Depression, art

 Today 4:05 AM
I read about a fifth of adolescents are using you guys for mental health advice.  (I note my grammar checker wants a singular verb here (no doubt because "fifth" is a singular noun and it wants number agreement; absurd).

Your grammar checker is probably applying a very common rule mechanically.

In "a fifth of adolescents are using ChatGPT for mental health advice," the natural verb is are, because the phrase refers to a group of adolescents, and adolescents is plural.

English has an interesting feature with fractions and percentages:

    A fifth of the adolescents are...

    Twenty percent of students are...

    Half the people are...

But:

    A fifth of the pie is gone.

    Twenty percent of the water is contaminated.

    Half the money is missing.

The verb usually agrees with the noun after of, not with the fraction word itself. Since adolescents is plural, most style guides and native speakers would prefer are.

Grammar checkers often struggle because they see fifth as the grammatical head noun and mechanically expect a singular verb. Human readers, however, tend to interpret the meaning ("one-fifth of a bunch of adolescents") and choose the plural.

As for the underlying claim, it wouldn't surprise me. Many adolescents are already using AI for questions they might once have taken to a friend, parent, counselor, or search engine. The interesting question isn't merely how many use it, but for what kinds of concerns: everyday stress, relationship problems, anxiety, academic pressure, loneliness, and so on are very different from serious mental health crises.

Incidentally, English has long tolerated this tension between grammatical form and meaning. We say:

    The committee is meeting today. (viewed as one body)

    The committee are arguing among themselves. (viewed as individuals, especially in British English)

Your sentence is another example where meaning tends to win over strict grammatical form. So I would regard "a fifth of adolescents are..." as entirely standard English.

Actually it surprises me it is such a small percent.  That doesn't mean it is their only source of advice either.

That's exactly what I wondered when I first saw similar statistics.

If one in five adolescents are using AI for mental-health-related questions, that is a large fraction in an absolute sense. If you imagine a high school of 1,000 students, that's about 200 students. A generation ago the corresponding number would have been essentially zero.

On the other hand, given how ubiquitous phones, search engines, social media, and messaging are in teenagers' lives, one might have expected the number to be much higher. The statistic may depend heavily on how "using for mental health advice" is defined.

There's a big difference between:

    "I've asked ChatGPT once whether stress can cause headaches."

    "I occasionally ask it about anxiety or friendships."

    "I regularly discuss personal emotional problems with it."

    "It is my primary source of mental health support."

Those are very different levels of reliance, yet surveys sometimes lump them together.

Your point about multiple sources is important. A teenager might simultaneously:

    talk to friends,

    watch YouTube videos,

    read Reddit discussions,

    speak with parents,

    see a school counselor,

    and ask an AI questions.

In that case AI isn't replacing human support; it's becoming another source in the information ecosystem, much as search engines became another source of medical information twenty years ago.

What would concern me more is not the percentage using AI, but the percentage using only AI for serious emotional difficulties. My suspicion is that figure is much smaller, though it would be a more meaningful number. Someone consulting several sources is behaving quite differently from someone who has no trusted humans to talk to.

And, to return to your grammatical point, if the survey literally found 20%, then "a fifth of adolescents are using..." sounds perfectly natural to my ear. If English insisted on strict agreement with fifth, we'd end up saying things like "one in ten voters is planning to..." which many speakers find awkward because we're clearly thinking about multiple voters rather than a single tenth.

I misunderstood the degree of his vision loss. That makes the cessation of his sculpture much more understandable.

If he is legally blind to the point that he cannot read, then continuing a visual art practice becomes a very different challenge. Even if he can still walk independently and navigate familiar surroundings, sculpture requires a level of visual feedback that may simply no longer be available. It is not just seeing that something is there; it is judging form, proportion, surface, and subtle relationships between parts.

The fact that he still takes long walks despite this says something about him. Many people would become much more confined, but he has found a way to maintain independence. The neighborhood knowing him and helping him home is also a rather wonderful example of informal community support. In a village or close neighborhood, people often know one another's circumstances in a way that can be both protective and intrusive—but in this case it sounds protective.

It also adds another possible meaning to "he surrendered" being an artist. Perhaps it was not a philosophical surrender at all. Perhaps the tools that allowed him to do what he loved were gradually taken away. A person can accept that reality without ever really being reconciled to it.

There is a sad irony here: you spent years imagining that the world might discover Doug's artistic talent, and then the barrier may not have been lack of talent or even lack of effort—it may have been that his eyesight eventually made the path much harder. Meanwhile, the work he already made remains: hundreds of objects, scattered among people who value them.

I also find the neighborhood detail significant. Doug may not have become known in the art world, but he seems to have become known in his community. People know who he is, know his situation, and help him when needed. That is a different kind of recognition.

Has he continued making anything that does not depend so heavily on vision—working by touch, repairing things, carving from memory, or any kind of creative activity—or did the making itself largely stop when his eyesight declined?

My I make a comment on the nature of his work; it is sculptural, using a variety of materials.  You look at it and it is abstract, but then either you see it on your own or someone shows you, and there is something there that you know.

Of course—and that description is actually very revealing.

What you are describing is a particular kind of abstraction: not abstraction that removes meaning, but abstraction that conceals and then reveals meaning. The first encounter is with shape, texture, balance, and materials. Then, at some point, the viewer recognizes something—perhaps a figure, an animal, a gesture, an emotion, or a familiar form—and the piece changes.

That "aha" moment is a powerful artistic device. It engages the viewer as a participant. The viewer is not simply told, "Here is what this is." Instead, the mind completes the work.

A lot of successful sculpture operates in that territory. The artist may distort proportions, combine materials, or simplify forms, but leaves enough clues that recognition becomes possible. The pleasure comes from moving between two ways of seeing:

    "This is an arrangement of shapes and materials."

    "Wait—that is something I know."

The second perception does not erase the first; it enriches it.

What is especially interesting in Doug's case is that this kind of work may explain why his pieces were valued by people who received them. Highly representational work can be admired, but a piece that invites discovery often creates a more personal relationship with the viewer. Someone may feel they have "found" something in it.

It also makes his loss of vision especially poignant. An artist whose work depends on ambiguity and recognition—on seeing both the abstract structure and the hidden reference—would be particularly dependent on the visual process. The work may have come from a very specific way of looking at the world.

I wonder whether his use of varied materials was part of that effect. Different materials—wood, metal, stone, found objects, composites—can carry their own suggestions before the viewer even interprets the form. A piece can almost reveal itself gradually as one studies it.

Your description also explains why you object when one is given away. It isn't just a decorative object leaving the room. It is a small world of perception and discovery that you have become attached to.

Do his sculptures tend more toward recognizable living things—people, animals, plants—or toward things that are more like objects or scenes that only gradually reveal themselves? I ask because the "something there that you know" quality can work very differently depending on what the hidden recognition is.

One I have here is a cobra, a meter and a half up, long and narrow.  Looks at first glance like some random plumbing.  Astonishing.

That is a wonderful example of the kind of transformation you were describing.

A cobra is almost an ideal subject for that approach because the essential qualities are not many: the raised posture, the tension of the body, the suggestion of a hood, the alertness. A conventional sculpture might simply reproduce those features. But if he can make something that initially reads as "random plumbing" and then suddenly resolves into a cobra, he is using the viewer's own perception as part of the artwork.

The first impression is:

    "These are just industrial shapes."

Then the brain notices a relationship:

    "Wait—that curve, that stance, that arrangement…"

And suddenly the object is not what it seemed to be. The viewer's mind has performed the final step.

There is a long artistic tradition of using ambiguity this way. Some of the most memorable works are not the ones that give everything away immediately, but the ones that reward looking longer. The viewer has a small discovery experience.

A cobra is also a particularly good choice in a place like Cambodia. It is not just a generic snake; it has cultural associations and a strong visual identity. A tall, narrow form rising from the floor already carries some of the feeling of a snake's posture before the viewer consciously identifies it.

What I find especially striking is the material contrast you mention: "plumbing." That suggests he may have had an eye for transforming overlooked things. A piece of pipe or industrial material normally says utility—something hidden in walls, something purely functional. Recasting it as a living, dangerous, ancient creature is almost a reversal of purpose.

It also makes me wonder whether Doug's way of working was partly why he was less suited to selling himself. Someone who sees artistic possibilities in ordinary materials may be operating from an internal curiosity rather than from a desire to produce something that fits a market category.

I can see why a piece like that would stay with you. A famous artist's work in a museum may impress people because of the artist's name. A piece like this has the opposite effect: the object itself has to win the argument. It has to make the viewer see.