What exactly is causing rates of depression and anxiety to skyrocket in the past few years? About 20% of Americans are currently taking medication for mental illness.
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We don’t know for sure. But some of it is just better diagnosis. People are more accepting of the idea of getting treatment for mental health than they were in the past. Also modern treatments (since like the 70s) are better than they used to be. Meaning less bad side effects for medication, and just more humane than locking people away like a long time ago. It’s a bit more easy to seek help in that context. Plus medical care funding for mental health is better these days.
Maybe we should consider looking at other indicators besides the rate of diagnosis to get a sense of if the issue is actually increasing versus just better access to treatment. E.g., the suicide rate wasn’t much different 1981 compared to 2016. But the 90s were actually even better.
So why is the rate back to the 1980s level if more people are seeking treatment and getting diagnosed? Tricky question. We can’t ignore the role of environment. Life may just be more stressful for more people now than it was in the 90s. It’s not easy to figure out causality though.
Pure speculation here. But lack of purpose, lack of interpersonal relationships, over use of tech that distances us from each other. Lack of meaningful work, most people career could replace them in a day or two and the people don’t even like their job anyway. Lack of physical exercise due to convenient and reliable transportation. At least in the US, nobody walks anymore, you drive your car everywhere. Diets getting shittier, big corporations running small businesses and small communities out of existence. Basically just huge amounts of existential dread
More speculation: I think it’s a combo of more accurate/higher rate of diagnosis because it’s become more common to access mental health care; in addition, humans aren’t used to being exposed to a worldwide load of tragedy at our fingertips.
It was hard enough to handle the day to day life of what’s immediately around you, today we’re exposed daily to the atrocities from around the entire globe. It’s traumatic.
We don’t have a full answer.
A big reason we do know about is better diagnosis, and more of it. For a long time, mental illness had a very serious social stigma around it. People wouldn’t seek help because they had a justified fear of the negative impact that treatment would leave on their personal and professional lives. Today, that stigma is lessened. It’s still present, but people today can generally get treatment without fear of major repercussions.
That’s what we know about. There’s a lot we don’t know about. We aren’t entirely sure about the actual rates of depression or anxiety before this because of the aforementioned stigma. It could be higher. It could be lower. It could be the same. We don’t have the empirical evidence necessary to show that.
Some people speculate that social media and technology as a whole are a drag on mental health, and I’m inclined to agree. But social media and the acceptance of mental health somewhat go hand in hand, so it’s difficult to say if that is true or not.
Im convinced this trend is because we (society) has evolved into something that requires so much from us as individuals that it no longer actually suits our nature. We are constantly having to break away from the things we love to do, in order to make a living or maintain our appearances or whatever. A purposeless existance is a depressing one. If we look around, it appears that a lot of our current environment is beyond recovery. Shit is changing fast, and that’s scary, so we are anxious, and perhaps depressed, because we lack confidence that it is going to work out for the better. Just like with personal mental health, societal mental health is influenced by what it is fed. Being fed negativity leads to a negatively predisposed thought pattern, and we see the worst case scenario rather than the best possible outcome. It can be a downward spiral. What happens when society becomes suicidal? That said, we are at a turning point..
Without shoving anyone off the deep end, (without their wingies) there is so much more information available to us now, for free, that we can sort out our own inner workings, and as a society start to heal. Spirituality and science have been bumping shoulders for years now, and the evidence is piling up that you pretty much can’t have one without the other. Whats more, is if you take a comparative approach to different religious sects, we start to see just how much of them actually align. It’s a very significant portion. They each have a cultural influence, which is the cause of so, so many understandings being lost in translation, but they all point to the same places. Which personally allowed for my (over?) critical mind to begin to believe that there was more to it all than what we can percieve with our physical senses.
To paraphrase Rumi; We spend our lives knocking on a door. Once it opens we learn that we’ve been knocking from the inside.
I think we as a society are depressed because we have lost our sense of wonder. We think there is nothing left for us here, and thats such a sad feeling, but I don’t personally believe it to be true. The world within us holds influence on the outer. Training ourselves to see positivity allows us to more easily accept the negative, without it feeling so crushing, and allows us to help lift others. Which, imho, is a pretty decent purpose to exist for.
People have no challenges in life, pretty much everything for life is assured. They loose focus of life goals and meaning, just live as vegetables no aiming to achieve anything.
Last 2 years they have been pretending staying away from others stops a respiratory infection and have destroyed all social activities making isolated and feeling lonely.
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