Jonah Davids
@jonahdavids1
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Research Fellow @MainePolicy. Senior Analyst at The America Fund. Blog/pod on mental health at https://t.co/fl1M9JEQLf. Opinions my own
Joined March 2020
Maine students used to rank #1 and 2 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Today, they average 36th. What changed? . In a new @MainePolicy report, I chronicle the decline of Maine's K-12 education system over the last few decades. Here is what I found: 🧵1/
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Half of Americans thought overturning Roe v. Wade banned abortion, according to a @SkepResCenter poll from last year (N=3014).
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@okimstillhungry When you're as depressed as it sounds like this guy is you really do get upset by anything ruining what little pleasure you can experience.
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26% of people in jail have a serious mental illness. 23% of police shootings since 2015 involved someone with a serious mental illness. Less than 5% of people with a serious mental illness are currently institutionalized. Previously, it was high as 29%.
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IFS: We are a legit, evidence-based therapy. Also IFS: Demons are real, but don't worry, we talk about how to deal with them in level 1 of our training.
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Are there any theories as to why mixed-race adults have such poor mental health? National Institute of Mental Health shows 35.8% had a mental health issue in 2020.
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Autism researcher publishes study showing most interventions aren't backed by solid science. Whole field threatens to sue him, harasses his family. Turns out most of the research in the field is just case studies with some high-bias RCTs.
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@kitten_beloved It was right-wing blank slatism at its worst. Pure delusion. They even wanted to implement No Child Left Behind in Iraq right after invading.
Bush government was planning to implement No Child Left Behind in Iraq after invading. Peak neocon delusion.
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Neuroscientists should just come out and admit that what they do is a form of idea laundering. Do they even believe this stuff, or is it just so they can keep getting funded? I hope the latter.
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@picardonhealth @PierrePoilievre @sproudfoot @GlobeDebate I don’t feel bad for journalists and neither should you.
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@scarlett4kids The fact that so many people are getting triggered by this clip suggests that Harari has hit a nerve. If you’re confident in your beliefs in God, human rights etc. you would not get triggered by a dude telling you they are social constructions.
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There's a certain point at which you realize you're downloading them not to read them, but just to keep them.
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@yifever James Jamerson recorded the bassline to "What's Going On" while lying on the floor because he was so drunk he couldn't sit or stand.
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@cremieuxrecueil For years I went to my doctor complaining about back pain. Every time he told me "go to the gym" but I never listened. Eventually I started going and all my back pain went away within three months.
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@TorontoStar What I wish our government would see is that this is not a political issue. It's a medical issue, a medical malpractice issue. Very few people used to get lobotomies but they were still wrong and a disgrace to the doctors who performed them and the governments that allowed them.
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Bush government was planning to implement No Child Left Behind in Iraq after invading. Peak neocon delusion.
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Since 2013, Maine has fully embraced proficiency-based education, restorative justice, social-emotional learning, and other experimental programs. These were supposed to improve test scores, reduce behavioral issues, and improve mental health. The opposite has happened. 3/
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The MacKenzie Scott giveaway discourse is making me reevaluate my stance towards grifters. Sure, grifters take rich people's money and do nothing with it. But if the average charitable donation given to "trustworthy" orgs makes things worse, then grifters are net-positive.
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A new preprint finds Ketamine doesn't outperform a placebo (surgical anesthetic) in reducing depression severity.
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I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Marginal Revolution comments section than by the Harvard University faculty.
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For my first Substack post, I decided to write about the mental health of psychologists. TV and movies often portray psychologists as suffering from mental health issues themselves. But is this accurate?. The data suggests it is:
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My uncle, who suffered from early-onset Alzheimer's, died this morning. I wrote about the time I spent working at his nursing home as a pianist, and what Alzheimer's looks like up close.
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A principal said he didn't think Canada was more racist than the US in a DEI training. He was called a white supremacist and bullied. His contract was canceled and he was barred from attending graduation ceremonies. He committed suicide.
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Over the last four decades, Maine has been a leader in the education reform movement, being one of the first states to develop their own state standards and tests; and making every student take the SAT. The reforms of the last decade, however, have been disastrous. 2/.
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@unusual_whales Or we cut entitlements massively so we're not spending our prime years working to fund your failed gerontocracy.
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@TorontoMet The morally and historically bankrupt colonized/colonizer rhetoric your professors teach and you endorse is being chanted by the protestors, in toronto today, who cheer on the murder and rape of innocent Israeli civilians. Your neutrality is disgusting. - class of 2021.
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@TorontoMet When George Floyd died you sent like a million emails making sure everyone was ok and to let people know you condemned racism. You also set up a whole anti racism task force and commissioned a study of TMU racism. I assume you’ll do the same for Jews/antisemitism, right?. Right?.
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@econhist_allday After I moved into my apartment, my grandma who lives 2 minutes away invited me for tea. Over a cup of earl gray she explained to me how she had spent years aggressively lobbying against them building my building, but now that it was built wasn't it nice I was there!.
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@Slatzism There’s a whole podcast about it called “last days of august”. Really worth listening.
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Teachers are burning out from having to comply with the latest changes and deal with students rising behavioral and emotional issues. They have left the profession in droves, leaving Maine with one of the worst teacher shortages in the country. 5/
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@WeAreCanProud This is good but the school is not even using the MCAT, just going off of grades. What's the point of even having medical schools if we're not selecting top people w/ MCAT?.
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Cognitive-behavioral therapy has long been considered the “gold standard” in psychotherapy. But a new meta-analysis shows it's not much better (or worse) than other therapies at treating depression. I wrote about it here: .
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Administrators are overwhelmed, and say they cannot keep up with the fast pace of policy change at the state and federal level. (these quotes are from *before* COVID btw) 4/
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As is to be expected, all of these changes have impacted the quality of education that children in Maine schools receive today. Traditional pedagogy is out the window, standards are dumbed down, and grade inflation is rampant. 6/
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I'm launching a new substack called "Mental Disorder" where I'll explore the science and politics of mental health from a data-driven perspective. I'll be writing on MH trends, treatments, policies, and much more, so stay tuned! .
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🧵Last week, went to the Maine Department of Education’s (@mdoenews) annual educator summit. What I saw shocked me: The MDOE is scaring teachers into believing that advances in AI will render the subjects they teach obsolete, and that education must be completely reimagined. 1/
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I have a new piece on Claremont Institute Chair @TomKlingenstein's site arguing that K-12 ed is more broken than RW media suggests. CRT/gender ideology are real issues but the foundations of instruction, management, and discipline have dramatically eroded.
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Ted Talks have always been bad. They take social scientists’ flashiest least rigorous ideas and broadcast them to an unquestioning audience. They’re still promoting Amy Cuddy’s body language talk in 2023.
TED is a farce: the organization pumps Ibram Kendi's astrology-level ideology as self-evident truth, while it submits Coleman Hughes' much more rigorous, subtle, and morally persuasive presentation to a full inquisition by social scientists and diversity activists. Disqualifying.
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And this doesn't even get to the more recent and controversial issues around schools becoming ideological environments, the ubiquity of DEI and CRT, sexually explicit lgbtq+ books, schools helping Maine students gender-transition without parental consent, etc. 7/
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Federal funding for school mental health initiatives increased from $100 million in 2013 to over $600 million in 2023. Figure from new report by @CarolynGorman_
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A psychologist is sounding the alarm on healthcare bureaucrats undermining the effectiveness of therapy:. "I am not allowed to provide any psychotherapy as designed, researched and manualized because I have next to no control over scheduling or caseload.".
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The DSM-6 is gonna be crazy.
Gen Z suffers from ‘menu anxiety’ when dining out — with many too scared to order their own meals
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"Labeling normative experiences as a mental health problem could create a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” whereby a person actually changes their behavior or beliefs to fit a diagnosis, and then actually does experience that mental health problem as a result."
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@MrDanielBuck Schools could stop these programs at any time but they won’t. They care about “evidence-based” not evidence.
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@MrDanielBuck Educators need solutions to impossible to solve problems:. “How can I improve classroom behavior without doing anything that might negatively affect a student in the short term?” . *fake rebrand of discredited social science theory*.
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Grandma took me out to lunch with her friends and they’re all talking about their plans to eventually MAID themselves. Life is weird.
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The through line with everything here is that when decisions around ed are made top-down by politicians, bureaucrats, and consultants, you end up with harmful policies that don't solve the problems they're intended to and make things worse by overburdening school staff. 8/.
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@PierrePoilievre ? Nobody had ever heard of this. Stop bringing up past injustices plz we already have the liberals and ndp for that.
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There is more in this report that is insightful as a case study/cautionary tale, and if you have kids in k-12, probably worth reading just to understand the level of insanity going on rn and some of the causes. Download here👇 /end
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"Buried in technical reviews of su*cide intervention efficacy, scholars will admit, 'There are no well-established, empirically supported treatments for decreasing su*cide attempts or non-su*cidal self-injury in adolescents with elevated su*cide risk.”.
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Canada: a place where, if you have the right skin color, you can impregnate your intellectually disabled daughter and get no jail time.
2023 NSCA 58: Derrick JA, for maj., upholds conditional sentence for incest, noting that Bill C-5 intended to address “systemic anti-Black racism and the well-documented over-incarceration of racialized offenders”. Dissent: penitentiary sentence required.
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The weakness of the safe supply lit is actually insane. Like it hasn't even been necessary for the proponents to concoct some p-hacked faux-quant results, it's just qualitative interview papers all the way down.
Our review of “Safe Supply” replicated the results of a previous review, which found no clear evidence of safety or effectiveness. Academic evidence has not advanced meaningfully since our work. But the evidence in our communities is powerful.
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Also, the pace of change matters a lot. Having a few top-down policy changes a year isn't too hard to comply with, and may be beneficial. But when it's non-stop torrent of mandates, priorities, and changes being rained down on schools, of course they'll struggle to keep up. 9/.
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Dick Schwartz, IFS founder at 22 minutes. Describes unattached burdens as not attached to a part of the self, not native to the self, very nasty and leading people to do bad things, traditionally described as entities.
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Nice writeup of the explosion in mental health diagnoses by @post_liberal:. "From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children and young people apparently rose by 4,000% in America. In the UK meanwhile, Autism diagnoses have increased by 787%"
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@Komaniecki_R As a former leftist, what made me dislike liberals more than conservatives was a sense that liberals were hypocrites pretending to fight the power or care about marginalized but not really doing either. Cons seemed cynical but not hypocritical. They weren’t pretending they were.
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Supreme Court of Canada just struck down the mandatory minimum sentence for child luring. They called it "cruel and unusual punishment". The minimum sentence was previously 6-12 months. This country is evil.
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Another great figure from this report: Here is a state map showing where schools are required to teach Social Emotional Learning (SEL), a pseudo-therapeutic program that promotes far-left ideology. Required for Pre-K through High School in most cases! @maxeden99 @CourageHabit
In a new report, I outline the challenges/downsides of providing mental health programs and services through schools, finding inconsistent marginal benefit, poor implementation, and some harm--making these programs a poor trade for academic priorities.
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In 2010, one in ten college students had an anxiety disorder. By 2019, that number had reached one in four.
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Doctors and nurses are rated the most trustworthy professionals in America.
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Gambling is the vice I am most in favor of heavily regulating or possibly banning. What societal or individual benefit comes from being allowed to gamble away your life savings through your iPhone? The house always wins.
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@mattyglesias Agree w/ this, and I think a lot of the Jordan Petersony utilitarian or pragmatic arguments for belief are a distraction from actual questions over God's existence which are ultimately more important and fulfilling than larping belief.
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We're at a place now where people need a licensed professional to tell them to spend time in nature, sleep 8 hours, see friends, etc. Stuff like this has to be part of the mental health solution, but the fact it's needed is an indictment of our culture in so many ways.
🏞️ 'Nature prescriptions' are on the rise. Programs like @NatlParkRx and Canada's PaRx help doctors prescribe free national park passes to patients. and The Lancet just published a systematic review on 28+ different studies across the world.
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@RichardHanania The Liberals in Canada recently proposed a bill allowing judges to put prior restraints on people who might commit "speech crimes" in the future.
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@feelsdesperate Overall I think this is good. It's useful to have people on some of these issues be liberal partisans so they have a chance of influencing readers of NYT, Atlantic on trans, social policy failures, etc.
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@AxiomAmerican Based on how people use it I think "true self" means doing the things you would want to do absent social pressure. Which, depending on the person, could be really good or really bad lol.
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@manofbert In today's day and age it's a bad idea to undercharge for your tickets because they'll get snapped up by scalpers. It actually ends up hurting your fans more since the scalpers will price-gouge.
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“After 1 year about 54% of young people with symptoms of anxiety and/or depression recover without any specific mental health treatment.”
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“Little independent scientific evidence shows that cannabis is an effective treatment for anxiety problems, and some studies have found it can worsen symptoms. Researchers say this is particularly true for products high in THC.”
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University is where you *should* make the best friends, since you're surrounded by people who chose to devote 4 years to the same thing as you, but most people I know made few good friends in uni and still hang w/ high school pals.
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I have a new article for @TheHubCanada on Canada's mental health crisis. According to new data from @StatCan_eng, the number of Canadians with major depressive disorder has increased 62% since 2012, and the number with anxiety disorders has doubled.
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Following the release of my report on Maine's declining K-12 education system, @mdoenews publicly attempted to discredit the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a widely respected educational policy research tool that I utilized. My official response is below:.
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