A map of depression rates around the world
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
But instead, they decided to have a scale between red and blue, which goes through purple if it's an admixture of the two colors. But then they would just have had a few colors with more or less the sale lightness and saturation, but different hues, and there's really no intuitive reason why purple should be perceived as "more" or "less" than blue. So instead they made a three-point scale going from red to white and then to blue (look at the pink and light blue colors next to the center to see that this is what they did); except that now white looks like "empty", and redder and bluer colors look increasingle "full", except in opposite directions: the only situation where this makes sense is when you have relative numbers, and white is zero, red is positive and blue is negative. But then it would look like Iran has lots of depression, Brazil has no depression, and Australia has... negative depression?
They could tell that something looked wrong, but what? "A-ha! Of course!" - thought the graphic designer - "a mix of red and blue is purple, not white!" So he replaced the white in the middle cell with purple, leaving the neighboring pinks and light blues unchanged. So now the scale goes "red, red but a little whiter, white but a little redder, PURPLE, white but a little bluer, blue but a little whiter, blue", and nothing makes sense. Good job!
Love this comment from the article
"I'm sure we've got high quality, nationally representative data out of the Congo."
Furthermore, if you don't believe this particular studies' findings of depression rates, I would invite you to look into the decades of research into suicide rates, depression or just the flow of immigrants from the countries in the red in the map to those in the blue as a proxy for overall happiness and perceived life opportunities, and to draw your own conclusions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
Where you can find a good mix of 'blue' countries such as US, Japan, India, Russia, Norway, China and Sweden. So it doesn't tell me THAT much unfortunately.
Depression is not something (as far as the current state of knowledge goes) that can be completely eradicated. The study was about comparing depression rates globally. In that context, taking the average (or mean, but let's assume it's distributed normally) depression rate as the 'baseline' (i.e., the middle) is not that strange. This way, the map shows not absolute depression rates, but rather the position of each country relative to the baseline value. Which is, I think, what people are most interested in - if you tell me 'country xyz has a depression rate of 2%', most people have no idea. The whole study is not about absolute depression rates, but about rates relative to other countries.
I'd even go as far as defending the purple. Remember, cartography is not about choosing color according to a rigid logical scheme, it's about conveying information. Now, I think these colors convey the message of which areas in the world have the highest depression rates, and which ones the lowest, quite well. If white would have been left in as the color for countries with baseline values, those white blobs would have been distracting and would have looked as if no data was available. Instead, what we have is a map that shows in a visually uninterrupted way the rate of depression relative to the baseline, with intensity increasing where you go further away from the baseline.
You proposal for using white to red would be OK if it were about showing absolute depression rates, but that's a far less interesting way of looking at the data.
To go with your defense, it should grade from red to purple between the highest point and the mean, and blue to purple between the lowest point and the mean.
Cartography is not about conceptual consistency, it's about conveying information. I challenge you to make a map that conveys the message better than the choices made in the map in the OP (apart from subjective wah wah like 'blue is democrats' as was laughably brought up elsewhere in this thread).
Or maybe I just don't understand how cartography works, but something about that still seems off.
Is depression diagnoses really so objective that we can not only compare diagnosis rates across the country, but across the world? Sort of like comparing how good the pizza is in countries across the world, is it not?
It doesn't seem like this analysis holds much value, if any.
Complete garbage... Favorite snippets: " The paper further cautions that reliable depression surveys don’t even exist for some low-income countries -- a common issue with global studies -- forcing the researchers to come up with their own estimates based on statistical regression models."
My interpretation: "There was no data so we guessed".
Terrible.
India is is similar. A person who goes to a therapist is a mad person.
It's like those reports on how the salarymen work these long and crazy hours and are ready to throw themselves off a building any minute but it's massively overblown.
Virtually everything is overblown or sensationalized about Japan. It reminds me of those herbivore men and "declining sex" articles that popped up recently. Writers like to write about some obscure sub-culture or push some misleading statistic and then write about it as if it applies the entire country.
I lived there for 14 months and it wasn't what I expected at all. I was prepared for massive culture shock but it just never happened. There was some, but no more than one would experience on an extended vacation. Japan, in my experience, is just like anywhere else.
I was bounced around a bit, but most of my time was spent in Tokyo, Sapporo and in Hachinohe.
Yes & no, I actually worked for several companies as a consultant. Only one of them I would consider "traditional" but I didn't spend much time interacting with them. I was more of a go-between.
To convey an anecdote, on several occasions I was told by fairly well-traveled people that the Eastern regions of Ukraine were the most miserable place they'd been to in Europe.
I agree with you - I don't understand how they got such a low rate for their map.
NHS data for 2010-2011 gives 4.7 million people.
For a population of about 60 million that's 7.8%.
I don't understand why people in this thread are so keen on trying to hold on to the position that depression in the West is high compared to other places, or even how they get to this position in the first place. To me it's quite self-evident that living in constant fear of being shot, blown up or just starving to death is more depressing than having to go through the agony of standing in traffic an hour before you can go home and eat a warm meal before falling asleep in front of the tv (to just name an example of what I've heard people as reasons on why life in the West is so 'stressing' and 'depressing').
It seems reasonable to complain that the diagram is confusing when it gives a rate of 4% for the UK, when UK NHS figures give higher rates.
> I don't understand why people in this thread are so keen on trying to hold on to the position that depression in the West is high compared to other places
I don't think that's happened in this particular sub-thread. One reason it happens is that some countries have better diagnosis than others. (Rates may be higher in developing nations, but cases are undiagnosed.)
> To me it's quite self-evident that living in constant fear of being shot, blown up or just starving to death is more depressing than having to go through the agony of standing in traffic an hour before you can go home and eat a warm meal before falling asleep in front of the tv (to just name an example of what I've heard people as reasons on why life in the West is so 'stressing' and 'depressing').
That manages to be fantastically ignorant of developing nations and mental illness.
EDIT: Maybe I'm being stupid but I can't find that map in the linked research. I go to figures and scroll through. http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
First of all, it violates the "rainbow map" rule, in that a wide spectrum of color is used to graph what is basically a very simple continuum: more depression vs. less depression.
http://eagereyes.org/basics/rainbow-color-map
Second of all, and most egregiously, it uses the most confusing color scheme possible. At least in America, which is the WaPo's main audience, the color blue is widely used to describe "depression" ('feeling the blues'). While red is often used to describe a dangerous or very intense situation...it's not really appropriate here, as red is also used for "passion", which is not mutually exclusive to depression, but is not usually associated with it either.
And the purple, rather than acting as a middle ground between "more" and "less" depression, comes off as its own weird symbolism.
And why the f-ck is "gray" in between blue and purple?
And of course, in America (and especially among the audience that the Washington Post serves), red and blue often indicate political thought.
It's hard to think of how this map could be any more confusing, even without getting into the discussion of how country/state-color maps greatly distort the quantities involved.
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That said, I was surprised to see that the United States ranked on the low side...my intuition was that well-off countries had higher rates of reported and diagnosed depression (first world problems and all that). But I had to stare at the map for quite awhile to make sure I was reading it right...
Edit: Also, this stuck out:
> The most depressed country is Afghanistan, where more than one in five people suffer from the disorder. The least depressed is Japan, with a diagnosed rate of less than 2.5 percent.
I know Japanese culture has the propensity to be greatly distorted by outside observers...but how is it that a country that has among the highest suicide rates in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan) also happens to have the lowest rates of depression? I mean, it's certainly mathematically possible (e.g. clinically depressed Japanese, few as they are, are also at the extreme edges of depression, or, Japanese suicides are committed for reasons other than depression)...it's just a bit unexpected.
If more depressed people commit suicide, then there's fewer depressed people showing up in the stats, right?
In general, 86% of people in the Netherlands say they have more positive experiences in an average day (feelings of rest, pride in accomplishment, enjoyment, etc) than negative ones (pain, worry, sadness, boredom, etc), more than the OECD average of 80%.
Perhaps it's a case of better access to health services, so more people in the Netherlands are able to be diagnosed and treated with depression whereas countries with poor health services and high levels of depression are ultimately under-reported?
[1] http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/netherlands/
Maybe their adulthood is comparatively worse because of their great childhood.
Where can we downvote? ;)