6 ms·

Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks about the cause

45 points by lschueller 1mo ago

VaderAi 1mo ago
Over 90% of your body's serotonin is manufactured in your gut, meaning severe anxiety and depression often start in your digestive system, not your brain.
janpeuker 1mo ago
If privileged people use words like depression (without also accounting for change in diagnosis) to basically say phones should be taken away from their children so they can control their feelings more, it always reminds me of https://heatherburns.tech/2026/07/08/the-kids-with-phones-are-alright/ https://heatherburns.tech/2026/07/08/the-kids-with-phones-ar...: > the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves, which is why the notion of blanket bans come so easily to them.
John23832 1mo ago
It’s the lack of community. In prior eras, we had more community to help us deal with ourselves. Now, without community, we just ruminate. Or fall into toxic, one subject, online community.
bluefirebrand 1mo ago
I don't know. I think it's too convenient to blame this solely on devices and internet and such. I'm certain that they are a symptom, but I am unconvinced that they are a sole cause for this Edit: Obviously not a psychologist, but just from what I observe: People have had way higher expectations from life than ever before in the past, and life has not really been meeting those expectations. A lot of people I know simply aren't going to enjoy the same luxury that they grew up expecting, being told they would have, that they were "promised".
- EA-3167 1mo ago
  Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense. What is Instagram if not a giant machine to generate the exact feeling? After all it “inspires” people to emulate what they see, which usually involves spending whatever they have on their appearance and lifestyle.
  - bluefirebrand 1mo ago
    Yes, that's true too I was honestly just talking about "people used to afford a house and family with two vacations per year on a single income, now people can't even afford a house on two incomes" which seems to be a common refrain nowadays I know a lot of my friends and peers believe they have worse standard of living than their parents did at the same age, and the data does seem to agree with them. Existence of smartphones is a nice convenience but it doesn't seem to offset being able to afford a house or flights and hotels for vacations
    - thegrim33 1mo ago
      I doubt "the data" is anything more than a survey of said people's feelings on the manner, which is basically of zero value. But we live in an age where if enough people say something is true that "makes" it true, objective reality be damned.
    - EA-3167 1mo ago
      While true a lot of subtlety is hidden in those seemingly simple comparisons. For example has the median/average home size grown since then? If so by how much? How about amenities that are expected in a modern home? In the 1950's and 1960's what did a vacation look like for a single-income family with kids back then? What does it look like now? If you look at the data what you see is that people have more, want more, and spend more. People didn't necessarily fly to Europe, maybe a vacation was a local seaside, a road trip, or something similar. Heck even for the same vacation to the same place you pay more today because supply and demand lets it happen; you'll pay 250% more for a trip to Disney now than you would in the 1970's, but then again the global population has exploded along with the population globally that can afford to go to Disney. https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-a-home-the-year-you-were-born/ https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-... I know that everyone wants to believe in some kind of quick political or economic fix, but it just isn't that simple. If you want to spread out the existing wealth for everyone then the average standard of living would drop. If you want to raise that standard of living while extending it to more people... well, good luck?
Aboutplants 1mo ago
We are inundated with more choices and decisions than ever before, causing stress that becomes overwhelming. Up until the last generation, you didn’t even worry about what you were going to have for dinner. Your option was whatever was available. You spent the day making that thing. You ate. Now you have to make decisions on every little thing in life because there are options and choices for everything in life. We have not yet evolved quickly enough to handle this many choices and decisions, as lame and unimportant as they may seem.
- armedgorilla 1mo ago
  From Moby-Dick, about spending three years at sea (Chapter 35): """There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner- for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable."""
- card_zero 1mo ago
  So I did a chronological search for "what's for dinner", here it is in a poem from 1794: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_pindariana-or-peters-p_pindar-peter_1794/page/22/mode/2up?q=%22what%27s+for+dinner%22 https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_pindarian... Their choices are rat, mouse, or nothing, but they do have choices, and I think non-fictional characters would typically have more palatable choices about what to have for dinner, when using this age-old common phrase, 230 years ago. Edit: 1794 was in the middle of the French Revolution, and in the decades leading up, the peasantry famously had the choice of no bread or no cake. This bewildering choice is why they were misérable.
  - cucumber3732842 1mo ago
    But it was less of a "choice". You could choose between using this or that now vs tomorrow, pulling something from the root cellar, etc, but it was a clear optimization problem even if some of the specifics were subjective or speculative.. No "I don't feel like eating chicken tendies" bullshit.
richard_chase 1mo ago
I think the new generation will be alright. From what I've seen, they seem to believe that maximizing their looks is the answer.
- LoganDark 1mo ago
  That is a thing people do when they feel a lack of control over other aspects of their life. It's a coping mechanism. Frequently comorbid with depression. Also it's quite rude of you to dismiss an entire generation with this belittling rhetoric. Mental health is a really, really big deal.
  - deepsun 1mo ago
    Watch any movie, typically the protagonist is good looking and antagonist is ugly. That's the whole answer. In Game of Thrones director had a chance to make the dwarf (protagonist ) really ugly, like in the books, but they chose a good looking actor. Same for Harry Potter, Hermione was supposed to be meh.
    - theF00l 1mo ago
      I think the previous generation of Hollywood films was not so egregious on this. There were a lot of normal looking famous actors: Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro etc. Often playing good guys. Now most actors in popular media are good looking to an uncanny level. Antagonist are beautiful too (in GoT as well). It's not surprising if this negatively affects the psyche of the everyday person.
    - LoganDark 1mo ago
      That's absolutely not the whole answer and never has been. - People who crave validation seek good looks. They want to be accepted. - People who crave status seek good looks. They want to be awarded. - People who crave admiration seek good looks. They want to be desired. There are so, so many more possible reasons and motivations, and it highly depends on the individual. Someone could have all of the above or none of the above and still obsess over looks. Someone could obsess for different reasons in different contexts or with different moods. It's not based on some infantile monkey-see-monkey-do obsession with media.
blueflow 1mo ago
60 years ago you might have ended up in a psychiatric hospital without getting effective treatment, mental health issues were stigmatized and the incentive to seek out help was low. People used to just live a miserable life with their issues. Nowadays knowledge about mental health issues is widespread in the population, somewhat normalized and leading to people seeking help. I consider it realistic that depression did not actually increase, its just more people showing up in the statistics.
- tim333 1mo ago
  One anecdote. I had a friend who went from healthy to almost unable to walk through a post viral 'chronic fatigue' type thing. She couldn't really work but chronic fatigue wasn't a recognised condition for benefits so had to claim depression to get state assistance. (Ireland)
- aaron695 1mo ago
  [dead]
- pinkmuffinere 1mo ago
  I 100% believe there is such an effect, and that it’s confounding the measurement of population level changes. But I want to point out that the existence of such an effect is not really evidence _against_ the changes, it’s just another confounder. Your wording is very accurate — you “consider it realistic that depression did not increase”, ie it is possible that depression didn’t increase. But whether depression actually did increase or actually didn’t, is not possible to determine from these numbers directly. Without controlling for confounders and doing some fun statistics, we largely just have opinions
- JoshTriplett 1mo ago
  Exactly. See also statistics for "how many people are left-handed". The incidence of left-handedness didn't go up; acceptance of it went up, and people stopped trying to force other people to hide/mask it. It is also possible that depression itself is more widespread. But it seems exceedingly likely that acceptance, willingness to talk about it, and general understanding that the correct answer to "chemical imbalance in the brain" is not "cheer up!", have improved substantially.
ks2048 1mo ago
To put it more succinctly: the world is changing too quickly for our biology to adapt.
- talon8635 1mo ago
  This has seemed like a compelling idea to me for a while. It’s an interesting thought.
- hackernud3s 1mo ago
  This is what adaptation looks like actually, some organisms not surviving to reproduce.
  - card_zero 1mo ago
    We have to be genetically adapted to survive food deliveries and TikTok?
    - quantummagic 1mo ago
      The point is that to the extent it causes certain individuals to lose faith in humanity, or become reclusive, and as a result not reproduce -- it has the effect of altering the overall genetic makeup of subsequent generations. The net result being a population "adapted" to this new environment.
    - pinkmuffinere 1mo ago
      Why not? The claim (which I believe is well supported) is that these things hijack some innate impulses to trap us in bad decisions. If you consistently make bad decisions (eg, put off developing your life) your line is less likely to continue. This is just like animals that didn’t run from humans — they didn’t know to be scared of us and now they’re dead. Even massive things that could crush us can be killed if we slip through their defenses. The ones that survive are the ones that learn to fear the dangerous thing.
      - deleted 1mo ago
paimapi 1mo ago
my partner is a psychiatrist (that's the one with an MD) in our household we treat all overly broad, trendy statements like this one with a huge grain of salt the difference between rates of diagnosed major depressive disorder (MDD) vs the past has much more to do with a combination of the diagnostic criteria being refined [1] over the years and the increase of screening [2] during your annual checkup (something physicians were recommended against doing as late as the 90s). you know how your PCP asks you now how you're feeling, if you've had thoughts of self-harm, had any loss in appetite, or have given up your hobbies? that's the one if you need to blame it on a social trend, there's a sharp correlation between the rates of suicide in the USA [3] with the transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% of people to the top 1% [4]. as they say, correlation is not causation but it is one of the best indications that it might be. smarter and much better trained people than I can probably do the in-depth research and analysis needed to make that claim [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t5/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t5/ [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3291670/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3291670/ [3] https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/data/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/data/index.html [4] http://blog.oxfamamerica.org.s3.amazonaws.com/politicsofpoverty/2015/04/Piketty-split.png http://blog.oxfamamerica.org.s3.amazonaws.com/politicsofpove...
- jrapdx3 1mo ago
  MDD is the "bread and butter" of psychiatric practice. I'm not really sure how much that's changed over decades. Of course, depression treatment options have evolved greatly since the late 80s, truly a blessing. You're probably right that increased awareness, reduced stigma and improved attention to diagnosis play a role in apparent population rate increase. Interesting how the comments here put forth quite a few "theories" regarding sources of the increase. AFAIK there's no definitive explanation of the observation. In passing we should note that many other psychiatric conditions have parallel rising incidences. The factors you cite apply to those conditions as well. Psychiatric conditions in general are very complex, with associations to a wide array of factors. Most likely many small contributors add up to vulnerability to one or more of these conditions. Our brains are constructed to prefer lumping things into simpler categories. What we call MDD clearly enough is not a unitary disease but outcome of a messy set of myriad "causes" diagnostically lumped together. The progress made in identifying and treating psychiatric disorders is impressive and gratifying. The more we accept the messy reality, the greater the level of progress we'll make.
Noaidi 1mo ago
As someone living with a lifelong serious melted illness, I say this guy can F off. Strictly blaming depression on sociological factors is demeaning to those people with mood disorders. What about diet? What about nutrition? What about EMF’s? What about Covid infections? This blow hard with his three points, always three points by the way, is minimizing depression, and all people with mental illness.
- card_zero 1mo ago
  Melted illness, that sounds very serious. He sure loves his brain hemisphere lateralization, wasn't that stuff seriously questioned? Like found to be divided the opposite way around, or not at all. He's also a bore, which according to the trendy theory of the day means he is doing a public service by making us bored.
  - cindyllm 1mo ago
    [dead]
wewewedxfgdf 1mo ago
Is it because the world is more depressing? Inequality, injustice, war, climate change, lack of opportunity, loneliness, destruction of social systems by technology, decay of community values and the promise of a worse not better future. Is it that this generation is less well off than its parents, that housing is no longer affordable, that the world is polluted, that nuclear war has returned as a possibility, that careers once valuable are commoditized by technology? Is that why or is it something else?
- talon8635 1mo ago
  Go read some books about the past lol, my god
  - jkmcf 1mo ago
    Not upvoting because the comment is flippant, but pre-1990 you had the Cold War and a somewhat realistic threat of nuclear war, though I have no memories of ducking under my desk in 1970's NYC. Generally, the best time to live in is the present, but there have been a lot of changes since Reagan that have made life harder and worse, e.g. the 24h news cycle exacerbated by a distinct lack of rational discourse. The list of other factors is pretty long, but it pretty much comes down to how public and disproportionate the negativity and spin pervade society.
- Avicebron 1mo ago
  Turns out when people can't afford kids, healthcare, housing they are unhappy.
  - darth_avocado 1mo ago
    *while being unemployed or having the threat of unemployment 24x7
  - wewewedxfgdf 1mo ago
    Usually it's rich people who are puzzled as to why others are unhappy.
arjie 1mo ago
Is this like how everyone warned us about an ADHD epidemic and it turned out it was an epidemic of getting extra time on exams? There were lots of explanations from the mental health brigade. These kinds of extra strong effects are like the blue zones situation - there's always something else that creates a formal effect that is nothing like an actual change.
VaderAi 1mo ago
Turns out houses are getting smaller for most people,and less interest in gardening and outdoor activities, sitting around and playing on there phones all the time will create boredom. And without having goals in there life to keep them motivated is one of the key things to prevent depression. John kirwin also stated this in his book. Apart from people with chemical inbalance
- jemmyw 1mo ago
  Living space per person has tripled since the 1950s for Americans. House sizes have gone up and family sizes down. I do notice that new houses seem to be built to maximize house size and leave little for the garden. I assume most people want that. Personally I've got a large garden, although it's a lot of work.

45 points by lschueller 1mo ago

Over 90% of your body's serotonin is manufactured in your gut, meaning severe anxiety and depression often start in your digestive system, not your brain.

janpeuker 1mo ago

If privileged people use words like depression (without also accounting for change in diagnosis) to basically say phones should be taken away from their children so they can control their feelings more, it always reminds me of https://heatherburns.tech/2026/07/08/the-kids-with-phones-are-alright/ https://heatherburns.tech/2026/07/08/the-kids-with-phones-ar...: > the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves, which is why the notion of blanket bans come so easily to them.

John23832 1mo ago

It’s the lack of community. In prior eras, we had more community to help us deal with ourselves. Now, without community, we just ruminate. Or fall into toxic, one subject, online community.

bluefirebrand 1mo ago

I don't know. I think it's too convenient to blame this solely on devices and internet and such. I'm certain that they are a symptom, but I am unconvinced that they are a sole cause for this Edit: Obviously not a psychologist, but just from what I observe: People have had way higher expectations from life than ever before in the past, and life has not really been meeting those expectations. A lot of people I know simply aren't going to enjoy the same luxury that they grew up expecting, being told they would have, that they were "promised".

EA-3167 1mo ago
Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense. What is Instagram if not a giant machine to generate the exact feeling? After all it “inspires” people to emulate what they see, which usually involves spending whatever they have on their appearance and lifestyle.
- bluefirebrand 1mo ago
  Yes, that's true too I was honestly just talking about "people used to afford a house and family with two vacations per year on a single income, now people can't even afford a house on two incomes" which seems to be a common refrain nowadays I know a lot of my friends and peers believe they have worse standard of living than their parents did at the same age, and the data does seem to agree with them. Existence of smartphones is a nice convenience but it doesn't seem to offset being able to afford a house or flights and hotels for vacations
  - thegrim33 1mo ago
    I doubt "the data" is anything more than a survey of said people's feelings on the manner, which is basically of zero value. But we live in an age where if enough people say something is true that "makes" it true, objective reality be damned.
  - EA-3167 1mo ago
    While true a lot of subtlety is hidden in those seemingly simple comparisons. For example has the median/average home size grown since then? If so by how much? How about amenities that are expected in a modern home? In the 1950's and 1960's what did a vacation look like for a single-income family with kids back then? What does it look like now? If you look at the data what you see is that people have more, want more, and spend more. People didn't necessarily fly to Europe, maybe a vacation was a local seaside, a road trip, or something similar. Heck even for the same vacation to the same place you pay more today because supply and demand lets it happen; you'll pay 250% more for a trip to Disney now than you would in the 1970's, but then again the global population has exploded along with the population globally that can afford to go to Disney. https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-a-home-the-year-you-were-born/ https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-... I know that everyone wants to believe in some kind of quick political or economic fix, but it just isn't that simple. If you want to spread out the existing wealth for everyone then the average standard of living would drop. If you want to raise that standard of living while extending it to more people... well, good luck?

Aboutplants 1mo ago

We are inundated with more choices and decisions than ever before, causing stress that becomes overwhelming. Up until the last generation, you didn’t even worry about what you were going to have for dinner. Your option was whatever was available. You spent the day making that thing. You ate. Now you have to make decisions on every little thing in life because there are options and choices for everything in life. We have not yet evolved quickly enough to handle this many choices and decisions, as lame and unimportant as they may seem.

armedgorilla 1mo ago
From Moby-Dick, about spending three years at sea (Chapter 35): """There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner- for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable."""
card_zero 1mo ago
So I did a chronological search for "what's for dinner", here it is in a poem from 1794: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_pindariana-or-peters-p_pindar-peter_1794/page/22/mode/2up?q=%22what%27s+for+dinner%22 https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_pindarian... Their choices are rat, mouse, or nothing, but they do have choices, and I think non-fictional characters would typically have more palatable choices about what to have for dinner, when using this age-old common phrase, 230 years ago. Edit: 1794 was in the middle of the French Revolution, and in the decades leading up, the peasantry famously had the choice of no bread or no cake. This bewildering choice is why they were misérable.
- cucumber3732842 1mo ago
  But it was less of a "choice". You could choose between using this or that now vs tomorrow, pulling something from the root cellar, etc, but it was a clear optimization problem even if some of the specifics were subjective or speculative.. No "I don't feel like eating chicken tendies" bullshit.

richard_chase 1mo ago

I think the new generation will be alright. From what I've seen, they seem to believe that maximizing their looks is the answer.

LoganDark 1mo ago
That is a thing people do when they feel a lack of control over other aspects of their life. It's a coping mechanism. Frequently comorbid with depression. Also it's quite rude of you to dismiss an entire generation with this belittling rhetoric. Mental health is a really, really big deal.
- deepsun 1mo ago
  Watch any movie, typically the protagonist is good looking and antagonist is ugly. That's the whole answer. In Game of Thrones director had a chance to make the dwarf (protagonist ) really ugly, like in the books, but they chose a good looking actor. Same for Harry Potter, Hermione was supposed to be meh.
  - theF00l 1mo ago
    I think the previous generation of Hollywood films was not so egregious on this. There were a lot of normal looking famous actors: Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro etc. Often playing good guys. Now most actors in popular media are good looking to an uncanny level. Antagonist are beautiful too (in GoT as well). It's not surprising if this negatively affects the psyche of the everyday person.
  - LoganDark 1mo ago
    That's absolutely not the whole answer and never has been. - People who crave validation seek good looks. They want to be accepted. - People who crave status seek good looks. They want to be awarded. - People who crave admiration seek good looks. They want to be desired. There are so, so many more possible reasons and motivations, and it highly depends on the individual. Someone could have all of the above or none of the above and still obsess over looks. Someone could obsess for different reasons in different contexts or with different moods. It's not based on some infantile monkey-see-monkey-do obsession with media.

blueflow 1mo ago

60 years ago you might have ended up in a psychiatric hospital without getting effective treatment, mental health issues were stigmatized and the incentive to seek out help was low. People used to just live a miserable life with their issues. Nowadays knowledge about mental health issues is widespread in the population, somewhat normalized and leading to people seeking help. I consider it realistic that depression did not actually increase, its just more people showing up in the statistics.

tim333 1mo ago
One anecdote. I had a friend who went from healthy to almost unable to walk through a post viral 'chronic fatigue' type thing. She couldn't really work but chronic fatigue wasn't a recognised condition for benefits so had to claim depression to get state assistance. (Ireland)
aaron695 1mo ago
[dead]
pinkmuffinere 1mo ago
I 100% believe there is such an effect, and that it’s confounding the measurement of population level changes. But I want to point out that the existence of such an effect is not really evidence _against_ the changes, it’s just another confounder. Your wording is very accurate — you “consider it realistic that depression did not increase”, ie it is possible that depression didn’t increase. But whether depression actually did increase or actually didn’t, is not possible to determine from these numbers directly. Without controlling for confounders and doing some fun statistics, we largely just have opinions
JoshTriplett 1mo ago
Exactly. See also statistics for "how many people are left-handed". The incidence of left-handedness didn't go up; acceptance of it went up, and people stopped trying to force other people to hide/mask it. It is also possible that depression itself is more widespread. But it seems exceedingly likely that acceptance, willingness to talk about it, and general understanding that the correct answer to "chemical imbalance in the brain" is not "cheer up!", have improved substantially.

ks2048 1mo ago

To put it more succinctly: the world is changing too quickly for our biology to adapt.

talon8635 1mo ago
This has seemed like a compelling idea to me for a while. It’s an interesting thought.
hackernud3s 1mo ago
This is what adaptation looks like actually, some organisms not surviving to reproduce.
- card_zero 1mo ago
  We have to be genetically adapted to survive food deliveries and TikTok?
  - quantummagic 1mo ago
    The point is that to the extent it causes certain individuals to lose faith in humanity, or become reclusive, and as a result not reproduce -- it has the effect of altering the overall genetic makeup of subsequent generations. The net result being a population "adapted" to this new environment.
  - pinkmuffinere 1mo ago
    Why not? The claim (which I believe is well supported) is that these things hijack some innate impulses to trap us in bad decisions. If you consistently make bad decisions (eg, put off developing your life) your line is less likely to continue. This is just like animals that didn’t run from humans — they didn’t know to be scared of us and now they’re dead. Even massive things that could crush us can be killed if we slip through their defenses. The ones that survive are the ones that learn to fear the dangerous thing.
    - deleted 1mo ago

paimapi 1mo ago

my partner is a psychiatrist (that's the one with an MD) in our household we treat all overly broad, trendy statements like this one with a huge grain of salt the difference between rates of diagnosed major depressive disorder (MDD) vs the past has much more to do with a combination of the diagnostic criteria being refined [1] over the years and the increase of screening [2] during your annual checkup (something physicians were recommended against doing as late as the 90s). you know how your PCP asks you now how you're feeling, if you've had thoughts of self-harm, had any loss in appetite, or have given up your hobbies? that's the one if you need to blame it on a social trend, there's a sharp correlation between the rates of suicide in the USA [3] with the transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% of people to the top 1% [4]. as they say, correlation is not causation but it is one of the best indications that it might be. smarter and much better trained people than I can probably do the in-depth research and analysis needed to make that claim [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t5/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t5/ [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3291670/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3291670/ [3] https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/data/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/data/index.html [4] http://blog.oxfamamerica.org.s3.amazonaws.com/politicsofpoverty/2015/04/Piketty-split.png http://blog.oxfamamerica.org.s3.amazonaws.com/politicsofpove...

jrapdx3 1mo ago
MDD is the "bread and butter" of psychiatric practice. I'm not really sure how much that's changed over decades. Of course, depression treatment options have evolved greatly since the late 80s, truly a blessing. You're probably right that increased awareness, reduced stigma and improved attention to diagnosis play a role in apparent population rate increase. Interesting how the comments here put forth quite a few "theories" regarding sources of the increase. AFAIK there's no definitive explanation of the observation. In passing we should note that many other psychiatric conditions have parallel rising incidences. The factors you cite apply to those conditions as well. Psychiatric conditions in general are very complex, with associations to a wide array of factors. Most likely many small contributors add up to vulnerability to one or more of these conditions. Our brains are constructed to prefer lumping things into simpler categories. What we call MDD clearly enough is not a unitary disease but outcome of a messy set of myriad "causes" diagnostically lumped together. The progress made in identifying and treating psychiatric disorders is impressive and gratifying. The more we accept the messy reality, the greater the level of progress we'll make.

Noaidi 1mo ago

As someone living with a lifelong serious melted illness, I say this guy can F off. Strictly blaming depression on sociological factors is demeaning to those people with mood disorders. What about diet? What about nutrition? What about EMF’s? What about Covid infections? This blow hard with his three points, always three points by the way, is minimizing depression, and all people with mental illness.

card_zero 1mo ago
Melted illness, that sounds very serious. He sure loves his brain hemisphere lateralization, wasn't that stuff seriously questioned? Like found to be divided the opposite way around, or not at all. He's also a bore, which according to the trendy theory of the day means he is doing a public service by making us bored.
- cindyllm 1mo ago
  [dead]

wewewedxfgdf 1mo ago

Is it because the world is more depressing? Inequality, injustice, war, climate change, lack of opportunity, loneliness, destruction of social systems by technology, decay of community values and the promise of a worse not better future. Is it that this generation is less well off than its parents, that housing is no longer affordable, that the world is polluted, that nuclear war has returned as a possibility, that careers once valuable are commoditized by technology? Is that why or is it something else?

talon8635 1mo ago
Go read some books about the past lol, my god
- jkmcf 1mo ago
  Not upvoting because the comment is flippant, but pre-1990 you had the Cold War and a somewhat realistic threat of nuclear war, though I have no memories of ducking under my desk in 1970's NYC. Generally, the best time to live in is the present, but there have been a lot of changes since Reagan that have made life harder and worse, e.g. the 24h news cycle exacerbated by a distinct lack of rational discourse. The list of other factors is pretty long, but it pretty much comes down to how public and disproportionate the negativity and spin pervade society.
Avicebron 1mo ago
Turns out when people can't afford kids, healthcare, housing they are unhappy.
- darth_avocado 1mo ago
  *while being unemployed or having the threat of unemployment 24x7
- wewewedxfgdf 1mo ago
  Usually it's rich people who are puzzled as to why others are unhappy.

arjie 1mo ago

Is this like how everyone warned us about an ADHD epidemic and it turned out it was an epidemic of getting extra time on exams? There were lots of explanations from the mental health brigade. These kinds of extra strong effects are like the blue zones situation - there's always something else that creates a formal effect that is nothing like an actual change.

VaderAi 1mo ago

Turns out houses are getting smaller for most people,and less interest in gardening and outdoor activities, sitting around and playing on there phones all the time will create boredom. And without having goals in there life to keep them motivated is one of the key things to prevent depression. John kirwin also stated this in his book. Apart from people with chemical inbalance

jemmyw 1mo ago
Living space per person has tripled since the 1950s for Americans. House sizes have gone up and family sizes down. I do notice that new houses seem to be built to maximize house size and leave little for the garden. I assume most people want that. Personally I've got a large garden, although it's a lot of work.