Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 469 posts

Re: A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression

#41

Post by akiselev »

spicyramen wrote: post #37
Pfhreak wrote: post #12

I've dealt with depression and anxiety for many years. I just want to tell anyone who happens to read this: it's ok to ask for help, it's ok to go to therapy, it's ok to use antidepressants. Find the tools that work for you and keep asking for help when you need it. (Believe me, I know how hard it is.)

Isn't antidepressants in America one of the reasons of the opioid crisis...?

No, that would largely be Purdue Pharmaceuticals misleading doctors regarding dosage and timing along with an unhealthy dose of fentanyl from China.

Re: A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression

#42

Post by virvar »

presiozo wrote: post #27

I wonder what's the correlation between this and people being underpaid. I'm fortunate enough to have my own house after graduation so I don't have to pay rent. But I have friends that don't have this luxury and man, they are struggling. Besides eating and rent they can't afford anything else in a month. No question here what's giving them these feelings

I live in Denmark, where we lift a lot of the burden of civilisation together, to give everyone access to education, health/elderly/child care as well as a solid security system for those who get unemployed.

And here society is hard enough these days, pressing more and more people beyond their limits. I really wonder how you all do it in America.

Re: A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression

#43

Post by marcell »

samvher wrote: post #31
marcell wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by the downvotes on this. The comment is quoting CDC numbers, this is not some fake news report. The 0.4% mortality for coronavirus is the CDC best estimate. The 0.2% is from the CDC website for the 2017 flu season. Edit: The parent comment has apparently been flag removed. But it was claiming that the reaction to coronavirus (lockdown) is worse than the damage from the virus, and used the above comparis…

I do think the CDC numbers seem strange - when I search for "flu IFR" and "coronavirus IFR" what I find for flu is 0.04-0.2% and for coronavirus it's more like 0.4-1%. So these CDC best estimates seem to make the comparison more favorable than the numbers found in other places. It seems like a factor 6 or so difference is realistic, which makes it quite a bit more serious than the flu. One thing that worries me more…

Sidebar, but I simply cannot figure out how the CDC estimates flu mortality.

I've spent about an hour trying to find the info, and gave up. I was able to figure out how they estimate flu deaths: they take the officially diagnosed deaths, and the multiply it by a factor based on presumed deaths. For example, they assume some % of pneumonia deaths are cause by the flu.

But I simply cannot figure out how they estimate the number of flu infections per year, which is the other half of IFR. It obviously is a statistical model (they don't do millions of flu tests a year), but what is the model? Without this info, it's really not an apples-to-apples comparison when you take flu IFR and compare it to coronavirus IFR.

Re: A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression

#44

Post by thebladerunner »

thebladerunner wrote: post #30
nunodonato wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fortunately, more and more scientists and doctors are stepping up and being public about why all of this lockdown and social distancing thing is not only useless, but harmful. Unfortunately, not only they don't get much air time in mass media, as they end up being censored by YouTube. Makes you wonder why...

Links?

Re: YouTube video you linked below. The table shown by that Dr in the first few minutes was enough to discredit her (claiming Covid-19 is not transmitted by air, only kills 80+ year olds, etc.) All falsehoods.

Re: A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression

#45

Post by xigency »

marcell wrote: post #35
entee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly 100,000 people have died of COVID19 and there’s good evidence that this is a substantial undercount. All this in a context where we shut down transmission vectors (being indoors, with lots of people). Most estimates I’ve seen suggest we’ll hit 150k-200k deaths by end of year. 2017-2018 flu season killed about 80,000 with no mitigation efforts. Just on the face of it, this virus is far more than 2x deadlier tha…

Sure, but 2x deadlier than the flu just means 2 flu seasons. It's not great, but we don't do half-lockdowns fur 1 flu season. Why do a full lockdown for the equivalent of two flu seasons?

What would the numbers look like without mitigations? There are certainly some flu seasons that are 2x worse than average. I imagine that the cutoff between no action and hard mitigation would be a 10x flu event. It seems plausible to me that this would have been 10x the flu with business as usual.

That still doesn’t do accounting for the negative effects of mitigation. The truth is that this is an open-ended ethical question and it’s not fun to participate in.

Re: A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression

#46

Post by tayo42 »

username90 wrote: post #28
rumanator wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A young person is building their life, lockdown is preventing them from doing that. I find this comment utterly mind boggling. The US's stay at home orders were issued when? Mid to end of March? That makes it what? About 1 month? Are we supposed to believe that "young people" suddenly get into a tail spin because they have to endure a whole month of not finding a partner, get to know each other, make life plans, an…

It doesn't just put family building on ice, it puts almost everything on ice. Everyone who hasn't already built a life they are reasonable happy with will be feeling horrible right now, and most young people are in that stage. I'm already above that age so Corona doesn't affect me much, but I know that if I were younger I'd hate it.

All of that plus the unknown end of it. Sure its been 2 or 3 months but its not like its ending tomorrow. Any one who wanted to make a major life change in the next two years is probably rethinking it.

Re: A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression

#47

Post by luckylion »

Pfhreak wrote: post #12

I've dealt with depression and anxiety for many years. I just want to tell anyone who happens to read this: it's ok to ask for help, it's ok to go to therapy, it's ok to use antidepressants. Find the tools that work for you and keep asking for help when you need it. (Believe me, I know how hard it is.)

I want to emphasize especially that it's okay to take medication. It's not "cheating", you're not going to get graded at the end on how you beat the depressive episode. They're far from perfect and you may have to try multiple times to find one that's working for you. I know how uncomfortable it can be to get off of SSRIs (brain zaps aren't fun at all!), but imho even considering them as part of the package, it still beats being down at the bottom by far.

If you don't want to take medication, that's okay too. But make sure it's not just your depression making you not want to.

And the usual advice applies to depression as well: don't worry about telling your doctor. They won't judge you, they've heard it before, they can help you. It can feel like a personal failure and as if "it's not like other people's depression, they have real problems, I don't, I just can't figure out what's wrong with me", but that's part of it.

And also don't beat yourself up if you're self-medicating. That's pretty normal. Get help, get more effective medication. You're not a lazy alcoholic, you're depressed and you're looking for any straw that can offer some support. And if your doctor tells you to stop self-medicating before they will help you, talk to another doctor, they have it backwards. Don't give up.

Re: A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression

#48

Post by xigency »

username90 wrote: post #23
_qwfv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite. That percentage represents a million people in the US. It also doesn't represent the number of people who may experience shortened lifespans due to damage to their lungs or other organs. Also, the comment suggests that we do nothing for the flu, which is patently false. We organize massive vaccination efforts every year to combat the flu, we have readily available tests, and we have a well understood model…

> Comparing it to the flu seems to be arguing in bad faith along political lines rather than deeply examining the issue. No it isn't. Before vaccine a normal flu season killed 0.1% of the population in a year. Not 0.1% of infected, 0.1% of everyone. Those kinds of numbers are not good, but they are not a catastrophe either, especially if it is just a single year. And to me it looks like Corona is roughly that dangero…

Doing the math is an input but it isn’t the solution itself. The question of what to do is a policy decision which doesn’t have an objective right answer.

Re: A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression

#49

Post by crocodiletears »

The nation's been psychologically wrong-footed during an election year where the incumbent is the most controversial president in decades (one who's been impeached, even), the challenging party's primary process has been subjected to accusations of corruption and favoritism (at best) by the presumed nominee's opposition, and been riddled with suspicious errors. That alone would be a memorable storm and a half for our political history, but it coincides with a sweeping collapse in institutional trust, economic hardship, concerns of government overreach, and fear of mortal peril.

And we're just inaugurating the decade.

Re: A third of Americans now show signs of clinical anxiety or depression

#50

Post by username90 »

xigency wrote: post #45
marcell wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but 2x deadlier than the flu just means 2 flu seasons. It's not great, but we don't do half-lockdowns fur 1 flu season. Why do a full lockdown for the equivalent of two flu seasons?

What would the numbers look like without mitigations? There are certainly some flu seasons that are 2x worse than average. I imagine that the cutoff between no action and hard mitigation would be a 10x flu event. It seems plausible to me that this would have been 10x the flu with business as usual. That still doesn’t do accounting for the negative effects of mitigation. The truth is that this is an open-ended ethical…

> What would the numbers look like without mitigations?

Look at Sweden, you'll find that their very light measures are not worse than the very late but much stronger measures of harder hit areas.

Post reply on HN