Otto Kretschmer

Just because something is written on the internet does not mean people have to believe it at face value - God gave Man intellect so that Man uses it... or so they say.

Add to this that the last 40 years have not exactly been a glorious march forward for psychiatry. SSRIs, the 1st line treatment for depression/anxiety were introduced in 1987 - literally the year Amiga 500 was introduced. Then there were 15 years of nothing but me-too SSRIs and SNRIs that weren't any more effective than the original fluoxetine. The approval of esketamine in 2023 was the 1st approval of a psychiatric drug with a novel mechanism of action in 19 years, the previous one had been buspirone in 2004. Bupropion has been around since the 1970s, benzos since the 1960s, dopamine d2 receptor blocking schizophrenia drugs - since the 1950s (an 18 y.o treated for schizophrenia today receives a drug almost identical to what their great grandparent would have received).

It's not universally true but it's true to a significant degree. There is normalization of mental health problems in US/Europe but IIRC it's mostly present among urban, educated populations and applies mostly to depression/anxiety - mental health issues involving aggression, unpredictability and/or odd behavior are still heavily stigmatized. Outside of the west it's even worse.

@exchemist @TheVat: Thanks for answers. I am myself of the opinion that this stigma will only disappear when psychiatry gets advanced enough that all or nearly all cases - including severe ones - get caught in childhood or adolescence and treated so successfully that the people in question never experience symptoms after that. But that will not happen probably for the next 15-20 or even 25 years, neuroscience simply isn't advanced enough yet.

Why is that the case? Even in the developed world, people with psychiatric disorders are still occasionally called psychos while people with type 2 diabetes don't get called "pancreatos". Even in successful cases of stigma reduction like epilepsy, stigma did not disappear fully and the reduction that did happen was mostly normalization through prolonged contact and normal generational replacement. Intellectual arguments like "it's just a disorder, like hypertension" barely changed anyone's mind.

I dunno . I don't even know if anyone would agree to it but if someone did, that would be the only way to bring some new people here.

I renew my proposal - maybe some science-themed Youtubers or subreddits can link people to SFN since classic forums are still #1 for long format discussions (Reddit is moderately suited for that, YT comment sections - unsuited at all).

There's the third thing I forgot about in the OP - they split constantly. So the one truth turns out to be not so one in the end...

This is true for both political and religious totalizing ideologies - the one who disagrees is always either an idiot or a traitor, never just a honest, smart person who looked at the same stuff and just happened to reach a different conclusion. And all of them hate heretics more than infidels - the early Catholic Church spent more time on fighting Arians than on converting Pagans, Stalinist USSR was willing to cooperate with Social Democrats, Liberals and even Nazis (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) - but never with Trotskyists. Modern radical movement also spend a disproportional amount of time on internal purges and policing boundaries, sometimes more than on pursuing their stated goals.

Probably not. Need for Closure is a cognitive trait that makes people more likely to seek definite answers to questions. Such people are more dogmatic and more prone to in-group/out-group bias relatively to more open-minded people who tolerate ambiguity and complexity better. Believing that immigrants do have their problems but their causes are complex and multicausal requires tolerating nuance. For some people a simple binary of white = good, non-white = bad is just easier to hold mentally.

I think it's just simple inability to tolerate change. There's a name about it in psychology, Need for Cognitive Closure, NFC/NFCC.

Not even them - they are themselves immigrants as are all speakers of Indo-European languages in Europe (who started arriving from Ukraine ca. 3000 BC)... and their predecessors too (who started arriving from Anatolia ca. 8000 BC). And H. sapiens itself evolved in Africa. Everyone is an immigrant.

Indeed - as Winston Churchill used to say, you cannot logic someone out of a position if they never logiced themselves into it. I debate such people all the time elsewhere, I quite enjoy it but someone else would have gone crazy.

IIRC since 2018, Google has been prioritizing Reddit and Quora in the search results - when someone asks a basic question like "how does natural selection work?", they get redirected to Reddit as the first place after Wikipedia. People may not even be getting SFN in search results unless they specifically google "science forum" - which many Gen Z/Gen A people likely don't do since they don't use forums (my 13 y.o nephew doesn't even have a computer, 90% of his interactions on the web are Youtube, TikTok and streaming services which he accesses via an Xbox app). Add AI intercepting the basic queries even from Wiki/Reddit and the old forums' survival loop (good thread → Google traffic → new members) is broken for generic questions. It still works for long-tail niche queries, but that's not a lot of traffic and even that is slowly being taken over by AI. Continued - I think it could be possible for SFN to talk to some science Youtubers or subreddits and suggest they drop a link to SFN. Both Reddit and Youtube are poorly suited for long form discussions unlike forums and 2 mods with PhDs is somewhat of a sales pitch.

Forums as a whole lost a lot of membership to Reddit, places like r/Science, r/AskScience, r/Skeptic and subs for individual disciplines like r/math, r/Physics, r/Chemistry and others fulfill the role forums did in the 2000s and early 2010s. I don't think the trend can be reversed.