The Arctic Suicides: It's Not the Dark That Kills You
npr.org
npr.org
Highest suicide rates occur during the spring, around the vernal equinox not around the darkest time of the year. If you've never experienced the northern spring where each day is 10+ minutes longer than the previous, you'll never understand it. It just fucks up your mind in ways that are hard to describe.
My kitchen psychology thinks the high suicide rates in the spring may be related to the fact that people around you start to get more positive and active (some too much so) but if you're suffering from a bad depression, seeing that around you will make it worse.
It's not just suicides that peak. It also affects breakup/divorce rates as well as forming new relationships. It probably affects professional careers too, but I don't know if there are stats about it.
The long, dark winters and the rapid change that follows brings out some very primal sides. That being said, I'd recommend travel to the extreme latitudes around the solstices, both of them.
side note: we have about 15 hour long days at the moment. It's still pretty dark at night but I can't wait for the summer when you can see the sunset and sunrise at the same time if you look to the north at around midnight... it's magical.
I wish I could move back north, even so.
Once they go on antidepressants, they go on suicide watch. It's the most dangerous time. Because they'll still be depressed, but they'll finally have the energy to get up. And they just might have the energy to do themselves in.
Not sure if you can really generalize this much. There are several studies studying the effect of antidepressants on suicide rates, and it's true that some of them seem to lead to more suicides but it's far from being something that you can categorize like that.
I'd also wager there are lots of suicides that could be avoided if people got the medical attention they needed on time.
It's not all black and white.
That's why hospitalization is often necessary when beginning treatment for depression when that depression includes suicidal ideation, but is not necessary for the duration of treatment.
Fun fact: The package insert also states: "It isn't completely clear how antidepressants work, but they can help increase the Serotonin and Noradrenaline levels in the brain." Very confidence-inspiring :-/
Well at least it's fair. The chemistry of the brain is still very poorly understood.
Note that many drugs were discovered to have effects before we knew HOW to explain why they work.
The family saw a therapist for counseling (not the therapist responsible for the SSRIs) yesterday and her opinion was that prescribing an SSRI without an accompanying mood stablizier was extremely risky. There's certainly a contingent of mental health workers who feel this is a real risk.
Simultaneously, a different member of the family has been on SSRIs under her primary care provider's oversight alone - something we finally convinced her was a bad idea. I wonder how common this practice has become, and if it's contributed to the overall increase in U.S. suicide rates.
The cold didn't bother me at all, even though I'm from a hot country originally. I rode my bike to work every day of the year in fact, even in -45C. I loved it. It's like being on another planet in it's beauty and differences.
Like you said, it was always in late winter/early spring that I'd loose it a little. I'd grab a burger and beer after work, then somehow two weeks would go by where I had done that every day, with lots and lots of beer, and I wouldn't really know how it happened.
The key for my was to always, always get outside at midday when the sun it out and get it on your face. Even on the coldest days I always go for a walk along the river to marvel at the beauty and get the sun on my face - that's a luxury of not being further North, the sun actually comes up and I can have it directly on my face.
And to get moving after work. Eat dinner then go snowshowing, x-country skiiing or whatever for at least a couple of hours. It's nice to get into this habit before winter really hits in Oct/Nov, then keep it up. It's amazing to be out there in -45C with a headlamp, the stars and of course it's how you get to see the Northern lights more often than not.
Of course, in summer, I get home from work, eat dinner then go mntn biking/hiking/fishing/whatever until 2am in the beaming sunshine. I call it two days for the price of one.
Whitehorse is a mecca for people that are seriously into outdoor pursuits, so it makes sense that so many people want to ride to work.
When you live there, the winter is not a reason to not go outside. On the contrary, it often makes going outside easier because all the lakes and rivers are frozen, so you can explore very far and wide which you can't do in the summer due to lack of roads.
So riding to work in the winter makes perfect sense :)
Also, downtown is fairly small. From the farthest reaches of "downtown" to anywhere you'd be working is a max of 45 minutes on a bike. Most commutes are more like 15-30 mins. Though lots of people live 30-45 minutes by car out of town, which is not doable in the winter. Riding on the AK highway in winter is not an option, the plowing is not good enough.
I'm only at 43-ish these days, but I've lived as far north as Edinburgh, Scotland (56ish). I had to explicitly get outside every day at lunch to get as much sun as I could.
Seasonal Affective Disorder is apparently a real thing.
Growing up in TX, though, I never really gave this kind of stuff much of a thought. The sun and humidity are so oppressive, that you spend half the year wishing it would go away, and winters are finally relaxing and time to be outdoors.
This year, however, with the results of El Niño, it has been incredibly mild fall and winter and quite sunny. I did not as a result suffer any seasonal depression. Many others who do get SAD every year have reported the same.
If you don't take vitamin D pills or consume (lots of) cod liver oil, then your vitamin D levels will be lowest in the spring. If I remember correctly, at around 60 degrees north, you have to wait until the end of April until you get vitamin D from the sun.
It does make sense though. If you're not taking supplements and the sun isn't direct enough to make any on your own until late April then late spring would be the longest point in the year you've gone without proper sunlight.
It's absolutely beautiful.
Anyway, when in Greenland it is politically correct to eat seal and whale, once you find out how they are hunted and how the population cherishes the animals.
The coolest thing about Greenland was that the museums had no tools for warfare. Conflicts between people in Greenland were carried out by people playing drums and 'rapping' their cause in a song duel. If you had the laughs and opinions on your side, the person who 'lost' received sled dogs and food and was let go. I wish this could be used for all conflicts around the world.
I'm thinking of visiting, but there's no way I'll be eating whale.
I do know that there were restaurants in Nuuk and Ilulissat selling whale meat on the menu. I guess mostly to Japanese customers, if you know the popularity of restaurants in Osaka or Tokyo selling whale meat. That is of course against the conditions of Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling.
Bush I: Oh, hello, Sad-um, I didn't see you sitting there. / But isn't this where / Kuwait used to be? I can see, maybe, / you got a little lost on your way to the market, / but driving 'round a tank, there's just never anywhere to park it / is there? / I'm a'let you finish, 'fore your mic starts gettin' mossy, / Just wait a couple minutes as I introduce my posse. / Hit it, Jaber.
Jaber III: Howdy, neighbor. Sure is good to see ya visit. / Err'body 'round here know you just a whiz at / throwing a party, / but ain't nobody like the guy that's fartin' / in the punch bowl.... / Hang on, slow down, I think I'm feelin' dizzy. / Gotta pass my mic to MC Saad, up in this hizzy.
Saad: Saddam, my man. Together on the stage at last. / Allow me to express my rage at the actions of your dumb ass. / This is my house, and you disrespectin' me? / Time to take your friends and make your exit, please. / Git gone, sucka.
Hussein: Y'all betta chill 'fore this come to a boil. / I'm only here 'cause I'm followin' my oil. / You don't think I saw your drilling rigs take / they straws out to drink my effin' milkshake? / You drink it right up. / And I'm a'gonna light up / your ears, with my rap of justice / as we discuss this / slant drillin' across my border. / You gonna need to order / a giant check, and put my name / on it, and there betta be the same / number of zeroes that I'm expectin'. / Cuz I don't need a phone to call on you, collectin'.
I believe many mental illnesses, depression, suicidal behavior and anorexia among them, can be characterized as contagious. And perhaps some other things that aren't usually described as mental illnesses. The border between belief, religion and mental illness seems a bit fuzzy (echoes of Snow Crash). Small isolated communities must be much more susceptible to contagion taking hold, as single events have a great sway over perceptions, and there are few connections with a larger world to normalize things.
Charles Stross said something about the internet that stuck with me: "the accidental invention of telepathy". Just like public water supplies opened up new vectors for diseases such as cholera, I wonder if the internet's ability to more or less put minds directly in touch can facilitate the spread of certain mental illnesses. Consuming unfiltered internet might be looked on in a few years like drinking unsterilized water. In particular, I wonder if certain "echo chamber" social websites that allow easy isolation from mainstream opinion (Tumblr and 4chan, I'm looking at you) might be analogous to these dangerous isolated communities.
> Consuming unfiltered internet might be looked on in a few years like drinking unsterilized water
For the last year or so I've decided to avoid news outlets as much as possible. So I've updated my Reddit subscriptions to remove anything that might be a news channel, I no longer frequent the BBC news website, and avoid newspapers and TV news as best I can.
The constant fear mongering and general bad news is at times overwhelming but oftentimes just unnecessarily miserable (IMO). It's like being given a long list of problems you can't do anything about. So I've decided to simply switch it off.
I would much prefer your approach where my news could somehow be "sterilised", taking out anything that is overtly negative leaving only factual stories (e.g. business, technology and so on).
If one has trapped himself in such a bubble, he/she is unfit to really communicate with other human beings, lead endeavor of complex composed groups and manage endeavors going into crisis situations. Please, if you ever form a team, state your perception of the species ahead of time, so people know what they are in for. The negative is a building block of reality, it has to be seen, it has to be handled, worked with, contained and used. One should not work as director if one is unable to communicate and take the company of for example bipolar people. Please don't take this as a insult. I just think your way of not viewing the world is dangerous and should be made obvious via disclaimer. Which in a way you have made with this post, so please do this in future conversations.
Regards.
A few years ago when my anxiety, depression and agoraphobia peaked one of the things that terrified me about talking about it to anyone was the way I'd managed to "logically rationalise" it to myself - I was literally scared of infecting friends with my ideas because even though a part of me knew it was stupid and broken beliefs, I was still capable of entirely justifying them. The fact I'm usually a strong minded person who's good at talking people round to my way of thinking only made this idea more troubling.
I can believe that.
Social cognition, attachment theory, mirror neurons, etc.
Swarm Intelligence has (for its time?) a great primer on social cognition, how our brains resonate with each other, how children use their parent's brains and emotions to regulate their own, etc. http://www.swarmintelligence.org/SIBook/SI.php
I lived with a paranoid schizophrenia. It started making me crazy too. Took months to shake that off.
And I can definitely confirm that anxiety is contagious, from personal experiences.
However, as for groups which just represent off-mainstream subculture I don't see it. Well, technically they are of course "contagious" - that's how transmitting culture and ideas work. But not every bad idea or weird subculture is already a mental illness. I would think "sterilizing" the internet by taking away all "contagious" sites would not just rob it one of its core identities, but would also present serious free-speech and censorship issues as the criteria for being "sterile" don't seem clear-cut at all to me.
Or to make an example, many opinions on HN aren't mainstream either. What would make HN a safe site to visit, but Tumblr not?
That means words have power. Certain words and phrases, repeated in the right way, perceived in the right way, will get people real sick. Names and labels have even more power. The right name can change people, give them a new identity. They change the way people see themselves, how they behave.
Some websites, some communities, are chronic incubators of the bad kind of magic. Enough exposure to it and you'll start having bad thoughts, you'll get depressed, withdraw from society, maybe start giving a harmful kind of name to yourself, maybe hurt yourself or other people. Sure, the boundary between mental illness and not-a-mental illness is vague, and maybe subject to abuse (just ask the Russians). But some stuff is unquestionably both contagious and harmful.
We just have to be careful not to get exposed to bad juju out there.
We don't have to sterilize every water source on the planet. Some people like drinking out of rivers. But we'd be crazy not to treat our water for obvious bugs.
But it does mean we should be prudent about what we're consuming, and what our families are taking in. And if you were a government, you'd be tempted to do some harm-benefit analysis. You could say that free speech isn't an absolute, and promoting, say, bulimia or terrorism carries great harm and should be minimized, as many governments do.
But anyway, the usual counter-arguments to censorship "for your own safety" apply, whether you name it censorship or "sterilization" or anything else.
For example, what would be the "obvious bugs" in that case? As I agree that certain communities can be harmful to certain groups of people and I would agree to blocking - because there is an established body of psychological literature that can tell you why and how those things are doing harm. And even in those cases it's not always clear-cut.
(Such sites are already being blocked in a number of countries btw, for example germany.)
But the parent poster was talking about Tumblr and 4chan. They think those sites are "contagious", I think they are not. So who would decide? And what about other cultures? If you ask an iranian or chinese official, they would tell you that the western media are highly contagious and harmful. Shouldn't we block those as well then? Or whatabout showing Saw in our cinemas? Is that good for the mental health?
So far the western strategy in those matters was to give freedom priority and instead strengthen the immune system of the individuals (to keep using that metaphor). And I don't see a good reason to change that.
Setting aside predictable culture clash, the fundamental issue is misaligned standards and expectations. Some communities need strong male leaders that everybody can orbit around, and there are none. They're all just trying to help people get by when there's more to life than just surviving -- it's about wanting more.
One sort of related example is local religions versus universal, missionary religions. The majority of religions in history have been local and exclusive. Deities such as nature/animal spirits and the like, other tribes may have their own spirits in their own regions, and there is no need to convert people outside of your regions. But the most successful religions are ones are universal and missionary; they believe that their religion is affects everyone, regardless of whether they believe it (and is often the only true religion), and that for some reason, it is beneficial to convert others to your religion.
Ideas like money, capitalism, art, really anything not essential to the biology of humans, are such "fictions", and the most successful (from any evolutionary standpoint) societies are the ones that have or adapt the most effective "fictions" for their societies. I guess to put it in HN terms, "how scalable are your beliefs?"
A lot of the old ways we've lost touch with, or never had, aren't helpful to modern society. A hunting trip in which you become a man doesn't amount to much in a society with mega-farms, slaughter mills and processed foods that don't expire immediately. Instead, our equivalent goals would be like "get a degree, get another degree, get a job". You're an adult when you're old enough to vote, and so on.
There's a lot of other topics as well, but that's what stuck with me the most and my interpretation of it. It's fascinating to think about.
Monotheism has a lot to answer for. It began with Judaism, which has a certain exclusivity, but does not take the missionary position of universal adoption and conversion. It is surely the descendants, Christianity and Islam, where the polarizing missionary zeal of crusade and jihad has caused a lot of trouble. While many religions practice ostracism for the non-believer, only Islam insists on death to the apostate, who is seen as a traitor by definition, even without any further subversive or mutinous action.
Unfortunately, the doctrinaire and totalitarian proselytizing religions seem to have been quite scalable and successful. The Reformation and the Enlightenment have successfully turned back the tide of Catholicism in the West, but the challenge to Islam has yet to really get started.
Given the exploding demographics of the relevant parts of south Asia, Middle East and Africa, that future struggle gets harder by the hour. Indeed, it is the intensive demographic success of the subjugation of women and the rejection of contraception that has propelled these expansive conquering religions through history. It seems very likely that Japan and Russia will decline in population (no immigration), Europe will be Islamized and North America will be (re-)Hispanized with Catholicism.
The Reformed and Enlightened might have liberated themselves into an evolutionary dead-end of personal choice, free from enslavement by community propaganda and intimidation, but ultimately just a fleeting moment of liberty before the incoming tide of ruthless and fertile monotheists.
You either let someone else make up the story or you make one up for yourself.
What's interesting to me is that I believe we are less than a decade away from a time when AIs will be able to instruct you, step by step, how to live sustainably on just your own power, with maybe $1000 worth of financing and access to a tool lending network.
At that point a lot of "rules" of economics start to break down.
And no, it's not just the dark that makes people commit suicide. Of the top 10 countries with the highest suicide rates, only Lithuania can be considered as having a somewhat gloomy winter. The rest of the countries all get more sunlight (Guyana, Suriname and Sri Lanka for instance) than the countries generally accepted as happiest in the world: Denmark (ironically, considering the story), Switzerland, Iceland and Norway.
1) Society changes. After breakup with USSR in 1990, all collective farms were dismantled and majority of industry closed or restructured what caused a lot of people lose jobs and forced to change profession. This was hard/impossible for some, especially older people, who were used to work the same job for years or even the whole life. In first years it was partly offset by the excitement of independence, but as years went by, excitement faded away and problems remained. Even bigger impact was the mental change that you are responsible for your and your family well being and there's no longer government that takes care of every aspect of life. Some people still can't wrap their minds about this fact and blame government everything. Also, there are very few jobs in smaller towns/villages, so those who could, already fled to cities or abroad and those who couldn't are doomed to poverty which leads to the second reason.
2) Alcoholism. Lithuanians, as most northlings, are overly serious (if you smiled to strangers, locals around usually look suspiciously or even aggressively) and prone to depression what combined witch financial difficulties many faces (caused by 1) often leads seeking relief in alcohol that worsens depression even further.
3) Identity crisis (not discussed very often, mostly my thoughts). We are still in transitional state, where no longer belong to east, but not yet fully converted to western way of life. We lack self-dependence, motivation, initiative and risk taking attributes common for democratic westerners and keep looking back for somebody to lead and hold hand (the same strong leader cult as in Russia today). We are like a teen who fled his parent's home -- don't know where to go and what to do.
These problems aren't unique and many post soviet countries have similar issues, though some simply cope with them better than others. Anyway I'm optimistic, because progress can be clearly seen in many areas (Lithuania has one of the fastest growing economies in EU) and many young people are doing better than their parents.
South Korea as well, its latitude roughly matches the northern half of Tunisia (Seoul's latitude is 37°33′N, Tunisia's northernmost city of Bizerte is at 37°16′N)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_South_Korea#Age
"The main cause of South Korea's relatively high suicide rate is due to the elderly's substantially high suicide rate, which is significantly dragging up the otherwise relatively low average rate. This is due to poor elderly people killing themselves not to be a burden on their families,..."
I find articles like this highly annoying. I see the headline, think "if it's not the darkness, I wonder what is" and click the link expecting to find the answer. Instead of the answer, however, I get a fluffy human-interest piece that I simply do not care about.
How about we stop with crap like this, I don't need to hear a story, just the facts please. I've wasted several minutes on this story and still have no clue what the real reason is.
> Like native people all around the Arctic — and all over the world — Greenlanders were seeing the deadly effects of rapid modernization and unprecedented cultural interference. [...] Between 1970 and 1980, the suicide rate there quadrupled to about seven times the U.S. rate (it's still about six times higher).
> Her observations are in line with something psychologists and sociologists think is fundamental to the causes of suicide in Greenland. When communities are disrupted, like Kangeq was, families start to collapse. There's an increase in alcoholism, child neglect and physical abuse, all of which are risk factors for suicide. Later, people who didn't get the love and support they needed as children find it difficult to cope with the routine heartbreak of dating, and a breakup becomes the final insult in a lifetime of hurt.
If there was one thing that my conservative culture had taught me better, It would be this. Even knowing this doesn't make the process any easier although there is some comfort in knowing that many others face this situation as well.
If you don't care for the lives affected by the phenomenon, then why would you be caring for the reason?
That's something even less important to know if one doesn't care about the effects.
I'm interested in the mechanism, not some anecdotes about one or two specific people. I like complicated systems and how they work, this interest me because it could give me additional insight in how the human machine works.
I don't need to be interested traveling to be interested in how a plane stays in the air or how the engine of a car works.
Putting forward a hypothesis requires facts and a ton of "fluff." It seems to me that you're not actually interested in learning anything, you just want some factoids. Try the CIA Factbook.
Begin with a short abstract in which you present your conclusions. Then follow up with how you arrived at that conclusion for people who want to go in-depth. Basically the way scientific papers are organised.
"The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended..."
Not every story should be structured as a scientific document.
The point of news it not to entertain but to inform.
Nonfiction need not read like crop reports or scientific papers. The best analogy is to photography. Photography is by its nature nonfiction, and yet we recognize that all photographs are not equal. Some are beautiful, some are moving, some are dry and clinical. They all inform, but some do more.
Fact is, it isn't completely clear why the rate is so high. Rapid modernization, decades of Danish control, a disappearing culture/way of life and lack of mental health facilities can all be named as factors.
Sorry were annoyed and feel like you've wasted your time on a well written, well researched human interest piece. And yes, sometimes you need to know just the bare facts. But do you really have to know the reasons behind the high suicide rate in Greenland? Or were you triggered by the headline? In that case a human interest story conveys the message a lot better than just the numbers. To me, Hacker News is about triggering curiosity about things that were previously unknown by me. Stories like these remind me that there is a world beyond choosing if I want soy milk or regular milk in my mochachino.
But hey, let me save you a couple of minutes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Greenland#Reasons
This is mildly in conflict with the finding that there's more suicide in Greenland in summer than in winter, but worth considering.
I've seen some theories that people in general don't commit suicide while under active hardship, but after the hardship lets up a bit and they have time to reflect on it.
Also relative hardship is far more important than absolute hardship. During the winter everybody is a bit miserable and under the weather so you don't stick out so much. When the summer comes and everybody but you cheer up the contrast becomes a lot more noticeable.
When suicide is driven by an established tradition of leaving so that your family doesn't starve, you really expect it to occur in winter. By the time the hardship is gone, so is the justification for suicide.
And yeah, this isn't a problem limited to Greenland. There has been a lot of news lately about the suicide strings at Attawapiskat. And Alaskan natives are twice more likely to commit suicide than non-natives.
Doctors have a very high suicide rate, and some of that is due to their knowledge and ability to kill themselves properly.
It is highly suggestive that it will though.
> Fact is, it isn't completely clear why the rate is so high.
Then why bother writing an article about it at all ?
> And yes, sometimes you need to know just the bare facts.
No, I always want just the bare facts. Anything else simply isn't relevant. You may call it "well researched human interest" I call it filler material. It feels like a high-school kid trying to make the minimum word count for an essay.
A story is a series of facts, but can provide a richer understanding sometimes, as one can build a cohesive picture in their mind.
I suggest you just preface all your searches with wikipedia, then you won't have to hear a story.
That way, nothing needs to be stopped, and people like me who enjoy some context and humanity with their facts can continue to find excellent stories like this.
The title should communicate what the reader is to expect when opening the piece.
Usually I find this is the difference between a good broadsheet newspaper and a provincial one.
It's fine to write in an expansive, non-tabloid way in the main body but you must address the headline in the first paragraph.
That was obvious from the get go. Whoever even claimed this in the first place just did not bother to check facts for more than 5 minutes.
Guyana and Suriname have severe problems with their post-colonial status, very low income contrasted by wealth shown by western mining companies and their employees, a very big problem with alcoholism and very bad perspectives for most (soldiers turning barkeepers because they don't get paid, police extorting people in lieu of a living wage etc). I think the same reasons the author listed for Greenland might apply to those countries too.
And I can't say that I really blame them. Attawapiskat is an extremely isolated community, with few jobs and no amenities. Kids growing up in Attawapiskat have nothing to look forward to. Those who leave the community have much lower rates of suicide, but given the memories of children being taken away from their families and forced into abusive residential schools, no politician in their right mind would dare to suggest that as an option. So they live out their lives in miserable isolation, waiting for their boredom to end; and some decide to speed along the process.
Thing is, like the towns in the post, these have always been "isolated communities with few jobs", but they used to be somewhat content. The difference is that they (like everyone else) are now bombarded with very powerful messages about rich and successful white people living in the Big City. They are basically getting constantly shamed for doing what their ancestors have done for generations. Those same powers of connectedness that can be so positive in certain cases (e.g. alienated small-town geeks finding accepting communities elsewhere) can often turn out to be trojan horses for cultural shaming.
This is something I struggle with because a big reason why I've managed to do somewhat well in school and in my early career is because of being competitive and using comparison to fuel my work ethic.
As an entrepreneur, I've come to realize I can't persist that mindset. There's always going to be people raising money and getting acquired. I have to filter that noise out and focus on building something that people want.
To some extent, this should be a cautionary tale about the dangers of a universal basic income: Giving people enough money to prevent them from starving doesn't necessarily allow them to lead more meaningful lives.
It's not necessarily an isolation issue. It's really a combination of despair in the young (they don't see a clear path to succeed in life while holding on to their identity), a cultural shift between the old holding on to past grievances and the young wanting to move on. And a serious lack of individual accountability from so-called adults. For example, First Nations have an astronomical rate of diabetes. The alcohol abuse stereotype, while not as prevalent as people think, is higher than in the general population. Band councils ban booze on their land but people smuggle it and others look the other way.
As a people they are walking a knife's edge trying to live in a modern world while holding on their ancestral ways of self governance and cultural identity. I could write more about this but it would be off topic.
I spent years answering the phone on a crisis line. Some people's problems just didn't seem that bad, yet they were overwhelmed nonetheless. Some people had such crushing burdens I was astonished they could even talk.
I didn't find it uplifting, in fact it drained me. I am astonished by her ability to do it for almost 20 years. I guess it was a form of catharsis for her as well.
I did this first at my school, MIT (which didn't thank goodness, get suicide calls when I was there though there were suicides and we did get calls about the consequences) and later for the Boston area, where we did get actual suicide calls. I recently learned that MIT had shut down the service -- I don't know why.
If you're interested just look on the web for suicide prevention hotline and you'll find the name of an organization in your area. I don't if they still use volunteers or what these days. My experience is 30 years old.
It wasn't very long before I began to see that the periods of depression -- even though they felt really real at the time -- just didn't make sense. I'd keep a journal, and if I read it later (or, worse, tried to write the journal entry after the feeling had passed), none of it made sense. I mean, the words made sense, but the feelings didn't.
I wonder if part of what got me out of it was just learning to manage those times. I knew I felt terrible, but I also knew it didn't make sense, and that in 3 days I'd recognize how little sense it made. So I just had to ride it out.
Now in my mid 30s, I have some anxiety that nobody else can see, and it rarely troubles me. But it's the same pattern-- when it bothers me, I feel completely overwhelmed by the silliest little thing (or collection of things). Not only burdens that others wouldn't think twice about, but ones that I myself handle regularly without issue.
We've all got things we're incapable of dealing with. Everyone's limits are different. And I think, for everyone, they change all the time.
P.S: I like the article's side bar about responsible reporting on suicide. That's forgotten far too often in the rush for gripping headlines and clicks.
Very good article.
As a counterpoint to this article's title (but not content, really), there was an interesting piece a while back about seasons and psyche:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/07/the-norweg...
TL;DR: Mindset matters. If you don't like winter, then a long dark winter isn't much fun: "The survey results indicated that wintertime mindset may indeed play a role in mental health and well-being in Norway. The Wintertime Mindset Scale had strong positive correlations with every measure of well-being we examined, including the Satisfaction with Life Scale (a widely used survey that measures general life satisfaction), and the Personal Growth Composite (a scale that measures openness to new challenges). The people who had a positive wintertime mindset, in other words, tended to be the same people who were highly satisfied with their lives and who pursued personal growth."
[1] On a somewhat related note, I highly recommend the Norwegian original film "Insomnia" (the basis for the American remake with Al Pacino): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119375/
See also this trailer, which I like a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwNoqgg474s (not the original movie, not the remake - but a StarCraft 2 mod allowing to play a mafia/werewolf-style game).
Their ancestors were hunters and this gave them purpose in life as well as good diet which led to much happier life. Now they have nothing to do except watch TV and sit on their couch and eat bad food. Of course they are unhappy, you would be too.
I struggle to see how it's racist to admit that white people traditionally own and define the mainstream culture of places like Denmark and Canada. You cannot fix a problem if you don't admit you have one; the main problem here is that modern mainstream white capitalist culture (to which I belong and partake) might not necessarily suit all environments and all communities, and we have to find ways around that.
EDIT: note that I don't have anything against "successful white people", I'm just pointing out that our culture constantly sends out messages saying you should be like (some of) them, which might not be the best course of action in all situations. Zuck himself does not tell the media to glorify him, but they do it anyway; he might not be the best role model for the average not-white, not-male, not-Californian, not-Stanford-attending, not-programming-passionate person though, and when a lot of these not-zuck-like people see the Zuck-worshiping, they get a metaphorical kick in the teeth. Same for Hollywood celebs and so on. This is what I meant.
Pretty much the worst thing a comment can do here is take a specific discussion about something factual and turn it into a generic one about something ideological. I'm sure you didn't mean to produce that undesired result, but because the mechanism is predictable, it can and should be scrupulously avoided.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11548148 and marked it off-topic.