U.S. Depression Rates Reach New Highs
news.gallup.com
news.gallup.com
In some countries, other people don't have much of anything, so people just kind of help each other out, others don't judge you for being short on cash and people even tolerate a bit of hustling. Kindness is important.
I find developing countries also often have a kind of homogeneous culture with shared beliefs and practices, which makes everyone feel like they're part of a community.
The USA puts money on a pedestal like nowhere I've ever seen before, ever, so not having money is bad in the USA. We can't even get healthcare without money. It's quite tragic.
Third option: They worked to attain it, they got it, and they found that it was empty.
"I worked my butt off to get a bigger TicTok following. And I got it! Why aren't I happy? Why isn't my life any better?" Because happiness and a better life were never in a bigger TicTok following.
Both advertising and social media sell us on empty goals and rewards. We chase them. We're not just miserable because we can't achieve them; we're also miserable because even when we do, we find that we got nothing meaningful.
To be fair, political differences are a result of moral and ethical ideology. It's fine to not involve yourself with someone whose ideology is antithetical to goodness as subjective as it may be for some.
I will never understand someone who says political differences are petty. Thinking that the traffic light's hue of yellow is a shade too light or dark is petty. Thinking that pregnant women should die because the unviable fetus their carrying is more important than they are is not petty.
I'm not in favor of abortion personally but I will always be staunchly pro-choice. It's the only ethical, moral, and logical position one can have. Anything else is punitive and regressive.
See also preventing folks from getting medical care, access to support services, children having food at school, or any other conservative position on anything that drives the welfare of disadvantaged people. It's immoral, unethical, and illogical. You can safely cut those people out of your life without being petty or other vapid argumentative nonsense.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/economy/real-wages-inflation/...
There still is inflation, but the idea that it's still terribly high is just not true. We are currently below 5% annualized inflation. This is an average over the last year; the rate for the past few months is lower still. The 10%-ish inflation that started this panic is long behind us.
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUSR0000SA0&output_view=pct_...
I can't control what conclusions people reach based on incorrect or incomplete information. I can only suggest they read better newspapers.
(CNN is not one of those better newspapers. It just had the relevant numbers.)
Are people today more apt to become depressed, are we conditioned to get more depressed, or is diagnosis better, or are we classifying and identifying more things as depression?
Back then we had no social services, no soup kitchens, "food stamps" etc. There was no governmental help (other than job creation such as WPA). There may have been more social cohesion and more reliance on the (extended) family though.
Data: The US unemployment rate peaked at 25%.
So, yeah, things were (much) worse during the Great Depression. I have no data on whether people were depressed then (though the final lines of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, his message to the country, were "Buck up" and then "Smile"). But I know that it left deep marks on people. When there just wasn't stuff, and there was no promise that there ever would be stuff, it affected people for decades after it was over.
You now have a situation where more than half the population doesn’t know what’s real and what’s fake. It’s an, “I don’t know what I don’t know situation.” You can easily identify individuals who don’t know, because they still have a positive view of social media and say things like, “It really depends on how you use it and who you follow.”
What has happened to the internet and social media sort of tortures me, because I spent about 15 years contributing to the current problem in not-so-insignificant ways. I feel dumb for not having had the foresight to see what was happening.
Poverty is the cause. The US will only get worse until citizens vote for corporations to pay their historical tax rates and reduce outsourcing.
It's really absurd how accepted/unnoticed this regression is. And of course it also makes the isolation problem worse as now single person households will be able to afford even less.
And many families with children are in a no win scenario where they either make due with a single income or one parents' income is completely eaten by child care.
Then, we should aim for one overarching economic policy target: most people should be able to land a job that would enable them to generously house, feed and equip one adult and several children without working themselves to the bone. This should include a reasonable amount of leisure and luxuries, and a thorough safety net.
How to achieve this? I’m not sure. I’m open to ideas from all sides of the political spectrum as long as the goal is achieved.
This should really be our bare minimum, if we’re going to insist on thinking of ourselves as an advanced society.
Short of that, I truly don’t know what all of this is really for.
Any non-mandatory "incentives" or "initiatives" to get people jobs that can keep them and their families fed, clothed, and housed will invariably leave tens of thousands to millions of people behind as companies just shrug and say "don't wanna".
What makes you say that someone should be able to "thrive" on the least-paying job? That's like saying that the dumbest person should be able to do get into selective universities, or that the weakest and slowest person should be able to win medals at sporting competitions.
Let me put it another way. Does $66k/year sound like a thriving wage to you? That's a little over $4k/mo after taxes. You won't be able to afford to pay rent, let alone buy a home, in any of the country's most popular cities, or take a family of four to vacation in Paris every year, or buy a nice new car. You could live in a smaller city in a less popular state, drive an older car, and maybe take your family to Disney World every now and then. Would you call that thriving?
That number ($66k/year) is all personal income in this country combined divided by the population; so that's the standard of living you could expect if all income was evenly distributed and it magically had no detrimental effect on the supply of goods and services. It seems like an extraordinary claim that the lowest income should even be able to afford a median lifestyle, let alone a "thriving" one. Perhaps I misunderstand what you mean by that word.
Why do you think any human being deserves not to thrive?
It's not that I think some people deserve to be miserable, but I am confident that no political-economic system is capable of fully eliminating misery, let alone ensuring that everyone thrives. (I assume we agree that there is a middle ground between misery and thriving.)
Consider that even Norway, which is a truly remarkable combination of a monoethnic culture that values hard work, high social trust, and incredible natural wealth, has homeless people to the tune of 0.62 per 1000[0]; vs. the US at 1.8 per 1000[1]. You'd think that homelessness rate in Norway with all its advantages would be one-tenth that of the US.
Moreover, I am confident that a political-economic system that can guarantee everyone's success is not one that is sustainable over the long run, nor one that isn't a few bad generations away from turning into something authoritarian and rapidly worse off for its inhabitants.
[0]: https://www.feantsa.org/public/user/Magazine/Spring_magazine...
[1]: https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
A "thriving wage" is not as well-established a concept as a "minimum wage" or a "living wage", but I'm hardly the first to mention it. It basically means a wage at which people will, in general, have enough for all the necessities of life plus enough extra to actually enjoy living.
This does not guarantee thriving, or eliminate misery. Plenty of people are very capable of making themselves miserable no matter what their other circumstances.
A thriving wage, on its own, does not even guarantee no homelessness. (I believe we should be solving that through other means.) For one thing, it doesn't even guarantee everyone a job.
What it does guarantee is that everyone who has a job has a very real opportunity to make themselves a comfortable life, provided they make reasonably good choices about where to live. (A federal "thriving minimum wage", for instance, would be unlikely to meet my above criteria in downtown SF right now.)
(Personally, I'm more in favor of UBI, but the poster I originally replied to was specifically talking in terms of that being impractical to implement, which I think is likely to be true right now.)
> it doesn't even guarantee everyone a job
> everyone who has a job has a very real opportunity to make themselves a comfortable life
I want to go further on this point. There have been plenty of empirical studies evidencing the Econ 101 maxim that a government-imposed price floor causes a surplus, and conversely a price ceiling a shortage. A minimum wage is a price floor on labor that causes a surplus of it, meaning unemployed people. Rent control is a price ceiling on housing that causes a shortage of it, meaning people on waiting lists for affordable housing. So on and so forth; in every case it's great for the people in the system, and terrible for the people outside.
There's a second-order effect to this, especially deleterious in the case of the minimum wage, which is that the young and the marginalized take the brunt of the impact of missing out on the upskilling, networking, and building experience that comes from having a job, even if it pays very poorly, maybe not even for the necessities of life, let alone the enjoyment of it. So over time, the difference between the ones who were lucky enough to get in and the ones who were unemployed because the economic value of their labor was less than the minimum wage broadens, and you run the risk of the latter group becoming a permanently unemployable underclass.
In other words: even a shitty, poorly-paying job is likely to be better for the employee over the long run than no job at all; and because of this, a high minimum wage is likely to result in an unintentional increase in the disparity of outcomes between the haves and the have-nots.
> The US will only get worse until citizens vote for corporations to pay their historical tax rates
When do you consider America at its prime? Because I guarantee both taxation and government expenditure as a fraction of GDP were less than what they are now.
If you're talking about the Gilded Age in the late 1800s, there literally wasn't an income tax on either people or corporations, and federal spend was single-digit percent of GDP. Yet America accomplished many feats like the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, and poverty rates fell greatly.
If you're talking about the 80s when the tax rate in the highest income bracket was 70%, the top 1% of income earners actually paid a considerably smaller share of all income tax receipts than they do now. The poverty rate didn't change much between then and now.
> Poverty is the cause.
Sure. But there is no empirical evidence to suggest that more redistributive taxation and bigger government alleviates poverty. The War on Poverty has been about as effective as the War on Drugs or the War on Terror.
1) The rate may have been constant over time, but we're only now observing the "true" rate because societal taboos have decreased.
2) The diagnostic criteria may have lowered over time. Thus, we may now be diagnosing people who wouldn't have previously met the criteria for diagnosis.
I've been wondering the same about the notable rise in self-identified LGBT+ individuals across generations[0]. Are we witnessing this surge merely because societal acceptance has improved, enabling more people to openly identify as LGBT+? Or could it also be because the definition of what it means to be LGBT+ has broadened and it's increasingly desirable for young people to identify as such?
[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/18228/share-of-americans-iden...
I still find it weird when queer spaces are full of people in hetero relationships but the demographics make sense.
[1] https://kinseyinstitute.org/research/publications/historical...
https://slowrevealgraphs.com/2021/11/08/rate-of-left-handedn...
Nothing caused the population of left handed people to soar. We just stopped hitting them in schools for using their left hands.
> People who are straight occasionally do become bi or gay, and vice versa.
Past puberty? Do they really change sexual orientation or do they realize they were X all along? And is it really the result of acclimatization or the result something else, like a biological process? I admit I didn't know that was a thing. Also, a problem is that most of this research is based on self-reporting, which is notoriously unreliable. Ideally researchers would find ways to measure sexual arousal directly, but I guess it would be more difficult to find participants and setup experiments.
Adult pedophiles can stop being sexually aroused by children, because there's still a cognitive component to it. In the same way that you might for example, stop being attracted to your partner if you start associating them with a negative memory, a softcore pedophile might lose their attraction to children if they begin to associate it with a negative emotional response from the child.
>Past puberty? Do they really change sexual orientation or do they realize they were X all along?
They quite literally change sexual orientation. The same way you might stop liking sugary foods if you go off them for a while, or how you might develop a taste for leafy greens if you give them a go enough times.
As far as general sexuality, the keyword you can look for is 'sexual fluidity', and as far as pedophiles are concerned, Mashall's "Are pedophiles treatable?" covers current approaches that seem to be successful in attenuating or replacing attraction to children.
>Aversion conditioning is understood to change behavior more than desire
Behavior and desire have a complex relationship, it's not necessarily the case that behavior follows from desire.
>And many people do not develop a taste for leafy greens or heterosexuality after decades.
Many people don't, but some do, and my comment concerns the 'some', hence my saying 'occasionally'.
I'd bet that a substantial portion of humans are naturally bi and shaped by their environment but there are some humans that really are Kinsey 0s or 6s. We're just rarer. I'd also guess the reputation that conversion therapy has for not working is because anybody in such a hostile environment with even a smidge of opposite-sex attraction is going to act 'straight' and the only people sent off to the conversion camps are the people for whom it wouldn't work.
Zoloft was Pfizer's second best selling drug during most of the 90s. So people were still going to get diagnosed and treated despite the stigma. They just wouldn't tell anyone about it, other than their therapist.
To your final paragraph, that also highlights the flaws in Gallup style polling. Even if people were being diagnosed in equal number, it doesn't mean they would admit to it in a poll.
Both "it's not a real disease, you are not dying of something" and "it's not real, just snap out of it!".
Some people react with depression to a serious grievance or ill inflicted upon them (this is the form of depression other people are most likely to understand), and some react with extreme depression to the most ordinary and mild of life's occurrences.
Some may lack the tools to identify the reason for their depression, that's not the same as nothing having happened to them.
>it's not out of the ordinary or different to what's been done to other people who are not depressed
It's entirely possible that the people who are not depressed are in fact the ones who are sick.
>some react with extreme depression to the most ordinary and mild of life's occurrences.
Or, the mild life occurrence just serves as a tipping point that cascades and causes the person to reevaluate their situation and come to the conclusion that they are dissatisfied.
In some cases. In others that's not the case. The latter are the cases of depression I'm talking about.
> It's entirely possible that the people who are not depressed are in fact the ones who are sick.
No, we can safely rule this out. The people who are not depressed are not sick, and depression is a real disease.
I'm saying depression sometimes has an identifiable trigger and sometimes it doesn't. In both cases it's a serious disease.
For many cases of depression, there's no identifiable "trigger" you can point at and say "this, this is the reason this person started suffering from depression".
Even when there is such a trigger, e.g. a divorce, losing their job, or the death of a loved one (say, a parent), people who are not depressed can overcome it. Life goes on, you don't get wrecked forever, you slowly rebuild your life. Whereas a person suffering from depression may never recover, so that a dramatic event in their lives overpowers everything else, forever, and they fail to recover, if they do at all.
The person I'm replying to seems to imply the depressive "let's get wrecked forever, life has no more meaning" is the "correct" response, and on the contrary, that picking up your life is "sick".
I also believe that ADHD still carries a stigma in the workplace. I wouldn’t personally discuss it in an interview.
Granted, suicide is also under-reported due to stigma, but it's another data point.
To your point on suicide, though. The OECD has some data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/... .. It's hard to say. US is flat. Norway is up a bit. Most countries are down or flat. I don't see any particular upward trend over the past 60 years.
Breaking down the US statistics into demographics makes for some disturbing yet interesting reading https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db433.htm. Seems like the bulk of the growth has been older men (trending down) and women aged 15-24 (a shocking 87% increase from 2007).
16.4 16.9 17.3 17.1 17.2 17.1 17.5 17.7 18.1 18.1 18.5 18.9 18.9 18.8 19.2 19.9 21.2 22.5 21.8 22.4
and OECD (per 100k intentional self harm starting @ 2010 https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?ThemeTreeId=9)
12.8 13 13.2 13.4 13.8 14 14.2 14.8 15 14.7 14.1
(USA, if not implied)
That finger points at the social isolation hypothesis (though is obviously not hard proof).
I wonder if social media is to socializing what fake sugars are to real. It occupies the same sort of space without the benefits, and is more desirable on the surface while generally being worse for you. It's a discount but more easily obtained substitute.
Humans evolved to be physically social, is 100% remote really the right direction for American society?
The way the work is organised and other factors that make home and surroundings not social for many people may be a factor. But looking at the remote work specifically here feels like holding the wrong end of the stick.
(source: Working remotely, having nice chats with coworkers, inviting others once a week to my home for work, meeting people otherwise)
It is hard to be happy when your physical condition is a mess.
Personally, I never have quite as good of a day as when I start my day with an hour walk. Literally never and I have performed this experiment over a thousand times now.
Get to spend more time with family/friends or personal projects.
Edit: want to add that I also finish my work in less than half an actual work day (2-3 hours). Compared to in office, the same tasks took 4-5 hrs due to constant nagging, interruptions.
I expect it's because we've gotten so good at being impersonal. Not necessarily in actual day to day relationships, but a lot of the things we do are basically designed to be alienating, because it's marginally more profitable to have them that way than to have them be convenient.
Like a favorite pet peeve of mine is that the Amazon Music app on android has the occasional modal advertisement to upgrade to a different plan or whatever. I literally never want to see those ads, but there's no way to turn them off because the app is designed to make Amazon as much money as possible, not to be convenient for me. Our lives are full of little "Fuck yous" like that one.
The Royal Family? War in a far off land? Latest tiff between Republicans and Democrats? Beer brand controversy?
To me this is related to the other article on HN earlier today about the dramatic decrease in birthrates since 2007. They're all symptoms of a society in decline.
+ crappy diet
+ addicted to porn
= depression
surprised?
fix those three, depression will vanish
pills will not fix it
your therapist is incentivized to keep you "sick"
I mean, it's rising most amongst young adults and minorities; given the political climate alone I can understand the correlation there.
This requires bigger homes with probably some layout adjustments. Some will already have the homes for such things, but many, not at all.
I always figured from the early days of the pandemic/WFH that distributed/decentralised workspaces would be a nice shift, so that most residential areas could have a not-too-distant workspace with no substantial commute. Then you decouple work's office location and/or personal home ammenities from your actual working conditions. Dunno if this is an actual thing or actually viable.