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How Depressives Surf the Web

nytimes.com

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Re: How Depressives Surf the Web

#61

Post by evoxed »

notJim wrote: post #47
pjscott wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite! This is making a statement about conditional probability, but you got the condition reversed: people who are depressed are more likely to be "engaged fully in the 'web' experience". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_probability To find out the chances that a heavy web user is depressed, you have to also consider the other things that can cause someone to use the web heavily. There's a really slick t…

Wow... I have recently taken courses that taught Baye's Theorem, and even more recently read a long, well-written piece about how even qualified people often misinterpret statistics (the way your parent did which is not congruent with Baye's theorem), and yet I still interpreted the stat in the same, incorrect way.

That seems to be one of the major laments in Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman). Us humans, even when we're 'ready for it', tend to be remarkably inflexible in adopting concepts which conflict with our basic or social intuitions...

Re: How Depressives Surf the Web

#62

Post by koide »

genwin wrote: post #16
wickedchicken wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So basically people who are engaged fully in the "web" experience are depressed? How could you read comments on HN, reddit and youtube and not be depressed?

Bingo. Or the news in general. If you're not depressed to some degree you're probably oblivious to what's going on in the world at large, or (possibly worse) don't care.

Or you just accept you alone can't solve the world problems and take the small steps you can.

For the record, I get angry at the world problems, not depressed.

Re: How Depressives Surf the Web

#63

Post by [deleted] »

genwin wrote: post #16
wickedchicken wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So basically people who are engaged fully in the "web" experience are depressed? How could you read comments on HN, reddit and youtube and not be depressed?

Bingo. Or the news in general. If you're not depressed to some degree you're probably oblivious to what's going on in the world at large, or (possibly worse) don't care.

[deleted]

Re: How Depressives Surf the Web

#64

Post by Atropos »

I disagree with all the negative comments here, if I understand the article correctly, they found a correlation like "IF you are depressed, THEN you might anxiously check your emails all the time'' They arent saying this internet use pattern makes you more likely to be depressed (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_ponens#Justification_via_...)

In my personal case, I have bipolar depression and I have gone through several depressive episodes and have definately changed my internet usage during them as described in the article. So I believe this research has value and I will probably build a tool for self-tracking these variables...

What I disagree with is that there should be a central software to notify "counselors'' of this behavior. I believe there would be too many false positives and it would be a huge intrusion of privacy.

Maybe a system where users by the software get an automated "Need help?" email once where they can schedule an anonymous appointment with 1 click at the student health center or something would be fine. But it should really just be a relatively cheap way to screen for students who might be in trouble and contact them proactively, the internet usage itself shouldnt be logged or discussed as a problem ever...

Re: How Depressives Surf the Web

#65

Post by lostlogin »

mwsherman wrote: post #9

Admittedly this article a high-level overview, but I see a lot of hand-waving use of statistical terms. For example, how is “30 percent of the participants met the criteria for depressive symptoms” in line with “10 to 40 percent of college students at some point experience such symptoms”. It’s not: 30% have depressive symptoms now vs 10% having symptoms at some point? One of those two numbers is way off, or they are…

Exactly what I was poised to write. After a howler like that, reading on is hard.

Re: How Depressives Surf the Web

#66

Post by vidar »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #3

Fascinating stuff. Just today I was looking at the 30-40 tabs I bring up each time I start Chrome and I was wondering: doest having all this data in front of me help me remember to do various internet chores? Or does it get in the way? Better still, is it a sign I'm actually experiencing some other condition that shows itself in my context-switching? I think there's something to this. Having said that, I found this w…

What is in those 30-40 tabs? I am genuinely curious!

Re: How Depressives Surf the Web

#67

Post by jcfrei »

this article seems to me as a hint that we need to redefine depression - the term has become ubiquous (synchronous with the rising term of burnout) and looking thru the test on http://cesd-r.com/ it seems to me at a large part of the correlation could come from the loss of focus amongst the test persons. this would also be in line with the higher usage of various web applications (which obviously dosen't contribute to your concentration). calling this as a form of depression just doesn't seem like the appropriate term.

Re: How Depressives Surf the Web

#68

Post by jakeonthemove »

Maybe it's the way they surf that makes them depressed :-)? I don't know, I always have a ton of stuff running at the same time, including Web tabs, software, email accounts, etc. And I'm not depressed, that's for sure - when I'm depressed, I install Skyrim, Crysis or another open world game and completely immerse myself into the virtual world, not giving a crap about anything around me. Thank God I don't like WoW :-)...
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