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A comment on Most Depressed Adults in the U.S. Remain Untreated. Parent comment

Re:Most Depressed Adults in the U.S. Remain Untreated by Bartweiss on Tuesday September 06, 2016 @01:13PM (#12437533)
Well, we can use the income result as a proxy. 18% of lowest-income adults were depressed, 3.7% of highest-income adults. That doesn't preclude 'medical' depression, but it implies that it's at least mediated by circumstances, which is an interesting place to start.
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Re:Most Depressed Adults in the U.S. Remain Untreated by GrumpyYoungMan on Tuesday September 06, 2016 @01:17PM (#12437559)
Seems more probable that you have the cause and effect backwards. Being affected by depression prevents people from functioning well enough to work in a high income profession.
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Re:Most Depressed Adults in the U.S. Remain Untreated by psyc on Tuesday September 06, 2016 @01:29PM (#12437662)
Seems even more probable that the controversy exists because it's a two-way feedback effect.
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Re:Most Depressed Adults in the U.S. Remain Untreated by Bartweiss on Tuesday September 06, 2016 @05:04PM (#12439279)
"More probable" feels like a claim that requires evidence, otherwise we're telling just-so stories.

I certainly think this is bidirectional, and it probably has some common-cause issues too (e.g. if your parents are too depressed to earn high incomes, you're getting an economics-genetics double whammy).

More to the point, though, your narrative is about 'medical' depression causing low incomes. Mine is about low incomes causing 'non-medical' depression, so realistically we're talking about different things. I'm sure they overlap, but I'm also confident that there's a difference between depression from "good life, but serotonin imbalance or immune response or whatever" and "lost my job, lost my house, lost a family member".

Most depression screens don't distinguish "depression because depression" from "depression because my life is shitty", and it's not at all clear that anti-depressants are more effective in one case than the other.

So my main observation here is that the high incidence at low income could be about untreated medical issues, but it could also be about a failure to differentiate medical from situational responses.

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