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Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study
- chmod775 7y agoSomething that isn't immediately clear to me is whether they accounted for the causes of air pollution. If not this is like observing that there are a lot of loud bangs in warzones and concluding loud noises kill people, even though they are at best just a side effect of the actual causes.
- mikelyons 7y agoI don't know if this really answers your question, but seems to be relevant: > The particle pollution analysed in the study is produced by burning fossil fuels in vehicles, homes and industry.
- IanSanders 7y agoI'm questioning this as well. Air pollution is almost always an attribute of big cities, which mostly imply certain lifestyle. For example, living in concrete box for most of one's life is new to our species.
- JamesBarney 7y agoAlso air pollution is usually highest near freeways and plants which are also notoriously poorer areas.
- bransonf 7y agoThe causal relationship seems like a stretch here. I highly doubt reducing air pollution will cure anyone’s depression. That said, it has other value in signally regions of high air pollution are regions of higher proportional depression. Areas of high pollution are less desirable to live in. If you live right next to a highway, garbage dump or power plant, your property value is going to be lower. (I must admit, I’m taking a US-centric perspective here) With that in mind, you could just as easily conclude that living in poorer regions causes depression. Anyone who thinks curing depression is as simple as cleaning up the air is oversimplifying a much more complicated relationship.
- galangalalgol 7y agoDepression has many causes. Some of them are super simple. Loss of a loved one. Or a lack of manganese. Why is it surprising that breathing things other than air might ne depressing?
- scythe 7y ago>The causal relationship seems like a stretch here. For context, particles from PM2.5 can and apparently do enter the brain: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/05/toxic-air-pollution-particles-found-in-human-brains-links-alzheimers https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/05/toxic-ai...
- ptah 7y ago> If you live right next to a highway, garbage dump or power plant In cities like London most of the city is like that. probably same as L.A. or New york, the whole place is next to a highway + powerplant + garbage dump
- coconut_crab 7y agoThere are many factors at work here but I am sure being forced to stay indoor is depressive as hell. The city where I live has been in constant smog with AQI in the range of 200~300* and every outdoor activities are stopped, I can't even talk a walk around the nearby lakes to relieve my stress. * the air is terrible already and the government is going to build more coal plants, powered by the 'cleanest coal' approved by the POTUS, sigh. Instead of one nuclear power plant now we have four coal plants instead, great.
- yalok 7y agoWhat city & country is this?
- hnuser123456 7y agoPOTUS = prez of US
- hyfgfh 7y agohttps://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- im3w1l 7y ago> The results show strong correlations, but research that would prove a causal link is difficult because ethical experiments cannot deliberately expose people to harm. This is kind of my hobby horse: you don't need to subject people to harm to test causuality. You can do the opposite: Remove harm and see what happens. Maybe give people free HVAC upgrades to filter more particles.
- allovernow 7y agoIt's a lot harder to test without administering the subject in question because there are far more variables to control than (mostly) just A/B. HVAC may confound the study by removing the actual responsible substances, for example, if "air pollution" is not solely the cause.
- hyperpallium 7y agoIsn't removing the "actual responsible substances" from the air removing air pollutants?
- frank_nitti 7y agoSemantically, yes. But I assume they are referring to the what people would consider the usual suspects for "big city" pollution, i.e. exhaust, aerosols.
- wongarsu 7y ago"HEPA filters reduce depression and suicide rate" might not be quite the causality we are looking for, but it would be a big stepping stone in addition to being a very useful result on its own.
- close04 7y agoThe trick is to adjust only the parameter you were targeting. Say you also change temperature and humidity and they are the real culprits, or big contributors. This is why the unethical method would be more precise because conceivably it's easier to introduce specific pollutants in the experiment. Of course this would be irresponsible so I'm hoping that by combining data from multiple studies and getting a better grip on how to control the test environment to selectively adjust (remove) only the studied parameters (pollutants) we can still get a good idea of what's happening.
- sn41 7y agoI live in Northern India which has heavy air pollution. I recently bought an air purifier. Just the difference in the quality of sleep is amazing. And it is not a placebo effect. The filters are already visibly grimy. The PM 2.5 consistently now is around mid 20s down from around 180-190. I would recommend it to all in North India who can afford it, esp households with small children.
- saagarjha 7y ago> And it is not a placebo effect. How do you know?
- opportune 7y agoYou do not deserve the downvotes. Just because the purifier takes particulates out of the air doesn’t mean the effects on humans isn’t placebo
- mc3 7y agoThis seems ripe for placebo. Installing purifier and indeed measuring lower PM, means naturally you feel less worried and more relaxed!
- coldtea 7y agoOn the other hand, measuring lower PM is indeed a quantifiable metric.
- mc3 7y agoYeah it depends what question you are trying to answer: 1. Does my air purifier filter out PM2.5? or 2. Dos lower PM2.5 make me sleep better? For #1 there is no placebo effect (there is no human element!)
- AstralStorm 7y agoIt's time to hire someone to maybe break the filter somewhen for a duration. And hack the meter to report invalid data.
- mkhpalm 7y agoWouldn't a cleaner observation be: "depression and suicide linked to the largest cities in new global study"?
- Noumenon72 7y agoThe cleanest observation would be Everything is Correlated (https://www.gwern.net/Causality https://www.gwern.net/Causality) and correlation is not a productive way of investigating the world.
- icandoit 7y agoCorrelation is all we have to go on mostly. If A causes B and B causes C then we can only say that A and C are correlated. If the average chain of causality is 4 long then the Bs outnumber the As and Cs. Inductive (observation) evidence is more available than deductive (purely logical) evidence. Why limit yourself to only deductive evidence? I don't have to resort to a chemistry lesson to convince you that drinking bleach would be very harmful, right? Can't I merely show you photos of bleach-bellied-corpses?
- tstrimple 7y agoNot sure how to reconcile this with the fact that suicide rates in rural areas of the US far exceed suicide rates in urban areas. Do the availability of guns in rural areas really offset this effect that much?
- sitharus 7y agoThere are multiple factors that lead to suicide. This study shows air pollution is one, but there are others that lead to an elevated suicide rate in rural areas of the US.
- porknubbins 7y agoIn NYC the overall pm 2.5 is really low, usually in the teens, so unless you live under a highway with your windows open its likely too little to affect suicide rates. There are probably other air pollutants in NYC but that could be true of rural areas working in agriculture/heavy industry as well. I imagine many US big cities follow this pattern except for a few unlucky places.
- taneq 7y agoHighly polluted cities and rural US share another feature: Poor people who feel trapped with little prospect of improving their lot.
- chippy 7y agoIn the UK there was a study on social isolation comparing rural and urban people to evaluate the assumption that people in "isolated" rural areas are lonely. It found the reverse - that people in urban areas are more socially isolated. https://www.co-operative.coop/campaigning/loneliness https://www.co-operative.coop/campaigning/loneliness "The report briefly mentions the ‘rurality factor’ as presenting greater barriers to connection, with rural areas having fewer and more expensive support services such as transport links. However, it goes on to suggest that ‘rural communities were felt to be less closed off than their urban counterparts’, with rural participants more likely to ask how people are, or stop for chats."
- squish78 7y agoEconomic disenfranchisement and the decimation of small farms
- aaron695 7y agoThis article is a dumpster fire, read to actual journal article - DOI: 10.1289/EHP4595 "DISCUSSION: Our findings support the hypothesis of an association between long-term PM2:5 exposure and depression, as well as supporting hypotheses of possible associations between long-term PM2:5 exposure and anxiety and between short-term PM10 exposure and suicide. The limited literature and methodological challenges in this field, including heterogeneous outcome definitions, exposure assessment, and residual confounding, suggest further high-quality studies are warranted to investigate potentially causal associations between air pollution and poor mental health." Don't really get the point, not really sure the journal is P hacking with PM10 being suicide and PM2.5 being depression but PM2.5/10 gives you cancer's which is depressing, why wouldn't you clean your air?
- mahgnous 7y agoSure lets just blame everything other than the actual problem.
- igor47 7y agoplug: if you're interested in air quality issues, we're hiring at Aclima. ping me at igor at aclima.io. we're deploying a distributed sensor grid to get actionable air-quality intelligence around the world, which we believe can motivate regulators to act, and motivate citizens to bug their regulators. we're looking for folks interested in: * data engineering * firmware and IoT platforms * full-stack and internal tooling * data scientists and other kinds of scientists interested in data, air quality, and atmospheric/environmental modeling
- vonnik 7y agoFwiw, Scott Alexander wrote a couple great articles about depression in 2017: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/12/toward-a-predictive-theory-of-depression/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/12/toward-a-predictive-th... https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/13/what-is-depression-anyway-the-synapse-hypothesis/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/13/what-is-depression-any... The first tries to fit it into a predictive processing framework, the second rounds up a variety of findings, including correlation with inflammation and treatment with ketamine.
- aszantu 7y agoalso: look into anti nutrients, some of the depression might just be nutrient deficiency. Can be tested by fasting for 4 days.
- IanSanders 7y agoIf that's the case, how would fasting work? Wouldn't it just reliably deprive you from nutrients hence give you a depression?
- aszantu 7y agoI don't know why, but there are a lot of people where fasting works for depression. Then there are ways of eating which seem to have an effect like low fodmaps. Etc.
- icandoit 7y agoBeing the kind of person that is willing to experiment to solve their problems is better than being a person that is miserable and changes nothing. A random walk may not get you out a bad situation, but staying put is strictly worse less likely to get you out. What would a reinforcement learning agent do?
- IanSanders 7y agoI'm just trying to understand the connection between >some of the depression might just be nutrient deficiency. >Can be tested by fasting for 4 days
- aszantu 7y agoanti nutrients causing inflammation(body uses nutrients to fight inflammation), leaving them out calms the inflammation and the body can use the nutrients it has better. Btw. supplementing zinc and magnesium seems to help ppl with depression. Lectins(all seeds) as in beans, nuts, corn and wheat are binding to iron and zinc, I forgot what was with the magnesium, but it played a role as well...
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoOh wow, this totally. My wife had a rough time in Beijing during long stretches of bad air, and I knew other people whose moods would visibly change during those times. The suicide aspect I’m not sure of, but many people I knew had the option of leaving and did.
- allovernow 7y agoThe authors admit there is no causal relationship established between pollutants and depression. It's pure correlation. I don't understand how nebulous studies like this even get published. Still very convenient that we have yet another reason to abandon fossil fuels. Almost starting to feel like a trendy scapegoat and honestly an irrelevant comment given the total uncertainty behind the relationship. But the Guardian made clear it's bias when it advertised for funding with a giant banner claiming "Trump must be impeached.". This isn't objective, fact based journalism, it's propagandist advocacy journalism.
- stakhanov 7y agoI can't find the link to the actual study. What I'd like to know is whether there was any research into the actual causal relationships (such as the other study that was linked with pollution particles found in brains), or if it was just statistical correlation between places with high pollution and places with high levels of depression and suicide. If the latter, it could well be a spurious correlation (e.g. pollution happens in big cities, people in big cities tend to have more stressful jobs, stressful jobs cause burnout and depression...)
- smcleod 7y agohttps://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP4595 https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP4595
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- boyadjian 7y agoAir pollution linked to overpopulation. Overpopulation linked to high birth rates. So, in conclusion : Depression and suicide linked to high birth rates
- cjslep 7y agoYou didn't go far enough: Air pollution linked to overpopulation. Overpopulation linked to high birth rates. High birth rates linked to sex. So in conclusion: Celibacy cures depression and suicide. Of course, why stop there? We could keep going deeper.
- QuamStiver 7y agoNothing was more depressing than growing up in LA in the 1970s, lungs hurting, and 30% of PE classes cancelled because of smog. I remember looking at the sickly yellow light casting this disgusting puce sheen on the asphalt. The city was all I knew, and I hated it. Once a year we would go up to the Eastern Sierra and I felt released, natural, like this was how the world should be. Returning home to the smog and traffic was a depressogenic gutpunch.
- geomark 7y agoI didn't grow up there during that time, but moved there in the late 70's. There were indeed many smoggy days. But surprisingly it got much better after about 10 years. I assume it was a result of stricter regulations. These days the air quality in the LA area is generally pretty good, with historical PM2.5 data showing "green" most of the time http://aqicn.org/city/los-angeles/ http://aqicn.org/city/los-angeles/
- ainiriand 7y agoThe more we look at the data the more it seems that if we want to save lives we have to replace coal plants with nuclear plants.
- Craighead 7y agoOr skip to renewables that don't have replacement parts measured in half life
- aalleavitch 7y agoI'm pretty confident that depression is not a result of air pollution, but rather that both air pollution and depression are results of industrialization. The problem is not chemical. The problem is how we live.
- sooheon 7y agoWhat gives you this certainty?
- tomrod 7y agoBayesian priors, I reckon.
- sooheon 7y agoThis is begging the question, which priors are strong enough to merit “certainty” in the face of opposing evidence?
- tomrod 7y agoFair critique, as the GP didn't say certainty but my response was pre-supposed. I would say that we don't have a well-founded, commonly known model linking air pollution and depression. However their confounding experience through poverty is accepted and easily understood.
- sooheon 7y agoMy bad, I read “confidence” and put “certainty” in their mouth. I can agree other already understood factors exist, and may confound the problem. But confounding != negation. And the health effects of air pollution are well understood and bad enough that denying the link from pollution -> depression is equivalent to denying link from bad health -> depression.
- tomrod 7y ago
- grandinj 7y agoOh more likely, both of them are correlated with a third variable (i.e. confounding) which is most likely living in a dense city
- conjectures 7y agoThis. Unless the Guardian is doing a big disservice to the underlying material, this sounds like sloppy science.
- motbus4 7y agoSurely not because industry-based jobs let people depressed and surely not because places with industries have been polluting air more than other places. Sure....
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- crashhacker 7y agoa lot of it is also linked to fear-mongering on insufficient data.
- adam0c 7y agoI'm all for cutting all pollution but is this just not a long shot to try link the two and get more results faster. linking it to more health issues and deaths
- zby 7y ago"Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation: Causal Nets Cause Common Confounding" https://www.gwern.net/Causality https://www.gwern.net/Causality - that should be a required reading.
- Rowern 7y agoSo much this.
- nashashmi 7y agoWhat counts as air pollution? Smog? Sulfur dioxide?
- higeyuki 7y agoQuite a simple concept, it's particulate matter in the air, the greater the density the worse the effect on humans, animals, and ecology. It would be difficult to measure the effect of one specific particulate's effect. Particle pollution — also called particulate matter (PM) — is made up of particles (tiny pieces) of solids or liquids that are in the air. These particles may include: Dust Dirt Soot Smoke Drops of liquid Some particles are big enough (or appear dark enough) to see — for example, you can often see smoke in the air. Others are so small that you can’t see them in the air. https://www.cdc.gov/air/particulate_matter.html https://www.cdc.gov/air/particulate_matter.html What Are People Dying of on High Air Pollution Days? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935184710048 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139... "The air pollution disasters in London in 1952, the Meuse valley in 1930, and in Donoroa, Pennsylvania, in 1948 made it clear that extremely high levels of particulate-based smog could produce large increases in the daily mortality rate."
- dunderinit 7y agoWhenever I go to the countryside and start breathing the pure air I start to feel drowzy AF. Also allergic AF.
- higeyuki 7y agoTemperature variability also factors into this. Though by itself is not a major factor, it seems to be a combination of things. If anything we are not "killing the planet" we are destroying the conditions that allow life to thrive on Earth. I've been following these links since 2013 and more studies are showing this could be a "thing." "Here we estimate associations between multiple environmental factors (air quality, residential greenness, mean temperature, and temperature variability) and self-assessed mental health scores for over 20,000 Chinese residents. Mental health scores were surveyed in 2010 and 2014, allowing us to link changes in mental health to the changes in environmental variables. Increases in air pollution and temperature variability are associated with higher probabilities of declined mental health. Mental health is statistically unrelated to mean temperature in this study, and the effect of greenness on mental health depends on model settings, suggesting a need for further study. Our findings suggest that the environmental policies to reduce emissions of air pollution or greenhouse gases can improve mental health of the public in China." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10196-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10196-y More importantly: 1. Air Pollution Linked to Mutations https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2002/12/air-pollution-linked-mutations https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2002/12/air-pollution-linked... 2. Air pollution causes sperm mutations https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080113/full/news.2008.439.html https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080113/full/news.2008.439.h... 3. January 1994 What Are People Dying of on High Air Pollution Days? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935184710048 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139... "The air pollution disasters in London in 1952, the Meuse valley in 1930, and in Donoroa, Pennsylvania, in 1948 made it clear that extremely high levels of particulate-based smog could produce large increases in the daily mortality rate." Edit: A Few more from earlier times: 1996 Feb: Psychiatric aspects of air pollution. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8637739 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8637739 December 1984: Air pollution and depressive symptomatology: Exploratory analyses of intervening psychosocial factors https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01256411 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01256411 Nov. 2, 1999 Air Pollution Linked to Increased Heart Rate https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/19991102/air-pollution-linked-to-increased-heart-rate#1 https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/19991102/air-pollution-linke... 1981 Dec The psychological effects of indoor air pollution. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805416/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805416/ June 1989 Psychological effects of air pollution on healthy residents—A time-series approach https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494489800027 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02724...
- pointillistic 7y agoThis is way beyond air, this is water we drink, the chemicals in processed food, the pesticides in the produce. The compounds in furniture, paints, stains, carpeting, general building materials including insulation, plastic plumbing,HVAC components, insistence on living in un-ventilated, year around closed windows spaces.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- arpa 7y agoThis is also about population density and the lifestyle in more populated (denser) areas.
- drderidder 7y agoNo doubt pollution will make you sick, but I'm inclined to think that depression has a lot to do with just living in an over-crowded, unattractive, big industrial city environment, having little contact with the natural world.
- alwaysanagenda 7y agoCame here to say this. Exactly.
- squish78 7y agoOur brains spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that cramming into cities with unnatural lights and disrupting biological rhythm would make them go haywire
- the_gastropod 7y ago"Our bodies spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that taking showers with unnatural temperatures and disrupting biological skin bacteria would make them go haywire" "Our teeth spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that scrubbing them with unnatural mint-flavored pastes and plastic bristles would make them go haywire" "Our eyes spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that covering them with unnatural lenses would make them go haywire" etc.
- squish78 7y agoI appreciate your pedantry - the scientific community understands the mechanical physiological body (skin, eyes, hair) on a cause-and-affect level, but hardly understands the mind and mood because mental health is such a subjective experience, it's nearly impossible to fit into modern a scientific paradigm
- icandoit 7y agoMental health isn't a strictly subjective experience though. You can measure days called-in-sick. You can measure suicide count. Cause and effect isn't necessary to reduce harm. You with me? It's nice to have certainly, but it is not required. Imagine that I am a friend of yours. I tell you that my child is depressed and the doctor suggests pill1, it makes my child more lethargic. We try pill2 and the depression is gone. I tell you that I am happy with the results of pill2 and that while I am interested in how it works and potential long-term consequences, I'm happy staying on pill2. Is this imagined parent strictly better than a parent that refuses to try any pill until convinced of its mechanism and success? I would say yes. Observation is the workhorse of the scientific paradigm, not idealized experimentation. The quantity, and thus value, of Inductive evidence is greater than that of Deductive evidence.
- pintable 7y agoNot unsurprising, though obvious caveat about correlation and causation. I wouldn't be surprised if pollution is correlated with other things like low quality of life, poverty, etc. All of these probably interact to create an environment that leads to poor mental health.
- sgspace 7y agoBuy a personal HEPA air filter on Amazon and get purified water delivered. Quit trusting your city officials with your health.
- blaser-waffle 7y agoProbably cheaper and easier to test your water and air. If your air or water quality suck, take it to city hall Also worth noting that the city can only do so much. A factory 3 counties over could spew noticeable smog, and you don't have any recourse outside of moving.
- larrywright 7y agoIsn’t air pollution tightly correlated to living in large cities? How do these studies factor that in?
- bagacrap 7y agohttp://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/BS/BS704-EP713_Confounding-EM/BS704-EP713_Confounding-EM5.html http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/BS/BS704-EP713_Co...
- poulsbohemian 7y agoWay back in the 1920s, my great-great grandfather killed himself. The obituary paralleled the family story of his life: he'd been a drifter of sorts his whole life, always looking for some way out of the life of a dirt-poor, subsistence farmer. He was the first member of the family to leave the Amish / Mennonite colonies of the east and come west. When he died, he was far from home in the middle of nowhere, not a penny to his name. Last night around the dinner table we were discussing an article from The Week about video game addiction. It described young men a lot like my great-great grandfather, with just the moment in history changed. It seems fairly straightforward that the root causes are: -- Limited economic opportunities / safety net. -- Lack (for whatever reason) of social ties and support. A lack of an outlet for emotional intimacy. Are chemicals, including in our air, at play? Sure, possibly. But, it seems clear that in any case you hear about a suicide the story is basically the same - someone simply did not see a future for themselves. We have not come fully to grips with a post-industrial / post-agrarian economy here in the US, leaving many men in particular without much purpose. The rural / urban divide is mentioned in this thread - living here in rural America (hi y'all!) is a microcosm of the rest of the country - we have the same problems as cities, just on a different but compressed scale. You see both the happiest and most miserable people up close. If you have the financial means to live away from the city, then you can be the big fish in the small pond, IE: both the financial and social I mentioned above. On the other hand, if you are living paycheck to paycheck, surrounded by a limited social network, etc, is it really that surprising it leads to depression? That's the same regardless of your physical location.
- wufufufu 7y agoAnyone have a link to an effective air filter? So I can order one and benefit from the placebo effect. Preferably on the 'zon so I can get 2-day shipping.
- winrid 7y agoBased on my travels it always seemed the more humidity the more relaxed the environment/people.
- gfs78 7y agoSo, living conditions in your typical high polluted city have nothing to do with being depressed or suicidal?