What happens in the brain to cause depression?
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
Because it turns out, and trust me on this one, that having a shit life causes depression. In particular: a shit life that the subject feels no hope of getting out of.
I suffered really severe, debilitating depression for years. I tried all the usual crap that know-nothings recommend, doing exercise and the like, and working hard to try and do better at life, but none of it budged the needle. Beyond that I was told I of course need to drug myself to feel better (SSRIs).
The depression was permanently solved, not by any of that, but just ditching my old life in full, and doing something else. Once your life stops being shit, you stop feeling depressed.
All the "chemical imbalance" talk is to avoid having to think about this, and instead reduces the problem in the same way a heroin addict does.
The main complexity in fixing it is that the subject often doesn't know their life is shit and just keeps trying to do that life better, or that they fear leaving that life will make things worse.
My non-psychologist tip for anyone suffering from severe depression like I was is simple: you have to make a very big, easy change to your life.
Big means not tweaking this or that, but completely changing everything. What's the most extreme change you could make, in your mind? Is it go and be a monk in Nepal for a couple of years? Then do that.
Easy means it can't be a struggle - if you're depressed you don't have the energy to do that.
A stark example: my employer has decided to outsource all of technology and as many other functions as possible to India. We have all been informed that most of us will be unemployed by the end of the year. They are also following up in all corporate communications about how "transitions can be hard" and "mental health is important" offering online counseling and the like.
I think this is partly their way of cleansing their own hands "we know some very bad outcomes for some people are going to result from this, but how can it be our fault when we offered them resources to help with their mental health?"
The other part is individualizing the problem: "yes losing your job can be a challenge but it's really about what's between your own two ears."
Finally, mental health is an industry, arguably one that is providing services principally to other businesses ("you can do what ever you want to your workforce and we will fix it in their heads").
By the way I remember some of those drug addiction studies that showed lab rats choosing heroin over food until they starve being criticized because the parameters of being a lab rat trapped in a glass box under harsh lights may have something to do with the rat's state of mind.
Yes one part is definitely pushing people past natural limits and then drugging them to try and extend their limits.
I think another is a privileged perspective - to a tenured university researcher with a low stress life, or a wealthy doctor, they may feel that "the program" has worked fine for them. So they can't imagine how the program has led another to a life of misery.
For individuals, it's like being a node, where you cannot see anything above. It feels that what works for you, should work for all.
> Once your life stops being shit, you stop feeling depressed.
You really should be more careful trying to shoehorn everyone with a medical condition into your shoes. You come off as terribly rude and narrow minded when you do so, which I am sure was not the intention. People who live perfectly good lives also suffer depression. People who have everything seemingly going for them suffer depression. And yes. The focus on brain chemistry is warranted, it’s based in scientific observation, discarding it just because your personal sorry doesn’t align is like discarding vaccines because “I never got vaccinated and didn’t die from covid” you are just one datapoint in the collection, and no matter what your experience is, you can’t blankly extrapolate to the entire population.
You should really be more careful taking things that people say as a personal affect on you, or people like you. It is ok for people to talk about their personal feelings/beliefs/experiences without it being value judged by you (as rude or narrow minded).
Not every message is meant for you.
If a depressed person genuinely thinks their life is good and that they have everything going for them, this is often from lack of realisation or self deception.
To pick an easy example, someone who's got a successful well paid big city career being depressed, because internally they don't want that and just did it because others told them that's the path to happiness, and they've repressed their subconscious desire to say raise a family in the countryside instead.
The working out, the meditation and all that shit is not meant for the health benefits. It's so that you'll appreciate that you're slightly healthier in time, or slightly more mindful, etc. Teaching appreciation of the things you have and have achieved.
There is a direct line from the explosion of modern depression to social media (particularly Instagram). Social media is entirely about envy of others, and as the saying goes "envy is the thief of joy".
The point of a happy, fulfilling, depression-less life is not to have everything, it's to have something. Particularly "somethings" that you've worked for.
The book, The Brain's Way of Healing, suggests modest improvements in a (similar) framework result in more hope which turns into a virtous cycle. Sounds like an overlap with your comments on appreciation.
I don't think it'd work or be appropriate if the depression comes from basic missing pieces in their life - a partner (or at least faith they'll find one one day), work they find fulfilling, their day-to-day interactions with others are tolerable etc.
I think depression is the mind and body's way of telling the subject " you have to go a different direction". This is consistent with it deenergizing and demotivating them and making it harder for them to prevail in their goals - this naturally arrests further progress in that failed direction, and sends them looking for answers on how to stop feeling depressed (which if our culture was good in this area, would send them off down different life paths rather than to drugs).
I think it can. That was sort of my point. It’s not about having all of the things you (think that you) want. It’s about having the things you appreciate.
People with depression already take care of themselves, but they can't just go in the Himalayas or south america or change jobs to heal depression.
You're comparing people who have unhealthy habits and telling them to stop drinking or smoking or anything a doctor already says.
Please stop pretending you have some insight on this. Let doctors and therapists do their job.
It's up to you if you want to defend that status quo of "cope with the life you've got - drugging yourself or paying expensive therapists if necessary to do so".
But it's important that others hear that there's another more effective way. That they can simply opt out of that tunnel vision, that they don't have to give in to the fear of disappointing others or "ruining the career" or just plain old fear of the unknown, and change their lives for the better.
Neurotransmitters send signals. The amount of neurotransmitter tells you nothing about what information is actually encoded in those signals. You can transmit happy and sad music using electricity, for example. It seems to me that you can transmit happy and sad thoughts using neurotransmitters. (And of course the brain is much more complicated than a computer, because a computer “just” uses electricity, whereas in the brain some processing happens at each neuron, and signals coming in on one neurotransmitter can cause signals to leave in others.)
I see the term antidepressant as a bit of a misnomer. A drug that inhibits re-uptake of neurotransmitters will amplify the “loudness” of the signals. If you only have negative thoughts, and you take such a drug, your depression could realistically get worse (and this does happen to some people).
If you can get in to a positive feedback loop (e.g. an activity that leads to positive thoughts that lead to more of that activity) and _then_ start amplifying those signals, then these drugs can do wonders.
A computer is a digital device, so it's more like all or nothing. It either powers up or not.
Analog electrical devices however can indeed behave suboptimally without enough electricity.
I know, but a digital device like a PC will either function or not. It wont change how it calculates based on voltage.
It seems to me like saying, I started a fire that burned my house down, but the real cause of the house burning down was too much heat in the house. It’s both true and unhelpful.
Regardless if the serotonine theory of depression is real or not, something having a biological substrate doesn't mean its hardwired or only kickstarted by biological factors.
Levels of hormones, neurotransmitters, and other substances can drop due to many factors, including diet, exercize, sun exposure, vitamin uptake, issues with insulin, thyroid, and so on, but also "psychological" things like trauma response, stress, continued fight or flight mode, etc.
Therapy is useful both in recognizing when your emotional response is disproportional compared to the cause (that is, being "properly" sad or embarrassed vs being depressed), snap out of it and to "learn" to avoid being embarrassed or sad for things outside of your control that could trigger your depression, for example. Something along the same lines of the "there's no spoon" quote from the matrix, but applied to your emotions.
Undervolting doesn't change what I wrote though: the computer will still do what it does as before (with less heat). The PC either gets enough power to power up or not - it's a (pun intended) binary thing.
It's not like it's behavior will change and the OS/apps will do something different because of undervolting.
We feed it alternating current to start with. It can partially power up, the only reason it appears to be working or not is because of all the safeguards designed in - don't power up unless voltage is at least blah, and failsafe cutout refuse to power up because voltage is over say blah*1.05. There's a subset of expect Voltage ranges (eg. 3.3V)[1].
It's literally the first thing the computer does. POST - Power On, Self Test.
[1] https://www.lifewire.com/power-supply-voltage-tolerances-262...
this is how alcohol works on me and why I never drink if I'm not in a good mood. But I'd be careful about generalizing what effects drugs have on people.
For me, by far the most interesting development in mental health is Chris Palmer's work, which asserts that most mental illness is primarily a metabolic issue. If you think that can't be possible, read his 2022 book[1]. Here's a podcast[2].
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02871-w [1] https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Energy-Revolutionary-Understand... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC-sQogfh3Q
Arylcyclohexylamines are awesome.
> Metabolic abnormalities have been identified in the brains and bodies of people with mental illness since the 1940's.
> We have a plethora of scientific research to support this.
> https://twitter.com/ChrisPalmerMD/status/1675801721820332032
I don't think the ketogenic diet is the best intervention, but it's a start. My friend figured out that she's a poor methylator who is harmed by the food fortification folic acid. Adding a methylated form of Vitamin B-9 to her routine flipped a switch for her, from "depressed" to "not-depressed", but the mental health professionals forced on her didn't care.
Dr. Palmer tweeted about his professional colleagues hurting people like my friend with anti-psychotics. While tranquilizers make the patient's symptoms seem better, they also harm the patient's metabolism. Whoops.
This submission about ultra-processed foods was on the front page earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40486504
Exercise is supposedly superior to all pharma antidepressants.
And in the vein of the metabolic stuff, exercise can change your gut bacteria and metabolism on a fundamental level that isn't as fringe, it's pretty well documented.
But it takes like a month to get the train rolling, no pill popping.
Exercise helps with sleep regulation.
Exercise helps with pooping regularly.
Exercise helps moderate appetite, excessive or inability to eat.
A very underrated aspect is it increases your pain threshold. Depressives have tested as less pain tolerant and if the correlation is a factor, exercise helps.
There's probably 20 other aspects.
- Those with biological issues, not getting enough sleep or bad nutrition etc
And the combo of those above which becomes much harder to solve and understand since both feed into each other. People might say x or y helped but it could be anywhere in this spectrum.
Well this one is easy: UBI. My own country has a good experience with income transfer (Brazil, Bolsa Família) even it being so little money.
In 2014 is was 200-300% more women then men. 2020 it was about 500% more women. 2024 and it's pushing up toward 600%. The pandemic was particularly bad on women.
https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/Intel...
The not-a-paradox at all issue has been well studied.
You might say but there are men who are depressed; but the men who are depressed are almost certainly a cause of depressed mothers or spouses whose depression and abuse and depress the man.
>KRYSTAL: Well, the story is more complicated than one neurotransmitter per nerve cell.
It's old news that SSRIs are of low efficacy because it's but 1 of the transmitters. But the take away isn't that we need 50 more SSRI equivalents. It's that perhaps we should help women with their depression. But from my point of view every man who has ever attempted to help has been called sexist, misogynistic, etc.
Out of interest, if a guy is stranded on an island alone, and he's depressed, how do you work out the woman who's actually the depressed one? Do you work out the geographically closest one and say it's her?
The context of the article is depression, the mental state in which requires a health professional to diagnose and help with.
Not the "I feel a little down right now" == depressed. Kind of a weakness is language here.
I never said men can't be depressed. Statistically it's tremendously improbable for a man to be depressed; probably in the error amount of category where differential diagnosis is probably far more valid here. Misdiagnosis is a known major factor for men and depression. Though it's not entirely impossible for a man to be depressed.
You could argue that men are as depressed and some sort of social construct is hiding it. Perhaps the book "I dont want to talk about it" by terrence real. Or you could argue that the current understanding and statistics of depression is wrong.
As for your scenario about a guy depressed on an island. So many questions then arise. Does he perhaps have BPD, cPTSD, etc? Does he have a legitimate diagnosis and what are the steps they've taken to solve his depression in that weekend? How did he end up on the island and still be depressed? IT's a very odd scenario to me sorry.
If cPTSD, it's likely his mother's fault. Doesn't matter geographically where she is.
Dont take me as blaming women or something like that. In fact, it's mostly the opposite. Men are essentially to be blamed here.
I hope one day you'll look back on your youth and realise how foolish you were to let others lead you astray from fairness and reason and into evil like that.
Either that or you've got some complexes yourself from an abusive childhood or whatever, and you're projecting your internal declarations about a particular man onto men generally, wrongfully, since in the real world men absolutely get depressed, not as a side effect of someone else's depression, far fewer people care, and they're far more likely to suicide as a result.
Can somebody point me towards a good review article or textbook to learn about the chemistry of the brain? Any exciting startups working in this field? Or any startups trying to come up with unconventional treatments for mental health problems?
High evidence of diet/gut science creating neurally diverse states. Different ethnic groups react differently to the staple foods that is local to its incumbent (ex. flour, bread, cereal)
Too much focus has been on manipulating the chemistry upstairs (dangerous) but have largely been bandaid solutions (leading to new age psychdellic science)
I'm not saying keto can't help with psychological problems, but we should first acknowledge the other multiple, known causative, elephants in the room.
Keto cuts out things that are bad for the microbiome, but the things it keeps are bad (red meat -> excessive protein and TMAO), and it doesn't feed the bacteria enough (fiber, etc).
Also, keto dieting advice is pretty universal but different people have very different microbiomes, lactose tolerance, etc.
The world outside of the brain "causes" depression.
Sometimes things inside the brain or body (ideas, beliefs, emotions) cause the certain things to happen in the outside world (actions or inaction).
Sometimes these form a cycle: undesired life circumstances cause the brain to become depressive, which causes inaction, which prevents the circumstances from changing.
Sometimes nature/nurture/nutrition play a part in those internal ideas/beliefs/emotions, causing certain people to tend to get in depressive states more than others.
I'm certain 95% of depressions is this, but don't bother coming after me for the last 5%, keep it to yourself.
There's actually a name for the above, it's called "Shit life syndrome" [0]. I don't know why society sees it as acceptable to load someone up with SSRIs when it's environmental factors causing them to feel the way they do. If you're going to drug someone up to make them feel numb to their awful circumstances why not just go the whole way and give them literal happy pills?
Given the scary, common side effects of SSRIs such as suicidal ideation and sexual dysfunction, I don't know how doctors can prescribe these things. It breaks the Hippocratic oath in my opinion.
I have no idea how you come to that conclusion and devalue people, that have the medical need for medication.
The vast majority of people with depression have actual life circumstances that cause it. Whether or not they’re fixable is perhaps another issue. I’d argue that the way we live in modern life itself is often a cause. We’re “meant” to live in tight-knit tribes. How often do I get to see my friends? Once a month, if that? We have a newborn and a toddler. The help of parents living with us would be immense. Our sets of parents are all retired and relatively close, but it’s not the same.
Instead we all live in individual homes, not that that doesn’t have its own advantages like privacy and moderate prevention of infidelity.
Antidepressants are not the solution for all people and all problems, but your solution to just live in tight knight tribes and visit friends is a good start, but that will not help people with depression that is caused by many difference causes: childhood trauma, abuse, …
Therapy AND antidepressants can be a solution. Pills are not sweets, but „just be happy“ is not the solution. You can be severely depressed and have all the things, tight family …
„Whether or not they’re fixable is perhaps another issue.“
So, if the causing issue is not fixable, depressed people have to live with it and not take medication.
I didn’t say they shouldn’t take medication. I was just pointing out how unfortunate it is that so many people think they just have a “chemical imbalance” and that’s all there is to it.
> And so I would say, in response to what’s often asked, which is: If depression isn’t simply an abnormality in serotonin, why would you prescribe an SSRI? And I think the answer is that through serotonin and norepinephrine, we can promote the brain’s capacity for resilience against the adverse effects of stress and depression on the brain.
(Also, every person who ever lived before modernity kind of had a shitty life. Often very literally. Usually horses are involved.)
I'm less certain about peasant life, but I suppose if it's all you've ever known, and everyone you know is in the same boat, then it probably is manageable. I imagine you live for the stories around the fire at night, and the occasional fair / feast / dance. Gruel isn't so bad if it's all you've ever known.
Shit life syndrome is watching the rest of society seemingly have it easy, while you're constantly struggling to get by. It's using your one free hour of the day to watch TV about the super-rich and their yachts. It's having no hope that things will ever get better for yourself or your immediate community.
Dr John Krystal talks about treatment of severe depression with ketamine and related substances, and findings how and why it works
He's cofounder Freedom Biosciences, a Yale Psychiatry spinoff with focus on ketamine, and ketamine versions
https://www.freedombio.co/#page-section-6223c55f53f5a65b449b...
A paper led by John Krystal, in the same vein:
https://doi.org/10.2147/dddt.s221437
Depression is a symptom with multiple underlying pathologies. Ketamine may be effective in treating some of those and not others.
It’s hard for me to accept this idea that it’s just about the brain. In many other areas brain looks like result of what happened before, not the cause. Why this would be different?
How would you train depressed model? Maybe that gives some clues. Maybe it’s more about our environment and our relationship with that? Our actions are feedforward, brain chemistry is feedback.
Anyways, I don’t know anything but I like to ask different questions. And now.. let the downvotes pour in (like usual hah)
> the political turmoil that we’ve been through, the racial issues that we’ve been through in this country, the global wars that are going on. It’s pretty discouraging.
That doesn't really make sense, does it? These issues have been going on for centuries; how does that explain a rising trend?
I'd rather assume that the lack of a framework to understand the harshness of the world is what makes people go crazy.
Maybe only in the major rich developed western countries whose economies peaked in the post-WW2 boom, and then switched to profiting by fleecing their young in order to enrich the existing wealth holders (usually through horrible housing policies), but in most of the former undeveloped and underdeveloped parts of the world, average young people are now richer than their parents or grandparents ever could have dreamed of.
Back in my home country a few decades ago, you would have to wait 10 years to be eligible to buy a commie crapbox car and vacationing would mean 1-2 times/year in some local village a few km away from home, and that's if you were lucky. Now some any young people can buy a car after saving a few months of wages and can afford to go on city breaks abroad in Lisbon, Barcelona or even Asia, something unthinkable to their parents.
I think a lot of westerner from rich countries have forgotten what true depression inducing poverty and suffering actually feels like since 2-3 generations ago, hence why they can afford this luxury of being depressed over petty things and forget how good they actually have it: that happiness comes from having friends, family unit, health, safety, life experiences, and not from having bigger McMansions than your predecessors.
Also, the US is extremely not in a recession and currently has the strongest economic performance in decades or ever. (Yes, for young people. And for poorer people most of all.) It was of course in a recession in 2008 and in 2020.
But, /other English speaking countries are in recessions/, and their housing crises are worse than ours. Part of what's happening is that you're picking those posts up because they're in English and not realizing they're in London.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/millenn...
> I couldn't afford it if I wanted, now.
Sounds like you own it though. So you could afford an equally priced piece of land if you sell that one. Most people's houses are the largest component of their net worth, so it of course looks bad if you leave it out of the calculation.
(This is why blocking housing construction is bad for the elderly though - it makes it hard to downsize so you can't use your housing net worth towards retirement as easily.)
Other approaches which many people do include having your parents help with the down payment or inheriting.
And of course land value tax would solve this. So would upzoning, which would allow 10x more productive use of the land.
The perfect weather kind of makes up for it, I say as going outside for an hour today gave me a sunburn.
California notably.
Also see discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40490610
Of course it's not just housing that has become more expensive – health care and higher education costs have also outpaced inflation for decades.
This one's partly natural for Baumol reasons - basically, having any highly paid industry near you raises the price for any service. But it's also partly the US has many bad ideas intended to create explicit limits on supply in healthcare, like limited residency seats and certificates of need for hospitals.
Also ”makes people go crazy” is a fittingly insulting way to put depression in a comment that’s way off base to begin with.
I still think my reasoning is fairly sound, though.
People are quick to make the least charitable interpretation, or even fabricate an issue entirely in the quest for a fix.
Also they are confronted with having less and less agency and control as information shrinks and standardizes the world.
I was aware shitty things happen in the world, but are rare and it was a nice day outside to hang with my friends and joke around.
But more to my point, I think it marked the end of a certain strain of optimism in world politics.
The ability to be mobile is what makes depression to go out.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK99429/
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/14/health/exercise-treat-depression-wellness/index.html
One had to go to store to buy something to eat then, now food can be delivered to the door.
Here is a recent presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVq4ARIlNVg
and a podcast with Simon Sinek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2hERv5l3H4
As we lowered the cost of publishing, we created a vicious cycle. Segmented audiences mean more targeting is required. More targeting requires appeals to more and more specific, and weird segments, fueled by YouTube and podcasts.
Look at the growth of conspiracy theories. That stuff was the province of truckers and other listeners of overnight AM radio. Now, people have a heartfelt belief in flat earth and chemtrails.
it's a bit akin to Santa Clause and Christmas shopping. shopping areas flood synapses with visual auditive and olfactory impressions because that lowers internal barriers to spending. the whole purpose of the western style pre Christmas frenzy is more sales.
if it was for inner transformation spiritual something, Christmas would look like pre Santa Clause (a guy in a highly carnevalistic red suit but I digress). pre coca cola Santa Clause, Christmas was a time of fasting, one candle, then two, then three, then four, and the family sitting together and _creating_ gifts for each other.
in the very same vein, social media are the pipe dream of 24/7 advertisement flooding. to increase sales. and fun it works for influencing elections, too!
even if social media (not: social networks!) were innocent, those placing targeted content for political or financial profit or both are not. and social media is the means they use.
I'll note this article mentions doctors were also reluctant to admit they didn't know why drugs work. They similarly provided vague theories.
Edit: spelling
I think this is exactly it. And I personally think this and the general decline in mental resilience we see in society is strongly correlated with decline in religion which (for better or for worse, depending on the religion I suppose) does provide exactly such a framework for dealing with the challenges of life with a more "eternal" perspective (i.e. death is not the end, life's challenges are temporary, God has a plan for you, etc).
Explain China, which didn't face any similar problems until this same generation, despite having no religion.
Or how about Japan until recently?
Or any of the ex-Soviet countries.
Something is changing in the world, and it is happening across geographic and cultural boundaries.
Now, it's easier to find that there's lots of things happening across the entire world, so it's more likely to feel that 'everything's turning to shit.'
I think basically this is just a visibility issue: the problems always existed, we just used to accept them as inevitable. We just demand more of life today, and actually pay attention, and that's a good thing.
There was a notion in the past that suffering was normal, and unusual behavior that very distressed people exhibit was just people being people. Like if you survived hunger in the great depression and a few decades later during boom times you still hid money in the seat cushion and wore rags and and went into fits when someone suggested you ought to spend the money you saved a bit more for your own good, no one thought that that was a form of suffering a doctor should help with. Not for poor people anyway. Or if you had been assaulted a woman who was assaulted by their husband and couldn't tell anyone about it, or if you were harmed by the clergy, or if you're a veteran who has a breakdown every time a loud noise happens, and all these other scenarios. Any unusual response to all that wasn't seen as a medical problem to be named and treated at a mass scale, I personally think because learning more about these things medically and making societal adjustments to prevent these things from happening required that society face some extremely uncomfortable truths, which did not happen easily or on its own.
And in fact I feel like the opposite even happened: I read, for example, about how shell shock was purposely not considered a real medical issue in WWI in the UK, to be able to return soldiers to the front as fast as possible even though more than a quarter of soldiers in the hospital were considered shell shocked. Eventually, the diagnosis was banned by the brits. Official shell shock rate at 0%. If you don't look, there's no problem, right?
So instead it was said that there's nothing wrong with you, you just need some rest. And if you had a really severe case and were not better, you were just weak or a coward, and you need to man up and get back out there. Then you get a court martial or electric shocks. It's no wonder that people pretended that they had nothing wrong with them - nothing good happened otherwise anyway. And so no wonder it took so long for society at large to accept this as a problem.
So now we finally have a more accurate pulse on these types of problems, and we see that unsurprisingly they rise as people have problems in their lives. Makes perfect sense to me.
> I'd rather assume that the lack of a framework to understand the harshness of the world is what makes people go crazy.
The framework is realism: it is very much that people do understand that the world is harsh and that hurts you, but then you now get to recognize that it hurt you and do something about it maybe.
The world has always been filled with negativity, but for most of history, most people only really knew what was around them. Now people are online more than ever before, which means they are exposed to more non-local content than ever before. People seek out engaging content, and negativity, especially fear, turns out to be particularly attention-grabbing due to human instinct formed through natural selection.
You can blame currently social media (Facebook, Tiktok, etc.) on this. But I believe even if it were replaced by the Fediverse and IRC, the current generation would still form a more negative outlook than previous ones. It's human nature to seek out negative content, so an algorithm would need to hide this content to prevent people from finding it.
Personally I still believe it's a good thing overall that people know about bad things in the world. I think it's better than the alternative, where most people are blissful and ignorant, and other people suffer with no-one to save or support them. Some negativity is important: just enough to motivate the feeler to do something and make a positive impact on the world.
I agree that part of a solution is "a framework to understand the harshness of the world". The world has a lot of bad but it also has a lot of good, and the massive amount of exposure is only an issue because negativity affects people and grabs their attention more than positivity. It would help people to understand this, so when they catch themselves hyper-focusing on something negative, they can take a step back and realize that e.g. it only affects a small percentage of the population.
Maintaining mental health requires the ability to balance these skills and perspectives.
Maybe at college level there is a bit of 'If you aren't vocal about issue x, you're an uncaring person'? I don't see it amongst peers at 40-50yo that you would be considered callous to not obsess over a given issue. (I'm accounting for some level of exaggeration with "obsess" and assume it would mean making public comments, donating, protesting, etc?)
That's kinda the point, they are endless. I have some peers that are continually in a state of distress, concern, and preoccupation. If you are inclined to fixate on these things, you wont ever run out of topics. I have serveral friends in their 30's who will be at a beautiful summer BBQ with friends and be unhappily fixated on negative news of police violence, foreign wars, or other things happening thousands of miles away. Im not saying paying attention to these things is bad, but the inability to stop and smell the proverbial roses is.
In my opinion, the phenomenon is more pronounced with younger generations, and also mellows somewhat with age. I think cranking out a kid or two certainly helps draw ones attention to the "here and now".
Sure, people need to use resiliency skills to cope with the stresses of life. Often times, this is an important part of what therapy for depressed people is trying to achieve.
But this isn't to say that there isn't a constellation of causes in recent decades and years that cause the world to be particularly stressful, especially for young people. It also isn't to say that we should dismiss what is occurring in the world today as "the same old stuff" without acknowledging that it may actually have unique properties worth understanding. Off the top of my head: world population is at an all-time high, global warming is becoming increasingly understood, it is increasingly acknowledged that we can no longer simply extract unlimited resources from the earth to solve all problems, the Internet has changed the way the world works that seems to speed everything up: communication, changes within social groups, larger societal shifts, economic change, etc.
But how does one measure the impact of recent changes, such as the rise of the internet? Did the invention of the crossbow, the invention of money, of language, of the wheel, not also impact our lives in dramatic ways?
World population has almost constantly been at an all-time high, because it is mostly increasing.
It sure may feel different this time, but if you read the Book of Revelation, or consider 14th century pandemics, our current situation looks like child's play to me.
So maybe it's becoming harder for the young to avoid something they don't want, or obtain something they want, and this is the fundamental reason behind rising rates of depression.
The noise of negativity is both exaggerated and amplified while the sights of positivity are both downplayed and silenced by media, both mainstream/commercial and social media.
There's a reason terms like "doomscrolling" came to be. Reducing exposure to the media can go a long way to improving mental health if someone is overexposed.
So if we assume that negative and positive is amplified equally, and there are even amounts of each, the end result will be pretty negative.
And while this was probably always true, the volume was probably low enough that the connection to your family and tribe were more dominant. Now, the volume from the internet might be more dominant.
This is a false assumption, at least with regards to mainstream/commercial media. Positive news simply doesn't grab as many eyeballs as negative news, so they are strongly incentivized to bias towards negativity.
As for social media, while the platforms themselves don't have as strong of incentives (they still do) it's easy to see that more people respond to negativity than positivity.
We even see this outside of the media. For example in elections, it is far more effective to go and ruthlessly attack your opponents than be positive about yourself because people respond better to negativity. Also reviews; nobody writes positive reviews, everyone writes negative reviews.
The moral is humans are hardwired to ignore positivity, because positive things are supposed to happen and thus not worth caring about. Nobody cares that thousands of airliners flew safely on a given day (positive), everyone cares that one airliner out of thousands happened to have an issue (negative).
As a data point, I feel like this. I'm excited about going to work on Tuesday. I'm also excited about not going to work tomorrow. There is a lot of pain and suffering in the world. Watching the 2024 campaign unfold is maddening and scary. But I still look forward to every day. I think depression is something different than merely realizing that society has a lot it needs to work on. That's just my perspective, though, and there are many others; all equally valid.
Like a kid that's playing way too much <insert popular game here> having their parents take it away might make them annoyed and irate for a while, but they ultimately won't be worse for wear. Meanwhile take drinks away from an alcoholic and they will literally die from withdrawal symptoms.
As such you also have the natural kind of depression that's being caused by outside circumstances which is solvable by altering them. Then you have the type where the brain gets stuck in that same state constantly because of some internal chemical imbalance which can't be resolved without medication.
None of this is new.
Almost everything people believe about "funding wars" is false and comes from believing headlines written to make you angry. (For instance, those are often humanitarian funds, or the other people are paying us, or the bill they're thinking of got vetoed. Spending on the MIC has actually continually gone down over time as % GDP.)
(It tastes bad, you'll gain water weight, and you may get false positives for kidney disease on tests.)
It's very understandable that people should reach out for the many useful resources online first.
You should talk to a dietician or a specialist. But not any old doctor.
Some people clearly recover from depression, solely through lifestyle changes.
For instance, see Bing Sidney or Golden Gate Claude reacting to themselves answering questions incorrectly. It gives them "anxiety", likely caused by the answers being out of distribution since external factors messed with them.
Humans are not buttons: one can depress a button, but a human can be oppressed.