6 ms·

I have a completely unscientific, subjective theory that some significant portion of depression in the population as a whole is caused by the economic circumsta

I have a completely unscientific, subjective theory that some significant portion of depression in the population as a whole is caused by the economic circumstances that some people live in. Things like being trapped in a dead end job to keep healthcare benefits in the USA, living in a never ending treadmill of debt.

triyambakam 4y ago
I'm puzzled by those who disagree with this statement. How is it surprising that depressing circumstances would lead to depression?
- astrange 4y ago
  Major depressive disorder isn't the same thing as feeling sad about your job.
  - UK-Al05 4y ago
    Bad jobs can cause suicide
    - WalterSear 4y ago
      Suicide is usually due to distress than clinical depression. This is why suicide hotlines work at all.
  - psyc 4y ago
    If being down about your job causes symptoms of depression that last more than 2 weeks, then it's the same thing. Psychiatrists diagnose based on symptoms. Worse, its usually what you say your symptoms are, with words and talking. They don't scan your brain. I've been seeing psychiatrists for almost 30 years. The good ones take plenty of interest in your situation, lifestyle, and other non-chemical non-medical factors. Psychiatrists don't distinguish between so-called 'situational' and 'clinical' depressions. Laypeople do that. If you get diagnosed by a clinician, that is the part that makes it clinical - it isn't a different kind of condition.
  - an-honest-moose 4y ago
    That is an incredibly dismissive and reductive argument to make. "Feeling sad about your job" isn't limited to burnt out software engineers with a safety net. It can also apply to, for example, someone stuck in a shitty, low paying job with few, if any, prospects for better employment. The lack of a path to a decent future can, in itself, be incredibly demoralizing, even if your present circumstances might be decent. After all, what's the point in continuing if I can see that it's all downhill from here?
    - astrange 4y ago
      That isn't major depressive disorder either. Even if those people think their life sucks, they're capable of, say, getting out of bed every day and don't regularly attempt suicide. Russian serfs might've revolted when they got the chance, but they were more or less psychologically normal until then. Their society adapts to not kill them all. (Or they all become alcoholics or something.)
- pcmoney 4y ago
  I would recommend reading some history books before saying these are depressing circumstances.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Just because some people have suffered through worse doesn't mean that you can use that to invalidate someone else's suffering.
    - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
      But when, for the vast majority of history, the population faced a much poorer, more monotonous, and less free existence than what the modern worker faces then you jolly well can.
      - asdff 4y ago
        That still doesn't invalidate people's mental conditions today.
      - pastacacioepepe 4y ago
        > the population faced a much poorer, more monotonous, and less free existence That's an over simplification. People could still have more free time than we do now[1], while their life could be more monotonous on some aspect, I believe an average office worker life today can be even more monotonous than what a serf life could be. You also have to consider labor alienation, which is a something that didn't exist so much before industrialization. Most importantly, life commonly revolved around tight communities, while today most people live in individualist societies. Individualism certainly has a larger impact on happiness than most modern convenience has. - [1]: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
        ThrowawayR2 4y ago
        If there are people today who want to put their money where their mouth is and give up the conveniences of modernity to go back to communal subsistence farming under serf-like conditions (and there are places in the world that still live like that), more power to them. I haven't seen any takers.
sn0w_crash 4y ago
I know plenty of depressed rich people. I understand your theory but spend a week in the Hampton’s and you’ll see some real sad souls.
- _yoqn 4y ago
  Yeah they are probably into some extremely toxic, unnatural things that cause them to secretly hate themselves. I wonder how much shady sexual shenanigans happens in the households of the top 1%? Plenty of drugs, gossip, gluttony, lust, etc. Happiness comes from the overcoming of not unknowable obstacles toward a known goal. It's the journey, not the destination. And the trick is to set another goal once you attained the one you're on.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    > I wonder how much shady sexual shenanigans happens in the households of the top 1% Fidelio
  - s-lambert 4y ago
    >Happiness comes from the overcoming of not unknowable obstacles toward a known goal. It's the journey, not the destination. And the trick is to set another goal once you attained the one you're on. I find this kind of bizarre because you can look around and see how it's obviously not true. Dogs are happy as clams to just socialize with their owners / other dogs and just live. People hustling to always get to the next goal don't seem particularly happier than people who don't have a goal and just have a healthy social life.
    - _yoqn 4y ago
      A. People aren't dogs. We are of a much higher level intelligence and self awareness. That's why psychological studies of rats, or even apes, as human analogs is ludicrous. B. The happiest people on the planet are extremely ethical, have a good moral compass and have a will to help others. They have goals and attain them. And they especially don't blame their environment for their shortcomings. They find ways to adjust their environment to themselves and not the other way around. Someone who is content with a simple life is still following that maxim. Their goal is to live each day in relative comfort according to their own standards.
pcmoney 4y ago
We have it way better than almost any period in history and are profoundly unhappy. Also, we always like to think we will be happy “once I have…X” and then we get X and say well actually what I need is Y. Most unhappiness is driven by vanity and desire (a bargain you make with yourself where you chose to be unhappy until you get something) to be better than our peers. Until you can be content with nothing you wont be content even with everything. If people can be happy in concentration camps we can be happy in dead end office jobs. They cant stop us from being happy.
- kayamon 4y ago
  > If people can be happy in concentration camps we can be happy in dead end office jobs. I don't think people in concentration camps are happy.
  - carabiner 4y ago
    He's probably referring to the book Man's Search for Meaning. The book's conclusion is a bit controversial for this.
    - mercer 4y ago
      and Frankl, the writer, is rather controversial himself. Personally, I can't take what that guy writes seriously.
    - pcmoney 4y ago
      I was thinking more along the lines of the TenBoom sisters.
- taylorius 4y ago
  How are we measuring "better"? If suicide rates have risen significantly, then perhaps there are ways in which our modern paradise is worse than the past.
- scns 4y ago
  This might help https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Trap-Struggling-Start-Living/dp/1590305841/ https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Trap-Struggling-Start-Livin...
carabiner 4y ago
IOW: Are you ready for me to diagnose your totally normal reaction to our shitty society as mental illness so I can get you addicted to mind altering drugs for the rest of your life? https://imgur.com/Jb1mJyx https://imgur.com/Jb1mJyx Or as the Unabomber said, "Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable." I think you're right. The problem is, this is the only life most of us have lived, and so we cannot imagine it otherwise, like a fish who cannot conceive of a world above water, or even that water is the medium surrounding it. If our entire society is causing this, then what can we do? Wage slavery, oligarchy, attention theft by tech companies, disintegration of community from various causes. Life for so many people is crawling through glass Monday through Friday, then getting shitfaced on the weekend. Is that happiness? How do we escape?
- seventytwo 4y ago
  > Life for so many people is crawling through glass Monday through Friday, then getting shitfaced on the weekend. Is that happiness? Ooof
- tptacek 4y ago
  It's a strange mode of persuasion, making arguments about how we should frame psychological dysfunction that quote a man who pooped into a hole in the corner of a shack while in hiding after trying to down a passenger jet.
  - eurasiantiger 4y ago
    That is the definition of an ”ad hominem” argument.
    - tptacek 4y ago
yomkippur 4y ago
There's rich people, famous people, powerful people, who fall into depression so not sure what your situation is but I hope you get through it.
missedthecue 4y ago
All quintiles of the US population make more money (inflation adjusted) than they did 20, 40 or 60 years ago. Yet there are more depressives around than ever.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  Now look at what it gets spent on. Specifically, take a closer look at housing, healthcare and higher education. All three of those have risen far, far faster than inflation for many years.
  - andrekandre 4y ago
    whats really interesting is, while some things like electronics and automobiles etc have been getting cheaper, intangibles like healthcare and education have been increasing in cost... whats the cause?
    - actually_a_dog 4y ago
      Obviously, I don't know the full story, but one thing the three things I named have in common is relatively inelastic demand. In the case of education and healthcare, I suspect Baumol's cost disease is also a factor. Cars and other manufactured goods tend to get cheaper over time because they can take advantage of economies of scale, as well as global supply chains and free trade. We're seeing that very concretely right now as the global chip shortage has put pressure on the used car market. Education, housing, and healthcare are largely unaffected by free trade, and Baumol's cost disease is literally a statement about how certain industries cannot take advantage of economies of scale. Come to think of it, let's also toss childcare in the bucket of "things that have gotten more expensive faster than inflation over time" since, among households with children, we have a predominance of households where all parents who are present work. Again, we have inelastic demand and Baumol's cost disease rearing their ugly heads, so maybe there's something to this theory.
    - missedthecue 4y ago
      Baumol's cost disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease TV and automobile manufacturing are a lot more productive than they were 50 years ago. A teacher can still only teach one classroom at a time. Therefore, service industries like healthcare, education, and even construction get less and less efficient relative to manufacturing and production industries, which enjoy massive increase in efficiency year after year. This is partly why an 80 inch 4K TV is eventually going to cost $500 and a 4 year college education is going to cost $500,000.
asdff 4y ago
You don't even have to be broke to be trapped in the stranglehold of modern society and feel like shit about it. Just because you are paid well doesn't mean the work you are doing is remotely engaging or interesting or doesn't want to make you hate yourself. Being rich doesn't insulate you from toxic coworkers, in fact probably the higher you end up marching up the economic ladder the more of these narcissistic and toxic personalities you are liable to run into. At the end of the day we are probably happiest when we are foraging for berries or mushrooms. This whole abstract 'society' crap we put upon ourselves leads to a lot of self directed scorn, embarassment, disrespect, and no doubt depression. How many billions of calories have been burned to fuel thoughts of worry about an outfit choice around the world? How many grey hairs have sprung up as a result of fretting about appearance? The stress society tries to shovel on you is such a waste of energy and does nothing to help you.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > How many billions of calories have been burned to fuel thoughts of worry about an outfit choice around the world?...The stress society tries to shovel on you is such a waste of energy and does nothing to help you. Sadly, not enough to offset our sedentary lifestyle and diets. I can't be too concerned about the energy expenditure involved in worrying about meaningless things. For now anyway, we've got energy to spare. The toll of all that stress on our bodies is much worse than the calories we lose. Still, I'd rather be worried about the trivial things that we occupy ourselves with than the life or death worries humans regularly faced when we were berry foragers. Going from worrying over "Will we eat today?" to "Which of several restaurants should we go to for lunch?" is a blessing.
imtringued 4y ago
Actually there is something worse than a deadend job. Having a job you are financially dependent on but where you aren't assigned any work so you must constantly come up with ways to look busy and productive.
refurb 4y ago
I have a gardener. In fact, I have three gardeners. Three generations of men with no ambition, who are happier than I will ever be.
AlwaysRock 4y ago
I'm overall pretty happy and have a pretty great job, life, and family. I'm still often hit with waves of despair when I realize housing prices are insane, retirement feels like a joke, and the biggest issues the world is facing seem to be ignored. It's pretty depressing if you dwell on it for any period of time.

triyambakam 4y ago

I'm puzzled by those who disagree with this statement. How is it surprising that depressing circumstances would lead to depression?

astrange 4y ago
Major depressive disorder isn't the same thing as feeling sad about your job.
- UK-Al05 4y ago
  Bad jobs can cause suicide
  - WalterSear 4y ago
    Suicide is usually due to distress than clinical depression. This is why suicide hotlines work at all.
- psyc 4y ago
  If being down about your job causes symptoms of depression that last more than 2 weeks, then it's the same thing. Psychiatrists diagnose based on symptoms. Worse, its usually what you say your symptoms are, with words and talking. They don't scan your brain. I've been seeing psychiatrists for almost 30 years. The good ones take plenty of interest in your situation, lifestyle, and other non-chemical non-medical factors. Psychiatrists don't distinguish between so-called 'situational' and 'clinical' depressions. Laypeople do that. If you get diagnosed by a clinician, that is the part that makes it clinical - it isn't a different kind of condition.
- an-honest-moose 4y ago
  That is an incredibly dismissive and reductive argument to make. "Feeling sad about your job" isn't limited to burnt out software engineers with a safety net. It can also apply to, for example, someone stuck in a shitty, low paying job with few, if any, prospects for better employment. The lack of a path to a decent future can, in itself, be incredibly demoralizing, even if your present circumstances might be decent. After all, what's the point in continuing if I can see that it's all downhill from here?
  - astrange 4y ago
    That isn't major depressive disorder either. Even if those people think their life sucks, they're capable of, say, getting out of bed every day and don't regularly attempt suicide. Russian serfs might've revolted when they got the chance, but they were more or less psychologically normal until then. Their society adapts to not kill them all. (Or they all become alcoholics or something.)
pcmoney 4y ago
I would recommend reading some history books before saying these are depressing circumstances.
- asdff 4y ago
  Just because some people have suffered through worse doesn't mean that you can use that to invalidate someone else's suffering.
  - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
    But when, for the vast majority of history, the population faced a much poorer, more monotonous, and less free existence than what the modern worker faces then you jolly well can.
    - asdff 4y ago
      That still doesn't invalidate people's mental conditions today.
    - pastacacioepepe 4y ago
      > the population faced a much poorer, more monotonous, and less free existence That's an over simplification. People could still have more free time than we do now[1], while their life could be more monotonous on some aspect, I believe an average office worker life today can be even more monotonous than what a serf life could be. You also have to consider labor alienation, which is a something that didn't exist so much before industrialization. Most importantly, life commonly revolved around tight communities, while today most people live in individualist societies. Individualism certainly has a larger impact on happiness than most modern convenience has. - [1]: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
      - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
        If there are people today who want to put their money where their mouth is and give up the conveniences of modernity to go back to communal subsistence farming under serf-like conditions (and there are places in the world that still live like that), more power to them. I haven't seen any takers.

sn0w_crash 4y ago

I know plenty of depressed rich people. I understand your theory but spend a week in the Hampton’s and you’ll see some real sad souls.

_yoqn 4y ago
Yeah they are probably into some extremely toxic, unnatural things that cause them to secretly hate themselves. I wonder how much shady sexual shenanigans happens in the households of the top 1%? Plenty of drugs, gossip, gluttony, lust, etc. Happiness comes from the overcoming of not unknowable obstacles toward a known goal. It's the journey, not the destination. And the trick is to set another goal once you attained the one you're on.
- walrus01 4y ago
  > I wonder how much shady sexual shenanigans happens in the households of the top 1% Fidelio
- s-lambert 4y ago
  >Happiness comes from the overcoming of not unknowable obstacles toward a known goal. It's the journey, not the destination. And the trick is to set another goal once you attained the one you're on. I find this kind of bizarre because you can look around and see how it's obviously not true. Dogs are happy as clams to just socialize with their owners / other dogs and just live. People hustling to always get to the next goal don't seem particularly happier than people who don't have a goal and just have a healthy social life.
  - _yoqn 4y ago
    A. People aren't dogs. We are of a much higher level intelligence and self awareness. That's why psychological studies of rats, or even apes, as human analogs is ludicrous. B. The happiest people on the planet are extremely ethical, have a good moral compass and have a will to help others. They have goals and attain them. And they especially don't blame their environment for their shortcomings. They find ways to adjust their environment to themselves and not the other way around. Someone who is content with a simple life is still following that maxim. Their goal is to live each day in relative comfort according to their own standards.

pcmoney 4y ago

We have it way better than almost any period in history and are profoundly unhappy. Also, we always like to think we will be happy “once I have…X” and then we get X and say well actually what I need is Y. Most unhappiness is driven by vanity and desire (a bargain you make with yourself where you chose to be unhappy until you get something) to be better than our peers. Until you can be content with nothing you wont be content even with everything. If people can be happy in concentration camps we can be happy in dead end office jobs. They cant stop us from being happy.

kayamon 4y ago
> If people can be happy in concentration camps we can be happy in dead end office jobs. I don't think people in concentration camps are happy.
- carabiner 4y ago
  He's probably referring to the book Man's Search for Meaning. The book's conclusion is a bit controversial for this.
  - mercer 4y ago
    and Frankl, the writer, is rather controversial himself. Personally, I can't take what that guy writes seriously.
  - pcmoney 4y ago
    I was thinking more along the lines of the TenBoom sisters.
taylorius 4y ago
How are we measuring "better"? If suicide rates have risen significantly, then perhaps there are ways in which our modern paradise is worse than the past.
scns 4y ago
This might help https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Trap-Struggling-Start-Living/dp/1590305841/ https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Trap-Struggling-Start-Livin...

carabiner 4y ago

IOW: Are you ready for me to diagnose your totally normal reaction to our shitty society as mental illness so I can get you addicted to mind altering drugs for the rest of your life? https://imgur.com/Jb1mJyx https://imgur.com/Jb1mJyx Or as the Unabomber said, "Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable." I think you're right. The problem is, this is the only life most of us have lived, and so we cannot imagine it otherwise, like a fish who cannot conceive of a world above water, or even that water is the medium surrounding it. If our entire society is causing this, then what can we do? Wage slavery, oligarchy, attention theft by tech companies, disintegration of community from various causes. Life for so many people is crawling through glass Monday through Friday, then getting shitfaced on the weekend. Is that happiness? How do we escape?

seventytwo 4y ago
> Life for so many people is crawling through glass Monday through Friday, then getting shitfaced on the weekend. Is that happiness? Ooof
tptacek 4y ago
It's a strange mode of persuasion, making arguments about how we should frame psychological dysfunction that quote a man who pooped into a hole in the corner of a shack while in hiding after trying to down a passenger jet.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  That is the definition of an ”ad hominem” argument.
  - tptacek 4y ago

yomkippur 4y ago

There's rich people, famous people, powerful people, who fall into depression so not sure what your situation is but I hope you get through it.

missedthecue 4y ago

All quintiles of the US population make more money (inflation adjusted) than they did 20, 40 or 60 years ago. Yet there are more depressives around than ever.

actually_a_dog 4y ago
Now look at what it gets spent on. Specifically, take a closer look at housing, healthcare and higher education. All three of those have risen far, far faster than inflation for many years.
- andrekandre 4y ago
  whats really interesting is, while some things like electronics and automobiles etc have been getting cheaper, intangibles like healthcare and education have been increasing in cost... whats the cause?
  - actually_a_dog 4y ago
    Obviously, I don't know the full story, but one thing the three things I named have in common is relatively inelastic demand. In the case of education and healthcare, I suspect Baumol's cost disease is also a factor. Cars and other manufactured goods tend to get cheaper over time because they can take advantage of economies of scale, as well as global supply chains and free trade. We're seeing that very concretely right now as the global chip shortage has put pressure on the used car market. Education, housing, and healthcare are largely unaffected by free trade, and Baumol's cost disease is literally a statement about how certain industries cannot take advantage of economies of scale. Come to think of it, let's also toss childcare in the bucket of "things that have gotten more expensive faster than inflation over time" since, among households with children, we have a predominance of households where all parents who are present work. Again, we have inelastic demand and Baumol's cost disease rearing their ugly heads, so maybe there's something to this theory.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    Baumol's cost disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease TV and automobile manufacturing are a lot more productive than they were 50 years ago. A teacher can still only teach one classroom at a time. Therefore, service industries like healthcare, education, and even construction get less and less efficient relative to manufacturing and production industries, which enjoy massive increase in efficiency year after year. This is partly why an 80 inch 4K TV is eventually going to cost $500 and a 4 year college education is going to cost $500,000.

asdff 4y ago

You don't even have to be broke to be trapped in the stranglehold of modern society and feel like shit about it. Just because you are paid well doesn't mean the work you are doing is remotely engaging or interesting or doesn't want to make you hate yourself. Being rich doesn't insulate you from toxic coworkers, in fact probably the higher you end up marching up the economic ladder the more of these narcissistic and toxic personalities you are liable to run into. At the end of the day we are probably happiest when we are foraging for berries or mushrooms. This whole abstract 'society' crap we put upon ourselves leads to a lot of self directed scorn, embarassment, disrespect, and no doubt depression. How many billions of calories have been burned to fuel thoughts of worry about an outfit choice around the world? How many grey hairs have sprung up as a result of fretting about appearance? The stress society tries to shovel on you is such a waste of energy and does nothing to help you.

autoexec 4y ago
> How many billions of calories have been burned to fuel thoughts of worry about an outfit choice around the world?...The stress society tries to shovel on you is such a waste of energy and does nothing to help you. Sadly, not enough to offset our sedentary lifestyle and diets. I can't be too concerned about the energy expenditure involved in worrying about meaningless things. For now anyway, we've got energy to spare. The toll of all that stress on our bodies is much worse than the calories we lose. Still, I'd rather be worried about the trivial things that we occupy ourselves with than the life or death worries humans regularly faced when we were berry foragers. Going from worrying over "Will we eat today?" to "Which of several restaurants should we go to for lunch?" is a blessing.

imtringued 4y ago

Actually there is something worse than a deadend job. Having a job you are financially dependent on but where you aren't assigned any work so you must constantly come up with ways to look busy and productive.

refurb 4y ago

I have a gardener. In fact, I have three gardeners. Three generations of men with no ambition, who are happier than I will ever be.

AlwaysRock 4y ago

I'm overall pretty happy and have a pretty great job, life, and family. I'm still often hit with waves of despair when I realize housing prices are insane, retirement feels like a joke, and the biggest issues the world is facing seem to be ignored. It's pretty depressing if you dwell on it for any period of time.