6 ms·

> but it seems most cases aren't that I like to think this also, but is it actually true? Has anyone done that survey?

• Bartweiss 10y ago
  Well, we can use the income result as a proxy. 18% of lowest-income adults were depressed, 3.7% of highest-income adults. That doesn't preclude 'medical' depression, but it implies that it's at least mediated by circumstances, which is an interesting place to start.
  • GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
    Seems more probable that you have the cause and effect backwards. Being affected by depression prevents people from functioning well enough to work in a high income profession.
    • psyc 10y ago
      Seems even more probable that the controversy exists because it's a two-way feedback effect.
    • Bartweiss 10y ago
      "More probable" feels like a claim that requires evidence, otherwise we're telling just-so stories. I certainly think this is bidirectional, and it probably has some common-cause issues too (e.g. if your parents are too depressed to earn high incomes, you're getting an economics-genetics double whammy). More to the point, though, your narrative is about 'medical' depression causing low incomes. Mine is about low incomes causing 'non-medical' depression, so realistically we're talking about different things. I'm sure they overlap, but I'm also confident that there's a difference between depression from "good life, but serotonin imbalance or immune response or whatever" and "lost my job, lost my house, lost a family member". Most depression screens don't distinguish "depression because depression" from "depression because my life is shitty", and it's not at all clear that anti-depressants are more effective in one case than the other. So my main observation here is that the high incidence at low income could be about untreated medical issues, but it could also be about a failure to differentiate medical from situational responses.
• randomgyatwork 10y ago
  Seems like it would be hard to determine, but also, its against the interests of the drug companies that are selling the drugs. In addition, if it was publicly funded, how would we 'deal' with the conclusions?
  • cujo 10y ago
    I'm just pointing out that this is basically a comfortable way of looking at depression. I WANT to believe that most people on anti-depressants are just going through some shit rather than having something that needs medication for treatment. I WANT that, but I have no actual reason to believe it. Sounds like you don't have any real evidence either.
    • zepto 10y ago
      Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
• jmde 10y ago
  Without meaning to sound antagonistic, you're framing the question in the wrong way. Research suggests depression is more like blood pressure, varying continuously in the population. There really isn't a clear line between depression-as-illness and other varieties of depression, only an increasing risk of problems as depression increases. So in one sense, the research does support what you're asking, in that most people who experience depression aren't extremely depressed. But that's sort of tautologically true, in that if you have a normal distribution, most people won't be at the extreme by definition. It's difficult to approach these things at a deeper level that I think you're getting at, which is "are most people who are depressed not seriously impaired by their depression" or something along those lines. That's harder to answer because it depends on defining "seriously impaired" which depends on sociological trends and so forth and so on.