>The fact that suicide rates have not changed in response to changes in medical technology and other ways of life is astounding. Because depression is a diseas

>The fact that suicide rates have not changed in response to changes in medical technology and other ways of life is astounding. Because depression is a disease, its not just feeling blue because something happened to you and as such it probably has has the same distribution since the early days of humanity. Its a disease with no good treatments so we can expect the same mortality rate. I think handwringing over people having easier lives but still killing themselves is fairly meaningless, and frankly, more than a little shaming. Depression affects people almost randomly. Wealthy people with easy lives kill themselves just as readily as poor people with harder lives. You can't will yourself out of depression because things are easy for you. The disease, unfortunately, doesn't work that way. I have major depression. Its not caused by some negative life events or my parents not loving me or anything like that. Its clearly something I was born with or rapidly developed when I was just a child. I think its dangerous to talk about depression as not being a disease of the brain and as something that emerges from negative life events. Those things can certainly make it worse, but depression is a disease like any other, not a mood.