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Prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in adults admitted to psychiatric hospital

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Re: Prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in adults admitted to psychiatric hospital

#81

Post by oliwarner »

freeflight wrote: post #61
oliwarner wrote: post #52

HN health posts tend to get posted without context and you'll get a pile of people [inadvertantly, I'm sure] pushing their supplement regime as a way to stave off clinical depression et al. This paper is NOT saying that low VitD causes psychiatric admission, just that patients may require supplements to bring them back to healthy levels. You get most of your vitamin D from skin exposure to sunlight so it's reasonable…

> HN health posts tend to get posted without context and you'll get a pile of people [inadvertantly, I'm sure] pushing their supplement regime as a way to stave off clinical depression et al. I wouldn't say people are necessarily "pushing" their personal regimes, more often than not people are merely exchanging their personal experiences with certain issues. Personally, I've had actual relief from a really annoying i…

I'm not complaining about the headline, I'm saying that people read far too far into them. The paper itself says that there is no causal link here, that the fact these people have decreased VitD is actually possible due to their [psychotic] behaviour, though without investigation, because that's not the aim of this paper. What I meant is that people who are so paranoid they can't get out of bed probably don't see much sunlight. Before admission. Exactly what the paper said, what you've repeated. I'm not sure what you don't understand here.

And yet the second-highest comment was talking about adding this to a guide about "hacking" mental health. HN has a hair trigger for digesting the fringes of scientific discovery and spinning it into quackery-fuelled hope for other sufferers.

I'm euphoric that this worked for you, once, but please don't use it as an argument that every comment on HN that advocates a supplement should be treated as anything more than the anecdote it is.

Re: Prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in adults admitted to psychiatric hospital

#84

Post by tree_of_item »

oliwarner wrote: post #52

HN health posts tend to get posted without context and you'll get a pile of people [inadvertantly, I'm sure] pushing their supplement regime as a way to stave off clinical depression et al. This paper is NOT saying that low VitD causes psychiatric admission, just that patients may require supplements to bring them back to healthy levels. You get most of your vitamin D from skin exposure to sunlight so it's reasonable…

> You get most of your vitamin D from skin exposure to sunlight

Is this even true? How are you going to get enough sunlight while living in, say, the US Northeast, or not being white?

Re: Prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in adults admitted to psychiatric hospital

#85

Post by pickpuck »

oliwarner wrote: post #52

HN health posts tend to get posted without context and you'll get a pile of people [inadvertantly, I'm sure] pushing their supplement regime as a way to stave off clinical depression et al. This paper is NOT saying that low VitD causes psychiatric admission, just that patients may require supplements to bring them back to healthy levels. You get most of your vitamin D from skin exposure to sunlight so it's reasonable…

CDNIC isn’t catchy enough. What’s a better shorthand for “Correlation does not imply causation”?

Re: Prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in adults admitted to psychiatric hospital

#86

Post by oliwarner »

tree_of_item wrote: post #84
oliwarner wrote: post #52

HN health posts tend to get posted without context and you'll get a pile of people [inadvertantly, I'm sure] pushing their supplement regime as a way to stave off clinical depression et al. This paper is NOT saying that low VitD causes psychiatric admission, just that patients may require supplements to bring them back to healthy levels. You get most of your vitamin D from skin exposure to sunlight so it's reasonable…

> You get most of your vitamin D from skin exposure to sunlight Is this even true? How are you going to get enough sunlight while living in, say, the US Northeast, or not being white?

In the UK you can easily get all your vitamin D from sunlight for 6 months of the year[0,1].

That said, more and more foods are being vitamin supplemented, or available in fortified versions, especially for children (eg milk, yoghurts). I doubt it'll become "standard" like thiamin and others in flour (in the UK at least) because you can overdose.

[0] http://www.bad.org.uk/for-the-public/skin-cancer/vitamin-d (footnotes 24, 25)

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Summerhealth/Pages/vitamin-D-sun...

Re: Prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in adults admitted to psychiatric hospital

#87

Post by kaybe »

YokoZar wrote: post #79
derefr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that that is a thing that could happen in the temperate and frigid zones of the Earth. It would be interesting, though, to attempt to replicate the study in a tropical region, where it's nearly impossible to not get enough sun, even indoors.

Glass windows block the kind of UV radiation you need to produce Vitamin D. You really have to actually go outside to produce it.

In some areas the windows contain enough quartz to let UV through, we found.

Re: Prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in adults admitted to psychiatric hospital

#88

Post by pasabagi »

jimnotgym wrote: post #30

As these kind of stories are so popular on HN, I recently started curating a list at https://github.com/Jimnotgym/Hacking_Depression I hope it helps someone one day.

I appreciate you're trying to help with this list, but as somebody who suffers from depression, I can't really imagine anything more harmful.

If you're suffering from depression, you're likely in partial denial. Going to a doctor represents a big change, and a big acknowledgement. Techniques like 'getting sunlight' and 'doing exercise' are infinitely more attractive - and infinitely more likely to degrade into new ways of beating yourself up and blaming yourself for your medical condition.

Some people can deal with depression with meditation, self-care, and better routine. Many, however, cannot. Folk remedies are like mirages for this second group - and they put people in a circle of denial, incomplete action, and self-blame, where they try to solve their illness with ultimately ineffective remedies, then blame themselves for the ineffectiveness of the treatment.

Pills, doctors, and psychiatrists are scary. As long as a depressed person believes there's a more normal option, that's what they'll go for. So this whole smorgsaboard of things that might help somebody somehow are really just a bunch of chimeras that keep people living in hell.

I know this because I've done this. I went through a period of simply trying everything anybody recommended, no matter how ridiculous. Predictably, nothing worked. Drugs work. Therapy works. Asking a doctor what they recommend works. Random studies you read on the internet by people who may or may not have had the same kind of depression you have, with p-values of like, 0.1, do not work, and do not help.

Re: Prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in adults admitted to psychiatric hospital

#89

Post by jrq »

ThrowawayP wrote: post #37
jrq wrote: post #20

Most of these patients are likely exhibiting some spectrum of antisocial behavior, which means staying indoors or generally away from other people. I don't think it's as interesting as it seems. I'm rather certain there's a sensible explanation.

> ...antisocial behavior, which means staying indoors or generally away from other people. That is not at all what "antisocial behavior" means. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour

But you knew what I meant.

In hindsight I should've clarified that my opinion originates from a layman. I am not a doctor or psychiatrist or anything of the sort.

Thanks for the correction!

Re: Prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in adults admitted to psychiatric hospital

#90

Post by conorh »

kenning wrote: post #50
conorh wrote: post #15

If you are going to supplement your vitamin D, just make sure to monitor your calcium too. My wife sees patients taking high doses of vitamin D, because their doctor puts them on it, or they do it themselves, and they do not realize that they are doing massive damage to their bodies because their low vitamin D levels are caused by a parathyroid tumor. http://www.parathyroid.com/low-vitamin-d.htm

This happens to your wife commonly?

Yes, several times a week. She is a parathyroid surgeon.
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