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

washingtonpost.com

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

#291

Post by danans »

Havoc wrote: post #272

I find the direct linkage to corona to be a little misleading. My gut feeling says this is a broader sign of the times: * Rising youth unemployment * Gig economy & the uncertainty that comes with it * Crushing study debt * Little hope of owning property * Rapidly increasing inequality * Offshoring & automation * Healthcare system where serious sickness can lead to financial ruin * Debt fueled systems (or credit score…

It could be both: Everything you listed has been turning the screws into people for a while, but this event has pushed people with those pre-existing anxieties over the top to needing clinical intervention.

It's similar to how the economy had a number of fragilities prior to COVID19 - actually, in a sense they are the same, given that people are the economy.

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

#292

Post by wayoutthere »

renewiltord wrote: post #289
wayoutthere wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends! Some forms of mental illness come with an inability to understand the illness as one of the diagnostic criteria -- this is part of why so many people are internally resistant to diagnosis. I was diagnosed as bipolar 2 a few years ago, and I just assumed the mood swings I dealt with were normal. Doesn't everyone occasionally get too enthusiastic during a meeting? Or call in sick because they can't g…

Yeah, that makes sense. It's hard to use the instrument of judgment itself to judge itself. I'm more wondering about a healthy individual.

I think it goes both ways though. We have no real frame of reference for “normal” — most of us only know maybe 20 people well enough to see the inner workings of their mind, and we’re probably related to at least half of them so anything congenital would feel “normal”. It seems pretty common that children of people with undiagnosed mental illness end up feeling weird or crazy until they break free and start to discover the world on their own (see also /r/raisedbynarcissists).

Trauma is a huge factor in mental illness as well, so much so that the definition of a “healthy individual” can only be really anchored to a specific point in time. Some things that rise to the level of clinical (anxiety, depression, BPD, PTSD, DPD) are largely seen as the result of trauma and/or some hereditary predisposition.

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

#293

Post by mjayhn »

idoby wrote: post #288
mjayhn wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not too happy with the govt in my country either, but I realize 90% of my situation would have been the same under most possible govts. We are literally in the polar opposite government than we were from 2008-2016. I don't think we'd be at 100k dead today if our government was different and responded properly. Is this what we're debating? Why did Hong Kong only have 4 deaths the last I looked a few days ago? Th…

Sorry to read that, mate. FWIW I don't think your government had a course of action that would have made a lot of difference. It caught everybody on the planet off guard and exhausted already-provisioned healthcare resources pretty fast.

When did you quarantine? Most States have only been closed for a month and now they're opening. This "didn't catch us offguard" it is more like "our leader didn't tell us how bad it was for 3 months while the rest of the world shut down so most of our businesses didn't close and it's worse than it should be". That's the government. It's coming from the top. Companies weren't going to close offices until govs/Pres told them to do so, they had NO idea what to do.

Most of our Republican Govs will do whatever Trump tells them. That is the problem.

I just moved out of a red state that acts like this is nothing to blue state that is almost completely shut down until next week and has had FAR FAR fewer cases.

So yeah, I think government matters now.

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

#294

Post by malandrew »

tdfx wrote: post #229
all2 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stress is not just a matter of the facts of every day life. Stress is the response to every day life. We don't have the coping skills we used to have. Kids, children, were conscripted, given weapons, and sent to a different continent to fight and die. Twice. After the first time, the Spanish Flu hit and killed millions of people. The kids who lived through that time were mentally tough and capable of coping with th…

> They also had nuclear families and all the benefits that go with them. There's a competing line of thought that considers the nuclear family to be one of the worst things that's happened to our society. It's created isolated household units, disconnected truly multigenerational households, and created distance and lack of necessity for extended family. By reducing the amount of direct family connections you can rel…

I think you're misreading what the OP is saying and you two are actually in alignment. They are not saying the nuclear family is an improvement on the multigenerational household. They are saying that the nuclear family is better than what we have today with divorces and single parent homes becoming increasingly common.

The degeneracy is from multigenerational to nuclear and from nuclear to less than nuclear families. Many people who are marxists typically celebrate the demise of both multigenerational homes and nuclear families because the family unit was seen as an opponent of socialist goals.

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

#295

Post by Talanes »

wayoutthere wrote: post #292
renewiltord wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that makes sense. It's hard to use the instrument of judgment itself to judge itself. I'm more wondering about a healthy individual.

I think it goes both ways though. We have no real frame of reference for “normal” — most of us only know maybe 20 people well enough to see the inner workings of their mind, and we’re probably related to at least half of them so anything congenital would feel “normal”. It seems pretty common that children of people with undiagnosed mental illness end up feeling weird or crazy until they break free and start to discov…

Plus people tend to be drawn to like-minded people. I know that personally the people that I am closest with are those who I've bonded with over dealing with similar types of anxiety and/or depression. It's just... harder to connect that way with a dissimilar mind.

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

#296

Post by dmix »

bobthepanda wrote: post #213
ssivark wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important point about the role of priors — especially if one is using a statistical (correlation based) proxy for what is actually a causal question. But here’s a practical question: imagine a universal healthcare mandate which allows people to get a mental health check-up every year. What criteria should the doctors use? Would the diagnostics have to change significantly?

What do practitioners do in countries with universal healthcare?

In Canada shrinks aren’t covered by our public health insurance. They are just as expensive as they are in the states.

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

#297

Post by UncleOxidant »

jesperado wrote: post #274
HighlandSpring wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you seek out carnivore/animal-centric nutrition in response to gut issues, mental health or something else? I keep stumbling upon anecdotes of significantly improved states of mind since going keto/carnivore. Have you found any discussions putting forward a proposed mechanism behind these reportings?

Not OP but I'm consuming a mostly carnivore diet, I struggled with gout for years and since I went keto and then pretty much carnivore I haven't had a flare up. I eat meat, fish, eggs, cheese and cauliflower (my stool seem fine with or without fiber but a little bit makes me feel more "flushed out", lol). The biggest culprit for gout is definitely carbs (sugar) and dehydration in my opinion and the carnivore diet and…

> The biggest culprit for gout is definitely carbs (sugar)

Citation? Because isn't gout generally thought by the medical establishment to be caused by high-protein, low vegetable diets that raise uric acid?

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

#298

Post by rubidium »

freeone3000 wrote: post #203
Exmoor wrote: post #3

>“What’s worrying is the effect this situation is clearly having on young adults.” I wonder if this is a perverse side effect of normalcy bias [0]? For me, a person in middle age, I can look back at my life and see a lifetime of fairly stable history with only a few traumatic events (9/11, 2008 crash). If you're 22, the current circumstances make up a much larger portion of your life. >The toll has also hit the poor…

9/11 happened to me in grade school. Iraq war happened thereafter. Then the financial crash. Then the subprime crash. And now covid. My life is shaped MORE by crises than by stability - not just the current one, but ALL of them.

Yea, so turns out being a human in a peaceful stable society is pretty rare. Most of humanity has had much more severe crisis than what you experienced. We’re a remarkably resilient species.

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

#299

Post by UncleOxidant »

JSavageOne wrote: post #131

As an American it's not surprising at all. Six figures of student loan debt, job insecurity, healthcare insecurity, rampant poverty / homelessness, the most despicable president to disgrace the white house (who didn't even win the popular vote), stay-at-home orders because the U.S. couldn't manage the crisis, lack of community (doesn't help that 99% of the country is sprawl), rampant obesity, and general lack of hope…

> lack of community

To a large extent we already had that in most of America. Suburbia is a very lonely place. See the book Bowling Alone.

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

#300

Post by rootusrootus »

idoby wrote: post #263
JSavageOne wrote: post #131

As an American it's not surprising at all. Six figures of student loan debt, job insecurity, healthcare insecurity, rampant poverty / homelessness, the most despicable president to disgrace the white house (who didn't even win the popular vote), stay-at-home orders because the U.S. couldn't manage the crisis, lack of community (doesn't help that 99% of the country is sprawl), rampant obesity, and general lack of hope…

As a non-American, why do you care about who is in the white house so much? How does it affect your life concretely? Try watching less talking heads/browsing Twitter less, maybe, and you'll feel better?

> why do you care about who is in the white house so much

He raised my taxes last year, rather significantly. So it's not just Twitter rants.

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