see a young family or friend, we should aspire to reach out to them and see how to integrate them in something we might like to do with them.