As a person with a history of depression and social anxiety I really do feel calmer since the crisis started, as if my state of mind was made for this kind of life.
Less people on the streets, it's quieter, no one breathing down my neck in the supermarket, home office, no expectations on how to pick my clothes, how to behave, no trying to hide the weird stuff I eat (carnivore, high meat, raw, cooked and aged whatever gets on the plate), no forced socializing.
I agree. It's not that my state of life is that great: in many ways it's a side-effect of a nasty upbringing that did me harm, and I'd be better off without it and am actively pursuing repair of some of these mental issues.
But given that I've spent my life with a set of challenges, this crisis has given me space to sort out what parts of it are ME and what parts are issues needing to be fixed. That's pretty valuable.
Even better, I don't think we'll ever go back to boisterous 'forced socializing or you are a bad person!' attitudes. There are now conditions attached, and that's reasonable (and opens the door to conditions like 'I don't have coronavirus, but when I socialize like you guys do I panic')
My hope for cultural change post pandemic is that the shift towards remote work will persist after it's over. I love being an engineer but I can't stand working in an open office or commuting 2 1/2 hours a day.
For a while I wondered if I'm the outlier since I feel substantially better now than I did before going into isolation. Then some of my close friends who were on anti-depression or anti-anxiety medication told me the same. They actually stopped taking the medication for months with no signs that the symptoms are coming back.
It's anecdotal and I have no idea how widespread this is or why it happens, at least to people for whom self-isolation didn't work in the past. I can only imagine that the isolation may relieve some of the social pressure without leaving you with the feeling that you have to go to extraordinary measures to achieve it, it doesn't feel so self inflicted like self-isolation does under regular conditions. Now it's an external cause and applies to everybody.
My worktime shifted more towards evening / night which is good for me because I’m a night owl and seemingly can only think very deeply at night. Having to work 9-5 with all its distractions can make me depressed as I start to make more mistakes or don’t really „get into“ things and produce shallow work. After being unsatisfied with my work for some time I tend to lose trust in my abilities. Did you observe something similar for you? Some colleagues also shifted towards evenings (many more evening chats right now).
I don't know how widely this applies, but sometimes undirected anxiety is harder to deal with than being worried about a specific thing. And if you're going to be anxious no matter what, then external circumstances might not affect the intensity of the anxiety as much as would seem logical. So it's possible that some people have benefited from having a very concrete threat to focus on, and relatively clear steps to minimise the risk.
(I'm not trying to push this too far: I assume it mostly applies to people who have enough control over their lives to take the necessary precautions, and who are fortunate enough that the threat to them and their loved ones remains a possibility rather than a tragic reality. And I know that the exact opposite can happen: sometimes external threats just multiply the pre-existing anxiety and make it even harder to cope.)
I think it’s even deeper than that. Human society has changed a lot really quickly, it would be unreasonable to expect a seamless transition. Similar to how wild animals in captivity suffer from tremendous stress due to their environment, the pressures from living in our society are massive.
Compared to say living in 1000 AD. Family units are smaller, life is more fast paced and it’s way more complicated with all the credit cards, the often difficult legal system, and ever present “connection” to one another through messaging and social media. During this pandemic I’ve deleted all my social media accounts and even though I’m less “connected” now, I feel much better than before and the world even feels more real to me.
Not a response to parent comment, but does anyone know of studies of people that describe their self-assessment? My impression is that most people think they're weirder than they are, i.e. most people fall within a band of what everyone would call normal, but they often self-assess as weird in one way or the other.
i.e. for parameter X which typically ranges between x and x' and for which people estimate themselves at x1, they typically severely underestimate the size of the range (x,x') and conclude that x1 is outside it, when it's really inside it.
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 get out of bed? Turns out no, everyone has mood swings from time to time but mine were more predictable and severe enough they were preventing me from doing the things I wanted to. Hence the diagnosis and medication.
This is why mental health professionals are important. It can go both ways -- sometimes folks are just neurotic and overanalyzing themselves, and sometimes they're oblivious to the mental illness they do have. Medication and life changes help, but the first step is to see a professional who can help you sort through whether your mood issues rise to the level of clinical or not.
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.
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.
Haha, but is it the case that maybe those people (or perhaps even everyone) tell everyone else at some point that they're weird? i.e. one problem with this is that if someone calls lots of people weird, their calling you weird isn't significant. And I'm certain everyone has been called 'weird' at some point in their lives, so merely having been called weird is insufficient to actually be weird.
There's a bias induced by how people act in public. You don't normally see people's quirks, you only see the most normal side of their behaviour. It doesn't occur to you that they also have weird ticks - possibly weirder than yours.
Do you live in a city? It sounds like you might enjoy living in a small town much more. Many small towns are very similar to what you just described all the time.
As a self-proclaimed weirdo and staunch individualist, small towns can be very difficult to just mind your own business in. Literally everything you do or don’t do tends to get noticed and talked about amongst the residents.
There’s something to be said for the anonymity of large urban center.
Absolutely. I grew up in a tiny town, and loved the ability to get way out in the middle of nowhere with no humans around. And hated practically everything else about it.
Small towns make your business everyone's. There's a desperation for gossip that's just gross to me, and worse, if you don't play along, you're an outcast. Which worked fine for me, except it makes you a target for local shitheads.
I get why others might like it if they're social extroverts who fit whatever local majority-normal is, if not, a city is a far better place to live.
Another data point. If you have difficulty with people talking about you, definitely don't move to a small town in a foreign country where you are a visible minority. I've yet to experience real negative discrimination amongst my neighbours, but boy are they interested in me! I'm kind of strange in that I like being the center of attention, but don't like spending energy to achieve that position, so it's kind of ideal for me. However, I've know people for whom it is haunting (Yes, they really do notice everything you do). If you need to buy things that are... um... delicate... best to go to another town -- and even then you aren't always safe ;-) When I first moved here, I was one of 2 visible minorities and I also taught at the high school, so everybody knew who I was. It's like being a celebrity without the money.
I agree with this. I have though about it extensively, as an introvert who hates large cities, and I think (at least for me) a city between 500k and 1 million inhabitants spread out over a sizeable area is ideal. It has some of the benefits of a large city and some of the benefits of a small town, and I think it strikes a good balance between being anonymous in a crowd while having enough space for myself to live comfortably. Such a city would also have the population to find enough people with similar interests/hobbies to have clubs and meetups.
Have to choose the town wisely... in extremely small towns you might find people go out of their way to interact with you more and are generally more interested in your private business. Part of my family lives in small towns and I think they have less privacy than I do.
Sadly, I experienced the opposite. I also have a history of depression and panic disorders (not social, however), and I was getting better before the quarantine. When the quarantine struck about a week after I started feeling hopelessness as if I have no control in life anymore. Like things, bad things will happen to me, and I will not be able to cope with it.
Then memories over past mistakes took over, and I started obsessing on every little bad thing I've ever done. As time went by these thoughts filled my head for the most of the day, and because of quarantine restrictions, I wasn't able to do much to shake them off. Anybody else experienced something similar?
I found I just break down without human contact. Thoughts. No thoughts. Staring, not moving. It's not good. I'm thankful that the lockdown restrictions are easing up a bit where I live and I can meet with friends again. Otherwise I'd have been arguing to take it slower with opening up, if it wasn't taking such a toll on me.
My therapist told me that a lot of her anxious clients are actually doing really well with all this, because now everybody is anxious and it feels less alienating.
Same for me. I was already out of work and could barely eat at restaurants due to a few years of emerging health problems, so the idea that we're supposed to stick around the house and get groceries delivered was easy to accept. It actually felt like a nice change from my habits. I like some of the political changes it is catalyzing, such as how some people are gaining a better understanding of why the government should provide a functional social safety net, and mandate things like paid sick leave.
However, it's been hard to witness and deal with the effects I've seen on other people. My roommate has been extremely stressed out. It makes me feel sad to see all the restaurants and bars that are closed down, and normally busy districts deserted at 6:00 on a Friday. I feel bad for people who have no choice but to continue working in high-risk jobs, and those whose businesses will be interrupted for quite some time, such as concert organizers. And, of course, for the hundreds of thousands of people who have died and their families.
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?
The point of the article is that we have five appetites, not one: protein, carbs, fats, sodium and calcium.
Then:
"The thing about ultra-processed foods is that they tend to be low in protein – which is expensive – and high in cheap carbs and fats. It is these foods that have largely been responsible for the dilution of protein in Western diets since the 1960s. And the more ultra-processed foods people eat, the more calories they need to consume to get the target intake of protein, with disastrous consequences."
So, get your protein (nuts,meat, fish, dairy, etc, etc) in and the rest should follow naturally. Once you fix up your protein intake, you may find that you fix other diet related snags as well. This is another telling quote:
"Intriguingly, in our experiments with people, we found that most of the extra calories eaten by those on a low-protein diet came from savoury snacks, especially those that tasted of umami, the signature flavour of protein. Protein-deprived subjects were craving things that tasted like protein, even though they were made of carbs. Our food environment is awash with such umami-flavoured carbs and fats, which we call “protein decoys”: crisps, instant noodles, crackers and so on."
I don't think I have overdone it on the quotes but the message is quite clear. You may need this to join the dots:
"Ultra-processed foods make us fat, but not because we have strong appetites for the fats and carbs they contain, as is often thought to be the case. Rather, it is because our appetite for protein is stronger than our ability to limit fat and carb intake."
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/or keto pretty much takes care of that, it eliminates the carbs and meat in my experience makes you drink a lot of water.
It is also a lot easier to maintain your weight (also very important in the gout equation) on carnivore, I find it really hard to over eat, you hit satiety fast and I find that there is a lot less noise in the hunger signals. My stomach now days only makes itself reminded when I truly need energy, no "fake" cravings.
My mental state also seem clearer, I find fat to be a smoother source of energy then carbs. Fat is a slow stable burn while carbs is a violent explosive burn, which is cool every now and then but you pay a price for it.
I've come to believe that the confounding factors in whether dietary ideas "work" are micronutrients and the gut biome, and these are still really unexplored areas of medicine.
If you have a deficiency of, say, magnesium - that won't be fixed by eating more meat or less sugar, but it might give you strange cravings or bad moods. And if you have a gut that is working inefficiently, it might not adapt well to a high fat diet. And this translates into "bad and good diets", because eating differently reduces the symptoms.
But if your body is generally taking in things efficiently, its macronutrient requirements are going to be mostly proportional to your energy use, and then you can have relatively more protein or relatively more carbs without many ill effects.
So IMHO a decent starting place for dietary change is not really diet itself, but to take a multivitamin, start intermittent fasting, and to get some daily light, full-body exercise. These things start up the flywheel of reducing ongoing deficiencies and increasing selective pressure on the gut.
No I have no citation for this, you are right, generally that is what you read, and I went down that route as well for several years but the gout just go worse and worse. Switching to high fat, high protein but pretty much zero carbs seems to be the best for me. I believe, again my own conclusion, that it is a insulin issue, I nuked my insulin system for years with carbs (sugar).
I'm not a medical person, I got my first gout attack around 24 (33 now) and since then I had at least one major flare up (lasting weeks) every year + a few minor once per year. 2018 I had the mother of all flare ups in my knee, I thought I had experience pain but oh my lord that was pain on a whole nother level. That made me take extreme measures dietary wise and I've been gout free since (knock on wood).
The carnivore diet stuff is just straight up garbage fad dieting except it sounds cool or whatever so it appeals to insecure dudes. No real substance to it, and everyone I’ve ever seen promote just spits out the same bullshit claims as every other fad diet testimonial (“no more brain fog”)
Unless you’ve been instructed to by an actual doctor, switching to a meme internet diet promoted by morons like Jordan Peterson is probably not a great idea.
> Prospective data suggest that consumption of sugar sweetened soft drinks and fructose is strongly associated with an increased risk of gout in men. Furthermore, fructose rich fruits and fruit juices may also increase the risk
I never understood why people get so worked up about what others eat. Like how does this affect you in any way?
If it works for people so what? Personally, I would never go that far but it seems like most people aren't getting enough protein and could use a bump.
I wonder if the people who had those "no more brain fog" had an underlying condition in the first place, like vitamin/mineral deficiency, anemia, etc. These problems are rarely checked in the first place.
Most stories I hear about people that try carnivore doesn't do it to get on the next hip thing, these are people that suffered from something for years and out of sheer desperation tried something "wild" and it worked FOR THEM.
I don't understand how it is a garbage diet either? You get all the nutrients you need while eliminating pretty much everything else. That to me sounds like an excellent starting ground to then build upon and figure out what YOUR gut is cool with.
So much of American how society functions is going to be rethought after this - telework, hygiene, respect for healthcare and "essential" workers - but somehow, I don't think "the dignity and health of shy or introverted people" is going to be part of that. Extroverts are finally seeing what the other side looks and feels like, but rather than reconsider how their privilege might come at the expense of our health and happiness, they're clawing at their cages like rabid beasts to get out and "get back to normal."
And if you have to live with one, you know that the first few weeks were bliss, until they started getting antsy and began offloading their nervous energy on you. Can't win.
I am the opposite. My depression and anxiety has gotten worse since I have been stuck working from home. The social interaction I got at work has been significantly reduced.
I also have a history of depression, 20+ years on an antidepressant manages it very well, but I'm an extrovert, so this has me climbing the walls. It's been difficult to deal with for me.
Diagnostic criteria for anxiety and depression are very broad because they are necessary as tools for practicing doctors seeing patients (as opposed to applying them to a random selection of people). If you turn the process back, and just ask how many people in the population fit under them, you'll always, even in normal times, get an unexpectedly large number. That doesn't imply that anything is wrong or that anything needs to be done about it, doctors don't use them like that. This is approximately the same phenomenon that causes medical students to self-diagnose themselves with every disease they learn about: one of the fundamental factors missing from such a diagnosis is that they haven't walked into a clinic. It's not a bug in the diagnostic criteria, it's just a misapplication of them.
One of the main ways of fighting over-diagnosis is to not apply diagnostic criteria for every known condition to random people who you have no a priori reason to suspect they might have those conditions.
I'm a PhD in clinical psychology, currently working with clients, whose research has focused on the psychometric evaluation of questionnaire measures.
I have no idea what you're talking about. The diagnostic criteria are not "very broad because they are necessary as tools". The diagnostic criteria are meant to be sufficient criteria for diagnosing a disorder. Questionnaire-based measures act as a scientifically validated proxy for a clinical interview to determine this. With a sufficient score on one of several validated diagnostic questionnaires, you can typically say with 80-90% certainty (specificity is the technical term for that percentage) that the person would receive a diagnosis from a clinical interview.
Psychologists and epidemiologists can and do research prevalence of mental health conditions by randomly sampling the population. This does not "over-diagnose" mental health disorders. That's absolute nonsense. Over-diagnosis is only an issue in cases where prevalence is below the false positive rate (technical term is "sensitivity") of the test. That is not the case here.
If you looked at the linked CDC study, they even mentioned the instruments that were used to support this statement. The PHQ2 and GAD2 are validated very brief measures of depression and anxiety that are sufficient for estimating the likelihood of a depression or anxiety diagnosis respectively. Likelihood of a false positive on the PHQ2[1] and GAD2[2] are both around 20% (100-specificity), which is just fine. Both of these are more than sufficient for epidemiological purposes if not for individual Dx.
The fact of the matter is that nationwide prevalence for diagnosable disorders IS high, and it's on the rise. Coronavirus has made people anxious and quarantine has made them depressed. And a LOT of people need help.
Hold on, do I understand correctly your comment about the 20% false positive rate? So even if exactly ZERO Americans were experiencing depression, a random sampling would indicate 20% of Americans are showing signs of depression? And if it's 20% for both tests, that would would correspond to a 36% false positive rate for at least one condition [0]. So the headline that a third of Americans are showing signs of anxiety or depression is consistent with what you'd expect to observe if there was zero (or very small) true prevalence? How does that work out?
[0] assuming test results for anxiety and depression are uncorrelated, which seems unlikely. But even if they were 100% correlated, the joint FPR would still be 20%.
The situation is a little more complicated as these tests ALSO have a false negative rate. And that false negative rate is also about 20%. As well, the false positive rate is for scores at threshold, which is 3 out of 5. If they score a 4 or a 5, the false positive rate drops dramatically.
As well, this isn't an antibody test. Diagnosis is not dichotomous but dimensional. A false positive on depression inventory does not mean the person actually has zero symptoms. It means that their symptoms might actually be mild rather than moderate because of the way they interpreted one or more of the questionnaire items.
In general, the way to look at this is that of the people who took the test, 80% of those who scored at threshold would likely receive a diagnosis from a clinician.
This doesn't address in any way the point being made about false positives leading to overly high estimates of prevalence in the general population, whereas nullc's comment is probably quite close to explaining the issue.
> This doesn't address in any way the point being made about false positives leading to overly high estimates of prevalence in the general population
It does if you are aware of the fact that these tests are never used on its own to diagnose depression/anxiety.
The GP or psychologist determines if the client exhibits symptoms of depression, and THEN performs the test, often in combination with other tests that test similar things. Afterwards the results of those tests (as well as the dialogue that's been had with the client), are used in conjunction to determine if a diagnosis is appropriate.
I think it's rather arrogant to assume that psychologists/diagnosticians/statisticians are oblivious to the fact that tests have reliability/validity measures. Of course they are aware, that's their job.
Is feeling anxious in a potentially dangerous situation or depressed in a depressing situation really a disorder that needs to be treated? It seems like a normal response and what needs to change is the situation, not people's reaction to it.
Anxiety and sadness can both be adaptive, yes. How we cope with those emotions can also be adaptive or maladaptive.
Both anxiety and depression, even in circumstances where they are reasonable responses, can benefit from supportive counseling, acceptance, self-compassion, etc. It's important to note that a therapist can "treat a problem" and "support and facilitate". In the second sense, all suffering can be "treated", even if it is not considered pathological.
Isn't this like asking "is it weird to feel ill during an illness"? What I mean - shouldn't humans be able to cope with these situations as "sad", but not "depressing", as depression reduces their ability to move forward?
> Over-diagnosis is only an issue in cases where prevalence is below the false positive rate (technical term is "sensitivity") of the test. That is not the case here.
The term "overdiagnosis" is actually ambiguous. As [1] points out, the word is used in two different ways: (a) to argue that the diagnostic criteria (such as in the DSM-5) are overly broad, and are labelling people as having a "disorder" who shouldn't be so labelled ("pathologising of normal human experience"); (b) to argue that the diagnostic criteria are being systematically over-applied, where people who don't actually meet the formal diagnostic criteria are nonetheless frequently being given the diagnosis.
This is a fair point. I read the op's comment as using the former definition. The latter definition wouldn't really apply as this is being determined by standardized testing. Unless one thinks that the standardized tests are overly liberal (their criteria are based on correlations with in-person diagnoses, so it's possible).
Well, it is a legitimate question of how well the standardised tests actually fit the diagnostic criteria for various disorders. [1] argues that the fit between the commonly used standardised tests for ASD and the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria is less than ideal. (And I doubt this finding is unique to ASD, I think it likely if you repeated the authors' exercise for other diagnoses you would get similar results.)
These are screening tools. They are not meant to make definitive diagnoses for the most part. They are used for epidemiology and flagging clients for further assessment.
There's always a balance to be made between sensitivity (picking up on real positives) and specificity (not producing false positives). The balance for these instruments is at about 80-85%. If a person is depressed, there's an 80-85% chance they will be correctly classified. If a person is not depressed, there is an 80-85% chance they will be correct classified.
Raise the threshold and you'll be more specific but less sensitive. Lower the threshold and you'll be less specific but more sensitive. It's just how the game works and why questionnaires are only first-pass tools.
I agree with you, but in psychiatry and clinical psychology, a 20% false positive rate is considered "acceptable".
Consider for example the Cochrane review of autism diagnostic instruments in preschoolers [1]. It found that on average (in research contexts), the main diagnostic test used for ASD, the ADOS[2], had a specificity of 0.80 (in other words, a 20% false positive rate). The Cochrane authors considered that acceptable. Now, professionals may consider that acceptable – but how many parents are told that the test used to diagnose their child has a 20% false positive rate? Added to that, there is evidence that the tests are actually less accurate in non-research contexts (the standards for administering them are certainly lower), which may make the false positive rate in non-research contexts even higher (on that topic see [3]).
[2] actually the original ADOS has now been superseded by a newer version, the ADOS-2, but the Cochrane reviewers couldn't find any studies of the ADOS-2 that met their inclusion criteria. In any case, I doubt the accuracy of the new version is substantially different from the original one.
>"very broad because they are necessary as tools"
>"diagnostic criteria are meant to be sufficient criteria for diagnosing a disorder"
Aren't these equivalent ideas? I don't think the parent comment was meant to be critical so much as it was to make an assessment. An overall rate of 80% accurate for a questionnaire instrument seems like a fine tool.
I read the comment as implying that they were overly broad and so should not be applied to the larger population outside of a professionals supervision.
My counter-argument was that they were properly narrow and could indeed be applied to the general population, though this would not provide definitive diagnoses only prevalence information.
I read the OP as saying that these statistics were not representative of the actual underlying mental health phenomena. I believe and asserted that they are.
Aren't somebody the criteria overkill in extenuating circumstances? Usually they will have caveats like "not immediately after death of a family member", etc.
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?
If you really think you need it, you go privately or join a long (years) waiting list for mental health service, maybe get a group therapy session if you're lucky while you wait.
I will say the barriers are definitely lower though when i compare my home country Australia to my adopted country the USA. Sure you need to actively pursue healthcare in Australia but the barriers are just so much lower.
> This is approximately the same phenomenon that causes medical students to self-diagnose themselves with every disease they learn about
Could you say more about this? It seems pretty counter-intuitive that medical students could look at some diagnostic criteria—which I assume often contain some fairly straightforward things like, "green spots on armpits" or whatever—and come out convinced they have the disease.
When you say diagnostic criteria function as a "tool," what is the purpose of the tool? My only guess so far is that it's about leaving things up to the doctor's case-by-case judgement by leaving the criteria overly broad. Maybe this ties into legal concerns as well as the fuzzy nature of real instances of diseases (i.e. it's rare to be able to exactly specify the symptoms in a way that works for all cases)?
I think the idea is that an implied symptom in diagnostic criteria is that the person was distressed enough to seek treatment. That bit of info is important for determining likelihood of having the disease.
Say you have a test for someone having a heart attack that is 99.9% accurate. If someone comes in complaining of chest pains, and the test says they are having a heart attack, then it is pretty certain they are having a heart attack.
Now, if you gave that same test to everyone in the United States, and you see that you have been diagnosed with a heart attack, most likely you AREN'T having a heart attack.
If you give this test to 300 million people, and 1 in 1000 tests give the wrong result, you are going to get a lot of false results.... 300,000 or so, in fact.
Given that the vast majority of people are not currently having a heart attack, the vast majority of those false results will be false positives.
This is why knowing the prior base rates is so important for diagnostic tests.
Hmm. So that looks like two separate issues to me, but maybe I'm missing something. I see:
1. Additional always-present criterion of distress
2. Knowledge of prior base rates as a means of estimating a proportion of false positives.
The first one makes sense to me in connection with the earlier comment. We aren't great at definitively reading our own states: it's easy for us to imagine symptoms, especially when prompted. But if something is actually wrong, an element of distress is typically present.
The second one seems like a separate issues though, or at least I don't see the connection. It seems like there are two important bits of information for correcting false positives. The first is that you have a known accuracy which suggests a 1 in 1000 chance of any diagnosis being incorrect; the second is that through historical record you can estimate how many people in e.g. the US are having a hard attack at any given moment on average.
I don't see the connection between either of those pieces of information and loose diagnostic criteria though.
The base rate part is just explaining why the diagnostic doesn't work when applied on a healthy population (like med students)
The instruction would be something like "if the patient complains of x, check for symptom y... if the have symptom y, they are likely suffering from z"
But the med student then checks themselves for symptom y, and thinks they have z, but that is only the case if they are suffering from x. The suffering from x part is what changes the base rate, and can't be ignored.
But in the patient's complaint about X, wouldn't X just be another symptom?
For instance, let's say a patient complains of a headache. The doctor uses whatever other knowledge they have of the patient to come up with some candidate diagnoses, and proceeds checking for symptoms from each of the candidates.
Presumably 'headache' is just another symptom on the diagnostic criteria for each of the other candidates. So why is it treated specially?
(Btw, thanks for your response—not sure why you were downvoted, but that was not from me!)
Right, my point is that the symptom X is often an implied one.... it isn't expressed in the diagnostic test explicitly, because the diagnostic test is run only when someone has symptom x.
> very broad because they are necessary as tools for practicing doctors seeing patients
This is such nonsense. These criteria are supposed to be scientifically valid and not a tool. What other medical speciality calls their diagnostic criteria tools. That's like saying the standards for diagnosing cancer are just a tool and anyone could be diagnosed with cancer if the doctor thought you would benefit from chemo drugs.
Amazing the mental gymnastics people will go to defend an obviously corrupt discipline like psychiatry.
In a cool future universe where we can introspect the brain like we do with code the need for statistics based diagnostic criteria might disappear but it's what we've got.
Meeting the criteria is a good sign that you should talk to someone about it and figure out if that's the best explanation for what's happening. It's not a checklist and then "you've got the GAD."
>“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 much harder, according to the Census Bureau data — throwing into even sharper relief mental health disparities that have long existed.
This seems completely, and sadly, reasonable. You probably couldn't design a situation in a lab that would screw over the poor more than COVID-19.
This is a stressful stage of life for a lot of people. The quarter life crisis is very real. Young people tend to have young kids, or roommates, or tiny apartments, and working from home is a larger strain, especially at the entry/junior level which is a stressful rat race in many fields. Plus you don't have much wealth built up if you do get laid off, and little experience on your resume to justify being rehired quickly.
When in human history has life for most not been stressful? If anything life for most today (even the young with kids, roommates or tiny apartments) is far less stressful than for most humans in history. There's a complete loss of perspective today.
Stress is not just a matter of the facts of every day life. That's almost like saying all that matters is if you can eat and sleep. That is not what most people want out of life. They want meaning in their life, respect, and love. Those are all things that are way way way more difficult to get today than at almost any time during human history.
I really don't think so. The people in the past were not getting automatic respect and were not getting automatic love. The marriage was often economic transaction and you often had to live among people who did not respected you. The marriage happened after short time of knowing each other and if it turned out mistake, that was it forever, no love.
Some people's lives had meaning, plenty of others were basically surviving in routine .
>The marriage happened after short time of knowing each other and if it turned out mistake, that was it forever, no love.
This makes it sound like you believe love is a bool that gets set at the beginning of the relationship, but from what I understand love is a float that the couple can work to increase.
No, love don't have to die. But, initial passion, is not love. And people are much different in the first period when they are trying to make best impression and later on after months. In extreme case, many abusers (of both genders) show themselves only after months.
For long term love, it matters greatly whether you two are match by personality and values. And short term engagement make it easy to select wrong partner.
We don't really know this with such certainty. Our records have gaps and only extend a few thousand years back, at most. Even then, we often only have bits and pieces for certain populations. It's a large stretch to generalize over human history.
Personal contact is super important to people. Physical closeness is important. Being able to meet people in person is important for personal relationships. This stuff matters, and it's very hard to get right now.
> 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 the tragedy of both events.
They lived full lives, had purpose, had families. By and large, they had a few things that today's kids don't; religion and nuclear families. To some extent, God is a panacea. Having certainty of one's final destination makes the road there a lot more manageable. They also had nuclear families and all the benefits that go with them.
We are now at the tail end of a "softening". Peace makes for soft people.
> 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 rely on for support, it's caused a massive increase in people depending on the government or charity for their emergency needs and arguably further exacerbated the loneliness epidemic.
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.
The US has had constant military engagements for the last 20-30 years, the largest terrorist attack on US soil, the complete economic erosion of the middle class followed by the largest recession since the great depression and now the largest depression since the great depression with the largest pandemic since 1918 where we're also on track for millions dying. This is one of the roughest times in history to be growing up in compared to those times.
Then there is their idea of "effective coping". It was to drink more and smack their wives. Your romanticization of those people is utterly off the mark.
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.
I would argue that resilience came from innovation and creative thinking. When we encountered a problem that threatened the species, we came up with solutions to fix it.
There are very few times in human history where we took any steps backwards on that progress. The collapse of the Roman Empire was one of those moments, and it took hundreds of years for civilization to recover from that.
I'm not saying we're getting close to a catastrophic event like that any time soon... but we should definitely not shrug off unnecessary world hardships with a glib "we've survived worse". Because if the worst should happen and Western Civilization takes a step backwards... the consequences aren't going to be pretty. Especially now that we have nuclear weapons.
I'm a similar age as you, but personally wouldn't count 9/11 (although maybe the year difference is why). For me 9/11 happened when I was in pre-k. I don't remember learning about it back then and had no clue what 9/11 was until middle school. I'd guess for most kinder/pre-k age kids even if they did learn about it, it's not something they meaningfully processed and then the life post 9/11 is pretty much all they remember. My memories of elementary school as a whole are already really weak and become nearly 0 for memories <=5.
The financial crash did impact my family some, but not much personally (prevented us from selling our house). I feel like covid is the first situation that's had a very direct impact on me. I was laid off due to finance issues back in march, have had a 'fun' time searching for a new job, and being stuck mostly at home. Still a lot better than others due to having a good financial safety net (my family).
In fairness, the Soviet Union fell when I was in grade school, which means I got laid off from my first job during the dot com crash, went to grad school, and re-entered the market when the housing crisis finally caught up with Silicon Valley.
Worse, I know someone that was supposed to retire in a few years, and he was laid off once for each Republican president going back to Regan.
Of course, when all that happened, the planet’s ecosystem wasn’t collapsing.
Europe was an even worse place crisis-wise for the majority of the 20th century.
The sad thing about humanity is our living memory only goes back fifty years or so. Everything past that is just "back in the old days" and we forget how extremely recently all those things were even on a human timescale.
The US had its share of bad times in the 20th century too, including the largest depression ever, but at least it invested in economic development. Currently, the goal seams to be reducing all social investment and let the financial industry take control of everything.
> This seems completely, and sadly, reasonable. You probably couldn't design a situation in a lab that would screw over the poor more than COVID-19.
I'm in a very low-income rural community. With most the folks living off food stamps already, their lives were relatively unaffected by COVID-19, it's not like they were working much anyways.
If you wanted to maximally screw over the poor, you'd first get them all sitting pretty long enough to start making families while riding on a social system like food stamps, then yank it out from under them. This is something the current administration has been both working on and threatening, and that creates significantly more anxiety from what I've observed.
As someone also from a low-income rural community, I'd say that entire scenario you presented has problems deeper than removal of social systems. If you were to rank worlds from best to worst, I'd say it looks like this:
1. The poor are net positive on the tax/social system.
2. The poor are neutral on the tax/social system.
3. The poor are negative but not dependent on the tax/social system.
4. The poor are negative and dependent on the tax/social system.
5. The poor are negative and have no social system.
In your scenario, the poor start at 4. In your view, the current admin trying to move towards 5. In your view, how does one get to 3? I imagine the move to 3 would require scaling back the social system as to prevent abuse and dependency on it.
We probably agree that the poor shouldn't remain a negative impact on the tax payer and dependent on the social system (I'm a conservative, you seem to lean more left of center on this). Where we likely disagree is how to get to 3, and I think scaling back social systems is some cold water in the face to help catalyze that change.
I would also add that the main stream media and social media don't help. Everywhere you turn, you're being conditioned to be in fear and social media amplifies that negative message.
A young person is building their life, lockdown is preventing them from doing that. For example a person looking to build a family will miss out on a few months they could find a partner, and the fertility clock is ticking
> 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, and get pregnant?
I find your comment to be even more mind boggling - I'm not exaggerating. The shutdown has been short but it has completely wrecked with education and entry-level jobs, which define a young person's development.
1) Anyone in school has had their education upended. Schools will be closed March through June. That is 3 months of a child or teen's educational/social/psychological development. I'm not even talking about college (which you can argue can muddle along with distance education), or summer activities (which you can argue are optional), but those have been impacted too.
2) For those in college, I would guess the majority have lost internships. Many new grads have lost their jobs. Most new grads probably didn't even get a job by March, and now they likely won't get a job until the end of the year or next year. For the majority of people who don't go to college, many work in service jobs and have been wiped out.
You're not wrong, but I suspect that there's a widespread Whig view of history that's been present in the Western world since the end of WWII.
You think of the '90s and the prosperity there, the end of major international rivalries, the birth of the Information Age, and imagine that time will just go on forever. Each generation is supposed to live better lives than the previous generation, right? We have the technology!
And yet the past couple of decades showed that no, income inequality and rising costs of living and the impossibility of buying housing in many markets have basically depressed American (and many other Western) youth, sort of like what's been happening in Japan all this time.
The hardscrabble Ellis Island immigrants were fleeing from clearly traumatic problems. Famine, war, disease. What afflicts modern day youth? High prices, bad numbers. It's an abstract foe with no clear solutions. It's not as if they can just move to Australia or New Zealand, another frontier of economic opportunity to start anew.
You only have to be aware of the recent financial crisis, whose impact went through arguably between 4 to 6 years, to realize that enduring a simple lockdown that takes 4 to 6 weeks is a mere inconvenience, and whining about the devastating impact of staying at home for a few weeks is a kin of whining about not getting a haircut on schedule.
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.
This is an issue I've had. I've been reconsidering and exploring career options over the last year. Atm I can't act on anything but I've all the time in the world to dwell on it. It's incredible frustrating and causing me a lot of anxiety. And I'm one of the lucky ones with a secure job that's not terrible. I can't imagine how rough it is for others.
> 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, and get pregnant?
No, but millions have lost their jobs due to the shutdown, and it's very conceivable that many would put off children/marriage/partnership because of that.
I know that the whole "have kids" thing, which we were thinking about, has basically been totally shut down. Nope, this is craziness, time to just survive for the next few years.
On the plus side, if you catch a bad case of Covid then a birth this year will probably work out as free because you'll be hitting your out-of-pocket max anyway. Just make sure you time it so the birth doesn't hit on the next year or they'll get you for double.
(yes, for international folks, people in the US who've thought it through really do base their family planning in large part on when their annual insurance limits reset, because the difference in costs can be thousands of dollars even with pretty good insurance, if you accidentally land most of the prenatal care on one year and the birth itself on the next)
We had a baby in May, it was a bit uncomfortable being in the hospital but it everyone is healthy. I'm in Illinois and I am grateful our governor ordered stay at home. We were worried about over crowding at hospitals.
But yeah....I don't think anyone would willingly have a baby right now.
It's not that it's been two months, it's that it's been two months and no plan for the future. If I knew, ahead of time, that I'd be able to meet people again in another month? Sure, that's 3 months, that's no problem. It's the indefinite suspension of all activities! It's the suspected lockdown! It's not even the laws - people are scared, if you don't already have a long-term partner you're probably not going to go meet someone new! You can't even make plans for "after", because it's unclear when exactly "after" is. This is a huge roadblock to any sort of planning, much less a romantic relationship.
My SO was supposed to start med school this fall, and now that's all up in the air. Try to empathize -- yes, the lockdown has only been in effect for a few months, but this pandemic is going to continue for at least a year or two. I'm planning on taking the GMAT in prep for business school next year, and even that is questionable at this point.
When you're in your mid 20s, delaying 6 months to 1 year of your career trajectory can have massive effects. If you already have your life established, you probably don't have the same concerns.
Yeah this is going to impact things for a while most likely.
When I finished college, the 2008 recession had not happened yet, however there were definitely warning signs in the job market even after I graduated. Many of my friends from college were laid off before or during the downturn, I was stuck in a very dead end job just trying to make ends meet. I wound up not getting a job fully utilizing my degree until I had almost reached 30.
Lots of folks in this area were in similar boats; they aren't starting families until their mid or even later 30s because they had stumbling blocks due to the 2008 crisis.
> Are we supposed to believe that "young people" suddenly get into a tail spin because they have to endure a whole month
They've already basically cancelled college in Canada for September through December. All large classes (so all freshman core classes) will be online and it's doubtful dorms will be open. So that's at least 9 months ruined for high school seniors and college students.
Dating is close contact with people from outside your household. Sometimes several in quick succession. I don't see that becoming safe or legal before full vaccination. The science-fiction timeline for full vaccination is two years. And I hope we in this industry know better than to take the "not physically impossible" timeline on an ambitious technical project as a commitment.
It's possible there will be some kind of compromise involving a longer phone/video-only period, earlier exclusivity, and public policy acceptance of having contact with a small number of people from outside the household. At least I can hope. But nevertheless, this is a uniquely awful time in history to be single.
Arguably the fertility clock is ticking harder for those who in their late thirties just realized perhaps it's ok to stop waiting for full employment stability before starting to consider a family.
I'm just entering my late 30's, and this made my decision for me - I didn't feel good about my resources the last few years and now this? It just got A LOT harder to see myself having kids - at this rate the clock is going to run out before I feel good.
Wow. I just checked the average age of motherhood in the USA and it's 26yo. That's 6 years less than in the country I'm living; perhaps my intuitions about what it's normal in a modern society are heavily skewed (and in my social circles it's even worse, with age if motherhood around 35yo, largely due to effects caused precarious work)
The grand parent comment probably made the same mistake because there isn't any country where the mean mother age at first birth is 32 or 33, that is, 6 years more than US 26.3 or 26.9 (depending on sources).
fertility clock was made up by fertility clinics, they say it's declining sharply, doubeling the rate at which bad things can happen to the child if u get it in ur 50ies, but it's going from 0,1 to 0,3 or so, it's really low if someone's healthy in her fifties and still has eggs left
I'm gonna speak purely anecdotally, and this is personal opinion.
I was born in 82 in France, was 19 on 9/11/2001.
It definitely shaped my psyche and world view. You just don't grow up as naively when you know 9/11 is an option (the end result, however we got there).
I realized last Sept (19) as I visited the Memorial in NYC for the first time that this had had a long, lasting effect on me. I sobbed in the room where you listen to a flight attendant's last call to her husband. Upon exit I saluted the security guard with deep gratitude. We exchanged a timid smile from the eyes. It felt right.
The shitshow that occurred in the US in the years following 9/11 (Patriot Act, Iraq conspiracy to bring in my country to war, Obama spying on Merkel and Hollande and condoning PRISM, etc) made me realize, with profound disappointment, how idealistic and naive I had been about the USA, as if their recent suffering made them somehow impervious to be becoming hostile. I now realize how ridiculous my optimism had been, and the truth is I have countless examples right here at home in history and reality.
The fact is we get over something like 9/11, we move on, but sometimes we're reminded that this shaped us deeply.
I believe COVID will have bigger and more lasting effects on youth, it's just so much bigger and longer. I hope it will help produce the bigger kind of changes that make history move forward.
> You probably couldn't design a situation in a lab that would screw over the poor more than COVID-19.
This is very true in the US and most countries around the world. If I were poor and I could choose where, I'd certainly prefer to be poor in Western Europe where at least it's not a death sentence thanks to free healthcare and a minimum socio-economic net (it's not perfect, far from it, but if I had to choose... better than the USA certainly under COVID, and that would probably remain true whoever the president is given the lasting social security structure).
I feel grateful, in a way, that we're taking care of poor people. I know many rich entrepreneurs today in Europe who, at some point in their life, were poor AF and may have died if it weren't for all the social nets, they might have never become who they are today. Some of them employ 100+ people, others have contributed massively to funding education (lifelong notably, for adults too).
This tangent to say: it's worse for the poor and probably always will be, but that's also how some eventually create value beyond mere wealth. The "trick" is to avoid death, whether social or clinical, when people are drowning. In that regard, most rich countries do worse today than 50 years ago (chances for children to do a better job than their parents), and that's deeply, deeply worrying because it's the very fuel of our current wealth and domination over existence (how modern civilizations are so much better at surviving, at thriving, thanks to science, tech, political stability, etc.)
Food for thought, and room for improvement, which I'm sure those most shocked by COVID will have no choice but to care about. They will have seen the fall, so they are uniquely qualified to build the next new rise.
Shit, our terrible healthcare system's given me what'd probably qualify as clinical anxiety for longish periods several times in the last few years, and that's despite being well into the top 20% most economically-fortunate Americans, consistently having health insurance, and not having really serious or chronic medical problems in my immediate family.
Same here. I am totally terrified of being in an accident or having a serious disease and then getting wiped out financially as I have seen others in similar situations. If you are lucky things usually work out but it can easily happen that you are liable for a $60000 helicopter ride or a $300000 hospital bill because somebody (not even you) has filled out some paperwork incorrectly.
> I am totally terrified of being in an accident or having a serious disease and then getting wiped out financially
For majority of people through history, a serious accident or disease would wipe them out biologically, not just financially. Were they totally terrified throught their lives because of it? I don't think so. It's all a matter of perspective.
I personally try to accept that my life will end, the ending will likely be agonizing and nasty, and it can happen at any moment. I don't know a lot about meditation, but I think some strains of meditation schools tend to focus a lot on this fact, with daily contemplation of decaying bodies etc. It's an ancient tradition which may actually contain a lot of wisdom.
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.
A lot of Americans think they can make it themselves without help from others. Smart people don’t believe that and make the government subsidize their stuff left and right. Often while deluding themselves into thinking that they are “self made”. And then you have the people who constantly vote against their own interests while enduring the hardships the system imposes.
The United States and Denmark are very different countries.
The U.S. has nearly 4x as fast population growth, 2x as many immigrants, 10x the incarceration rate, much greater religious and racial diversity, 100x more billionaires, 17% less GDP per capita, and 3x as much debt/GDP.
I'll refrain from opining as to what is cause and what is effect, but the differences are many.
Denmark has a dramatically greater household debt to income ratio than the US, and is one of the most indebted countries in the world. They're in horrible debt shape. Their household debt as a percentage of disposable income is 282%, the worst in the world; that contrasts with 105% for the US, which is only slightly worse than Germany at 95%. Denmark's quality of life is coming at the expense of the future, as they load up massively on debt today to fake their standard of living.
>Denmark's quality of life is coming at the expense of the future, as they load up massively on debt today to fake their standard of living.
It's probably worth it in the end. How much longer do we have to endure low quality of life for the sake of some future? Let's say you endured and now your son becomes an adult. Is that now the time to start improving things and enjoying a better quality of life? Probably not, people will say it isn't time yet and we aren't ready, therefore your son will have to sacrifice his happiness and wellbeing too, for his children.
The average person in Denmark will probably die of natural cause, after a relatively happy and fulfilling life. Doesn't seem like they're getting any worse either for it.
What do we have to show for our sacrifices? Nothing it seems. The powers that be will cry about muh inflation all day and won't bail out people, but they're ready to bend over and print money if the corporations and ultra rich need it though.
> 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.
It's all relative. Someone in the US is looking at failed states in Central America and Africa and thinking the same thing. One day, people will look at Denmark and think the same.
Objectively people may be having a better or worse time in different places at different times, but how you personally feel about your situation is all relative at the end of the day.
I don't know whether there's a large correlation, but I believe it would mostly be in the severity of outcomes. Depression isn't "because life is hard", but life being hard makes dealing with depression harder than life being easy.
I know people who are very wealthy who struggle with depression, I know people who are very wealthy who don't even really understand the term because they've never experienced anything remotely close. And I know both types who are not wealthy at all. From my personal experience, money doesn't matter in that regard. But it's definitely better to struggle with depression without the added stress of keeping up with the bills, and when you've gotten through it, you're having a good life if you've been rich before, and you're going to have to pick up the pieces and try to glue them back together if you haven't.
On top of that, I wonder how much these statistics are influenced by the ridiculous student debt burdens the U.S. education system saddles their youth with. Getting a master's degree will easily have you graduating with six figures in student loan debt. In a sibling comment I see a mention of Denmark - a country where not only is higher education free, the government actually pays students a monthly stipend to help cover basic living expenses.
The U.S. is an extremely backwards country when it comes to taking care of its people, with city streets literally lined up with tents of homeless people in some of its biggest cities. No universal healthcare, low social mobility, it's not the least bit surprising to me that a third of the country is depressed. It's just sad that our government does nothing about it while our president is busy tweeting conspiracy theories.
That's a start. Also, this is the first I've heard that Russia went away. Where ever did it go? And who told you that it was gone? Seems like a pretty big (and historically well understood…) thing, and most unlikely to randomly disappear.
Justice decided they cannot/don't want do anything about it and the Republican dominated senate decided they don't want to hold the president accountable for anything.
I'd like to see anxiety and depression rates associated with age and social media usage. In my personal experience, social media gave me a lot more negative feeling than positive. I know a lot of people handle it better than I do, but I'd still like to see.
I'm also curious if this is associated with more diagnoses because we've become more aware of these issues as a society, or if this can be associated with the internet and our modern "always on" lives. My guess is that the former is more of a reason, but I'd love to see some studies in this area.
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.
This realistically only applies in a few hot cities in the US and to low income groups. The middle class still can easily achieve home ownership in most of the US.
>* Rapidly increasing inequality
This is just a political talking point. It has no realistic impact on the day-to-day life of the bulk of the population. Whether Jeff Bezos has 1 billion or 1 trillion doesn't really matter to someone making 90k living in Chicago.
>* Healthcare system where serious sickness can lead to financial ruin
Again, this doesn't apply to a huge portion of the US population because they have health insurance. Remember that the reason that healthcare is so hard to change in the US is because it works for the majority of the population.
I have. Procedure totaling about $90k. HDHP covered everything after the first $4k. HSA that company contributes to covered the first $4k. My expense = $0.
>You are then fully aware that you are covered by a gold plated healthcare
My healthcare plan is not gold plated. It's trivial to find a HDCP on the open healthcare exchange with the same $4k deductible. The only atypical thing was that my employer covered the $4k HSA deposit, but paying that $4k does not lead to financial ruin for the vast majority of the middle class.
>and your experience is utterly atypical.
Did you even read the survey I sent you? I think your view has been heavily tainted by political arguments about healthcare, which focus on the minority it doesn't work for. Again, the reason healthcare is so hard to change in the US is because it works for the majority of the population.
>HN guideline prohibit me from saying what I think about people like you.
Consider why you are so emotionally charged about the topic and take a step back. Is there something that deeply upsets you about healthcare not being a failure for more than half of the population?
US politics are making me seriously anxious. Will I have to leave if I want my kids to grow up in a healthy democracy? Where would we go? Will there be violence before/after the election or transfer of power?
More than anything, I don't have much of a sense of hope for something better. Maybe things go ok and "the bleeding stops", but it'll still be a long, difficult slog to start fixing all that's broken.
Oh, yeah, and there's also a deadly pandemic on the loose.
You forgot that global warming will displace 1/3 of the earth’s population by 2070, and that the WHO is now estimating that the coronavirus response will lead to 1 billion starving people (1/7 of the population), up from their beginning of year estimate of 135M.
That’s 10x more people than died in WWII (including civilians on all continents). As a percentage of population, it’s 3x more than WWII.
In the WHO numbers, I don’t think starvation implies death, but it’s clear the earth has never seen a humanitarian crisis of this scale.
(Edit: my percentage of population math was off. It’s 4-5x WWII on that metric.)
I'm a very mild type II bipolar, and I recognize that depression is a biochemical affair, but the situational aspect cannot be ignored either.
I have ongoing anxiety over the fascist coup that has taken place in the US, as well as the fact that we're cooking the planet and being actively blocked to try to remediate that. I don't know how to be at peace with that.
I might encourage you to reconsider the reality tunnel you are subscribing to.
Not because it is false, but because it is opinion-based, and interpretive, and reliant on certain assumptions. If it is making you miserable, it might be worth exploring a different, equally compelling, version of reality.
Not op, but to phrase it another way, consider if it's benificial to worry about - vote for who you want etc. But that doesn't mean you have to watch every political "event" - you'll just burn yourself out.
I'm not saying bad things aren't happening - just that if there's nothing more you can do, try not to envolope your life with it. It's like high school drama - it can feel like it's your entire world but in reality it doesn't necessarily matter.
Get worse how? apart from the pandemic, what has fundamentally changed in the US that is so bad. The world will go on, and yes maybe the balance is a bit more on the right, but the pendulum swings on. The partisanship is just a way to keep you tuned in to the news, it's a farce, there is not that much difference between democrat and republican.
So the real question is, would you like to pass on this kind of anxiety to your kids, or give up this fatalistic bs, and start filling your days with more quality content.
Get worse? I believe that global warming is going to come at a faster clip than predicted. I'm still naive/hopeful enough that if the world collectively worked to remediate it we could get through ok.
I don't see that happening until shit hits the fan and its effectively way too late.
Couple that with the political landscape that indicates this election is going to be a shit show and if Trump is properly voted out will not leave office. Instead his plan is to light the fuse for Civil War II.
If you think I'm Chicken Little crying that the sky is falling, then that tells as much about you as it does about me.
As for you judging my parenting: I've been very guarded about these worries around my children. That said, my teen age daughter has insisted that she will never have kids. It was only a couple of months ago that she confided that it was because she didn't think she'd live long enough to do that.
Bear in mind that this teenager, being a teenager, pays as little attention to what I say as possible and this realization was entirely her own.
So there you go, Mr. Happy Go Lucky Ramblerman, who just thinks wishing things away will make it all better. It won't.
It's my duty as a citizen and a father to pay attention and do whatever I can to speak up or act whenever I can. I don't do this often enough or well enough, but I will continue to try.
So again, thanks for telling me how to parent. I look forward to you accepting the favor in return.
I am not in the mind changing business, and I say that from humility. I wish I was, but I’m just not that great at it.
My life has gotten a million times better from listening to and reading stuff specifically from Scott Adams, and Jordan Peterson. Adams for reshaping the reality tunnel and Peterson for getting me to focus on what I can control.
For what you’re saying, Scott Adams kinda saved my sanity.
After the 2016 election I was having a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t understand what the hell happened. I was depressed and freaking out.
I started googling and found out that Peter Thiel and Scott Adams supported Trump. This blew my mind, because Thiel seems fairly bright, and Adams I figured must not be completely stupid because he wrote a successful comic strip, which is harder than you might think.
I read a few Adams blog posts, one of them called ‘deprogramming a Clinton supporter’ or something. It was like reading some crazy alternate reality and it made me angry. How could he be saying I was brainwashed!!
I kept an open mind though, because he made a good point, that the law of large numbers dictate that if 50 million people disagree with me, statistically at least one of them must be smarter, more knowledgeable, and more moral than I am.
But they could still be wrong.
However, over time, I started to see his position, about how it is indisputable that we cannot perceive reality directly, that we each filter it. This is fact.
Then he goes on to show that if what you have is a filter, you should evaluate the filter for two criteria: how well it predicts the future (accuracy) and how happy it makes you.
Over time I started to see how the facts for what you are saying aren’t fully in evidence. Or rather, there are some contradictory observations, that are worth examining.
I can’t do justice to the ideas of the people I am referencing. I am concerned that even by typing them here I am doing more harm than good, because my paraphrasing may make you reject them without investigation.
All I can say is I think it is worth it to look for a variety of viewpoints, and if you give those two a try, it could reshape your relationship to world events in a positive way so you can feel confident you are contributing to making the world better, rather than powerlessly suffering under tragedy.
Thank you for your thoughtful words. I recognize that you are well intended and I'm going to try to politely disagree.
Scott Adams lost my respect the moment he became a Trump supporter. For all of Trump's supporters I could still give a pass for the initial excitement of "stirring shit up", but I remain, quite frankly, stunned that anybody with any intelligence could support the man today.
Jordan Peterson seems to be popular because he promotes "the good old days" mentality. I understand the appeal (from afar), but it's more patriarchal claptrap from where I stand. He had a huge test of character when it came out that he was a drug addict, and all I'm aware of is deflection and finger-pointing, e.g., his daughter's statement that doctors in the West didn't have "the guts" to medically detox her father. If I'm omitting anything key there, please let me know as I'm only interested in being "right" in that I'm not operating on faulty data.
In my view, modern conservatism is dead and has been replaced by a literal cult (Trumpism), and in being anti-libtard.
Even though I am a "liberal" I could spend hours pointing out the failure and flaws of those ostensibly represent it. For example, I think Hillary Clinton wanted to be president solely for the achievement. She is a war-hawk and a corporatist, and that her politics are of the "finger in the wind" and not of true passion for change.
That said, she's also incredibly intelligent, accomplished, and experienced and was without a doubt the most qualified candidate to to hold the office when she ran in 2016. She also had a literal industry of hate mongers that demonized her for years. My elderly step-mother loathed the women but could only explain so by repeating Fox News talking points, e.g., "she gets expensive haircuts!"
So here I am again, dancing on the edge of admonishment from @dang for being political in a forum that discourages it. My defense is that I am not a partisan and these discussions are made in good faith.
The concerns I've raised have been heavily politicized, but I consider them to be germane to the fate of humanity and my goal is a (perhaps futile) attempt to reach some sort of consensus.
I feel like what you are writing (in this comment and others in this thread) is an indicator that you firmly believe that it isn’t your beliefs that cause your mental state, but rather, objective facts do.
The thing is, frameworks from stoicism to Buddhism to cognitive behavior therapy to Timothy Leary to Sam Harris to Viktor Frankl etc etc etc invite us to reconsider that position.
Mental states are in a certain important sense entirely self created.
Knowing that doesn’t mean we can will ourselves to be happy, but does open the door to finding out how we can productively ‘hack’ our mental state.
The facts you name aren’t the important point. It is the fact of you naming them that seem to indicate you are very committed to a certain reality tunnel.
Even if that reality tunnel is making you unhappy. Which is your right, maybe it serves you in some other important way.
But it’s not a position from which you could ever be convinced of anything, at least, I have no idea how.
Because I’m not disputing, and wouldn’t want to be in the position of, disputing any of those facts. Yet I still live in a very different reality tunnel.
Not sure how to communicate that better.
I don’t think altering your reality tunnel in regards to this stuff would make the stuff somehow more of a danger to you or everyone on the planet. It would just change your emotional experience and potential effectiveness in addressing the problems. For better or worse, depending on the tunnel shift.
I believe the existential crisis so many are experiencing has been caused by the pandemic, but perhaps not in the way one might expect when approaching the problem rationally. Yes, we are more isolated, and perhaps concerned for the safety of ourselves or our loved ones, or even for some abstract concept of community or society, but depression is characterized by anhedonia: the inability to feel pleasure. Are we all sitting around, so preoccupied by the crises of the day that we have become numb to pleasure? That doesn't describe depression, although perhaps anxiety. I would describe depression as the loss of most strong feelings, not only pleasurable ones, and that is why death becomes so alluring: fear of death has been numbed as well.
No, an existential crisis is rooted in the meaning, or lack thereof, we are able to ascribe to our lives. And the pandemic has in many ways restricted our connections to those sources of meaning. Whatever stories we were telling ourselves about our life's purpose, the plotlines we imagined for ourselves, have been disrupted. The student has had their university all but taken from them. They cannot experience it in quite the same tangible way as they once did. The same is true for the worker who derives his meaning from labor. For many, that connection has been damaged, if not severed. It is the loss of meaning that accompanies the dawning realization that our sources of meaning were nothing more than illusions to begin with.
We realize now that life goes on without these guiding influences; that the rituals we perform do not in fact earn us the favor of the Gods. We come upon the idea that perhaps life really is meaningless and that we were in fact only existing previously because of a foolish, irrational faith. It has been thrust upon us, entirely by happenstance (and not because of any rational deduction or brilliance on our parts), that we are fools, rubbing our prayer beads and voluntarily deluding ourselves into thinking that some bit of our finite, meaningless lives could somehow persist alongside the infinite.
"For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite."
fine points up to the third paragraph. you said yourself that the pathways of meaning have been blocked - of course then things would feel meaningless! there’s doesn’t need to be a Meaning to life for life to have meaning
I agree, the meaning of life is just that simple: to be alive. No greater meaning exists, and that's fine. We can live life without so much meta-analysis.
To arrive there though, we often need to see other personal sources of meaning exposed as illusory, or at least I did. I am trying to describe that process in the third paragraph.
Good to hear; it’d be hard to be capable of the perception of the start without also being capable of seeing the road past & through the conclusion at the end of your comment. I just tend to take issue with the naïve cynic nihilist take i detected in the latter half of your initial comment.
ps you may enjoy Nietzsche if you haven’t been exposed to him yet - his project essentially starts with - OK, we’ve been freed from the prison of (religious) dogma, now what? His greatest aim, imo, was to answer the question of the (totally true, accurate) nihilistic observation you’ve reached. start w beyond good and evil
The quarantine made my depression and anxiety disorder much worse. About two weeks into quarantine, I started feeling paralysing sorrow about everything that ever happened to me, and the view of the future became grim.
I guess the time alone made me confront my problems in a way I couldn't handle, so I resumed my psychotherapy and went back on anti-depressants. I still haven't figured out the way to get out of this only-bad-thoughts loop. Morning Yoga helps a bit, and sports, in general, seem to take the stress away, though not for long. Maybe someone can share their experiences coping with that?
The 'cure' of endless and pointless lockdowns is indeed proving worse than the disease, particularly when the CDC estimates overall mortality from the virus will be only 0.4%:
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 comparison to flu mortality to support this claim.
I'm not sure why this comment was flag removed, since it used data to support a position.
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 than the flu.
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.
If you compare Sweden to the other Scandinavian countries (which is the most suitable comparison considering population distribution and habits) the light measures actually seem to have resulted in a much higher prevalence.
Yes, but not catastrophic prevalence. The question was whether not locking down things like schools would result in much higher deaths than we currently see in for example England or New York. The answer is no, not necessarily.
In Sweden a lot of people were self-isolating and being cautious without the need of a formal lockdown. They still have the most deaths per capita in Europe.
Schools were open. A million kids went to crowded classrooms every day for the past two months and death rate is still not even close to England, Belgium, Italy or New York.
The number of deaths per capita is higher than England, Belgium, and Italy however the total number is lower (they have a smaller population). They also have a low population density, a lot of single households, and as a population have less issues with diabetes, obesity, and chronic heart conditions compared to other countries.
Targeted lockdown was a good idea in the context (not that much different clusters).
Sweden was since the beginning at the place where France will be next week, but Sweden did not have the Mulhouse cluster that crippled multiple hospitals in eastern France.
Many thanks to Switzerland and Germany for helping us saving a dozen patients by the way.
If you compare Sweden to other countries with full and absolute total lockdowns like Belgium the UK and Spain and Italy....they actually have lower incidences of infections fatalities and higher incidences of recoveries.
Sweden is the control group in all of this for how effective lockdowns are and it's showing that they're potentially not as effective as we think they are.
Sweden has a higher density of day to day human interactions than any country with full quarantine lock down.
How do the other data points apply to a country that's been on quarantine for months and another that has never been on quarantine?
The exponential explosion of coronavirus cases hasn't happened in Sweden and it's not happening so far when people reopen their economies. there's not even a second wave in economies that have been reopened since early May like Florida.
The model was flawed.
Time to face facts quarantine was ineffective response.
The major flaw in your argument is focusing on an official quarantine order. In practice it seems many of the places you mention have an informal quarantine in place. In Florida Miami-Dade county did have a lockdown though the broader state didn’t. It’s also the densest, so most at risk. Nursing homes also took steps way beyond the government order and well before the order. There’s also tons of evidence that people did not adopt initially and are not returning to normal behavior. For example even in Sweden restaurant attendance was down massively even in the absence of an official ban.
You may be right that a more localized or targeted response has almost the same effect as a full lockdown. (Though things are still decidedly not great in Sweden concerning the death rate). But people are taking massive measures even in non-locked down areas, it’s improper to compare that to the status quo ante.
If there wasn't a lock down in Florida like you say and no hospitals were overwhelmed and no exponential explosion of cases happened.... Then that's all the evidence you need to know that flattening the curve was a myth and quarantine was an ineffective solution.
(the same effect happened in Sweden by the way)
I bet you based on these data points that every region that opens it's economy will have the same result. Steady state of cases, no second wave.
Quarantine was pointless. A lot of lives were ruined by the flat curve proponents...for nothing.
That’s actually not what I said. I’m saying there were lockdowns in the most important regions (Miami-Dade for example), that people behaved as though there were lockdowns in at risk areas (nursing homes), and that people are still behaving with lockdown-style precautions. All of these things produced a flatter curve, and have also to a certain extent done so in Sweden where people followed many (not all) lockdown precautions without official government decree.
Just because the government didn’t say things were locked down doesn’t mean they weren’t in practice. Look at Sweden’s GDP losses, restaurant attendance, movie attendance, you’ll find they haven’t avoided massive economic damage. In exchange they also have a pretty high death rate.
These things are complicated, but it’s pretty clear lockdown behavior cuts infection spread. It’s also pretty clear people are terrified of getting sick, so they’ll adopt the behavior to a certain degree regardless of decree. This means issuing a decree or not doesn’t make you avoid economic pain, but a decree might make it easier to guide the right actions and give pretext to minimize economic pain via external support.
People are finding it impossible to discuss this rationally. If you try to disagree with the seriousness of this and even insinuate that the response is incorrect you are demonized even if you back it up with data.
The data from Sweden and regions opening up their economies are starting to show that there are is no exponential explosion of coronavirus cases like predicted, no hospitals are being overwhelmed.
The data is starting to show and will continue to show as time marches... that quarantine was potentially ineffective, the fatality rate was extremely inflated, and flattening the curve was potentially a mistaken theory.
> there’s good evidence that this is a substantial undercount.
I don’t know about the US, but most European countries count anyone who died with corona as a covid death. No matter how clearly you died to something else.
The overall flu mortality estimation counts people we guess might have flu, but never seeked doctor. As deaths, they estimate how may other deaths are fly and add them (like % of pneumonia). There is also fuzziness about who counts as death from flu too. For covid, there is no added estimation afaik, if you die without test you dont count.
It is not like one number was super clean and other dirty. Both are dirty and estimations.
While that may be true, most European countries still undercount the true death rates since there are large discrepancies between each country's official covid deaths and excess deaths.
Yes, but it's not quite the same, because the suicides etc for COVID-19 are not directly caused by the virus, but by our reaction to it, and some believe it's an over-reaction.
I'm not an expert on the actual, real dangers, e.g. how many and who will die, so that's not what I'm concerned with. If they're terribly high, doing what ever is necessary to stop it is right, I consider that obvious. "Flattening the curve" makes generally sense to me, in a "let's make sure our hospital system doesn't collapse" kind of way.
I live in a county of a bit over 300.000 people in Germany. We have 10 known active cases in the county. We're still in a very constrained soft-lock-down, i.e. schools not running normally, half the offices not open, mandatory masks, public services on emergency-only-level etc. We're still taking damage economically, obviously. Lots of people are scared to death in a very real way, and are still afraid to leave their houses.
Is it still the right call to remain in this state today? Will it be when we have 0 active cases, but there are counties nearby that still have more than 0? By saying "well, everything that happens happens because of COVID-19", we're removing our agency from the equation.
Where do you see the data that 80% of people are asymptomatic? You complain elsewhere in this thread of being dismissed even when you have data, yet provide none.
We understand that you think that the lockdowns are bunk and that this is a big non-issue cooked up by the world to ruin our lives; sure, maybe, but where is the data?
"We understand that you think that the lockdowns are bunk "
Correction...lockdowns ARE bunk.
WHERES THE SECOND WAVE?
Why hasn't Sweden followed the model of exponential explosion that was used to justify the lockdowns.
The flat curver movement was unscientific and wrong and you would do well to fight unscientific attacks on your civil freedoms with all of your vigour going forward because this isn't the last time this will be attempted.
Thank you for posting the data. These are both brand new from yesterday, however, so I’m not sure why the tone here is so belligerent. Either way, this is incredibly interesting, and something we should continue to look into going forward. It sure would be nice to ease up on the lockdowns if they are not the correct path going forward.
If you do some research and start questioning the narrative the amount of demonization and arrogant dismissiveness you get for it will make you belligerent. lol
People are scared and when you disagree with the experts even if you're right you get treated poorly.
It seems pretty clear that the systemic effects of COVID-19 are much worse than those of seasonal flu. You don't see news of hospitals struggling to cope with seasonal flu the way we've seen now. You don't have Italian doctors triaging patients with the flu.
Don't actually see places struggling with this and coronavirus ... most of the overflow hospitals were empty.
In places that have largely opened their economies back up we're not seeing any overwhelming of hospitals.
We're also not seeing this in Sweden who never locked down.
Flatening the curve could have been a myth, an incorrect response. There's no evidence showing that it was effective compared to control groups like Sweden and regions with reopened economies.
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 about coronavirus than the flu is that it can cause lasting lung damage. I personally think that the higher mortality and the possibility of permanent damage in people who survive justify restrictions, but I guess that's a matter of opinion.
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.
No! I dug through that page and the cited papers, and it absolutely does not have any of the answers to those questions.
If you find the answers on that page, I'd love to read them.
For example, they say:
> The numbers of influenza illnesses were estimated from hospitalizations based on how many illnesses there are for every hospitalization, which was measured previously (5).
Ok... "estimated from hospitalizations"? What does that mean? How are you deriving that estimate? If you read the study linked, they say this:
> Multipliers were calculated as the simple inverses of the proportions at each step. We accounted for variability and uncertainty in model parameters by using a probabilistic (Monte Carlo) approach
Ok... so it's a Monte Carlo simulation? What does that even mean in this context?
Compare this to the Coronavirus IFR estimates. They are easy to understand. They test random samples of people in a population for antibodies, and use that to estimate the spread of the virus.
I looked at the linked study. It's not very complicated. In fact one could argue their method was too simple.
They estimated the number of illnesses by dividing the number of hospitalizations by a series of probabilities (the probabilities constitute a funnel from someone getting an infection to someone being hospitalized - for example the probability you actually seek hospital attention, the probability your test accurately detects influenza, etc). The probabilities were uniformly sampled from a range of plausible values (derived from their survey data). They did this process 10k times to arrive at an distribution over the number of illnesses (this is a Monte Carlo simulation).
> One thing that worries me more about coronavirus than the flu is that it can cause lasting lung damage.
Flu can also cause lasting lung damage. All diseases inducing pneumonia can do that. I have seen no evidence that these things are more prevalent in corona than in influenza. The reason we see so many articles about the rare effects in corona and not the flu is that corona is a hot topic and news is drumming up scare stories about it for clicks.
I agree there is no clear evidence on the prevalence in coronavirus vs flu but I think as a naive estimate it's reasonable to suspect that if it's around 6x more deadly, that serious side effects are similarly more prevalent. Considering we don't know the disease very well it seems better to err on the side of caution.
It's comparing 0.4% and 0.2% but not mentioning infectiousness (covid-19 appears more transmissible). 0.4% of a very large number will be considerably more people than 0.2% of a much smaller number.
It says we do precisely nothing for flu and that's incorrect. We have internationally coordinated programmes of vaccine development and we have annual programmes to vaccinate as many vulnerable people and healthcare workers as possible. We have programmes of flu monitoring and surveillance that tell us what strains of flu are circulating, who is being affected by it, and whether we need to create more surge capacity.
Notice that flu always puts pressure on healthcare systems -- hospitals get fuller, and they often try not to book as many elective surgeries during winter -- but they're not, even in bad flu seasons, overwhelmed. We don't have temporary morgues set up in container lorries in car parks. Funeral homes don't get overwhelmed.
> The scenarios are intended to advance public health preparedness and planning. They are not predictions or estimates of the expected impact of COVID-19.
People made the issue political in USA. So instead of thinking rationally and discussing facts people just vote along the party lines. Downplaying the disease makes them think that you are right wing and hence should be down-voted.
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 for how it spreads and how to treat it (including antivirals if caught early.)
Comparing it to the flu seems to be arguing in bad faith along political lines rather than deeply examining the issue.
> 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 dangerous, meaning it is like an Influenza we don't have a vaccine against. We should work hard to create a vaccine for this disease, just like we did for influenza, but I haven't seen anyone who did the math on if it is worth locking things down to prevent loss of life. People in the early 1900's didn't think it was worth it, and when I do the math with current mortality in Sweden which barely locked down then the numbers clearly show that a lockdown wasn't worth it.
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.
The moral thing to do is to ask whether someone in their 20's would choose to lock down for a few months in order to slightly reduce the risk of dying in their 80's. I think we all know the answer to that. It is only a dilemma of the person would choose to do it for themselves but not others, the current measures would not be done by almost anyone for themselves.
Come out and tell us. I'd like to hear a broad summary of your position. I do suspect it's a trifle more conspiracy-leaning than you're currently making out. Ending with a dog-whistle like this rather amplifies that impression.
(I browse HN with showdead switched on which adds context to some comments that are easy to miss otherwise)
I think there's a valid debate to be had about mortality, unexpected consequences and over-reaction but the minute I start looking into that side of the argument I quickly get lost in the thickets of bizarre conspiracy theories and extremist views. And even short of the crazies - there is some terribly ingenuous cherry-picking of data (although admittedly both sides of the debate do this - as is sadly true with most public discourse)
Conspiracy? Please. One example: two hour-long interviews of John Ioannidis from March and April have been removed by YT a few days ago. And he is very careful with picking words and stating opinions. But he happened to foretell (based on reasearch that he was doing at the time) the mortality rate comparable to seasonal flu when everyone was talking about 1-7%. My point is that if you give even slightest attention to alternative info sources, then you may clearly see, that COVID is 90% a political/economic issue.
> the mortality rate comparable to seasonal flu when everyone was talking about 1-7%.
I don't ever remember anything close to 7% being seriously discussed. But also I don't see how people can say "close to seasonal flu" without being very selective with the data they pick. Bear in mind it's become clear that the CDC's seasonal flu figures where high-balled so you see a lot of of comparisons between an unrealistically high IFR for flu with their own favourite low methodology for COVID.
Literally one of the first links for "covid fatality rate", one from March 31st. They mention 3.5% average estimate from CDC/WHO with 4.8% for highest risk groups. I can't be bothered to find links to original reports and statements though.
Can't really comment about the second part, as I'm not an expert, but while fractions of a percent surely are important from the organizational point of view (e.g. estimating loads in hospitals and such),
I believe that in a broader context the phrase "close to seasonal flu" was used to help people relax and stop PANIC!11
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.
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'm always ignored when I ask for help. Being a person who "takes it like a man" in a sense, as in absorbs these problems for greater overall execution, I'm always ignored when I bring up my problems. "Tough shit" is the general attitude. Unless I'm highly expressive or emotional nobody takes it seriously. But if I'm being that emotional it's already too late.
Squeaky wheel gets the oil. Absorbing problems for good overall execution benefits others, but they get used to it as normal and take it as granted after a while. Then they don't know what to do on change, because they have no experience with it.
It's worth looking into make support groups. There's various movements starting up support groups for men run by men, who are trying to break that stigma. I don't know where you are based but have a Google and you may find a local one.
And if possible/available, talking to a therapist can be a huge help. For various reasons I don't talk about various serious issues to my nearest and dearest, and it's been really helpful to have someone to talk to every two weeks who is 1) not entangled with the various issues, 2) paid to listen, and 3) professionally trained to do so.
While, anything is probably better than nothing, I've found that it's crucial to find a therapist that one 'clicks' with. I wasted quite a bit of time sticking with a therapist who didn't help (and possibly made things worse, much as she meant well).
If a therapist is not an option, I also recommend support groups. In some ways those have been even /more/ of a help than a therapist, because the fact that they're not paid does matter, and the fact that it's a solution without an end-date comforted me.
As a thirty-something, 1) I wish that I looked for help earlier, and 2) I would do everything in my power to move to a different place if I couldn't find the support wherever I was. It's been /that/ helpful.
Not knowing your environment, trying to find other doctors could help.
A lot of practicians have surprisingly little knowledge or very old views on depression. Some will very strongly argue against medication for instance, while others try multiple simultaneous approach. Some will throw the same medication every time they hear "depression" and call it a day, while there is a variety of drugs on the market and a regular follow-up on the situation can help find ones that effectively work.
I have the same issue for physical problems. I don't like to complain and I'm not really expressive. Physical appearance may also play a role (I'm 1.95m/95kg.) I had a double hernia with sciatic nerve inflammation go undiagnosed for quite some time before I took my wife with me to the doc and she complained in my stead. In any case, I've been postponing going to a psychologist for exactly this reason: I'm convinced I won't be taken seriously.
As a fellow large male, I totally hear you. Getting empathy can be challenging.
WRT psychologists -- audition them. Schedule initial visits with 3, make all those visits, then see if you feel that one of them has listened and can help.
This inverts the power dynamic, at least to begin with. You're actively choosing someone who will work for you, and based on some of your own felt evidence. You don't have to worry about "making it work" with the 1 counselor you chose to begin with.
This is common practice. No good counselor will be surprised by it. Any who argue it can easily be dropped from your short list.
Baring your soul to 3 strangers sure can be daunting. I find it gets easier. And again, if it sucks with one of them, probably that's not the counselor for you.
I've seen multiple therapists and while every time I assumed the worst, every single time I was surprised by how seriously my issues were taken, or at least by how willing I was to believe this to be the case :). And I'm an incredibly paranoid/suspicious person!
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.
I would be very hesitant to recommend someone experiencing depression or anxiety as a result of our current state of affairs to seek pharmaceutical medications. Certainly, there is no shame in it. Indeed, I'd actively support the pursuit of medication for anyone experiencing persistent suicidal ideations, have become psychologically incapable of performing day-to-day activities still required of them, or have begun abusing more harmful substances in their stead.
That said, some time ago, I was listening to the BBC's today show, and I recall being profoundly disturbed when they aired a piece about the NHS either recommending or considering a recommendation for the prescription of antidepressants to people having trouble coping with the trajectory of their society (I wish I could provide a citation, but it was a live broadcast).
For many, COVID has sapped what little vitality and opportunities they had for joy left in their lives from their lives. Their purpose, perhaps defined by a job they can no longer perform, or their hobbies contingent upon meeting with others. Maybe they're just terrified they won't be able to feed or house their families in a month or even a year's time.
This is a shitty situation, and people quite rightfully should feel shitty about it. Indeed, many of in the lower classes should be outright livid that they have to bear the brunt of not only the disease but the externalities of society's response to it.
We seem to have collectively forgotten that negative feeling have value. Anger, sadness, and loneliness are as equally valid and important signalling mechanisms as joy, content, and love.
If you're living through hard times, it's natural to exhibit symptoms of depression for a week, a month, or two. It's a not just natural, it's desirable, because it tells you that something's in the world's gone profoundly wrong. It's not easy, and as anyone who's lived a hard live, or found ways deal with moderate or intermittent depression (without drugs) will tell you, it takes time to develop resiliency and coping mechanisms to deal with that.
I'll reiterate:
There's no shame in seeking out medical help if you truly can't cope with how things are, or are losing yourself and your desire to live.
But I think it's important to think deeply on it before you take that step.
> If you're living through hard times, it's natural to exhibit symptoms of depression for a week, a month, or two.
Absolutely! But that's also not what I'd suggest medication for (well, maybe I'd suggest recreational drugs, but not anti-depressants), because it's not depression.
In my opinion, there's quite the difference between depression on the one side and feeling overpowered and broken because of external circumstances on the other, and I wouldn't suggest trying to fix the latter by pretending it's the former and medicating accordingly.
It's hard to tell the two apart from your own perspective, especially because they can both be true, you can be depressed and go through shitty times at the same time. At the very least if it does persist, don't settle for "my life is just shit, this is just a normal reaction to that shit", go see a doctor. And at the absolute very least, if friends suggest that it may be depression, consider that they may have a better view of you-six-months-ago vs you-today, because they don't see you every second of every day.
Depression clouds your judgement, and in my opinion, you're not gaining anything from suffering through it. It's not a great challenge that's been put in your way and when you finally beat it, you're a stronger person. In retrospect, at least for me, but some friends have shared similar opinions with me, it's just time you've lost, where you cannot remember anything from other than feeling terrible, thinking about suicide, possibly harming yourself and silently hoping that a bus will jump out from nowhere and end your suffering. There's no medal at the end, having gone through it once does not make you immune, and it can take years to get better, and maybe you never do.
I don't know whether I would've listened to anyone if they had told me to go see a doctor, but I wish somebody would've tried, and I hadn't spent the better part of my twenties just suffering for no reason. I'm diagnosed as bi-polar, but with much less pronounced manias, and now when I sense that I'm sliding down, I'm very active about stopping that slide, and if it doesn't stop quickly, I've made it a habit to go see a doctor before I think I need to, because I've learned that I might not be able to make that call if I'm past a certain point.
But keep in mind antidepressants aren't a panacea and can even make things worse. My girlfriend has tried medication like antidepressants and anti conception, but basically anything that changes her brain chemistry sent her spiraling down even more.
Turns out she has ADHD and that class of medication is much better at stabilizing her mood.
The prescription system for these things is very .. unscientific? Because there's no good diagnostics other than asking the patient questions about how they feel. So it ends up like the optician's "can you see better with this or this?" except the minimum timetable for most of the medications is several months to "try".
I assume that's a genuine question and that you're not trolling.
Opioids are a very different class of drugs than anti depressants (including medication to treat anxiety).
While people with mental issues may use opioids for self medication, no reasonable psychiatrist would ever prescribe such medication for psychological issues.
Oxy and their ilk were massively pushed by Purdue and their "colleagues" as a non-addictive pain relief if applied correctly.
They lied, of course, and that's where the US is now with the opioid crisis, since those drugs were massively over-prescribed.
It can't be mentioned enough that if you have serious mental issues then appropriate medication may be one of the pillars to help you out of the deepest circles of hell.
While it maybe a crutch (sometimes temporary, sometimes long term) it can be immensely helpful if properly prescribed and monitored and seriously be the difference between life and death.
Some medications used for mental health can be addictive, and some can have "discontinuation effects" (these are important and unpleasant but are not really addiction). The addictive medications are the benzodiazepines and the "z drugs" (zopiclone, zolpidem, etc (sleeping meds)).
I think mental health medication is good and useful, and I think SSRI / SNRI / NASA type meds are very good, but useful questions (for any medication) are "What happens if we do nothing?" and "what are the side effects of taking it, or stopping taking it?"
These medications are not linked to the opioid crisis. The causes for that are complex, but they include over-prescribing of strong opioids for mild pain over many years.
Antidepressants have nothing to do with opioids. Almost none of those who are still on the market even have the slightest addictive potential. In fact, even products which only had very minor such potential have been withdrawn, even though they were much milder than drugs on the market such as benzos or opioids.
Also note that opioids are depressants, though that is not an antonym for antidepressant.
I would caution against using any sort of chemicals, try to exhaust all other options first. You don't want the sort of problem where you feel unlike your own self without some substance, not to mention that most of them basically reduce you to a zombie.
Sleepwalking through life isn't my idea of living.
I think this is an unfair characterization and borderline misinformation. Medication can be net positive given severe symptoms. Every person is different, and medication for psychological issues should not be a first line of defense, but it can be helpful and potentially life saving.
When you make a blanket statement like “medication will turn you into a zombie”, not only are you wrong, but you could be turning people away from a potentially life saving treatment.
I qualified that statement with "most of", and if anything comments like yours promote laissez faire attitude towards pharmaceuticals, the consequences of which are disastrous - as can be seen by the opioid epidemic etc.
Look, drugs work. They work incredibly well for some people. You absolutely should avoid them if you can help it. Makes sense, no?
Your qualifier “most of” makes little difference. It’s wrong and you couldn’t possibly know that anyway. I don’t care to share my own personal anecdotes about my experiences with various psychotropic medications but I will say that being a “zombie” has seldom been a side effect of them.
Bringing up opiates in a thread about psychiatric medication is either a deliberate red herring or a clear indicator of your ignorance on this subject. Either way you should not be putting out misinformation in a topic about potentially life-threatening medical disorders.
> Look, drugs work. They work incredibly well for some people. You absolutely should avoid them if you can help it. Makes sense, no?
I agree with this, but it’s a different statement that what I was reacting to. Your previous statement was wrong, and it’s still wrong after you tried to dig in further.
You agree pharmaceuticals should be administered judiciously and yet find the energy to disagree on... what exactly? Throwing around terms like "misinformation" in an attempt to discredit what amounts to essentially a common sense conclusion is baffling and borders on vitriol.
If you have personal history with mental disorders and anti-depressants, I in no way mean to diminish your experience, and hope things turn out ok for you - whatever the path you choose to take.
I apologize if I came off as vitriolic (truly), but I found the "zombies" statement to be very offensive, given my own run-ins with severe depression in the past.
There are problems with statements like that:
1. Turns away people who might otherwise have no better treatment option ("What's the point of living if I'll just be a zombie anyway?")
2. It comes off as judgmental which has an isolating effect to people who are on the treatment. Hearing something like this could lead a person to question their sanity when they'd otherwise be okay (aka triggering, maybe you triggered me!)
3. It's just wrong.
Antidepressant drugs generally don't turn people into zombies at commonly-prescribed therapeutic doses. At very high doses they can have an emotionally blunting effect and even this is preferable in some cases. There are side effects and no one would argue that it's ideal to be on these drugs, I totally agree with you on that, but there are worse things than being on a drug.
I think you just have to be really careful when you throw blanket statements around on these topics because the people they can influence are not feeling their best and at much higher risk for suicide than people who wouldn't care because they wouldn't need drug treatment anyway. Personally I hope to never deal with antidepressants again, but in the past they've helped me get through times when I felt otherwise out of options. And somehow I escaped turning into a zombie :)
> You absolutely should avoid them if you can help it.
The issue is knowing whether you can "tough it out". Will you make it through without medication? Will you make it through in a reasonable time frame?
It's a valid point, but I don't think it's a good idea to judge that for yourself. It's very similar to anti-biotics. It's a good idea to avoid them in general and not take them when you don't need to or when they won't do anything. But it's a terrible idea to want to make that call if you don't have the training. And it's a bad idea to figure "ah, I'm better, I'll just drop these now" after a day or two.
I personally believe that the "zombie-like state" is blown out of proportion, and I'm certain that even with side-effects, anti-depressants are still much nicer than going through a major depressive episode.
I went way too long before trying an antidepressant because I was worried I'd lose who I was, that I'd face social stigma, and that I was somehow cheating.
Turns out they've made me more expressive, energetic, and connected to others in my life. The biggest effect is an increased ability to break out of mental ruts much more easily.
> Turns out they've made me more expressive, energetic, and connected to others in my life.
Sounds like you did lose who you were, medications change your personality and that's not something I want for myself. More power to you for undergoing that change, though.
Your personality is changing all the time. You've already lost yourself from 5 years ago.
Even putting aside the question of whether one can lose one's self, what is so special about you that you can't bear to lose it? I don't understand this romantic ideal of self.
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.
America has a profound ability to diagnose individual problems, and an active inability to diagnose social problems.
The American psychological industry cannot be let off the hook. DSM-5 is a handbook for how to blame society’s failures on individuals. We need scientific doctors capable of considering not only the realities they are allowed to accept but also the realities of the actually existing world in which their patients live.
We desperately need legitimate mental health institutions, but for-profit healthcare and for-profit education cannot provide that.
> DSM-5 is a handbook for how to blame society’s failures on individuals
I staunchly disagree with this, this has never been my experience with any of the psychologists/psychiatrists I have seen (I've seen somewhere around 6 over the course of my life).
Blame has never been a component of any psychiatric treatment I have experienced. The DSM is a book of diagnostic criteria to identify the issues you are experiencing, to help guide the provider in finding an appropriate means to help the patient cope with their problems. There is no question of blame; blame is basically irrelevant to the treatment.
I also don't think identifying someone's problem as being a result of society is clinically productive. Is telling a depressed person "Listen, you're just getting screwed over by society" going to be helpful? I think not, because the corollary to that is "and you can't change society, so you're stuck like this".
I do think it is important to consider how society is impacting the mental health of all of its members, but I don't think that discussion belongs inside your doctor's office.
> "and you can't change society, so you're stuck like this"
I think OP meant that psychologists/psychiatrists don't recognize the social nature of mental illness at all. Just because you can't change society doesn't mean you should tell patients that they can lift themselves out of depression through sheer willpower, healthy eating habits, and exercise. Those things can help but if you don't know how you're going to pay rent next month and you've got two kids, you're going to have serious anxiety.
Being anxious about a freight train heading straight towards you is not "anxiety" any more than grieving for the loss of a loved one is "depression." Medical doctors have absolutely nothing to do with the natural and accurate negative feelings associated with not being able to make rent.
But in most cases depression is a natural response to the difficulties of life. It's like when your immune system triggers an inflammatory response to infection. It's painful but natural; and the cause is external. Willpower can't cure depression any more than it can reduce inflammation. But in the case of mental illness, the external agent is socioeconomic hardship, family dysfunction, loss of a loved one, etc.
The dsm5 is a billing manual. Psychology is still a juvenile practice rife with the problems of a juvenile industry. Fact is, psychology can't do much to make people happier if their life isn't great to begin with.
The solution is not legitimate metal health institutions, there are many great ones. They are merely powerless to meet their goals when their patients lives are the problem. Instead we need to put the people of this country first. This needs to be enshrined in law and people must be provided a bare minimum to allow them to thrive. Forced poverty to benefit shareholders has had ruinous effects of the people wherever it's been attempted.
I recently read "Man's Search for Meaning", written by a psychologist who survived several years in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
Frankl's main thesis is that humans have a deep need for meaning in their life, which he defines as producing some kind of work, caring for others, or having enriching experiences. This strongly resonates with me. I believe America's consumer culture undermines this need. Many work "bullshit jobs" only to be able to afford to consume things — the work itself is not for anything more meaningful than a paycheck. Mass manufacturing lets us care of most of our material needs ourselves so there is less culture around caring for each other than there used to be. There are an infinite number of "experiences" available, but most are simply consuming a thing created by someone else and endlessly reproduced. There is nothing particularly enriching about watching the latest Hollywood spectacle, nearly instiguishable from the previous ten movies in the franchise.
Frankl observed about his fellow prisoners that people could survive anything if they had something to live for. But when our lives are meaningless and we fill that void with shallow pleasures and distractions, we are ill-equipped to have the resilience needed to get through something like the current pandemic. When something bad enough is going on that Netflix no longer takes your mind off it, then to what do you turn?
It seems that American culture and/or economics have, in recent decades, moved toward primarily consumption rather than primarily production. My point of view is that the backlash and anger against capitalism I perceive from younger generations is a result of how unfulfilling consumerism really is.
I think individualism and personal liberty has been conflated with a selfish sort of consumerism, from the end consumer up through corporate cultures. Want something new? Buy it! Are you a business wanting to make inroads in a new sector? Don't research and produce. Acquire!
It is no surprise to me, then, that corporate debt is at an all time high, corporations and individuals are less prepared and resilient than ever, and that this crisis is violently exposing that.
> I think individualism and personal liberty has been conflated with a selfish sort of consumerism
Yes. It's important to note, too, that this isn't something American people spontaneously decided to do. It was a deliberate strategy by rich business owners to sell the country on the idea of consumerism being great (because it was great for their businesses).
I went through a several years long period of pretty extreme anxiety. I went through sleepless nights, racing thoughts, near panic attacks on public transportation (for seemingly no reason!) In retrospect, it was a pretty terrible time, despite the fact that a lot of things were going well in my life from an outsiders perspective.
I can honestly say that therapy along with a lot of introspection got me to a much better place, despite my doubts from time to time. For anyone going through it, know that it actually, honestly is something you can get past with help.
I thought i had conquered my anxiety with lifestyle changes and then this happened. For someone who depends on their community but lives alone, this is major. I’m sick of people shaking me off for feeling depressed despite their introversion or their social circle being their family. For those of us alone, and isolated, who are extroverted, this blows the big one. I feel crazy every day. I’m not even sure if i want to code anymore. I miss meetings. I find myself crying with no reason everyday. Like I’m a middle aged man and this is honestly the hardest non self induced hardship I’ve ever dealt with. Oh... damn
I'm telling you, the elite of this country in the 90s and the early 2000s sold this whole country up the creek. Both sides of the political spectrum pushed ultra capitalist policies and broke the common fabric of America. All meaningful blue collar work was outsourced, large swaths of intelligent highly competitive workers insourced from other countries, artificial boosting of financial assets, etc. The old America is rotting, the new America we see is bright and shiny. This will take a long time to fully surface, 50 years maybe, but it will eventually.
Not just America, but all nations have decided that let's gut out the local manufacturing of goods, allow complete exploitation of labor in one country and then reap the benefits. Now there is only one place that knows how to make stuff. Executives benefited tremendously at the expense of their homeplace. This way the entire fabric of the country tears apart and gets so tangled that voices of reason, science, truth and liberty gets drowned and no one knows what to believe anymore. The state of democracy is in danger. From top-bottom to left-right, the entire nation is dividing and these troughs will not be easily coalesced. Don't worry, services are starting to go to this centralized authoritarian regime too, not just physical goods.
> The state of democracy is in danger. From top-bottom to left-right, the entire nation is dividing and these troughs will not be easily coalesced.
Divide et impera. But it doesn't even have to be a conspiracy and "class warfare", it seems that "enemy action" is hard to tell apart from "we've just let things happen and this is what happened".
Well, duh, the expected prevalence of any disease diagnosed entirely by the fiat of a group of people enriched by the disease being more prevalent is pretty close to 100%.
In other words, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
This is not to deny the reality of depression and anxiety but to cast doubt on the diagnostic criteria purveyed by a special interest group whose members get richer and more respected the more they can convince the world that the thing they do is needed. All professions justify their own existence.
Though this is a troubling outcome, the questions asked seem a little vague for the times. Basically everyone will "feel down" or "feel nervous" given the risk facing them and their loved ones.
I feel nervous every time I go to the grocery store, but it would need to be causing problems in my life to be clinical anxiety.
I feel fortunate that I have a south-facing balcony I can sunbath on during the day. Sunlight is a great antidote for many people when they're feeling blue, but this has now become inaccessible to many. Sunlight through windows just doesn't cut it; glass blocks too much UV.
Either you're overestimating how most people consume news media, or i'm underestimating it.
Unless you think the fact that journalists are more often depressed and/or anxious make their reporting more "hysterical". In this case you might be onto something.
Tucker Carlson on Fox News yesterday tried to directly correlate the findings in this study to other news agency reports ( lies according to Tucker ) on the coronavirus... see the video @ around 6:50ish headlining this story on Fox News:
I suspect a third of Americans are now displaying symptoms of mental health disorders that were already present. Mental health disorders are drastically under reported in the US, and due to various stigmas most people are unwilling to except mental health illnesses as actual illnesses until they are prepared to harm someone.
This is the number one problem most police officers deal with when engaging with the public. Many people have mental health disorders they are not aware of resulting in all manners of poor decisions and disorderly conduct. Some of these disorders are severe and demand medication and some are exaggerated by existing medications. I recommend talking with experienced police officers and listening to some of their war stories.
My sister-in-law is also a managing mental health counselor and says the number of undiagnosed mental health disorders could represent as much as 40% of the population.
In my own experience I find that people hide from this by frequently changing their social situation and environment through out the day, such as driving to an office. When you are stuck at home full time with nowhere to go suddenly coping and distraction mechanisms are gone which becomes clear to the coinhabitants. I am on my fifth military deployment so I have gone through this a few times, and you can readily see the people lacking of a regular rhythm of emotional stability and stress management. You are with these people all the time as you live, socialize, and work with them. On a military deployment you can’t rely on a frequent change of scenery to hide your insanity.
The most common example of excuse that people would hide behind pre-pandemic is finances. Bad financial situations are stressful, but stress is not a mental health disorder. Extreme stresses though often exacerbate pre-existing illnesses. In that regard bad finances don’t produce mental health disorders as frequently as suggested but instead exaggerate pre-existing conditions that become more clearly identifiable.
The difference between stress and a mental health disorder is something called homeostasis, which is the ability of the brain to return to a state of regular emotional equilibrium following an incidence of high stress. The military refers to the cognitive process of actively maintaining homeostasis as resiliency and it’s part of our annual training. The inability to return to resume functions of prior behavior following a major stressor is likely the result of a mental health illness.
if you want to understand what's going on zoom out and look at the last 200 years of civilization and society. Nietzsche is probably the best resource who predicted this. You can read "Ecco Homo" or "Thus spoke Zarathistra" and see the parallels in our modern life. He predicted the herd mentality which we've created. We despise and fear mental pain which is required for growing and most of us rather Netflix'n'Chill than read a book. Parents who put their kids on Ritalin or give them a tablet to be quiet.
Then as part of the herd-mentality we have the social-justice-warriors and activists and the cancel-culture preachers who try to fill this void with their own faulty logic (as a way to cope with their own pain - knowing something terrible is happening but drawing dangerous and false conclusions they are nothing but fools).
Today we have also the PsychologyIndustrialComplex which is filled with people who have no idea what they're talking about. It's no surprise that the product of all this is collective depression, rising nihilism and anti-natalism, and hate. Technology's (and Science and Academia in general) role in this is to produce ways of "making things easier" (coping mechanisms) but no longer to produce greatness. So science and knowledge as taught today is not the way out but part of the cause.
Here are a few videos, though you should probably read the books if you can:
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. The U.S. is more and more resembling a failed state, a mere shadow of what it used to be.
I can't say I share the same feelings as you, but it certainly would be great to see young Americans be more excited about the future and I think some big investment in infrastructure could be a way to make that happen. There are many people worse off in other Countries that are happy because they are seeing vast improvements year over year and their own value goes up proportionately to how much effort gets put in.
We have low interest rates so I'd love to see shovel ready projects like the Gateway tunnels in NYC get off the ground. I'd love to see emerging industries in America get bigger like Robotics, new Energy Ventures, anything related to Space and Advanced Manufacturing.
Anecdotally, the largest problem I think we have is that there are vast amounts of people who feel like victims and just about everyone feels like they are under attack or have been violated. I want to create value with my life and hope that I can provide opportunity for others in the process. There are many culture wars things that are debated on social media that I see disingenuous actors from many angles that I need to drown out so I can focus on other things.
What future? What is there to be excited about? Can't actually spend money at the federal and state level aside from tax cuts and the military without being met with resistance and a subset of politicians and economists screaming bloody murder about super dooper hyper inflation that's totally going to happen any day now we promise (but don't worry about the last 40 years of us saying it, this time we're sure we're correct).
We have low interest rates now. We had low interest rates in 08 through the early 10's too but the ~i n f l a t i o n~ boogyman and super serious debt hawks said we couldn't do it, all while passing tax cuts and giving the military essentially unlimited money, while continuing to erode our rights.
American infrastructure is beyond saving and will require new deal levels of spending to even get it to a shape resembling the amount of wealth this country has, and we are never going to do it because we live in an oligarchic state and the billionaires are fine, so why do we need to do anything more?
sorry but typically in the past older generations have been optimistic about the future and younger generations have been pessimistic. That is a a common phenomenon observed by social scientists which is that people in their twenties are a lot more pessimistic than people in their 40s and 50s.
Let's be clear:
globally the world is much better off than it has ever been and therefore the optimists were correct. Even in the US I remember how in the early '90s the Gen xers were always complaining about how the future was going to be f*. They were wrong too.
based on historical trends you are most likely wrong as well.
I mean listen to yourself. you are talking about generations of false optimism and yet the world and even this country has a much higher standard of living than it has ever had.
If the world is better overall it's due to technological advancement, not due to governance. Our current president is Trump, an idiot who completely mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic, lied about how well he was handling it, refuses to be televised wearing a mask while mask-shaming others, and spends his time peddling conspiracy theories on Twitter, and now threatening to shut down the platform for fact-checking his blatant disinformation. We have probably the worst president to ever disgrace the office next to Andrew Jackson, so yea people are pessimistic.
Also this is the first time in our history that the youth are expected to make less than their parents. The older generation stripped away pension plans, affordable university, affordable healthcare, job stability - basically everything that was working well, and sold their kids off into student loan debt.
I agree that Trump sucks. Rhetorically, worst president. But as policies and outcomes go, there have been worse. Hoover? How about the fact that we banned alcohol for over a decade? Bush started a ruinous war on false pretenses. FDR incarcerated Japanese Americans in internment camps. LBJ and Vietnam. What about the chain of corporate owned presidents that allowed, and encouraged, outsourcing of manufacturing? That certainly hurt coronavirus response. SK and China were able to make their own PPE. US factories have dwindled over decades. Trump didn't create that mess. Clinton and Newt Gingrich did in a bipartisan sell out of the working class.
Read a history book and gain some perspective. You lack it.
By the way, you left out affordable housing. That is a huge generational theft, and is the worst in areas like California, where baby boomers used zoning laws to prevent an adequate supply of new housing from being built.
The different is that in the 90s, there was no clear evidence for pessimism about the future. The same is not true now.
Standard of living for most Americans is actually bad right now - trillions of student loan, no prospect of home ownership, no jobs, extreme income interest, weak authoritian governments,and let me know even start of climate change.
But hey, we have a new iPhone so I guess it's all fine.
Actually the central banks are very good at causing inflation. The problem is that the only way to get access to central bank money is through a mortgage or a student loan. Corporations are not in need of financing beyond surviving the current lock down. So what we get to see is inflation in higher education and house prices.
If you want to borrow money from a bank as a 26 year old startup founder you are probably getting a bad deal with high interest rates. You're not seeing the benefit of the negative interest rates. Going from a 13% interest rate to 10% isn't going to magically make your startup profitable.
Basically the policies have an effect but they are completely inaccessible for those who actually need them. Because of the selective access the stimulus is actually causing market distortions that hurt those who don't have access to the stimulus.
> it certainly would be great to see young Americans be more excited about the future and I think some big investment
I don't think it's the fault of young Americans. It's more the fault of those in charge. We haven't been investing in young Americans like we did in the post WWII era. It's no wonder they're pessimistic given high amounts of student debt and political rulers that are basically trying to milk all the money out of the masses to enrich the themselves and their wealthy friends.
> I think some big investment in infrastructure could be a way to make that happen
I'm curious what infrastructure you think would excite young Americans. With the exception of changing energy generation from fossil fuels to renewables, I can't think of a single thing that I could generalize young Americans caring about, much less be excited about.
Not saying that there aren't people like yourself and others that get excited about infrastructure, but is there anything that would excite more than just a tiny subset of us nerds that care about such things?
> Anecdotally, the largest problem I think we have is that there are vast amounts of people who feel like victims and just about everyone feels like they are under attack or have been violated.
I wholeheartedly agree that many feel this way, but how does getting excited about infrastructure projects address this? The root cause of people feeling this way is because they are constantly being told by the MSM and social media that they should feel this way.
I'm a "young"-ish American (lower end of millenial), and the growth of public transit in my local city was immensely exciting. New trains and bus routes were probably a huge factor in me staying where I'm at, and I feel more engaged in local politics than anything happening on the national stage.
Contrast that with some of the underfunded, addiction-riddled states where nothing new has been built since the 1960s...I mean, I'm going crazy just from staying inside for the last couple months. I couldn't imagine what it'd be like if I was born in and terminally stuck in a town that looked exactly the same for entirety of my life. That's incredibly depressing and demotivating.
I grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC. My suburb still 30 years later still looks exactly the same, just with less local businesses and more big chains, and more homeless people. There is still no viable public transportation accessible without a car. Needless to say I left a long time ago (to NYC, where I saw firsthand the subway get worse and worse every year and is currently in a dire state).
I ended up leaving the U.S, and was surprised to learn that public transportation and not needing a car is pretty much standard in the rest of the world.
> Anecdotally, the largest problem I think we have is that there are vast amounts of people who feel like victims and just about everyone feels like they are under attack or have been violated.
its easy to feel that way when the news media from fox (especially) to cnn is pumping that stuff out daily as they almost seemingly yell at you from the screen...
Don't forget the internet and the constant FOMO and comparisons to people at their best points in life, or the fact that the social dynamics of dating have gotten crazy.
Attractive, fit, intelligent men get a completely outsized proportion of the interest on apps like Bumble and Tinder, while even median men are mostly ignored.
America is in the worst shape in the West, but these trends are getting worse here in Canada and elsewhere too.
“Attractive, fit, intelligent men get a completely outsized proportion of the interest on apps like Bumble and Tinder, while even median men are mostly ignored.“
Is that even true? I am not very pretty (but fit and some level of intelligence ) . When I did online dating I had no problems connecting to women around my age and with similar attributes. Most guys who were complaining wanted a supermodel half their age. And they were surprised that they only attracted crazy people that way.
By and large these are results of choices people make, not accidents.
A guy with visible abs didn't just wake up one day and have abs. He put in the work. Same goes for attractive or intelligent.
Taking time to find clothes that fit, discovering a flattering hair style, and generally not being a slob can put an average man into the "attractive" group.
By intelligent, I mean "witty" or a good conversationalist. Wit/conversation are learned skills. Yeah, some people are better at it than others, but you can still learn.
Don't feel trapped on the outside. You can be excellent if you so choose.
I didn't feel right about putting it in my original comment, since it didn't seem relevant and honestly it feels weird to type this out on HN, but I'm attractive. Before Tinder and Bumble I didn't have trouble dating but now it's crazy. It's effortless to get dates with attractive, successful women. Things didn't used to be this imbalanced and I don't think it is completely fair to say to someone with a less attractive face or to someone that isn't over six feet that they should learn how to dress properly and that will sort things out for them. Yes exercise and proper nutrition go a long way, and I tell multiple people a month about the basics of nutrition[0] or about how to exercise[1] but I don't pretend that this will fix everything. I think it is important that lucky people are honest about the current situation.
[0] Way more fibre, no refined sugar, more protein, no transfats.
Adding: 90% of health and fitness is momentum and environment. If you live in a food desert, you're screwed. If you have a history of bad gym experiences, you're screwed. If you have a job that makes gym-time difficult, you're screwed. If your housing costs preclude a gym membership and the necessary quantities of healthy food, you're screwed. If you can't cook or afford healthy takeout, you're screwed. If you have sleep apnea and can't get it treated you're screwed. The list goes on and on. And getting back on the wagon is harder than staying on it.
If you provided a robust right to housing (low waiting lists, high choice) and expanded the armed forces' commissary program to build and stock stores in places where it would be unprofitable or undesirable for a private entity to operate, obesity (or, at least, morbid illness) rates would plummet. (This would also completely reshape our economy, so I understand any reticence to implement.)
1. How to win friends and influence people
2. The Art of Seduction
3. She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman
They all seem like terrible/manipulative books, but read them anyways. Glean what fits your ethics.
In terms of online dating: work out, buy nice clothes, get 2-3 good photos. Or don't do online dating and go out to the same (mixed gender) place over and over for a while.
It's all work. It sucks. Good luck.
If the above is too much, beat Dark Souls, then try again.
> Attractive, fit, intelligent men get a completely outsized proportion of the interest on apps like Bumble and Tinder, while even median men are mostly ignored.
I exported my data from Tinder and I've had to swipe 25,000 times per successful long-term relationship.
That's a pretty terrible ratio but it only works out to ~10 hours of swiping and another ~10 hours of dating per successful relationship that lasts months or years (or maybe forever!)
As a result I've only been single for a small minority of my adult life.
I agree about the toxicity of social media, it's why I don't have an Instagram and, well, Facebook is dead among my generation anyway so it's not an issue.
>Attractive, fit, intelligent men get a completely outsized proportion of the interest on apps like Bumble and Tinder, while even median men are mostly ignored.
Is this a real problem though? I've heard about how women rate most men as below average, yada yada, but monogamy is still dominant, it's not like these hot men are building harems---on aggregate the vast majority will end up with a life partner, just as always. Am I missing something?
You're missing a few pieces that contribute to the decay of society:
- No they don't build harems, but they are more likely to wait before settling down with a long term partner.
Also, perhaps it's the circles I've run in, but monogomy is far less dominant than it was in the past, and serial dating is far more common, especially when you start looking at some folks interpretations of 'empowerment'. I'm using airquotes here because I'm thinking of someone who would literally always be 'getting over' her last relationship with her current one, but would be checking OKCupid and POF because they were starting to have doubts about the current one.
There's a question of how much psychological damage online dating scene does to how one deals with interpersonal relationships. Most of the 'serial' daters I know get more and more bitter with every failed date, and post more and more vitrol on social media about the opposite gender.
There's also the issue that Dating profiles really often remove so much of the important part of a relationship; getting to know someone, which is a good test of communication.
I have a roommate that serial dates and she's gradually gone from "im getting over my breakup" after dating a man for 3 years to "ug can we just get rid of men" and telling my girlfriend to dump me when I'm standing in the room. She's gotten very bitter, and self-destructive to her original intention (finding a soulmate) breaking things off with new guys when they don't pick her up random things or run odd errands.
While this is just one example of the few I've seen, and of course this is just my experience, but I would hypothesize that serial dating combined with a culture of "empowerment" + unlimited options is detrimental.
This sounds like the philosophy that drives the incel groups.
If you were to ask women they would say the exact same thing as well. And internet dating is very heavily driven towards superficial things, whereas if you meet someone IRL you might be able to find things to connect on.
It’s a logical fallacy to imply that someone’s argument sounding similar to the ideology of people you don’t like has any bearing on whether it’s valid or not.
>And internet dating is very heavily driven towards superficial things
No, internet dating is no different than real life, it just mirrors the nature of things and is very harsh. Some people might find things that certain people want superficial, but that's ascribing morality to a very biological and carnal need.
Also, I think if presented with a list of interests online, you'd be more inclined to rule people in or out of contention. Whereas, if you met in person, you might notice chemistry before you realised you liked different movies and music, for example.
This effect is called hypergamy and it's always been around. Tinder and the likes just exaggerate it. It's sort of like increasing wealth inequality but for men's dating. There's been genetic studies which show that most women that have lived procreated, while during some periods most men did not. Upside is that if you belong to the top 5% of attractive men this is the best time to be alive :)
Don't date online? It's not surprising that an image-based communication medium will favor physically attractive people. You don't have to play that game if you would actually make a good partner.
This is very true, as an American. There's almost no difference in the vast majority of daily life for most Americans if you just pretended like the president doesn't exist.
Scant comfort for immigrants whose residency and livelihood are under threat, or Americans who have lost loved ones indirectly due to bad decisions made by the president, or non-Americans who have to live in a world shaped by American action or inaction on foreign policy.
The president has not had a dramatic impact on my life directly. The people who follow him and listen to him absolutely have. I'm getting real tired of seeing armed protests, nazi/confederate flags, and Make America Great Again signs at my state capitol every other day. I'm tired of his threats to punish my state after a massive flood because he doesn't like my governor. I'm tired of one of his cabinet members riling up these armed protests with nazi/confederate flags.
And even if the president hasn't done anything to me specifically, I'm getting real tired of hearing all the stupid shit he does/says every night on the news or the next morning when my coworkers talk about it. If I could figure out a way to block the words "twitter", "hydroxycloroquine", "inject disinfectant", etc... I'm sure he'd make up even stupider things for people to talk about.
It's tiring. It's exhausting. And knowing that nearly half of my countrymen agree with what he says just makes it worse. But the worst part of all is having a president who is actively attacking my state and its elected representatives while we're in not one but MULTIPLE states of emergency.
Have you ever had your president declare war on your state? It's not normal. And it's really hard to pretend it doesn't exist.
Within a week of him assuming office in 2017, all of my extended family was (and still is) banned from visiting the country. It was his campaign promise and executive order.
Right now the US is the leader in COVID19 cases and deaths. Bigger countries like China have so far performed better than the US. Yes, there are structural issues, like the obesity epidemic. But it doesn't help the government is spending time arguing about masks and drinking disinfectant instead of building out test, trace & quarantine infrastructure.
How is it insane? Allowing SALT deductions at all allows states and municipalities to skip out on federal taxes by taxing themselves. That's money that isn't going into medicare, the VA, etc, etc, (thereby defeating the point of funding those things at the federal level) and instead is going directly into state/local coffers which defeats the point of having uniform federal taxes for funding federal programs.
I'm personally paying more thanks to the deduction cap but I understand the principal of it.
The fact of the matter is that the federal government does not have a huge bearing on most Americans lives. I live in Colorado and therefore get to enjoy marijuana whenever I want despite the fact that it's not legal at the federal level. I like it that way.
Yet when we talk about this virus that is making everybody so miserable via lockdowns and for some killing them, suddenly everyone talks about it at a federal national level.
As if the United States is a small homogeneous country.
The virus hit New York City hard and nowhere else in the country. if you remove New York City from the equation the United States is at the top as far as low numbers of deaths per 100,000.
if you include New York City the United States is still doing better than the United kingdom Spain, Italy, and Belgium etc.
However the news media in this country is in the mode of if it bleeds it leads. they like to scare people to get them to keep their eyeballs glued to their screens and their prescription drug advertisements.
The most recent thing that they've been doing is focusing on absolute numbers rather than relative numbers with the deaths. Same for positive tests. The number of tests being administered has gone up radically and therefore more positive cases are turning up. The media in this country has conveniently left out the fact that the positive test rate is the number that matters and that has gone down all over the country.
I really really dislike Donald Trump like most of the people on this website. However I'm old enough to remember when a previous Republican president started a needless war that cost thousands of American soldiers their lives as well as trillions of dollars and I'm not even counting the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that were killed. The current president is incompetent and just says dumb s* all the time. That's honestly the extent of it and I have to constantly hear the whining and complaining as if the world is coming to an end. It's frankly very irritating and the media doesn't help.
You say that as if it COULD have been contained. What is unique about the USA compared to every other country that locked down?
Whose fault was it that Italy, UK, Spain, Belgium, Germany had to lock down?
This election year absurdity has warped the reality of this virus.
The virus is insanely transmissible with a long incubation period and high percentage of asymptomatic carriers. It couldn't have been contained in a free country.
The "had to go into lockdown" is debatable for most of USA. NYC needed a lockdown. Rest of US probably not.
Remember when Sweden was going to be a disaster a few weeks ago? Georgia and Florida? Yeah, they ended lockdowns, moron journalists pretending to be epidemiologists predicted doom.
All wrong. Sweden is fine. Georgia is fine. Florida is fine.
Why? Because they aren't the same as NYC and shouldn't be treated the same.
I'm not condoning the lockdown and agree that the danger of coronavirus has been vastly overstated, my point is that the U.S. government was not prepared. There were not enough tests, masks, and ventilators, and so NYC had to go into lockdown. Anecdotally my friends in NYC who suffered from all the symptoms of coronavirus were not able to obtain tests.
Meanwhile South Korea never had to resort to any lockdown. Both the U.S. and South Korea reported their first case on the same day (Jan. 20th), and Korea had tests available in a week while the U.S. took 5 weeks.
1 detail that I think is relevant to the US learning lessons from this:
As incompetent as Trump is (and boy is he incompetent), having worked in the Federal gov't for 8 years, including 6 years under the Obama administration (I left after the Snowden revelations on moral grounds), there is nothing in my experience that tells me the Federal gov't in the US is competent in any way to deal with things like this virus.
Obama tried, but the dude inherited a steaming pile of old bureaucracies that make IBM look like a hot, nimble start-up. It is beyond horrible.
If you think that Trump made this worse, I agree. However, if you think it was anything more than a drop of water added to an ocean of mediocre apathy, then you haven't seen the Federal government agencies and the talent they retain (if you want to call it "talent").
Americans (whether left or right) need to stop arguing over the size of government and start focusing on it's spending efficiency and efficacy. It really is a travesty. Every now and then, I encounter a random coworker who is highly ineffective, and typically on the edge of being fired. I think back to my time working in the Federal sector, and realize that said person would be above average in any of the agencies I dealt with. We deserve better. And it's going to take a LOT more than a new president to get it. Trust me, I watched Obama's executive orders (for example, an open data executive order) get ignored or partially obeyed in optics only by the various bureaucracies. The Deep State is real, but it's not some nefarious, coordinated conspiracy. It's just a calcified collection of old, dispirited, soulless agencies filled with people riding their desks and avoiding risk at all costs. They avoid risk in the easiest way possible: defer action in favor of deliberation and meetings to ensure that blame is diffused if any action results in something bad happening. The government isn't like "House of Cards." It's like "Veep."
A lot of people didn't think the guy in the white house could matter that much until Trump. As a non-American a lot of Americans would likely be envious of your lifestyle right now. The 30 million currently unemployed for sure, the people who also can't get to a hospital if they need surgery or healthcare because they're closed because of our botched (guy in wh) response care as well. The essential workers with no healthcare who are making an extra $2/hour to possibly die.
This isn't a vaccuum in America. A lot of us have friends, family and coworkers affected by this.
Even if I ignore the president or the news I'm still trapped inside my house for the most part. If I leave my house it's an experience figuring out whether something is open or not, what their rules are, etc.
I mean I can go sit in my backyard and ignore the world but I still need to function day to day and right now I can't do half of my chores, errands, etc. So it's something definitely affecting my day to day.
And I'm on the lucky end, I can wfh and sit here and respond to you. I can't imagine having to go to work at some gas station to pay rent right now.
The guy in the white house isn't doing anything to calm anyones nerves or concerns. He's exacerbating them greatly. He has the largest microphone in the country, it's hard to ignore him or his affect on peoples mental health.
Everywhere we look is a reminder of our failure of a government. It's on everyones mouths. Now imagine going to work and fixing bobscars.com database while this stuff is in your face everyday.
I see your points and I don't understand those who disagree with you.
1. Your life is directly affected by the actions of those in power.
2. The future of your country is directly affected by the actions of those in power.
I'm sorry you feel this way, but it kind of feels to me like you're linking everything back to a political landscape that you don't like, but which doesn't have a lot to do with the current state of things.
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.
> 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? The government and societal response?
Maybe we're miscommunicating. Yeah, 90% of my life is the same but we all have friends and family affected by some part of it (healthcare or unemployment typically). The most mutual thing right now is our combined stress (except for the people partying at the beach).
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.
> I don't think your government had a course of action that would have made a lot of difference.
The obvious counter-argument to this are China and India. Significantly larger populations, living in far greater densities, possessing fewer healthcare resources, yet far fewer overall deaths. Even if China had 10x the deaths they're reporting (which would be hard to cover up, but you never know), it's still lower than the US. Their lockdown wasn't for as long. Schools in Wuhan reopened this month.
> It caught everybody on the planet off guard.
It caught China, and maybe Italy and Iran off guard. Surely after learning that a Chinese province of 20 million people had been put on house arrest, the rest of the planet should have cottoned on.
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.
Multiple people I know have died, almost everyone I know is out of work. The shithead in the White House killed all the programs that would have helped us.
It's harder to feel optimistic about the future when there's an idiot in office who's actively trying to dismantle everything that's good about the country.
Trump still being in office points to a systemic failure of our government, which nobody is really talking about changing. Sad to feel optimism in a country with a failed government.
True but it's not either/or. In Korea everyone lives in apartments, and they never had a lockdown. Live has practically been carrying on as usual throughout the whole pandemic, minus the closing of schools, libraries (checkout only), and churches for a brief period of time.
Our cities and rural areas aren't exactly in a great state either. I would imagine the average resident of a dense city does not know the names of all of their next door neighbors.
All of these are extreme and very myopic takes. 6 figures of student loan debt? That's < 5% of all borrowers (and many of those are post-grad education), 92% of Americans have healthcare and a fraction of the already small number of bankruptcies are related to medical debt, poverty rate has been relatively steady since the 60s.
Sure a lot of people hate Trump (I think if the media stopped talking about him, and he stopped tweeting that'd help a lot of anxiety - it's more media spin than his actual policy that seems to anger people), the US ranks better than most countries in Western Europe in terms of death rate per 1000, lack of community I'd agree with.
My point is: if you shut off some of the news and social media, your perspective would likely drastically improve. Things aren't actually that terrible if you tune out all the alarmists.
What a perfect encapsulation of the individualism that drives the special American breed of blame-the-victim mentality. It allows society to erode the well-being of huge swaths of the population while simultaneously making them feel ashamed of their inability to triumph over the ruthless machine grinding them into the dirt.
Yes, we need personal responsibility, but maybe we could also stop making it harder for people to eke out a decent living. Maybe then we could rightfully claim the title of "the land of opportunity". As of now, we rank lower than dozens of other industrialized countries in terms of social mobility and economic equality.
While the person you're responding to has a horrible tone, I've sort of grown to agree with the general sentiment.
Most of the problems I've seen people face can be solved on their own, or could have been prevented on their own.
Pandemic made you lose your job? Absolutely not your fault. Massive injury or illness wipe out your savings and leave you in debt? Absolutely not your fault. These are things we can and should be improving.
But it's really hard for me to feel bad about people who end up with a massive amount of school loans. There are plenty of state school options available. Work moderately hard in high school and you'll get a massive discount on college, too. Would it be great if it were free? Absolutely. But it isn't. And that shouldn't be an excuse for ending up with a massive loan afterwards.
Job sucks? So many people I meet aren't even trying to apply to new jobs. It was like pulling teeth trying to get my sister to apply to just a few jobs a week (when I applied to a dozen a day when I was starting out).
But it's really hard for me to feel bad about people who end up with a massive amount of school loans. There are plenty of state school options available. Work moderately hard in high school and you'll get a massive discount on college, too. Would it be great if it were free? Absolutely. But it isn't. And that shouldn't be an excuse for ending up with a massive loan afterwards.
I hear you, and you're absolutely right. So many people with massive student loans would be better off had they made better decisions. But why didn't they? Why has student loan debt massively exploded to $1.6 trillion? To me it seems obvious that there are systemic incentives and disincentives at play that are actively making it more difficult for people to make good decisions in these areas, not a sudden rash of people being born or raised with inferior character or intellect to the generations that came before.
I'm not sure. Maybe lack of funding for high schools and below? Maybe peer pressure? Probably a combination of a few reasons.
I don't think there's a fundamental lack of ability for high schoolers to understand long term financial consequences.
Making college free would certainly "fix" this issue, and would be great for non-financial reasons, but it seems like a bandaid to the whole financial intelligence thing that will just push the issues down the line. It's not like once you become an adult you automatically become more financially intelligent (see: 2008, massive car loans, etc). I truly believe better or more focused high school education would help a ton.
I feel like you're making my point for me. Whatever the reason, it seems pretty clear that we as a society have made it more difficult for these kids to make good decisions, maybe just by virtue of the lack of education on how to do so. Chalking their collective indebtedness up to a lack of personal responsibility and a moral failing on their part is just lazy.
Given the stress of the current crisis, this does not surprise me. The topic of the news for the past two months now is that there's a doom plague, a mask might not save you, people are violating quarantine to spread the plague, the economy is going to collapse, and Trump is making it all worse. People have lost their jobs, are being told they can't work, that they must stay home, they must stay away from other people, they must be afraid, etc and so forth. So in light of that, it does not surprise me at all that depression and anxiety are ramping up in the adult population.
Neither does the breakdown by age surprise me, with it being worst amongst 18-29 year-olds, and declining with age. I would love to see a finer breakdown in that category. Here is my hypothesis:
For the youngest of adults, especially those just now entering adulthood or their professional careers, this is probably the first societal shock they've experienced. They did what they were supposed to according to The Plan of How The World Works. They persevered through the soul-crushing hell that is high school, and got the best grades they could, and applied for colleges, and are ready to become adults. Or maybe they didn't get quite so good grades or dropped out and were banking on being able to support themselves with some kind of basic labor or service job. Or maybe they've taken out all the student loans to go to college, and are coming into what's supposed to be the beginning of their professional career to an economy that's about to collapse. Or if they haven't graduated, now there's the uncertainty if whether or nor they'll be able to finish their degree, with there being question about when/if campuses will open back up, or whether the online classes offered as substitutes will actually do any useful teaching. Regardless of the myriad variations available in the above, the basic situation remains the same: here they are, their life finally about to begin, and now the economy is collapsing, everyone's dying, a fascist oompa loompa controls the government, and generally the world is over. Well, shit. Now what?
I speak somewhat hyperbolically in describing the above, of course, but I stand by my basic point: The youngest adults are beginning their adulthood in fairly bad situation. And unless they're old enough to remember the previous societal shocks that were supposed end the world, but didn't, it's all to easy to come near the despair event horizon or even cross it.
Compare those who are a little older, or hell, a lot older. They've seen the Housing Crisis, War, 9/11, the dot-com bubble, and so on and so forth. And yet, they didn't die and are still here. Odds are, at least one of the previous crises made their life worse for a time, or messed up what was supposed to be a bright future or golden opportunity. And yet, they didn't die, and are still here. And the older they are, odds are, the more times they've seen that the world was about to end, and then didn't. And the more likely they've internalized the lesson that in crises like these, how well they come out of it depends largely on their attitude and how they apply themselves to getting through it. And so we see that with the older and older age groups, the anxiety and depression numbers are lower and lower.
This post might sound a bit ranty, and like I am projecting, and I'd be lying if I tried to claim there weren't threads of that woven through it. But it is not my intention for this to be just a "toughen up you whippersnappers and get off my lawn!" type post. No, if I had to have a message for the youngest of adults, it's this: I get it. The world just got turned upside down an nobody knows what's coming next. But, the future is not over, and things will get better. There are still opportunities to be found, and you _can_ come out of this stronger.
Before this incident (I've been through a few disasters and violent incidents), I was already on my 13th antidepressant (vilazodone) which doesn't appear to be working. Also on propranolol, clonidine, atomoxetine, carbamazepine, baclofen, gabapentin, and 40 mg/day of CBD. I buy CBD isolate (pure CBD) in bulk and make my own sublingual tincture using a precisely-measured ratio of ingredients comprising:
- Organic coconut oil
- Vitamin E T50
- Grape seed / citrus extract
- CBD
in a dark glass container filled into sterile saline spray bottles for use.
If you don't do this, then you're probably either being cheated or don't know what you're taking.
Anyhow, so far this new antidepressant doesn't seem to be working so the dose is getting upped. If this doesn't work, it's back to mirtazapine and weight gain. The only other options involve anticholinergics, extrapyramidal issues, electricity, magnets, and/or brain surgery.
I also have gradually, over the past few years, developed some sort of neurological decline vaguely reminiscent of vascular, frontotemporal, or Lewy body dementia or chronic traumatic encephalopathy (I was born cyanotic over several hours because of incompetent Kaiser Permanente doctors and was hit in the head extremely hard as a teenager twice and didn't receive proper medical care).
I can barely speak, I stutter a lot, my memory is disappearing, and my level of consciousness and clarity is declining. I can't code in any language anymore and I used to work in Rust, Haskell, C, Crystal, and so on. My sleep is a mess... one or a few hours here and there at all times of the day. I use every bit of concentration to write this. If it's an incurable condition, I will go somewhere very, very remote in Montana or Wyoming and breathe nitrogen.
It sounds like you're in a bad place. Lots of us have been there. Seek help from others, please. There are people around, hopefully in your local area, who can help.
What age? I've noticed way more young people (teenagers and early 20s) exhibiting signs of anxiety and depression than people my own age (mid 40s). I never knew anyone with anxiety or depression growing up. But that probably has a lot more to do with mental illness not being discussed back than it not being around. But, even among me friend group nobody exhibited the signs that I see so clearly prevalent among my own kids' friend groups. Is it social media? Some chemical that has entered our environment? Is it something having to do with growing up in a post-9/11 world?
I think they would say that their future prospects are a lot dimmer than yours were, precisely because boomers have strip-mined civilization for their own benefit and left your kids' generation holding the bag.
At 37, I'm among the oldest of the millennials and I don't entirely agree with that assessment, but I think that's what they'd say.
Teenagers are sensitive to the cognitive dissonance that accompanies learning how society works and their place in it, even if they're not yet able to articulate those feelings. Some are more precocious than others but anything a college student would be able to tell you about their relationship to society was developing for years beforehand.
I agree with you; however, the interesting thing is that instead of millenials asking boomers why they've gone and strip mined everything, the millenials are mad that there's nothing left to strip mine.
Or maybe the negativity of social media and the popularity of sad music isn't the cause, but the effect? People listen to sad music because they're sad. The news is negative, because the world is going to shit. People "glorify" depression, because they're depressed. A meme about depression might seem like glorification, but it's probably just be a way for depressed people to connect. What you call glorification, could just be people sharing their experiences with people who feel the same way.
I'm in my mid to late 30s and I'm with you on agreeing with Clint Eastwood. I used to joke that I'm 30 going on 60 (with many friends in their 60s and 70s), but these days I've updated the terms so the kids can understand and say that I'm a transboomer.
