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.
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.