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blythewallick

People with Depression Use Language Differently | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

daily.jstor.org/ssion-use-language-differently

science psychology research brain science language

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • New research shows that people with depression use absolute words, such as “always,” “nothing,” or “completely,” more often than others.
  • Scientists have long tried to pin down the exact relationship between depression and language, and technology is helping us get closer to a full picture. Our new study, published in Clinical Psychological Science, has now unveiled a class of words that can help accurately predict whether someone is suffering from depression.
  • So far, personal essays and diary entries by depressed people have been useful, as has the work of well-known artists such as Cobain and Plath. For the spoken word, snippets of natural language of people with depression have also provided insight. Taken together, the findings from such research reveal clear and consistent differences in language between those with and without symptoms of depression.
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  • We know that rumination (dwelling on personal problems) and social isolation are common features of depression. However, we don’t know whether these findings reflect differences in attention or thinking style. Does depression cause people to focus on themselves, or do people who focus on themselves get symptoms of depression?
  • Our lab recently conducted a big data text analysis of 64 different online mental health forums, examining over 6,400 members. “Absolutist words” – which convey absolute magnitudes or probabilities, such as “always”, “nothing” or “completely” – were found to be better markers for mental health forums than either pronouns or negative emotion words.
  • From the outset, we predicted that those with depression will have a more black and white view of the world, and that this would manifest in their style of language.
  • Crucially, those who have previously had depressive symptoms are more likely to have them again. Therefore, their greater tendency for absolutist thinking, even when there are currently no symptoms of depression, is a sign that it may play a role in causing depressive episodes. The same effect is seen in use of pronouns, but not for negative emotion words.
  • But as the World Health Organisation estimates that more than 300m people worldwide are now living with depression, an increase of more than 18% since 2005, having more tools available to spot the condition is certainly important to improve health and prevent tragic suicides such as those of Plath and Cobain.
krystalxu

NIMH » Depression Basics - 0 views

www.nimh.nih.gov/...index.shtml

psychology brain science depression

shared by krystalxu on 03 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Depression—also called “clinical depression” or a “depressive disorder”—is a mood disorder that causes distressing symptoms that affect how you feel, think, and handle daily activities, such as sleeping, eating, or working.
  • Two of the most common forms of depression
  • Major depression
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  • Perinatal Depression
  • Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD):
  • Psychotic Depression:
  • Scientists at NIMH and across the country are studying the causes of depression. Research suggests that a combination of genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological factors play a role in depression.
  • Depression can occur along with other serious illnesses, such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Depression can make these conditions worse and vice versa.
  • Depression affects different people in different ways.
  • The first step in getting the right treatment is to visit a health care provider or mental health professional, such as a psychiatrist or psychologist
  • Medications called antidepressants can work well to treat depression.
Javier E

How Depression and Anxiety Affect Your Physical Health - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-anxiety-physical-health.html

depression anxiety health effect mental health psychology research brain science

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • It’s no surprise that when a person gets a diagnosis of heart disease, cancer or some other life-limiting or life-threatening physical ailment, they become anxious or depressed.
  • But the reverse can also be true: Undue anxiety or depression can foster the development of a serious physical disease, and even impede the ability to withstand or recover from one.
  • The human organism does not recognize the medical profession’s artificial separation of mental and physical ills. Rather, mind and body form a two-way street.
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  • What happens inside a person’s head can have damaging effects throughout the body, as well as the other way around. An untreated mental illness can significantly increase the risk of becoming physically ill, and physical disorders may result in behaviors that make mental conditions worse.
  • In studies that tracked how patients with breast cancer fared, for example, Dr. David Spiegel and his colleagues at Stanford University School of Medicine showed decades ago that women whose depression was easing lived longer than those whose depression was getting worse. His research and other studies have clearly shown that “the brain is intimately connected to the body and the body to the brain,”
  • “The body tends to react to mental stress as if it was a physical stress.”
  • Anxiety disorders affect nearly 20 percent of American adults. That means millions are beset by an overabundance of the fight-or-flight response that primes the body for action.
  • “We often talk about depression as a complication of chronic illness,” Dr. Frownfelter wrote in Medpage Today in July. “But what we don’t talk about enough is how depression can lead to chronic disease. Patients with depression may not have the motivation to exercise regularly or cook healthy meals. Many also have trouble getting adequate sleep.”
  • These protective actions stem from the neurotransmitters epinephrine and norepinephrine, which stimulate the sympathetic nervous system and put the body on high alert. But when they are invoked too often and indiscriminately, the chronic overstimulation can result in all manner of physical ills, including digestive symptoms like indigestion, cramps, diarrhea or constipation, and an increased risk of heart attack or stroke.
  • While it’s normal to feel depressed from time to time, more than 6 percent of adults have such persistent feelings of depression that it disrupts personal relationships, interferes with work and play, and impairs their ability to cope with the challenges of daily life
  • “Depression diminishes a person’s capacity to analyze and respond rationally to stress,” Dr. Spiegel said. “They end up on a vicious cycle with limited capacity to get out of a negative mental state.”
  • Although persistent anxiety and depression are highly treatable with medications, cognitive behavioral therapy and talk therapy, without treatment these conditions tend to get worse.
  • When you’re stressed, the brain responds by prompting the release of cortisol, nature’s built-in alarm system. It evolved to help animals facing physical threats by increasing respiration, raising the heart rate and redirecting blood flow from abdominal organs to muscles that assist in confronting or escaping danger.
  • Improving sleep is especially helpful, Dr. Spiegel said, because “it enhances a person’s ability to regulate the stress response system and not get stuck in a mental rut.”
Javier E

Anxiety and Depression Are on an 80-Year Upswing -- Science of Us - 1 views

nymag.com/...ore-anxious-and-depressed.html

depression anxiety psychology modernization adolescent mental health values image money fame

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Ever since the 1930s, young people in America have reported feeling increasingly anxious and depressed. And no one knows exactly why.One of the researchers who has done the most work on this subject is Dr. Jean Twenge, a social psychologist at San Diego State University who is the author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before. She’s published a handful of articles on this trajectory, and the underlying story, she thinks, is a rather negative one. “I think the research tells us that modern life is not good for mental health,” she said.
  • The words “depression” and “anxiety” themselves, after all, mean very different things to someone asked about them in 1935 as compared to 1995, so surveys that invoke these concepts directly only have limited utility for longitudinal study. To get around this, Twenge prefers to rely on surveys and inventories in which respondents are asked about specific symptoms which are frequently correlated with anxiety and depression
  • Much of the richest data on this question, then, comes from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which has been administered to high school and college students since the 1930s — and which includes many questions about symptoms. Specifically, it asks — among many other things — whether respondents feel well-rested when they wake up, whether they have trouble thinking, and whether they have experienced dizzy spells, headaches, shortness of breath, a racing heart, and so on.
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  • The trendlines are obvious: Asked the same questions at about the same points in their lives, Americans are, over time, experiencing worse and worse symptoms associated with anxiety and depression.
  • there’s an interesting recent wrinkle to this trajectory. In a paper published in 2014 in Social Indicators Research, Twenge tracked the results of the Monitoring the Future (MtF) survey, “a nationally representative sample of U.S. 12th graders [administered] every year since 1976,” between 1982 and 2013. Like the MMPI, the MtF asks students about symptoms in a manner that should be generally resistant to cultural change: The somatic items Twenge examined asked about trouble sleeping, remembering things, thinking/concentrating, and learning, as well as shortness of breath. An interesting recent pattern emerged on these measures:
  • All the items end up significantly higher than where they started, but for many of them most of the increase happens over the first half of the time period in question. From the late 1990s or so until 2013, many of the items bounce around a bit but ultimately remain flat, or flat-ish.
  • drugs — Prozac and Lexapro, among others — have been prescribed to millions of people who experience these symptoms, many of whom presumably saw some improvement once the drugs kicked in, so this explanation at least makes intuitive sens
  • there are likely other factors leading to the plateau as well, said Twenge. For one thing, the “crime rate is lower [today] than it was when it peaked in the early 1990s,” and dealing with crime can lead to anxiety and depression symptoms. Other indicators of youth well-being, like teen pregnancy, were also significantly higher back then, and could have accounted for the trajectory visible on the graphs.“For whatever reason,” said Twenge, “if you look at what was going on back then, the early 1990s were not a good time, particularly for young people.”
  • “Obviously there’s a lot of good things about societal and technological progress,” she said, “and in a lot of ways our lives are much easier than, say, our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ lives. But there’s a paradox here that we seem to have so much ease and relative economic prosperity compared to previous centuries, yet there’s this dissatisfaction, there’s this unhappiness, there are these mental health issues in terms of depression and anxiety.
  • She thinks the primary problem is that “modern life doesn’t give us as many opportunities to spend time with people and connect with them, at least in person, compared to, say, 80 years ago or 100 years ago. Families are smaller, the divorce rate is higher, people get married much later in life.”
  • it may simply be the case that many people who lived in less equal, more “traditional” times were forced into close companionship with a lot of other people, and that this shielded them from certain psychological problems, whatever else was going on in their lives.
  • She was virtually never alone — and that can be a bad thing, clearly, but from a mental health perspective being surrounded by people is a good thing.”
  • the shift away from this sort of life has also brought with it a shift in values, and Twenge thinks that this, too, can account for the increase in anxiety and depression. “There’s clear evidence that the focus on money, fame, and image has gone up,
  • “and there’s also clear evidence that people who focus on money, fame, and image are more likely to be depressed and anxious.”
  • “It’s so tempting to say the world is going to hell in a handbasket and everything’s bad, but there are so many good things about modern life,” she said. So maybe the key message here is that while there’s no way to go back to family farms and young marriage and parenthood — and, from an equality standpoint,we wouldn’t want to anyway — modern life needs to do a better job of connecting people to one another, and encouraging them to adopt the sorts of goals and outlooks that will make them happy.
Javier E

Is the World More Depressed? - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-great-depression.html

depression psychology suicide international social media

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The World Health Organization reports that suicide rates have increased 60 percent over the past 50 years, most strikingly in the developing world, and that by 2020 depression will be the second most prevalent medical condition in the world.
  • n 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the rate of antidepressant use in the United States rose by 400 percent between 1988 and 2008.
  • there is reason to believe that mental illness is indeed increasing around the world, if only because urbanization is increasing. By 2010, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population lived in cities.
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  • What has exploded in India over the past few decades, but also everywhere else in the world, is information about other people. As we watch television, surf the Internet and follow events around the world, we become intimately aware of other ways of living and of others who are richer and more powerful. We place ourselves in a vast social order in which most of us are ants. It may truly be a depressing reflection.
  • We know that social position affects both when you die and how sick you get: The higher your social position, the healthier you are. It turns out that your sense of relative social rank — where you draw a line on an abstract ladder to show where you are with respect to others — predicts many health outcomes, including depression, sometimes even more powerfully than your objective socioeconomic status.
  • cities also break traditions and fracture families, and they breed psychiatric illness. In a city you are more likely to be depressed, to fall ill with schizophrenia, and to use alcohol and drugs. Poverty and rapid urbanization sharpen these effects.
  • Some of these figures might simply reflect more willingness to label an experience as a symptom. For example, until recently, most Japanese understood intense fatigue as sacrifice for one’s work and suicide as an act of reasoned will. In her book “Depression in Japan,” the anthropologist Junko Kitanaka writes that partly as a result of aggressive pharmaceutical marketing, many Japanese began to think of their fatigue and suicidal thoughts as symptoms created by a disease. The number of diagnoses of depression in that country more than doubled between 1999 and 2008.
Javier E

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...534198

smartphone generation social media psychology teen

shared by Javier E on 03 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”
  • The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household
  • Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.
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  • the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind.
  • The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.
  • it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.
  • theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen
  • Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet.
  • iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.
  • . I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.
  • More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.
  • Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
  • the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.
  • But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.
  • Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a while, they might start dating.
  • only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.
  • The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991. The average teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11th grade, a full year later than the average Gen Xer
  • The teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2016, down 67 percent since its modern peak, in 1991.
  • Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school.
  • In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.
  • In the late 1970s, 77 percent of high-school seniors worked for pay during the school year; by the mid-2010s, only 55 percent did. The number of eighth-graders who work for pay has been cut in half.
  • Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.
  • In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.
  • eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s.
  • The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.
  • So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.
  • despite spending far more time under the same roof as their parents, today’s teens can hardly be said to be closer to their mothers and fathers than their predecessors were. “I’ve seen my friends with their families—they don’t talk to them,” Athena told me. “They just say ‘Okay, okay, whatever’ while they’re on their phones. They don’t pay attention to their family.” Like her peers, Athena is an expert at tuning out her parents so she can focus on her phone.
  • The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently.
  • Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.
  • The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.
  • The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.
  • There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness
  • Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media
  • If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen
  • Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since.
  • This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online.
  • Teens who spend more time on social media also spend more time with their friends in person, on average—highly social teens are more social in both venues, and less social teens are less so.
  • The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.
  • It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out
  • Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That’s much more than the risk related to, say, watching TV.)
  • Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.
  • For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out.
  • Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age groups.
  • Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them.
  • Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. When Athena posts pictures to Instagram, she told me, “I’m nervous about what people think and are going to say. It sometimes bugs me when I don’t get a certain amount of likes on a picture.”
  • Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today’s teens. Boys’ depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls’ increased by 50 percent—more than twice as much
  • The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys
  • Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style of aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around the clock.
  • I asked my undergraduate students at San Diego State University what they do with their phone while they sleep. Their answers were a profile in obsession. Nearly all slept with their phone, putting it under their pillow, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach of the bed. They checked social media right before they went to sleep, and reached for their phone as soon as they woke up in the morning
  • the smartphone is cutting into teens’ sleep: Many now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived
  • Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the four years from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.
  • Two national surveys show that teens who spend three or more hours a day on electronic devices are 28 percent more likely to get less than seven hours of sleep than those who spend fewer than three hours, and teens who visit social-media sites every day are 19 percent more likely to be sleep deprived.
  • Teens who read books and magazines more often than the average are actually slightly less likely to be sleep deprived—either reading lulls them to sleep, or they can put the book down at bedtime.
  • Sleep deprivation is linked to myriad issues, including compromised thinking and reasoning, susceptibility to illness, weight gain, and high blood pressure. It also affects mood: People who don’t sleep enough are prone to depression and anxiety.
  • correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough to suggest that more parents should be telling their kids to put down their phone.
  • What’s at stake isn’t just how kids experience adolescence. The constant presence of smartphones is likely to affect them well into adulthood. Among people who suffer an episode of depression, at least half become depressed again later in life. Adolescence is a key time for developing social skills; as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face, they have fewer opportunities to practice them
  • Significant effects on both mental health and sleep time appear after two or more hours a day on electronic devices. The average teen spends about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could keep kids from falling into harmful habits.
Ellie McGinnis

Meaningful Activities Protect the Brain From Depression - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...360988

depression psychology brain science research

shared by Ellie McGinnis on 22 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Aristotle famously said there were two basic types of joy: hedonia, or that keg-standing, Netflix binge-watching, Nutella-from-the-jar selfish kind of pleasure, and eudaimonia, or the pleasure that comes from helping others, doing meaningful work, and otherwise leading a life well-lived.
  • "Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided,
  • “While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do ... Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future.”
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  • scientists have found they can measure the amount that a person enjoys something by taking MRIs of activation levels in the ventral striatum—the “reward center” nestled in the bullseye of the brain. The ventral striata of teens, in particular, tend to light up especially brightly in response to all kinds of rewards
  • teens brains are so sensitive to these little jolts of pleasure—or lack thereof—late adolescence is also when depression peaks for many people.
  • the researchers followed a group of 39 teenagers over the course of one year to see whether the way their brains reacted to either eudaimonic or hedonic rewards correlated with how depressed they felt over time.
  • the teens who had the greatest brain response to the generous, family-donation financial decision had the greatest declines in depressive symptoms over time. And those who got a boost from the risk-taking game were more likely to have an increase in depression. The types of rewards the teens responded to, it seems, changed their behavior in ways that altered their overall well-being.
  • It’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily mean parents can inoculate their teens against depression by forcing them to seek happiness through volunteering. But it could be that teens who already do that kind of thing because it really does lift their spirits are likely to have that lift stick with them.
  • “Taken together, our findings suggest that well-being may depend on attending to higher values related to family, culture, and morality, rather than to immediate, selfish pleasure,”
anonymous

It's OK to Feel Joy Right Now - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pandemic-optimism-joy.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • It’s OK to Feel Joy Right NowHere’s how to prolong it.
  • The birds are chirping, a warm breeze is blowing and some of your friends are getting vaccinated.
  • After a year of anxiety and stress, many of us are rediscovering what optimism feels like.
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  • Spring is the season of optimism. With it comes more natural light and warm weather, both great mood boosters
  • Yes, receiving your vaccine shot, daydreaming about intimate dinner parties or those first hugs with grandchildren may give you a jolt of joy, but euphoria, unfortunately, tends to be fleeting.
  • When good (or bad) things happen, we feel an initial surge or dip in our overall happiness levels.
  • Hedonic adaptation means that, over time, we settle back into wherever we were happiness-wise before that good or bad event happened.
  • ven if the good thing — like getting your dream job — is continuing.
  • To maintain those positive feelings, you are going to need to work on it a bit
  • Thank evolution.
  • “Our brains developed biologically for survival, not happiness,”
  • ven the mundane things — like watching yet another youth soccer game — can feel special if you take a moment to remember the not-so-distant past when so much of our lives was put on hold.
  • While many Americans are beginning to exhale, many others are buried deep in grief.
  • If you’re not allowing yourself to feel happy because you worry you’ll be disappointed by future bad news, that’s OK too, Dr. Owens said.
  • This is called defensive pessimism, and it can help people feel more in control of a bad situation.
  • it’s understandable if you are just not ready to feel optimistic yet
  • Savor this (and everything).
  • Your first time hugging friends in a year is going to be so sweet, you’ll undoubtedly savor every moment of it. But there is joy in everyday things, too
  • To start, it’s OK if you’re not OK.
  • Marvel as much as you can.
  • This feeling can come from a walk around the block, said Allen Klein, author of “The Awe Factor.” One of his favorite strategies for ensuring his daily dose of awe is heading out for an “awe walk.”
  • On these strolls, he’ll turn off his mental list of chores and things to remember, and instead focus on finding wonder in small things along the way.
  • Be grateful and kind.
  • Acts of kindness tend to increase people’s ratings of their happiness,
  • The boost you get may not be huge, however
  • University of California, Riverside, found reflecting on past kind deeds improved well-being at a rate similar to actually going out and doing new good deeds.
  • This isn’t clearance to never be kind again, though. But if you’re stuck at home and cannot get out to help a friend, try thinking back on a time when you did those things.
  • Realize happiness alone isn’t enough.
  • If you have been struggling with depression throughout the pandemic — as many Americans have — working to boost your own happiness may not be the cure you are hoping for
  • “The opposite of depression is not happiness,”
  • “The opposite of depression is no longer being depressed.”
  • If you have been struggling with symptoms of depression these past 12 months, you may feel your depression subside as the pandemic slowly wanes. It may not.
  • Clinical depression should be treated by a mental health professional.
  • Break out your calendar.
  • Perhaps it’s too early to set a date for that 15-person dinner party, but you certainly can crack open a cookbook to start planning the menu.
  • And when party day arrives, don’t forget to savor every last morsel and belly laugh, as you eat, drink and be more than just fleetingly merry.
Javier E

Teens who choose music over books are more likely to be depressed - 0 views

www.eurekalert.org/...uops-twc040411.php

reading adolescent research music depression

shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • young people who were exposed to the most music, compared to those who listened to music the least, were 8.3 times more likely to be depressed. However, compared to those with the least time exposed to books, those who read books the most were one-tenth as likely to be depressed. The other media exposures were not significantly associated with depression
  • Richard Monari on 11 Apr 11
     
    That's remarkable. Is it ever clarified if the trend is between depression and the content of the music or depression and the act of listening to music itself? I wonder if they include any information concerning the genres of music that are being listened to by these teens.
Javier E

Opinion | How to Be More Resilient - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...xiety-depression-research.html

resilient toughness happiness psychology brain science stress

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • As a psychiatrist, I’ve long wondered why some people get ill in the face of stress and adversity — either mentally or physically — while others rarely succumb.
  • not everyone gets PTSD after exposure to extreme trauma, while some people get disabling depression with minimal or no stress
  • What makes people resilient, and is it something they are born with or can it be acquired later in life?
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • New research suggests that one possible answer can be found in the brain’s so-called central executive network, which helps regulate emotions, thinking and behavior
  • used M.R.I. to study the brains of a racially diverse group of 218 people, ages 12 to 14, living in violent neighborhoods in Chicago
  • the youths who had higher levels of functional connectivity in the central executive network had better cardiac and metabolic health than their peers with lower levels of connectivity
  • when neighborhood homicide rates went up, the young people’s cardiometabolic risk — as measured by obesity, blood-pressure and insulin levels, among other variables — also increased, but only in youths who showed lower activity in this brain network
  • “Active resilience happens when people who are vulnerable find resources to cope with stress and bounce back, and do so in a way that leaves them stronger, ready to handle additional stress, in more adaptive ways.”
  • the more medically hardy young people were no less anxious or depressed than their less fortunate peers, which suggests that while being more resilient makes you less vulnerable to adversity, it doesn’t guarantee happiness — or even an awareness of being resilient.
  • there is good reason to believe the link may be causal because other studies have found that we can change the activity in the self-control network, and increase healthy behaviors, with simple behavioral interventions
  • For example, mindfulness training, which involves attention control, emotion regulation and increased self-awareness, can increase connectivity within this network and help people to quit smoking.
  • n one study, two weeks of mindfulness training produced a 60 percent reduction in smoking, compared with no reduction in a control group that focused on relaxation. An M.R.I. following mindfulness training showed increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex, key brain areas in the executive self-control network
  • Clearly self-control is one critical component of resilience that can be easily fostered. But there are others.
  • One plausible explanation is that greater activity in this network increases self-control, which most likely reduces some unhealthy behaviors people often use to cope with stress, like eating junk food or smoking
  • she and colleagues studied the brains of depressed patients who died. They found that the most disrupted genes were those for growth factors, proteins that act like a kind of brain fertilizer.
  • “We came to realize that depressed people have lost their power to remodel their brains. And that is in fact devastating because brain remodeling is something we need to do all the time — we are constantly rewiring our brains based on past experience and the expectation of how we need to use them in the future,
  • one growth factor that is depleted in depressed brains, called fibroblast growth factor 2, also plays a role in resilience. When they gave it to stressed animals, they bounced back faster and acted less depressed. And when they gave it just once after birth to animals that had been bred for high levels of anxiety and inhibition, they were hardier for the rest of their lives.
  • The good news is that we have some control over our own brain BDNF levels: Getting more physical exercise and social support, for example, has been shown to increase BDNF.
  • Perhaps someday we might be able to protect young people exposed to violence and adversity by supplementing them with neuroprotective growth factors. We know enough now to help them by fortifying their brains through exercise, mindfulness training and support systems
  • Some people have won the genetic sweepstakes and are naturally tough. But there is plenty the rest of us can do to be more resilient and healthier.
Javier E

The Obama legacy that can't be repealed - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-9a51-cd56ea1c2bb7_story.html

obama presidency great recession

shared by Javier E on 19 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • There is no mystery about Barack Obama’s greatest presidential achievement: He stopped the Great Recession from becoming the second Great Depression. True, he had plenty of help, including from his predecessor, George W. Bush, and from the top officials at the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve. But if Obama had made one wrong step, what was a crushing economic slump could have become something much worse.
  • It is Obama’s unfortunate fate that the high-water mark of his presidency occurred in the first months, when the world flirted with financial calamity. The prospect of another Great Depression — a long period of worsening economic decline — was not far-fetched.
  • In the first quarter of 2009, as Obama was moving into the White House, monthly job losses averaged 772,000. The ultimate decline in employment was 8.7 million jobs, or 6.3 percent. Housing prices and stock values were collapsing. From their peak in February 2007 to their low point, housing prices dropped 26 percent. Millions of homeowners were “underwater” — their houses were worth less than the mortgages on them. Stock prices fell roughly by half from August 2007 to March 2009.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • There was no guarantee that the economy’s downward spiral wouldn’t continue, as frightened businesses and consumers curbed spending and, in the process, increased unemployment. The CEA presents a series of charts comparing the 2008-2009 slump with the Great Depression. In every instance, the 2008-2009 downturn was as bad as — or worse than — the first year of the Great Depression: employment loss, drop in global trade and change in households’ net worth.
  • The starkest of these was the fall in households’ net worth (people’s assets, such as homes and stock, minus their debts, such as mortgages and credit-card balances). It dropped by $13 trillion, about a fifth, from its high point in 2007 to its trough in 2009. This decline, the CEA notes, “was far larger than the reduction [adjusted for inflation] . . . at the onset of the Great Depression.”
  • What separates then from now is that, after 18 months or so, spending turned up in 2009 while it continued declining in the 1930s. This difference reflected, at least in part, the aggressive policies adopted to blunt the downturn. The Fed cut short-term interest rates to zero and provided other avenues of cheap credit; the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), enacted in the final months of the Bush administration, poured money into major banks to reassure the public of their solvency.
  • Still, Obama’s role was crucial. Against opposition, he decided to rescue General Motors and Chrysler. Throwing them onto the tender mercies of the market would have been a huge blow to the industrial Midwest and to national psychology. He also championed a sizable budget “stimulus.” Advertised originally as $787 billion, it was actually $2.6 trillion over four years when the initial program was combined with later proposals and so-called “automatic stabilizers” are included, the CEA says
  • More generally, Obama projected reason and calm when much of the nation was fearful and frazzled. Of course, he didn’t single-handedly restore confidence, but he made a big contribution
  • the recovery from the Great Recession is mostly complete. This seems plausible. Since the low point, employment is up 15.6 million jobs. Rising home and stock prices have boosted inflation-adjusted household net worth by 16 percent. Gross domestic product — the economy — is nearly 12 percent higher than before the financial crisis
  • his impact is underestimated. Suppose we had had a second Great Depression with, say, peak unemployment of 15 percent. Almost all our problems — from poverty to political polarization — would have worsened. Obama’s influence must be considered in this context. When historians do, they may be more impressed.
sissij

Depression is as bad for your heart as high cholesterol | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...heart-as-high-cholesterol.html

fox news brain science science

shared by sissij on 30 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • When you think of heart attacks, you might assume the most common causes are smoking, high cholesterol, or obesity. Mental health issues probably don't spring to mind.
  • Depression—which for this study, was determined by a checklist of mood symptoms, including anxiety and fatigue
  • “depressed mood and exhaustion holds a solid middle position within the concert of major cardiovascular risk factors.”
  • sissij on 30 Jan 17
     
    I think it is really interesting that even mental health issues has a positive relationship with cardiovascular disease. Our mind can affect how our body works. As we learn in the sense and perception unit, we know that brain will give us a shot of certain chemical that makes us feel good when we make certain decision. I think how we feel can reflect how our body feels. We all know that we feel pain because it is a warning that the injured part of our body send to our brain. So I think probably the feeling of depressed can be a warning sent by some part of our body. The scientific method mentioned in this article is a population research which is a typical biology scientific method. --Sissi (1/29/2017)
Javier E

Andrew Weil's Spontaneous Happiness: Our Nature-Deficit Disorder - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...r-nature-deficit-disorder.html

modern life depression nature health post-industrial

shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • In my experience, the more people have, the less likely they are to be contented. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that depression is a “disease of affluence,” a disorder of modern life in the industrialized world. People who live in poorer countries have a lower risk of depression than those in industrialized nations. In general, countries with lifestyles that are furthest removed from modern standards have the lowest rates of depression.
  • there seems to be something about modern life that creates fertile soil for depression.”
  • More and more of us are sedentary, spending most of our time indoors. We eat industrial food much altered from its natural sources, and there is reason for concern about how our changed eating habits are affecting our brain activity and our moods. We are deluged by an unprecedented overload of information and stimulation in this age of the Internet, email, mobile phones, and multimedia, all of which favor social isolation and certainly affect our emotional (and physical) health.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Behaviors strongly associated with depression—reduced physical activity and human contact, overconsumption of processed food, seeking endless distraction—are the very behaviors that more and more people now can do, are even forced to do by the nature of their sedentary, indoor jobs.
  • e we are gathering scientific evidence for the benefits of living close to nature, not simply for enjoying its beauty or getting spiritual sustenance but for keeping our brains and nervous systems in good working order.
  • Human beings evolved to thrive in natural environments and in bonded social groups. Few of us today can enjoy such a life and the emotional equilibrium it engenders, but our genetic predisposition for it has not changed.
  • I believ
  • It may seem baffling, but the explanation is simple: the human body was never designed for the modern postindustrial environment.”
  • Possibly, the deterioration of emotional well-being characteristic of contemporary urban life represents a cumulative effect of lifestyle changes that have been occurring over many years, an effect that is now suddenly obvious.
  • Not only do we suffer from nature deficit, we are experiencing information surfeit. Many people today spend much of their waking time surfing the Internet, texting and talking on mobile phones, attending to email, watching television, and being stimulated by other new media—experiences never available until now.
  • The allure of synthetic entertainment—television, the Internet—is eerily reminiscent of the false promise of industrial food. It seems like a distillation of the good aspects of a social life, always entertaining yet easy to abandon when it becomes tedious or challenging. But, like junk food, it is ultimately unsatisfying and potentially harmful. Our brains, genetically adapted to help us negotiate a successful course through complex, changing, and often hazardous natural environments, are suddenly confronted with an overload of information and stimulation independent of physical reality.
anonymous

National trial: EEG brain tests help patients overcome depression -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...180515162751.htm

brain science technology depression language science

shared by anonymous on 20 May 18 - No Cached
  • Imagine millions of depressed Americans getting their brain activity measured and undergoing blood tests to determine which antidepressant would work best. Imagine some of them receiving "brain training" or magnetic stimulation to make their brains more amenable to those treatments.
  • The first study -- to be published in the June edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry -- found that measuring electrical activity in the brain can help predict a patient's response to an antidepressant.
  • Dr. Trivedi sought to improve this situation by spearheading the 16-week EMBARC trial at four U.S. sites in which more than 300 patients with major depressive disorder were evaluated through brain imaging and various DNA, blood, and other tests.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Dr. Trivedi's work is becoming increasingly critical in the U.S. as the depression rate continues to soar. According to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, more than 34 million adults took antidepressants in 2013-14 -- more than double the number in the 1999-2000 survey.
  • In addition, RAD is a 10-year study of 1,500 participants (ages 10-24) that will uncover factors that reduce the risk of developing mood or anxiety disorders.
  • Combining blood and brain tests, he said, will improve the chances of choosing the right treatment the first time.
anonymous

Suicide and Self-Harm: Bereaved Families Count the Costs of Lockdowns - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uicide-self-harm-pandemic.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Suicide and Self-Harm: Bereaved Families Count the Costs of Lockdowns
  • The psychological toll on young people of months in isolation and great global suffering is becoming more clear after successive lockdowns.
  • Joshua Morgan was hopeful he could find a job despite the pandemic, move out of his mother’s house and begin his life.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • lockdowns in Britain dragged on and no job emerged, the young man grew cynical and self-conscious, his sister Yasmin said.
  • Mr. Morgan was “exceptionally careful” about her health.
  • But days before the end of his quarantine last month, Mr. Morgan, 25, took his own life.
  • “He just sounded so deflated,” his sister said of their last conversation, adding that he said he felt imprisoned and longed to go outside.
  • “The cost of the pandemic was my brother’s life,” she said. “It’s not just people dying in a hospital — it’s people dying inside.”
  • Editors’ Picks
  • More than 2.7 million people have died from the coronavirus — and at least 126,000 in Britain alone
  • Those numbers are a tangible count of the pandemic’s cos
  • public health officials in some areas that have seen a surge of adolescent suicides have pushed for schools to reopen, although researchers say it is too early to conclusively link restrictions to suicide rates.
  • But bereaved families of young people who have died during the pandemic are haunted by questions over whether lockdowns — which not only shut stores and restaurants but required people to stay home for months — played a role.
  • They are calling for more resources for mental health and suicide prevention.
  • “Mental health has become a buzzword during the pandemic, and we need to keep it that way,”
  • While people may have felt a sense of togetherness during the first lockdowns, that feeling began to wear thin for some as it became clear that restrictions were hitting disadvantaged groups, including many young people, harder.
  • “If you are a young person, you are looking for hope,”
  • “But the job market is going to be constrained, and opportunities to build your life are going to be slimmer.”
  • “Imagine a young person in a small room, who takes their course online and has limited social life due to restrictions,”
  • “They may be tempted to consume more drugs or drink more alcohol, and may have less physical activity, all of which can contribute to symptoms of depression, anxiety and poor sleep.”
  • “We would ask him if he was depressed, and he would say, ‘Depressed? I don’t know what depressed is, I don’t think I am. I feel bored, but I don’t feel depressed,’”
  • “With the pandemic, the things that spiced his life, that made it worth going to school, were gone,” he added.
  • After a series of lockdowns in Britain last year, one suicide hotline for young people, Papyrus, saw its calls increase by 25 percent, in line with an increase of about 20 percent each year.
  • “Lockdown put Lily in physical and emotional situations she would never have in normal times.”
  • “It’s OK for a young child to fall over and let their parents know that their knee hurts,” Ms. Arkwright said. “This same attitude needs to be extended to mental health.”
  • People should be praised for adapting and finding resilience during these difficult times, Mr. Flynn said. “Even the need to reach out to a help-line shows resilience,” he said, adding that considering the circumstances, many people were doing “really well.”
lucieperloff

Suicide and Self-Harm: Bereaved Families Count the Costs of Lockdowns - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uicide-self-harm-pandemic.html

mental health coronavirus knowledge education

shared by lucieperloff on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • But as lockdowns in Britain dragged on and no job emerged, the young man grew cynical and self-conscious
  • He and his mother contracted the coronavirus in January, forcing them to quarantine in their small London apartment for over two weeks. Concerned by things he was saying, friends raised the alarm and referred him to mental health services.
  • “He just sounded so deflated,” his sister said of their last conversation, adding that he said he felt imprisoned and longed to go outside.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • “But the job market is going to be constrained, and opportunities to build your life are going to be slimmer.”
  • there is a tally that experts say is harder to track: the psychological toll of months of isolation and global suffering, which for some has proved fatal.
  • Mental health experts say prolonged symptoms of depression and anxiety may prompt risky behaviors that lead to self-harm, accidents, or even death, especially among young people.
  • the psychological fallout of the pandemic could unfold for months, or even years, public health officials say, with young people among the most affected.
  • “Mental health has become a buzzword during the pandemic, and we need to keep it that way,”
  • restrictions were hitting disadvantaged groups, including many young people, harder.
  • “It’s not just people dying in a hospital — it’s people dying inside.”
  • “They may be tempted to consume more drugs or drink more alcohol, and may have less physical activity, all of which can contribute to symptoms of depression, anxiety and poor sleep.”
  • ‘Depressed? I don’t know what depressed is, I don’t think I am. I feel bored, but I don’t feel depressed,’”
  • Mr. Remmers said his son’s death was caused by a combination of carbon monoxide poisoning and drugs.
  • But the pandemic, he added, “provided a context in which things become possible, and which may have otherwise not happened.”
  • It is unclear, the organization says, whether this is a sign of more people experiencing more suicidal thoughts or symptoms of mental health issues, or if people now feel more comfortable reaching out for help.
  • “Lockdown put Lily in physical and emotional situations she would never have in normal times,”
  • “It’s OK for a young child to fall over and let their parents know that their knee hurts,” Ms. Arkwright said. “This same attitude needs to be extended to mental health.”
  • “Even the need to reach out to a help-line shows resilience,”
anonymous

What being messy could be saying about your mental health - Insider - 0 views

www.insider.com/ntal-health-depression-2017-12

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Here's what a messy room can tell you about your mental health
  • If you're normally neat, a messy room could be a sign that your mental health is in a tough spot.
  • If the mess bothers you or you're worried, you may want to speak with a qualified professional.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • But if the mess doesn’t bother you, it’s probably no big deal.
  • Having a messy room doesn't necessarily mean that there's anything else going on in terms of your mental health, but, in some cases, it can indicate something more serious.
  • Several of the criteria for a depression diagnosis — hopelessness, fatigue, and lack of concentration — can all play a role in why your messy room is in the state it's in.
  • If you're feeling a little less than hopeful, you might have a hard time understanding why you should even bother to clean up or organize things since, from where you're standing, everything seems to be going wrong anyway.
  • "Sometimes when life feels out of control or stressful other areas of your life get affected one being your working or living space,"
  • "So you can intend to put things in order in your room and never find the concentration or the energy to get around to it because you have so many other things going on.
  • Even if you don't recognize that you fit the criteria for an official diagnosis of depression (or just plain don't fit the criteria) if you're overwhelmed or have a lot going on in your head, cleaning your room can still be a major challenge.
  • Lack of concentration, too, can make the actual task of cleaning up your room impossible.
  • "If you're depressed or overwhelmed with life you may feel you don't have time to clean/organize, you may feel you don't deserve a clean space or you may be so preoccupied with other things you don't even notice how messy your room has become."
  • But just because your room is messy, doesn't mean you have depression, of course.
  • "If you're constantly hoping to stay more organized and keep the room clean, but find yourself unable to do it for other reasons, that's when you know that it's time for an intervention,"
Javier E

Jonathan Haidt on the 'National Crisis' of Gen Z - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...lity-gap-childhood-11672401345

social media psychology research education crisis culture Gen Z mental health defense creativity

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”
  • He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood
  • Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.”
  • Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (His data are available in an open-source document.)
  • Mr. Haidt imagines “literally launching our children into outer space” and letting their bodies grow there: “They would come out deformed and broken. Their limbs wouldn’t be right. You can’t physically grow up in outer space. Human bodies can’t do that.” Yet “we basically do that to them socially. We launched them into outer space around the year 2012,” he says, “and then we expect that they will grow up normally without having normal human experiences.”
  • He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”
  • That meant the first social-media generation was one of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. They were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.
  • Now, their childhood “is largely just through the phone. They no longer even hang out together.” Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.
  • Mr. Haidt especially worries about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.
  • The comparable numbers for millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen-Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,”
  • Most girls, by contrast, are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.
  • Mr. Haidt says he has no antipathy toward the young, and he calls millennials “amazing.”
  • “Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation, and interaction, into the center of the Colosseum. We’re not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform” before spectators who “want blood.”
  • To illustrate his point about Gen Z, Mr. Haidt challenges people to name young people today who are “really changing the world, who are doing big things that have an impact beyond their closed ecosystem.”
  • He can think of only two, neither of them American: Greta Thunberg, 19, the Swedish climate militant, and Malala Yousafzai, 25, the Pakistani advocate for female education
  • I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’ ” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”
  • University students who matriculated starting in 2014 or so have arrived on campus in defend mode: “Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world.”
  • 56% of liberal women 18 to 29 responded affirmatively to the question: Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition? “Some of that,” Mr. Haidt says, “has to be just self-presentational,” meaning imagined.
  • This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”
  • Whereas millennial women are doing well, “Gen-Z women, because they’re so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen-Z men—and that’s saying a lot, because Gen-Z men are messed up, too.”
  • The problem, he says, is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.”
  • something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” That makes it hard for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.
  • “this could severely damage American capitalism.” When managers are “afraid to speak up honestly because they’ll be shamed on Twitter or Slack, then that organization becomes stupid.” Mr. Haidt says he’s “seen a lot of this, beginning in American universities in 2015. They all got stupid in the same way. They all implemented policies that backfire.”
  • Mr. Haidt, who describes himself as “a classical liberal like John Stuart Mill,” also laments the impact of social media on political discourse
  • Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12.
  • Is there a solution? “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16,” he says—“and enforce it.”
  • By contrast, “life went onto phone-based apps 10 years ago, and the protections we have for children are zero, absolutely zero.” The damage to Generation Z from social media “so vastly exceeds the damage from Covid that we’re going to have to act.”
  • Gen Z, he says, “is not in denial. They recognize that this app-based life is really bad for them.” He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventur
maddieireland334

Heart failure victims require depression counselling - BBC News - 0 views

diigo.com/07nttz

research psychology brain science

shared by maddieireland334 on 27 May 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 27 May 15
     
    People with heart failure must be screened for signs of depression and offered counselling, scientists say. A small study presented at the European Society of Cardiology suggested patients with depression were more likely to die within a year. Though many factors are likely to influence this - including the severity of the disease - researchers say managing depression is important.
Javier E

A Right To Die? Ctd - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...a-right-to-die-ctd-7.html

depression treatment psychology

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • based on our ever-growing knowledge of brain physiology and habit formation.   He can fix himself; it is absolutely within the realm of the possible.  But he won't do it by thinking about himself; he needs to externalize.  Contra Freud, insight alone rarely solves much, and a constant focus on oneself and one's problems, especially for people who are depressed, tends to make things worse in the absence of concommitant specific cognitive and/or behavioral strategies for change
  • focus on doing something for someone or something outside of himself, sounds counter-intuitive and Pollyanna-ish, if not outright cruel.  And yet...  his neuronal pathways tending towards depressing, defeatist self-references have obviously been over-enriched at the expense of, well, everything else.  So he's got to change that. These things are plastic, and literally grow or shrink depending on usage.  
  • He needs physical activity directed towards an external goal; not doing something for himself (although he will be), but for other people, animals, the planet, a political cause, neighborhood clean-up - whatever.  Once he finds that cause and starts working, setting goals (however small) to accomplish in that cause, and accomplishing them, the energy itself will build and grow, just like his non-depressive cognitive patterns.  And every time he finds himself thinking negative, defeatist thoughts, he should imagine one of those giant red stop signs and STOP!  It's another habit to develop, and gets easier and more effective every time he tries it.  
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • let him develop the habit of smiling any time he starts feeling rotten. Believe it or not, it works.
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