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

Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks about the cause

bigthink.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 70 posts

Re: Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks about the cause

#11

Post by armedgorilla »

Aboutplants wrote: post #4

We are inundated with more choices and decisions than ever before, causing stress that becomes overwhelming. Up until the last generation, you didn’t even worry about what you were going to have for dinner. Your option was whatever was available. You spent the day making that thing. You ate. Now you have to make decisions on every little thing in life because there are options and choices for everything in life. We h…

From Moby-Dick, about spending three years at sea (Chapter 35):

"""There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner- for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable."""

Re: Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks about the cause

#12

Post by card_zero »

Aboutplants wrote: post #4

We are inundated with more choices and decisions than ever before, causing stress that becomes overwhelming. Up until the last generation, you didn’t even worry about what you were going to have for dinner. Your option was whatever was available. You spent the day making that thing. You ate. Now you have to make decisions on every little thing in life because there are options and choices for everything in life. We h…

So I did a chronological search for "what's for dinner", here it is in a poem from 1794: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_pindarian...

Their choices are rat, mouse, or nothing, but they do have choices, and I think non-fictional characters would typically have more palatable choices about what to have for dinner, when using this age-old common phrase, 230 years ago.

Edit: 1794 was in the middle of the French Revolution, and in the decades leading up, the peasantry famously had the choice of no bread or no cake. This bewildering choice is why they were misérable.

Re: Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks about the cause

#13

Post by EA-3167 »

wahern wrote: post #7
EA-3167 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense. What is Instagram if not a giant machine to generate the exact feeling? After all it “inspires” people to emulate what they see, which usually involves spending whatever they have on their appearance and lifestyle.

> Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense. Nobody is seeing how the wealthy live. They're seeing caricatures of how people imagine the wealthy live, or sometimes the extravagance of the nouveau riche living out those fictions. And even when they get glimpses of actual wealth, like all forms of entertainment (including rage bait) they're seeing h…

"Wealthy" is extremely relative, which is why people here think of SV oligarchs, but people in a very poor part of the world might see the standard of living of the average middle class person in another country as wealthy.

For example the people in Fnideq, Morocco can see how people in Ceuta are living directly, and media deptiction (including quite accurate ones) of how people live in Spain. Now while you or I would find both to probably be a significant lifestyle downgrade, to a destitute young man in Fnideq it's literally tempting enough to risk their lives to bridge that gap.

Wherever you are in the world you now have a window into the possibilities, the lifestyles, the leisure, the lack of humiliating poverty that others experience. It's not just human nature to see that and want it, it's primate nature.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2141866/

Re: Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks about the cause

#14

Post by blueflow »

60 years ago you might have ended up in a psychiatric hospital without getting effective treatment, mental health issues were stigmatized and the incentive to seek out help was low. People used to just live a miserable life with their issues.

Nowadays knowledge about mental health issues is widespread in the population, somewhat normalized and leading to people seeking help.

I consider it realistic that depression did not actually increase, its just more people showing up in the statistics.

Re: Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks about the cause

#16

Post by deepsun »

LoganDark wrote: post #10
richard_chase wrote: post #8

I think the new generation will be alright. From what I've seen, they seem to believe that maximizing their looks is the answer.

That is a thing people do when they feel a lack of control over other aspects of their life. It's a coping mechanism. Frequently comorbid with depression. Also it's quite rude of you to dismiss an entire generation with this belittling rhetoric. Mental health is a really, really big deal.

Watch any movie, typically the protagonist is good looking and antagonist is ugly. That's the whole answer.

In Game of Thrones director had a chance to make the dwarf (protagonist ) really ugly, like in the books, but they chose a good looking actor.

Same for Harry Potter, Hermione was supposed to be meh.

Re: Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks about the cause

#17

Post by EA-3167 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #5
EA-3167 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense. What is Instagram if not a giant machine to generate the exact feeling? After all it “inspires” people to emulate what they see, which usually involves spending whatever they have on their appearance and lifestyle.

Yes, that's true too I was honestly just talking about "people used to afford a house and family with two vacations per year on a single income, now people can't even afford a house on two incomes" which seems to be a common refrain nowadays I know a lot of my friends and peers believe they have worse standard of living than their parents did at the same age, and the data does seem to agree with them. Existence of sm…

While true a lot of subtlety is hidden in those seemingly simple comparisons. For example has the median/average home size grown since then? If so by how much? How about amenities that are expected in a modern home? In the 1950's and 1960's what did a vacation look like for a single-income family with kids back then? What does it look like now?

If you look at the data what you see is that people have more, want more, and spend more. People didn't necessarily fly to Europe, maybe a vacation was a local seaside, a road trip, or something similar. Heck even for the same vacation to the same place you pay more today because supply and demand lets it happen; you'll pay 250% more for a trip to Disney now than you would in the 1970's, but then again the global population has exploded along with the population globally that can afford to go to Disney.

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-...

I know that everyone wants to believe in some kind of quick political or economic fix, but it just isn't that simple. If you want to spread out the existing wealth for everyone then the average standard of living would drop. If you want to raise that standard of living while extending it to more people... well, good luck?

Re: Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks about the cause

#18

Post by izacus »

Aboutplants wrote: post #4

We are inundated with more choices and decisions than ever before, causing stress that becomes overwhelming. Up until the last generation, you didn’t even worry about what you were going to have for dinner. Your option was whatever was available. You spent the day making that thing. You ate. Now you have to make decisions on every little thing in life because there are options and choices for everything in life. We h…

This is absolute nonsense, for most of history most people were at the edge of starvation, balancing on the knifes edge between "not enough people to work on a farm to provide enough food" and "too many people for the food we grew".

Of course, most of history didn't even have concept of depression or a sizeable count of medical professionals to diagnose it.

Re: Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks about the cause

#19

Post by paimapi »

my partner is a psychiatrist (that's the one with an MD)

in our household we treat all overly broad, trendy statements like this one with a huge grain of salt

the difference between rates of diagnosed major depressive disorder (MDD) vs the past has much more to do with a combination of the diagnostic criteria being refined [1] over the years and the increase of screening [2] during your annual checkup (something physicians were recommended against doing as late as the 90s). you know how your PCP asks you now how you're feeling, if you've had thoughts of self-harm, had any loss in appetite, or have given up your hobbies? that's the one

if you need to blame it on a social trend, there's a sharp correlation between the rates of suicide in the USA [3] with the transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% of people to the top 1% [4]. as they say, correlation is not causation but it is one of the best indications that it might be. smarter and much better trained people than I can probably do the in-depth research and analysis needed to make that claim

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t5/ [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3291670/ [3] https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/data/index.html [4] http://blog.oxfamamerica.org.s3.amazonaws.com/politicsofpove...

Post reply on HN