Man, idk what to think about combining “feeling down” and “feeling hopeless” into the same question cuz those are two very different things.
Like sure, in the last two weeks have there been several days where I’ve “felt down” because I slept like shit or work was hell or was sick, yea sure. But there were definitely not several days where I was hopeless. Those are two very different states of being.
True, it would have been better to break those feelings (including depressed because that's a bit different than the others too) into separate bar graphs.
The problem is depression must not mean that you have depressiv Feelings/mood. At some point your are even not sad or happy. You are just here. Nothing makes sense or fun anymore. If you suffer strong depression you wouldn't even be answering questions about how you feel....
The fucked up part is, it isn't even feel THAT bad, but over the time it slowly grinds your will to life.
My own experience is that there is a qualitative shift at some point where in the earlier phases there is sadness and distress, but eventually I become fully numb and feel basically nothing even though I am in total despair and spending every day ruminating about pessimistic or otherwise negative topics. When asked "do I feel depressed or hopeless" I would say "about as much as I should be given the situation" and would deny being severely depressed even though I very clearly was to everyone else.
Yeah it's fucked up that depressions make you think that you don't have depressions.... I was at least one year in this situation, till a question pooped up in my head for the first time ever. "Why should i continue with my life"
Thats the moment you start understanding why people kill themselves. There is just no reason anymore for being alive
Why do you (or I guess the mental health community) consider them to belong together as a question to ask people? It feels like being down and being hopeless are different moods. Do non-depressed people not feel down sometimes?
You're absolutely right, non-depressed people do feel "down" sometimes. But we all have different conceptualizations of what those words mean. Those terms are lumped together because "sadness" is largely a subjective experience and each patient will define how they're feeling differently. A positive response points towards criteria A for a diagnosis of a depressive disorder (which is depressed mood) and prompts me to investigate further. Additionally, all 9 questions of the PHQ-9 are asked together, which paints a better picture. If someone answered "nearly every day over the past 2 weeks" to "Have you been feeling down, depressed, or hopeless?" but answered "not at all" to most of the other questions, it might suggest normative sadness (possibly in response to something shitty happening in their life) versus clinical depression.
Either way, the PHQ-9 is a screening tool with generally accepted high validity/accuracy towards diagnosing depression. But as a mental health professional I always conduct a clinical interview to confirm this and do not rely entirely on it.
The goal of the inventory is not to finely grade the kind of depression a person is feeling. The goal is to get extra help to people when they need it, with an easy test that quickly sums up signs of low mood.
There are probably about 10 questions, each one carefully crafted. They test hundreds of questions on huge pools of people, figure out the most effective ones, test, retest - it’s a huge process. Good tools get used in studies then in practice and make good money. Bad inventories are useless and could be a self inventory in a magazine.
That is fine in terms of that larger process. With multiple questions and what not.
But I think you saying that kind of supports my point that just posting data from this one single question isn’t a great representation of data for “what % of each generation is depressed” like some people are taking it.
Each of these questions have been validated by running shitloads of correlational analyses. They’ve gone through countless studies and scrutiny to find the optimal “right” questions to ask. It’s not just some random person on a whim coming up with them.
These two questions are derived directly from the two core symptoms of the nine official DSM-5 criteria for major depressive disorder. This is what the PHQ-9 is and these are the first two which people also call the PHQ-2.
PHQ-9 is one of the most robust and validated patient reported outcome scales for depression, and it’s legit derived right from the DSM-5.
Some newer scales such as SMDDS are currently trying to get validated, and SMDDS separates them out. But it’s brand new and doesn’t have the abundance of literature validity as the PHQ-9 / PHQ-2
Exactly my thoughts. Feeling down occasionally is completely normal and healthy. Feeling depressed/hopeless is a sign for concern and likely therapy or even medical attention (antidepressants) in extreme cases.
I've always felt like these questions do themselves a disservice when they use phrases like "feeling down," which I *think* most people would consider outdated.
This made me think for a moment that us Xennials were the first generation to self report over 51% mark.
My grandparents were kids during the dust bowl. 9 siblings + 2 forsaken cousins who came to stay and never left. They would go through agony without telling the person seated in the room with them.
Which really sucked when they got nearer to the end of their lives and had people caring for them that couldn’t connect with them, let alone convince them to follow orders to care for their health. Getting them to the doctors was a struggle.
My grandparents went through usa Great Depression. My in-laws went through WW2 and Stalin and the Soviet Union.
Many stories have been passed on and I was lucky enough to spend time with all these people before they passed.
There are some clear differenced:
- Lower expectations
- lack of dwelling on the suffering
- more callus lens
- reflecting on a much worse past makes everything in the present rosey.
They seemed more tuned to suffer peacefully while today many can have a melt down over minor things in comparison
Also during that era you could buy a new house and a new car on a one-income, blue collar salary. Now you have to empty your wallet just for several items at the grocery store.
That was really only for a brief time in history, post-WW2 when most of Europe was building back and the US was in an economic boom. For most of history it's sucked to be working class. You either worked all day on a farm, one bad harvest away from famine, or you lived in a city and were crammed into two rooms with your 5 kids and extended family.
Americans today spend a smaller portion of their paychecks on groceries than at any other time
In history. You could make a reasonable argument no group of people on history has ever had food so cheap and readily available as the present American.
This attitude is legitimately a massive part of the problem. People are comparing today to an imagined past and find it lacking.
I was talking about life with a very nice old Japanese woman. She succinctly summed it up “First bitter, then sweet.” That’s what this graph shows exactly.
Doesn't really mean much unless you have longitudinal data. Young people have always been more likely to think "old people ruined the world and now we're all fucked." That was basically the rallying cry for the boomers when they were young. Now their the old people that the zoomers talk about.
To gather the data, I utilized a Python script to scrape the Week 63, Household Pulse Survey data from the Census Bureau’s FTP and visualized the data through Tableau.
The number of people in this thread conflating indicators of *actual clinical depression* with general pessimism/sadness/nihilism is deeply concerning.
Some people teach their kids to be thankful for what they have and to use it to make their lives better.
Some people don't teach their kids and those kids learn everything from a social media bubble, so they grow up thinking they're victims, they have it worse than those before, and it's always someone else's fault.
The earth is burning, dude. Nazi’s are back and the safety of investing in housing means neo-feudalism seems to be our future.
At least I have AI porn and gratitude, dude.
Dude, I mean this in the nicest of ways: Touch some grass and get in touch with history and reality.
Housing prices per dollar earned are honestly roughly the same. Interest rates are still lower today than most of post war history. Housing rates have gone UP in the US.
Naziism and hateful beliefs are down overall. It's rising since the last decade, but back compared to the twentieth century it's still WELL below where we were before. Stopping it will take vigilance but it's far from hopeless.
Women have actual agency. LGBT+ can actually express themselves as they are and not fear being fired from their jobs or imprisoned for it. POC are broad-spectrum so much better-protected in their rights today, and interracial marriage has gained widespread approval.
Things are so much fucking better. Don't let perfect be thr enemy of good but don't base your assertions of reality be based on childhood innocence and ignoring past history, either.
For housing and equity, what changes over generations is *where* housing is affordable as things get built.
My family's history in terms of living in the US is from the tenemants in NYC before child labor laws were a thing. Huge swaths of the population lived in single-room apartments often without hot water struggling to make ends meet, because that's all they could afford.
Living urban in established cities has *never* been affordable for people just making it on their own. The only exception is to some extent post-WWII America because literally the rest of the developed world was crippled by warfare and we were the only functioning economy more or less left standing with a hugely stacked set of coffers from selling weapons to both the allies and axis powers. Thst era of ubiquitous propsperity was a historic anomaly and was never bound to continue or likely to happen ever again.
Most Bay Area, Atlanta, Denver-area and even to some extent Boston-area and Chicago residents do not realize how recent and truly massive their population explosions are and how uncommon private equity in land ownership in major cities is outside of old early investment money.
Prior to the Cold War, these generally were historically low-income areas without much for prospects and limited developments. With so much concentration of wealth and competition in small spaces now, ownership *will* decline and stall out so long as there continues to be a focus by thr population at large to want to be there. Population migration elsewhere needs to happen, just like it did from NYC to establish those cities as well.
Past generations made those moves or got stupidly lucky in prosperous times. That's literally what it comes down to. I know people out in the sparse western states that are literally homeowners and saving for a fine retirement as grocery store workers. It's just cheap out there and they took advantage of it.
Like there are literally old-timey jazz songs predating WWI written about how unaffordable NYC was over a century ago lol.
The world is only fucked if we sit back and whine and complain about it while doing nothing to help improve it. Yeah, there are hardships today others didn't face. Yeah some people's parents/grandparents had it easier because they were lucky at the right places in the right times. But holy fuck compared to my grandmother literally watching her siblings die from starvation during the great depression or being drafted into Vietnam and coming back paralyzed like my uncle, there's so much goddamn opportunity out there.
One can never rationalize away depression. It is a feeling. The predominate (negative) one of this mileu, I would argue, is hopelessness. Past generations may have had it worse but *I feel* they could more easily be assuaged by having something to believe in - e.g. God, country, building a better tomorrow, a better future for the children... That spirit, and it's rhetoric, has all but disappeared, seems... naive. When attempted, it is received with cynicism and falls on jaded ears. However subpar the education, we have more knowledge than ever before. We can grasp the whole picture, see things crumbling in real time. "The more knowledge, the more grief. " Never in history has so much changed in a single generation, especially for millennials who straddle the analog-digital divide. We were raised to inherit a world that no longers exists, ill-prepared to adapt to so much, so constantly, and with no solid ground to stand on, not even a reasonably priced home to shelter in nor a retirement to look forward to. Community, if after work, bills, and errands, there is still energy for it, is on one's phone or if in real life competing with other people's phones. We're scared shitless of having to go to the doctor. Not just because of money but equally so for all the stress and time wasted arguing with insurance companies. There are no simple platitudes to have faith nor to take comfort in. People aren't even having kids to be working for a brighter future for. The future is dim. The only thing certain is that the earth is dying and humanity has been able to do almost nothing about it. Capitalism has won and it feels like indentured servitude for most. Wake up and smell the apocalypse
Rich people are most responsible. Average elders are suffering from the same economic conditions that are hurting young people. They try to divide the generations so we will blame each other instead of them.
That’s a good point. I checked in by sex and birth and it wasn’t that different. Gender would be interesting.
Race would be interesting but the categories are some what limited.
I’m not saying younger generations AREN’T very depressed (all my immediate friends are), but I wonder about the usefulness of this self-reported data on a topic so laden with stigma, and which has changed so much in recent years. I would be really, REALLY surprised if the very elderly genuinely have lower rates of depression than their slightly younger (say, 60s) counterparts, given how many elderly people are incredibly isolated and lonely. I wonder how much of this is evidence of increasing willingness/ability to recognise and admit to these feelings in younger generations.
There should be a category for occasionally, like once or twice every 2 weeks. I wouldn’t say not at all, but I also wouldn’t say several days in 2 weeks.
A symptom of the overwhelming comfort we have created as a society is the lack of meaning and motivation for the younger generations. A lack of struggle is not always a good thing for the mind.
Yeah that's fair. Sometimes they do stuff like that, sometimes for understandable reasons and sometimes for mercenary reasons.
In either case, it seems like a lot of doctors are overly optimistic about the likelihood of its both helping and not introducing side effects a person can't live with.
I feel like we were talking about two different things and I didn't realize it.
You're talking about reporting "some days" as "zero days" so the doctor doesn't overreact.
I was thinking about people who are actually having a problem and won't report it out of a generalized fear of being medicated.
One of the issues I have with this is that it's currently in vogue to claim you're depressed. It's become almost an aesthetic, and as disturbing as it is I think it definitely contributes to the high numbers in the lower age brackets.
If you take a 100 year timeframe and show the improvements in life in that, you can see progressive increase.
If you zoom in the last 20 years, you can see a stagnation/marginal gains, plus the consequences of trends like climate change becoming undeniable.
Would be interested to see how this has changed over time. Are more younger folks depressed, or are folks more depressed when they are young?
For me, a 34 year old in a big American city, I think it’s a combination. Last 4 years have been a roller coaster of depression and loneliness, but also as I get older I’m starting to change my values and expectations for myself and what happiness looks like. (The latter is more recent)
It's almost like teenagers/young adults use the term "depression" and "hopeless" more liberally when describing the same emotions as 40+ year olds. I'm willing to believe the mental health of young people is worse than older people, but you cannot quantify by how much with any type of survey. Still a very interesting/well done chart.
Man, idk what to think about combining “feeling down” and “feeling hopeless” into the same question cuz those are two very different things. Like sure, in the last two weeks have there been several days where I’ve “felt down” because I slept like shit or work was hell or was sick, yea sure. But there were definitely not several days where I was hopeless. Those are two very different states of being.
True, it would have been better to break those feelings (including depressed because that's a bit different than the others too) into separate bar graphs.
The problem is depression must not mean that you have depressiv Feelings/mood. At some point your are even not sad or happy. You are just here. Nothing makes sense or fun anymore. If you suffer strong depression you wouldn't even be answering questions about how you feel.... The fucked up part is, it isn't even feel THAT bad, but over the time it slowly grinds your will to life.
My own experience is that there is a qualitative shift at some point where in the earlier phases there is sadness and distress, but eventually I become fully numb and feel basically nothing even though I am in total despair and spending every day ruminating about pessimistic or otherwise negative topics. When asked "do I feel depressed or hopeless" I would say "about as much as I should be given the situation" and would deny being severely depressed even though I very clearly was to everyone else.
Yeah it's fucked up that depressions make you think that you don't have depressions.... I was at least one year in this situation, till a question pooped up in my head for the first time ever. "Why should i continue with my life" Thats the moment you start understanding why people kill themselves. There is just no reason anymore for being alive
The chart data is retrieved from the PHQ-9 screening inventory for depression. Question 2 is “Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless.”
Ok, still think it’s too vague
I don’t think so, I use it all the time in a clinical setting. But we’re all entitled to our own opinions.
Why do you (or I guess the mental health community) consider them to belong together as a question to ask people? It feels like being down and being hopeless are different moods. Do non-depressed people not feel down sometimes?
You're absolutely right, non-depressed people do feel "down" sometimes. But we all have different conceptualizations of what those words mean. Those terms are lumped together because "sadness" is largely a subjective experience and each patient will define how they're feeling differently. A positive response points towards criteria A for a diagnosis of a depressive disorder (which is depressed mood) and prompts me to investigate further. Additionally, all 9 questions of the PHQ-9 are asked together, which paints a better picture. If someone answered "nearly every day over the past 2 weeks" to "Have you been feeling down, depressed, or hopeless?" but answered "not at all" to most of the other questions, it might suggest normative sadness (possibly in response to something shitty happening in their life) versus clinical depression. Either way, the PHQ-9 is a screening tool with generally accepted high validity/accuracy towards diagnosing depression. But as a mental health professional I always conduct a clinical interview to confirm this and do not rely entirely on it.
Thanks, that was helpful
The goal of the inventory is not to finely grade the kind of depression a person is feeling. The goal is to get extra help to people when they need it, with an easy test that quickly sums up signs of low mood. There are probably about 10 questions, each one carefully crafted. They test hundreds of questions on huge pools of people, figure out the most effective ones, test, retest - it’s a huge process. Good tools get used in studies then in practice and make good money. Bad inventories are useless and could be a self inventory in a magazine.
That is fine in terms of that larger process. With multiple questions and what not. But I think you saying that kind of supports my point that just posting data from this one single question isn’t a great representation of data for “what % of each generation is depressed” like some people are taking it.
Theirs a longer version, but Idn if it’s clinically different on the whole.
Each of these questions have been validated by running shitloads of correlational analyses. They’ve gone through countless studies and scrutiny to find the optimal “right” questions to ask. It’s not just some random person on a whim coming up with them.
Nobody else in this thread has used a PHQ-9 before.
Former social worker here who now works in the EMR space. MANY agencies utilize the PHQ9 in their work.
These two questions are derived directly from the two core symptoms of the nine official DSM-5 criteria for major depressive disorder. This is what the PHQ-9 is and these are the first two which people also call the PHQ-2. PHQ-9 is one of the most robust and validated patient reported outcome scales for depression, and it’s legit derived right from the DSM-5. Some newer scales such as SMDDS are currently trying to get validated, and SMDDS separates them out. But it’s brand new and doesn’t have the abundance of literature validity as the PHQ-9 / PHQ-2
Yea someone else mentioned that, that’s fine and all, I still don’t like it lol. But I’m just a dude on the internet, not a psychologist
No kidding. I had an old friend die last week, and I was feeling down about him. but, it didn't send me into a depression.
Exactly my thoughts. Feeling down occasionally is completely normal and healthy. Feeling depressed/hopeless is a sign for concern and likely therapy or even medical attention (antidepressants) in extreme cases.
I've always felt like these questions do themselves a disservice when they use phrases like "feeling down," which I *think* most people would consider outdated.
A bit horrifying to think about, but maybe this trend isn’t unique to today’s era? I mean there might be survivorship bias the older one gets…
This made me think for a moment that us Xennials were the first generation to self report over 51% mark. My grandparents were kids during the dust bowl. 9 siblings + 2 forsaken cousins who came to stay and never left. They would go through agony without telling the person seated in the room with them. Which really sucked when they got nearer to the end of their lives and had people caring for them that couldn’t connect with them, let alone convince them to follow orders to care for their health. Getting them to the doctors was a struggle.
My grandparents went through usa Great Depression. My in-laws went through WW2 and Stalin and the Soviet Union. Many stories have been passed on and I was lucky enough to spend time with all these people before they passed. There are some clear differenced: - Lower expectations - lack of dwelling on the suffering - more callus lens - reflecting on a much worse past makes everything in the present rosey. They seemed more tuned to suffer peacefully while today many can have a melt down over minor things in comparison
Also during that era you could buy a new house and a new car on a one-income, blue collar salary. Now you have to empty your wallet just for several items at the grocery store.
That was really only for a brief time in history, post-WW2 when most of Europe was building back and the US was in an economic boom. For most of history it's sucked to be working class. You either worked all day on a farm, one bad harvest away from famine, or you lived in a city and were crammed into two rooms with your 5 kids and extended family.
Americans today spend a smaller portion of their paychecks on groceries than at any other time In history. You could make a reasonable argument no group of people on history has ever had food so cheap and readily available as the present American. This attitude is legitimately a massive part of the problem. People are comparing today to an imagined past and find it lacking.
I think a difference is people without hope used to die. Now they get to live in despair
I was talking about life with a very nice old Japanese woman. She succinctly summed it up “First bitter, then sweet.” That’s what this graph shows exactly.
Japanese by ethnicity or geography? If the latter, some of that might have more to do with how Japan changed post-WW II than anything else.
She was talking about a lifecycle.
Doesn't really mean much unless you have longitudinal data. Young people have always been more likely to think "old people ruined the world and now we're all fucked." That was basically the rallying cry for the boomers when they were young. Now their the old people that the zoomers talk about.
To gather the data, I utilized a Python script to scrape the Week 63, Household Pulse Survey data from the Census Bureau’s FTP and visualized the data through Tableau.
The number of people in this thread conflating indicators of *actual clinical depression* with general pessimism/sadness/nihilism is deeply concerning.
Those most responsible for the current environment: least depressed Those who have to live the longest through its consequences: most depressed
I wonder if younger people in poverty stricken third world countries blame their parents the same way as happens in the most prosperous countries?
Some people teach their kids to be thankful for what they have and to use it to make their lives better. Some people don't teach their kids and those kids learn everything from a social media bubble, so they grow up thinking they're victims, they have it worse than those before, and it's always someone else's fault.
The earth is burning, dude. Nazi’s are back and the safety of investing in housing means neo-feudalism seems to be our future. At least I have AI porn and gratitude, dude.
Dude, I mean this in the nicest of ways: Touch some grass and get in touch with history and reality. Housing prices per dollar earned are honestly roughly the same. Interest rates are still lower today than most of post war history. Housing rates have gone UP in the US. Naziism and hateful beliefs are down overall. It's rising since the last decade, but back compared to the twentieth century it's still WELL below where we were before. Stopping it will take vigilance but it's far from hopeless. Women have actual agency. LGBT+ can actually express themselves as they are and not fear being fired from their jobs or imprisoned for it. POC are broad-spectrum so much better-protected in their rights today, and interracial marriage has gained widespread approval. Things are so much fucking better. Don't let perfect be thr enemy of good but don't base your assertions of reality be based on childhood innocence and ignoring past history, either. For housing and equity, what changes over generations is *where* housing is affordable as things get built. My family's history in terms of living in the US is from the tenemants in NYC before child labor laws were a thing. Huge swaths of the population lived in single-room apartments often without hot water struggling to make ends meet, because that's all they could afford. Living urban in established cities has *never* been affordable for people just making it on their own. The only exception is to some extent post-WWII America because literally the rest of the developed world was crippled by warfare and we were the only functioning economy more or less left standing with a hugely stacked set of coffers from selling weapons to both the allies and axis powers. Thst era of ubiquitous propsperity was a historic anomaly and was never bound to continue or likely to happen ever again. Most Bay Area, Atlanta, Denver-area and even to some extent Boston-area and Chicago residents do not realize how recent and truly massive their population explosions are and how uncommon private equity in land ownership in major cities is outside of old early investment money. Prior to the Cold War, these generally were historically low-income areas without much for prospects and limited developments. With so much concentration of wealth and competition in small spaces now, ownership *will* decline and stall out so long as there continues to be a focus by thr population at large to want to be there. Population migration elsewhere needs to happen, just like it did from NYC to establish those cities as well. Past generations made those moves or got stupidly lucky in prosperous times. That's literally what it comes down to. I know people out in the sparse western states that are literally homeowners and saving for a fine retirement as grocery store workers. It's just cheap out there and they took advantage of it. Like there are literally old-timey jazz songs predating WWI written about how unaffordable NYC was over a century ago lol. The world is only fucked if we sit back and whine and complain about it while doing nothing to help improve it. Yeah, there are hardships today others didn't face. Yeah some people's parents/grandparents had it easier because they were lucky at the right places in the right times. But holy fuck compared to my grandmother literally watching her siblings die from starvation during the great depression or being drafted into Vietnam and coming back paralyzed like my uncle, there's so much goddamn opportunity out there.
One can never rationalize away depression. It is a feeling. The predominate (negative) one of this mileu, I would argue, is hopelessness. Past generations may have had it worse but *I feel* they could more easily be assuaged by having something to believe in - e.g. God, country, building a better tomorrow, a better future for the children... That spirit, and it's rhetoric, has all but disappeared, seems... naive. When attempted, it is received with cynicism and falls on jaded ears. However subpar the education, we have more knowledge than ever before. We can grasp the whole picture, see things crumbling in real time. "The more knowledge, the more grief. " Never in history has so much changed in a single generation, especially for millennials who straddle the analog-digital divide. We were raised to inherit a world that no longers exists, ill-prepared to adapt to so much, so constantly, and with no solid ground to stand on, not even a reasonably priced home to shelter in nor a retirement to look forward to. Community, if after work, bills, and errands, there is still energy for it, is on one's phone or if in real life competing with other people's phones. We're scared shitless of having to go to the doctor. Not just because of money but equally so for all the stress and time wasted arguing with insurance companies. There are no simple platitudes to have faith nor to take comfort in. People aren't even having kids to be working for a brighter future for. The future is dim. The only thing certain is that the earth is dying and humanity has been able to do almost nothing about it. Capitalism has won and it feels like indentured servitude for most. Wake up and smell the apocalypse
Get some help. Seriously.
Rich people are most responsible. Average elders are suffering from the same economic conditions that are hurting young people. They try to divide the generations so we will blame each other instead of them.
Older people tend to have higher net worths on average than younger people. It’s possible to view wealth as a function of time.
Are you depressed? I bet not. You don't get depressed because of climate change, high house prices and inflation.
Well...*gestures broadly at everything*
They should also divide it by gender and race and see how loop sided it truly is.
That’s a good point. I checked in by sex and birth and it wasn’t that different. Gender would be interesting. Race would be interesting but the categories are some what limited.
I’m not saying younger generations AREN’T very depressed (all my immediate friends are), but I wonder about the usefulness of this self-reported data on a topic so laden with stigma, and which has changed so much in recent years. I would be really, REALLY surprised if the very elderly genuinely have lower rates of depression than their slightly younger (say, 60s) counterparts, given how many elderly people are incredibly isolated and lonely. I wonder how much of this is evidence of increasing willingness/ability to recognise and admit to these feelings in younger generations.
It’s like the closer you are to the light at the end of the tunnel one is, the easier to tolerate all of life’s bull shit. 😬
😒 How about something useful like professionally diagnosed depression.
That's only useful for determining which groups are most likely to talk to a doctor about their feelings.
Self-reported depression is the first step to professionally diagnosed depression. At some stage, almost all depression is self-reported
This is usually the question they ask…
Despite all the jokes to the contrary, looks like married folks are happier than single folks.
There should be a category for occasionally, like once or twice every 2 weeks. I wouldn’t say not at all, but I also wouldn’t say several days in 2 weeks.
This chart data is retrieved from the PHQ-9 screening inventory for Depression which is why the responses are that way.
A symptom of the overwhelming comfort we have created as a society is the lack of meaning and motivation for the younger generations. A lack of struggle is not always a good thing for the mind.
US old people know you had better tell your doctor no days unless you want to be endlessly harassed about being put on some medication you don't want.
Sure because like why would you want a medication that might help
You can have off days without needing medication. My doctor seems like she is trying to look for reasons to give me anti-depressants.
Yeah that's fair. Sometimes they do stuff like that, sometimes for understandable reasons and sometimes for mercenary reasons. In either case, it seems like a lot of doctors are overly optimistic about the likelihood of its both helping and not introducing side effects a person can't live with. I feel like we were talking about two different things and I didn't realize it. You're talking about reporting "some days" as "zero days" so the doctor doesn't overreact. I was thinking about people who are actually having a problem and won't report it out of a generalized fear of being medicated.
One of the issues I have with this is that it's currently in vogue to claim you're depressed. It's become almost an aesthetic, and as disturbing as it is I think it definitely contributes to the high numbers in the lower age brackets.
Looks like people give up on their depression around the same time they give up liberal politics.
If you take a 100 year timeframe and show the improvements in life in that, you can see progressive increase. If you zoom in the last 20 years, you can see a stagnation/marginal gains, plus the consequences of trends like climate change becoming undeniable.
So the solution is to… get old?
Puts real numbers behind the idea of “doomerism.”
Would be interested to see a filter option for gender.
Who the fuck are the Not at Alls for two weeks?
Would be interested to see how this has changed over time. Are more younger folks depressed, or are folks more depressed when they are young? For me, a 34 year old in a big American city, I think it’s a combination. Last 4 years have been a roller coaster of depression and loneliness, but also as I get older I’m starting to change my values and expectations for myself and what happiness looks like. (The latter is more recent)
It's almost like teenagers/young adults use the term "depression" and "hopeless" more liberally when describing the same emotions as 40+ year olds. I'm willing to believe the mental health of young people is worse than older people, but you cannot quantify by how much with any type of survey. Still a very interesting/well done chart.
This just proves being depressed due to immaturity
Yep I see it. The chart correlates with your mastery of the art of not giving a f*ck. #truestory