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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

60 years ago you might have ended up in a psychiatric hospital without getting effective treatment, mental health issues were stigmatized and the incentive to seek out help was low. People used to just live a miserable life with their issues.

Nowadays knowledge about mental health issues is widespread in the population, somewhat normalized and leading to people seeking help.

I consider it realistic that depression did not actually increase, its just more people showing up in the statistics.

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I 100% believe there is such an effect, and that it’s confounding the measurement of population level changes. But I want to point out that the existence of such an effect is not really evidence _against_ the changes, it’s just another confounder. Your wording is very accurate — you “consider it realistic that depression did not increase”, ie it is possible that depression didn’t increase. But whether depression actually did increase or actually didn’t, is not possible to determine from these numbers directly. Without controlling for confounders and doing some fun statistics, we largely just have opinions

One anecdote. I had a friend who went from healthy to almost unable to walk through a post viral 'chronic fatigue' type thing. She couldn't really work but chronic fatigue wasn't a recognised condition for benefits so had to claim depression to get state assistance. (Ireland)

Depression is related to biological health of the brain. People are exercising less leading to worse biological health of the brain. So you’d expect depression to be increasing.

Exactly. See also statistics for "how many people are left-handed". The incidence of left-handedness didn't go up; acceptance of it went up, and people stopped trying to force other people to hide/mask it.

It is also possible that depression itself is more widespread. But it seems exceedingly likely that acceptance, willingness to talk about it, and general understanding that the correct answer to "chemical imbalance in the brain" is not "cheer up!", have improved substantially.

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