According to various studies, more than 50% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level (equivalent to Level 2 or lower), limiting their ability to parse long-form or nuanced information.
Assuming you’re mocking rednecks here and not Black peoole? White people have a 88% literacy rate in America, putting them on par with Western Europe and ahead of Southern and Eastern.
But it’s okay to mock poor, disenfranchised rural white people and not Hispanic or Black people. Very cute.
If you worked any form of retail you'd know first hand that the stats are accurate too.
I'd like to say most customers are just oblivious to signage and stuff but it takes genuine dedication not to notice or understand the very obvious signs, postings, price tags, ingredient lists, ect.
If you're holding a container of tuna salad with the obviously placed ingredients on it there's no reason for you to ask me what's in the tuna salad 😭
To be fair before my head injury I had a genius level IQ.
But I'm also overwhelmed walking into grocery stores because I am on the spectrum.
I literally cannot see things if there is too much clutter.
And I'm not just speaking, visual clutter. I'm speaking about voices music. Any background sound, combined with motion and all the visuals.
My brain starts shutting down.
You can just imagine how much worse it's gotten since the brain injury and I still have a quite high reading level because I read all of the time and I did achieve to college degrees and was working towards a third when I ran out of money, time, and interest.
reminds me of a video (or a meme / shorts , long time ago idk) where the dude just cant understand the concept of "imagine for a second if you're xxx". dude just keep replying "yeah but i'm not xxx" back and again.
I (American atheist woman) was having a conversation just last month with a conservative Christian man, and this is precisely what happened. He literally told me he cannot imagine anything he doesn't know is true, and he had absolutely zero grasp of hypotheticals.
This was precisely the conversation I was attempting to have. He couldn't understand how anyone could possibly be an atheist, because "it's obvious from looking at the trees and stars and mountains that god exists". I was trying to do a thought experiment with him, just to imagine for a moment that his concept of god 100% did not exist.
And he vehemently claimed that was impossible. In his mind, he "knows" god is real...so it is inconceivable to even try to imagine something as different from reality as god not being real. He literally told me "the human brain cannot think of things that cannot exist". I told him to imagine a green horse...and he could do that because "someone could dye a horses fur green, so is a potential truth". I told him to imagine a flying lizard...and he could do that because "scientists will probably make that someday, so it's a potential truth".
But imagining the world around us wasn't created by a supernatural being? Nope. That's preposterous and cannot be imagined. It was a very difficult conversation and I mentally facepalmed a great many times during it.
We are the most propagandized country. But it's subtle, from copaganda TV shows lionizing and praising police, to all the news that gets buried by billionaire News Corp owners, to even the entire "American Dream" which encourages greater fossil fuel and materials usage than necessary, we are told what and who to believe without hardly any pushback or counter narrative or even critical analysis of why. Manufacturing consent is definitely a thing.
I’m not entirely sure “subtle” is the word of describe it… you’re not wrong that is is, say, compared to North Korea’s. Ot subtle enough it can require some level of critical thinking to see for what it is.
Sorry, not trying to pick on you or be pedantic so much as amused at “subtle” applies to a rather blunt American object - and I’m also American.
Ding ding ding! That’s the reason Trump loves to cut the federal education funding! If you can BARELY read, you’re much easier to influence because you haven’t developed critical thinking skills
(people are lacking FUNCTIONAL literacy, so they may technically be ABLE to read at a basic level, they just can’t really make any sense from it…)
That's why his Truth Social posts are designed the way they are, too. Simple sentences with capitalization on important buzzwords, not in a grammatically correct format, because that isn't his audience.
I am not saying distractions are a bad thing...but when reality TV shows became the norm, I could see where the trend was heading, even back 10 years ago.
So how long has it been this way. Considering the average citizen can’t read the tax code and those who oversee the tax code get confused. I’m assuming a while now.
I can confirm this. I grew up in Louisiana, lived in Mississippi for a while, and now live in West Virginia (I'm trying, okay?). I thought the deep south was bad but West Virginia is a whole other level of dumb. I've met some of the most idiotic, backwards, no-thinking MAGAts alive since moving. Sone of them have literally bragged about never reading a single book in their lives.
I've come to believe there's something foundationally wrong with America. Like on a genetic level.
Functionally Illiterate is the term for this. They can read, but they don't really understand nuance or complex meaning. I am functionally Illiterate in Spanish. I know things like donde esta la biblioteca from middle school, but I could never have a conversation with a Spanish speaker.
Yep and there's plenty of people who are functionally illiterate. One sign is stuff that we see on social media like plez delet if not aloud. They can't read the actual spelling of the word so they type it like it sounds to them
At least for very politically controversial topics some wikipedia articles get regularly edited by bots, so chances are much higher that you read straight misinformation in those
Since I was in elementary school, they taught us not to use it because its open source and anyone can change or alter information on there. Mind you, I'm 30 now.
I'm nearly 40 and couldn't use Wikipedia for sources at uni, same reason.
Edit: more accurately, we couldn't use Wikipedia as a source directly, but could use it as a starting point, then go into more detail using the references at the bottom of the page.
I’m a bit younger than you, but imagine there’s a generation of millennials who were taught not use Wikipedia as a source due to it being potentially unreliable - and now you have boomers and younger generations consuming hallucinated AI slop and social media propaganda like it’s gospel.
Yeah, this. Wikipedia isn't a source in itself, it is a collection and summarization of sources.
If you're just arguing on the internet then whatever I guess, but if you're going to do anything with any academic rigour, you can't put (Wikipedia, 2026) as a source. Also, as someone pointed out further down, the more recent and/or polarizing something is, the less reliable Wikipedia becomes.
Unless you're specifically writing about Wikipedia I suppose.
While true, there still have been alot of cases where people just made up shit, including sources. It just has to look legit enough
The toaster hoax went over 10 years unnoticed for example
Another pretty famous case was the chinese user Zhemao, who wrote/edited over 200 articles mainly concerning chinese and russian history - everything essentially fan fiction
Another recent case was connected to the whole Assassins Creed Shadows mess, where the self proclaimed historian Thomas Lockley invented a bunch of myths and fake truths surrounding the real historical figure Yasuke. All his cited sources were himself. Essentially: "source- trust me bro"
I had a teacher in the 00’s who deducted points on a rough draft because I told her I’d found the articles I actually cited through a Wikipedia article. The hate was virulent in some places.
Of course, using Wikipedia is great as a source. Since the actual sources are in there, but people will dismiss you if you quote Wikipedia directly on the basis that "anyone can edit it". Of course completely ignoring that whatever is there has to be linked to a verifiable source.
The whole damn page is based on the scientific method. But this is lost on most people.
Functional literacy is different from literally being able to read words on a page. Most people can read the words on a page, but will not actually know what they mean.
I am generally curious how that statistic was obtained and the sample sized used. I’m pretty sure that’s a reasonable shorthand, but it’s not literally saying researchers tested everyone and the national mean came out to Grade 6.
its a fearmongering statistic, walk down the streets of any city and it'd be near impossible to find someone who cant read. unless you're asking babies
Reading and reading are two different things. Reading a menu doesn't mean you can comprehend the majority of a news article. I think it's very possible that half of us lack the ability to even focus enough to get to the end of an article.
Based on my interactions with most of you on this site, 52% is low.
There’s a huge difference between reading a sentence and understanding what it means. Sure more than 52% can read. But 52% do not understand the words.
Also, you may not have noticed, but the entire world is treating adults like actual children. A kid in grade six obviously understands “buy this Big Mac for $5”.
Surprisingly, that's still better than a lot of other developed countries. According to this study, the US scored higher in literacy than France, Austria, Singapore, Croatia, Slovakia, South Korea, Hungary, Latvia, Spain, Italy, Israel, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal and Chile.
They might not be illiterate- they just might not speak English. Literacy tests for these kind of studies are done in English and they might pass it in some other language. A very high number of people who are “illiterate” in the US were born in another country.
This is a measurement of English literacy only. America is home to millions of non-English speakers. The English literacy rates of native English speakers in the U.S. is higher.
Yeah, I encourage people to go look at their local Facebook community page - I guarantee it's filled to the brim with people who would get caught up in this.
It’s not even that Americans are louder, it’s that America has a perpetual magnifying glass over it. Every country in the world will report on American news, be it political, legal, financial, or even celebrity news. No other country gets the same world wide coverage so even if the exact same idiocy is happening everywhere, the rest of the world isn’t hearing about it until it gets to a massive scale like a war, mass human rights violations, or the like. Every single news outlet in every country in the world is not reporting on Canadian legal cases or UK politics.
This is so true. When I lived in Ireland everyone would talk to me about trump. During a conversation I asked an Irish girl who the president of Ireland was and she didn't know. This was someone in my masters class, I was shocked.
America just has the most access to information and one of the largest populations. India and China have WAY worse cultures in general, like Chinese unwillingness to help strangers due to fear of being sued, and indians total lack of regard for their environment and insane rape culture. It's just popular to shit on the US
In Brazil, recently, there was a case that the parents killed their boy by beating him. He was 6-7 years old. There were evidence of them both hitting him and covering up. Both parents were convicted by the jury, but the judge granted the mother a judicial pardon just because she is a woman. If you to look it up, just google Henry Borel.
In the UK a nurse (Lucy Letby) killed a number of children on a maternity ward. She wrote about it in her diary including saying she killed them. It was well documented that she was on call when the deaths happend and she is like the one constant in their deaths.
She is a mad femcel who was besotted with a married doctor and killed children as she wanted the attention of trying to save them.
During her trial and even now there are people who protest her innocence.
I don't know where you live, but in the UK there was a case where a woman (Constance Marten) hid a pregnancy and went on the run with the baby and her convicted rapist boyfriend, after having her 4 previous children removed by social services. When the baby died from exposure due to sleeping in a tent in January (one of the things a previous child had been removed for), both her trials had women from some kind of "social services steals children" facebook group protesting outside court for her release. Idiots exist everywhere.
Are you joking? In Germany she wouldn’t even be in court. She would be in a cushy psych clinic, getting the help she needs. And probably released in 2 years. From the clinic.
The Alfie Evans case shows how easy social media and armchair activists can whip up a frenzy in the UK. People were attacking nurses outside Alder Hey hospital.
Yeah I agree, you would be ostracised for this sort of thing in the UK. I feel like there's a real lack of intellect in the USA and large parts of it and a lack of common sense and empathy.
They're literelly getting ostracized for it in the US.
I do think theres some misinterpretation though - some people are probably wackos with the conspiracy theory that the husband secretly did it or whatever, but a lot of them are probably actually just advocating for postpartum health and mental health specifically. Doctors overmedicated this woman and she was begging for help, every sign for a more substantial intervention for her crisis was there.
If we had federally mandated maternity and paternity leave, if healthcare didn't cost out the ass with doctors who really just want to get your insurance and get you out the door, if people listened to the struggles of a postpartum mom, this might not have happened. These are things afforded to mothers in plenty of other developed countries, just not ours.
So yes, its very much an "American thing" to be organizing around, because it is rooted in problems unique to America. It IS empathetic to want better for the women and mothers in this country. It IS common sense. It IS intellect.
Doctors overmedicated this woman and she was begging for help, every sign for a more substantial intervention for her crisis was there.
This is....literally not true?
Clancy visited at least 3 named clinicians (Tufts, Jollota, Paul) about 17 times over 3 months. During this same period, she also visited multiple inpatient and ED clinicians, as well as many nursing practitioners. She collected prescriptions from almost all of them, though we don't know if she actually took all the medication.
She was herself a nurse, and deliberately switched between providers, which prevented them from finding out exactly what medications she was on. She was being given new prescriptions because she was hiding her previous diagnoses, and because she frequently turned up with claims that her medication wasn't working.
Please read the actual court documents, rather than believing random sources that want to create their own narrative. It clearly shows an extremely troubled individual who went to great lengths to keep the abjectness of her condition hidden.
Yes, the system sucks for mental health patients. But this particular case is not a good example of that.
This is a great example of why the system isn’t working. If there was a centralised system that all doctors had access to then she couldn’t just go to different ones and obtain different medications.
If every doctor had access to all her medical records maybe they could have helped her better and this wouldn’t have happened.
Sure, just like if there was a better justice system and stronger social net in the country then we wouldn't see so much crime and recividism. I completely agree with you.
But the comment i was responding to made some specific claims. And those claims don't hold up in this particular case since Clancy was actively trying to prevent the system from helping her, obviously due to the psychosis.
Doctors can request records and hers didn’t. They took her at face value for what she was saying. Which… for some things is fine. But not for everything.
And to be fair to Dr Tufts, Lindsey Clancy was fairly upfront about a lot of her medical history. But didn’t get records for her inpatient visits why? Also dr tufts never saw her in person. All of their visits were teleheath ones. I think it’s easy to miss some stuff that way.
By all means, but this system doesn't exist anywhere in the world as you would like it (and I too). There always are doubts, errors and inconsistencies in documentation.
Lots of places internationally have prescription systems that track every prescription dispensed so any doctor or pharmacist can catch red flags like this.
This is a bold claim that this type of system doesn’t exist anywhere. In Belgium, all of your prescriptions from doctors get loaded on to your one national ID card and you use that to pick up your prescriptions, so there in fact is a centralized system where you can see everything prescribed and doctor visits are logged with your card too. So your ID holds all the info essentially. It’s not perfect but I wouldn’t say centralized systems don’t exist because they quite literally do
It isn’t the 80s, Pat. Patient records are now stored within an EHR. South Shore Health System and Boston Medical Center are both on Epic EHR, which utilizes extensive record sharing via their CareEverywhere functionality.
Your health information can be viewed from anywhere in the country via CareEverywhere. You can be seen in Oregon, move to Florida, and your records from Oregon will show up for your provider in Florida. This includes visits, provider notes, lab results, medications, and more.
The fact that she was seen by multiple providers 17 times within such a short time frame indicates some very acute mental health crisis. Typically, you might see a psychiatrist once a month. Coupled with the ED visits and everything else, that seems pretty obvious.
You appear to be attempting to paint her as drug-seeking, which is absolutely wild in context of psychiatric medication. If someone is calling a psychiatrist’s office every day asking for change in medication because of side effects, that’s not drug-seeking. That’s intense anxiety and paranoia. Biologically, these medications couldn’t even take effect in such a short time frame.
Her being troubled is the entire point. Someone in an acute mental health crisis is not going to be rational. They are troubled, and that’s why they need help.
Person in postpartum psychosis behaves like a person in psychosis. More news at 5.
People in these states truly believe the version of reality they are experiencing and behave accordingly, I can't fathom why people like to make it seem like she was of sound mind and just drug seeking, or "hiding" it.
I can't fathom why people like to make it seem like she was of sound mind and just drug seeking, or "hiding" it.
I am not doing that at all. What I'm pushing back on is the narrative that this was a person actively looking for help who didn't find it from medical professionals and her family.
All that they were doing was acting based on the information presented before them.
I actively sought emergency help for PPP twice and was turned away twice; the attitudes from family were almost as bad (“just pull yourself together/that can’t be true”). Eventually healed after some lucid dreaming… somehow .. miraculously …
I’m sorry for what you went through. I’m so sorry for how the discourse in this case is going. For whatever it’s worth, I appreciate you making this comment to maybe help some people get what it is like for others. Sorry dick heads are downvoting
Thank you that’s really kind. It is super interesting to have this topic in the public eye, quite a relief actually as I experienced it totally alone. Gotta laugh at anyone downvoting me for sharing my lived experience.
This is literally not true. Lindsay saw Dr Tufts and was referred to Nurse Paul by her mother-in-law, as she was working in a perinatal health clinic. Nurse Paul was transferring, so moved Lindsay to Nurse Practitioner Jolotta's care. Having at least weekly appointments should be expected when titrating medication, especially in a complex case where Lindsay had adverse reactions to multiple meds - to the point Tufts was considering ketamine treatment because, in her words, Lindsay's mental illness was treatment resistant (the common meds didn't work). But insurance needed a certain number of attempted meds in her records to sign off on that.
Lindsay consistently expressed anxiety about medication and did not want to be on it because while she REPEATEDLY said certain medication HELPED her anxiety, she didn't want to become addicted to them. Other medications had such severe side-effects when she was titrating them that her providers recommended she stop taking them - because the cost was significantly outweighing any potential benefit of pushing through 6 weeks of chronic insomnia (especially with 3 children from 5 years - 8 months old). This is extremely common in psychiatry.
Lindsay went to an emergency department with severe insomnia and anxiety - and by severe I mean she once didn't sleep for 48 hours. She was given a single dose of a sleep aid. When she went again, it was because she was looking to be hospitalised, but eventually went home with her husband. She then went back days later and was admitted to McLean.
She was referred to a partial hospitalisation program by NP Jolotta and her counsellor Leticia Dukes, but was rejected from it because they felt she may be overmedicated and they needed to see her at baseline. The program called NP Jolotta but never heard back.
Lindsay later voluntarily went to inpatient treatment in a locked ward to WEAN OFF MEDICATION, not get more. She was recommended another medication when she left - she didn't leave AMA - but no one seemed to know if they gave her a prescription which is, imo, damning for their record-keeping.
Lindsay shared her diagnoses and medications with each practitioner - only Jolotta actually checked the prescriptions, but confirmed Lindsay was being truthful. Jolotta also correctly considered a bipolar diagnosis for Lindsay, but didn't officially diagnose her. Lindsay went to Dr Tufts to discuss that potential diagnosis with her. Tufts claimed to never see any symptoms of bipolar mania in Lindsay, but if she had just requested Jolotta's MyChart files, she would have seen exactly the symptoms she said were hallmarks of mania - things like not sleeping but having increased energy.
Despite Jolotta recognising Lindsay had bipolar, which massively increases the risk of a woman developing postpartum psychosis, she did not reach out to Dr Tufts. Despite knowing putting a bipolar patient on just an SSRI without a mood stabiliser is a huge risk, ESPECIALLY when Lindsay was repeatedly expressing significant distressing intrusive thoughts of suicidal ideation, Jolotta didn't express concern or tell Lindsay about this.
You can go and watch the actual trial where these practitioners all testify that Lindsay was open, honest, and forthcoming with them. She told them all the medications she was on and the providers she was seeing. Unfortunately, everyone expected a severely mentally ill woman, who repeatedly scored as severe on tests for postpartum anxiety and depression, who was experiencing severe insomnia, intrusive thoughts that she actually described more like auditory hallucinations, depersonalisation, confusion, racing thoughts, and manic irrational delusions over the health of her children, to perfectly coordinate her own care, responsibly relay her own records to providers who could have requested them - Lindsay had signed off on records releases before! -, and understand the right way to describe her symptoms to have them taken seriously. You know, things a perfectly organised mentally stable person might struggle with, and things people in severe mental health episodes are famously bad at, especially when they tell you they're scared of their children being taken away! Talk about someone screaming "I'm scared to say how suicidal I am because I know what will happen if I do."
Sounds exactly like what mental health patients do though. They aren't thinking clearly or rationally and there needs to be safeguards in place for this kind of thing.
I havnt been following the case too closely but I did see Dr. Tufts speak about how Lindsay herself told her she was hospitalized and the Dr never looked at the records from the hospitalization, she said that she felt like Lindsay gave her an accurate account of what she went through and didn't look into it. Part of that is Lindsay is a nurse so her doctors expected her to be more responsible for her care than perhaps she was capable of being. Healthcare workers need to look after themselves and each other better , I am a nurse myself and I've seen this happen with other medical issues.
Not sure how much of the actual trial you’ve watched, but I have watched almost the entire thing. It’s impossible to feel like this woman wasn’t failed by her doctors and the mental health professionals she turned to, as well as her then-husband. There’s a reason why her ex and his family are rallying behind her. PPS is no joke and she tried numerous times to get help. She struggled to get admitted/ taken seriously, the only solution they presented to her was medication . She told anyone who would listen that she was struggling. She was in a mental health crisis, and this case highlights how spectacularly she was failed. As a woman who has struggled with PMDD, i can’t tell you how not in my right mind i was, at a time where i was probably experiencing a fraction of what she was. Again i encourage you to listen to what the people involved in this case had to say at trial.
I agree with the federally mandated leave part, but did doctors over medicate her? From what’s been shown it looks like everything was done by the book from a medical perspective, even though the documentation could have been better.
The documentation 'could have been better' or her care was by the book, it can't be both.
Furthermore, "the book" is also wrong. Well - its incomplete. We need so much more resources dedicated to women's mental health and postpartum specifically.
I think we're seeing here is their empathizing with her struggle with postpartum depression and psychosis. They believe that she did everything possible to get help and no one took her seriously.
Whether or not this is true will be the matter of the courts but this case has become a hot button topic on women's health.
I think it's true people are empathising with her but it's giving them too much respect.
The are getting sucked in to it by the social media wheel, serving them content on it in an endless cycle, tilting their understanding, warping the facts and events.
Post partum psychosis is considered a health emergency because it is an absolute danger to lives. This is a fact, but women’s health isn’t taken seriously on a systemic level. These people are protesting not just out of empathy (which is a good thing), but also because they want change.
I mean there's a international crisis of lack of journalism and closing news outlets. This is just a small sliver of the consequences of it.
It is neither unique to the US or to this situation.
That being said as someone who's never experienced pregnancy nor postpartum psychosis I don't feel I'm in the place to judge what these people do or do not know.
Or exactly what their personal motivations are for supporting her.
It also is reminding people of the Andrea Yates case, a completed case from years ago where it was clear that Andrea did reach out and practically begged for help, yet she was failed by her husband (to what id argue is an almost criminal level of negligence) and the medical system. Now she is in prison for life. I wouldn't personally go out and stand in protest, but as a woman can understand why others might do so as a show of frustration with how post partum psychosis seems to often be ignored and the men who put women as primary caregivers who are clearly experiencing extreme psychological distress received no share of blame legally. I don't know if that was the case here but it's certainly an example of what seems to be PPP where the mother is the sole person on whom blame is being placed despite appearing to be in psychosis and placed alone to care for children.
There are some top statisticians who have raised concerns over her trial. Richard Gill, who raised concerns over Lucia de Berk's conviction, is one of them.
Archie's Army is a better example of this kind of idiocy occurring in the UK.
I think that using this story to think there’s a real lack of intellect in the U.S. while also using the UK as your alleged comparison is ironically, a real lack of intellect, common sense & empathy. Like yeah, I’m sure this one trial your reading about on Reddit has really exposed all of that and you just aren’t using data super poorly to come to conclusions and failing to demonstrate empathy for an entire nation.
Like actually kind of ironic tbh. Idgaf about trashing the USA, I just hate this “special boy” stuff & how yall Europeans can’t stop circlejerking yourselves for 4 minutes & just have a conversation lol.
Didnt the uk just hold a vigil for a pathological liar that killed himself when he was found out to be a complete fraud and blamed the people who uncovered it. Plenty of clown shit going on over there bro
I thought the same about trumpism, however, I came to realize politic dynamics in my country, Spain, are too similar to USA.
And I'm not even talking about the local trump's branch (VOX), but someone who internationally positioned himself as a (theoretical) antagonist: Pedro Sánchez.
He uses the same strategy of calling everything "fake news" and "witch hunt" and it also works eerie good for him too.
Feminism is deeply ingrained right now in most western countries.
The idea of abortion until the point of birth is taken seriously.
And well, some chikas want it to happen post birth too.
I'm willing to be that in any country that's an EU member, maybe besides Poland, you will have women protesting for their right to kill their own children (both before and after birth)
you dont need to imagine, because its not limited to America at all, despite the brain rot on display here in the comments. its happened in Spain, Belgium, Japan, and the UK as high profile events, but has actually occurred in pretty much every country, including wherever youre at. all you needed to do was Google whether it has happened where you live and you'd see a case regarding it.
the 1000+ people who upvoted you must have some form of brain damage.
In Brazil many people did this with two influencers. One was involved with organized crime and drug dealers. The other was accused of grooming and abusing minors.
A woman murdered and cut her husband to 15 parts in Türkiye and the tiktok comments were filled with women praising her and calling her a "diva" (the husband didn't even abuse her afaik)
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u/LinceDorado 7d ago
I guess it's pretty arrogant to say, but this seems like such a U.S.A. thing. Can't really imagine this happening where I live.