I'm pretty confident that depression is not a result of air pollution, but rather that both air pollution and depression are results of industrialization. The problem is not chemical. The problem is how we live.
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/hidden-costs-of-co...
> In the US alone, individuals who struggle to pay off their debts and loans are more than twice as likely to experience mental health problems, including depression and anxiety. Today’s unprecedented levels of consumer debt prompt further exploration of its effect on mental and physical well-being.
> While suicide is not a common response to unmanageable debt, it remains a leading cause of death in the US. The potential of suicide increases among financially distressed individuals as debt levels become harder to manage. Suicide rates have increased by more than 30 percent since 1999 according to a recent report by the Center for Disease Control. Like Jerome, more than half of people who die by suicide do not have a history of depression or mental illness. Almost 30 percent of suicides occur in response to a crisis within the past two weeks and 16 percent occur in response to a financial problem.
>The fact remained that at the beginning of the nineteenth century an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will either in some form of slavery or serfdom. [1]
The common historical interpretion today is that the industrial revolution _improved_ the standards of living for the average person, so it's contradictory to your thesis.
[1] Forsythe, David P. Encyclopedia of human rights. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press, 2009. (399)
Anyway, this study shows that medium development countries have significantly lower suicide rates than high and very high development countries, which could lend support to my position:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221060061...
> There has been no worldwide ecological study on suicide as a global major public health problem. This study aimed to identify the variations in suicide specific rates using the Human Development Index (HDI) and some health related variables among countries around the world. In this ecological study, we obtained the data from the World Bank Report 2013. The analysis was restricted to 91 countries for which both the epidemiologic data from the suicide rates and HDI were available. Overall, the global prevalence of suicide rate was 10.5 (95% confidence intervals: 8.8, 12.2) per 100,000 individuals, which significantly varied according to gender (16.3 in males vs. 4.6 in females, p < 0.001) and different levels of human development (11.64/100,000 individuals in very high development countries, 7.93/100,000 individuals in medium development countries, and 13.94/100,000 individuals in high development countries, p = 0.004). In conclusion, the suicide rate varies greatly between countries with different development levels. Our findings also suggest that male gender and HDI components are associated with an increased risk of suicide behaviors. Hence, detecting population subgroups with a high suicide risk and reducing the inequality of socioeconomic determinants are necessary to prevent this disorder around the world.
That basically follows from the definition of HDI: one of the three components of HDI is life expectancy, so even if people in countries of different HDI would have equal tendencies to commit suicide, a lower proportion of people would actually end up committing suicide in lower HDI countries as they would likely die due to other causes either at birth or later.
There is more than one variable in play. We can optimize wealth AND health.
(An aside: Your argument is a form of learned helplessness. I expect more from you. I am certain that in matters of business and your families well-being you are not so reductionist.)
What kinds of solutions would you like to see?
Silver bullets, just like with code, do not exist for real life problems.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24121465
> A meta-analysis of pooled odds ratios showed a significant relationship between debt and mental disorder (OR=3.24), depression (OR=2.77), suicide completion (OR=7.9), suicide completion or attempt (OR=5.76), problem drinking (OR=2.68), drug dependence (OR=8.57), neurotic disorder (OR=3.21) and psychotic disorders (OR=4.03).
When are we going to start designing our economies around creating a healthy and enjoyable environment for humans to actually live in, and not arranging human lives around squeezing the greatest amount of economic efficiency out of them as possible? The way we make ourselves live is tantamount to animal abuse.
I do, however, think the overall approach we are taking towards depression as a society is fundamentally backwards. We have a massive industry that is focused around producing psychiatric medication so that people can more effectively operate in the society we've structured around them, but we didn't even stop to consider the idea that maybe it is the systems we've built around them that are pathological in themselves.
We have this basic notion that if someone doesn't fit in with this social mold we've built that it must be a fault in them, it must be a sickness they suffer from that prevents them from thriving in the ways we expect them to. But why are we not asking ourselves whether the square hole that we are trying to shove their round peg into isn't the problem in itself? Why do we think we are helpless to change things on a systemic level? We grate against the idea that the world we've built might be a bad fit for us, and not the other way around.
Instead, we have pathologized what is an entirely natural reaction to the world people live in. We think we need medication to make humans fit better into this system, but really it is the system that is failing us. We built this world for us to live in, why did we make it so incredibly hostile to human happiness?
The problem of air pollution and the problem of the fucked up society we live in are not identical in scope. You can't dismiss the solution to the smaller problem for not solving the larger one.
If living in a smog filled city is affecting my health, I will invest in air filters and masks before I invest in societal change that will change the way the world does business. I can do one in an afternoon, and the other is an unbounded task.
We should be able to tackle problems at large and in the small simultaneously, but your position strikes me as all or nothing in the sense that nothing but your exact prescription will do.
Given A: fucked up society, B: air pollution, C: depression, the world is probably a cyclical graph between all three. You are denying that B and C could be connected, just because you think A is such a huge problem. This is putting the blinders on against evidence for political reasons.
My grandma lived in what essentially was a pre-industrial society. She lived in crushing poverty (i.e. being hungry most of the time). Then, our country industrialized and she was never hungry again.
That doesn't mean, however, that the way we live doesn't desperately need to be improved upon. We may have lost hunger but we gained depression. Maybe we should be lucky to die of suicide rather than to starve, but I think we can and should try to build a world where we don't have to do either.
EDIT: I also want to add that debt is an entirely different but very real and horrible kind of crushing poverty. People in debt have their basic needs met, but they are slaves to a number they carry over their heads, often for the rest of their lives. I can't honestly say that is always a better life than to be free to do what you want even if you must constantly contend with hunger.
Hypothetical Theories are nice, but not when actual evidence contradicts them. Do you have any actual evidence for your comment?
> Job strain and long work hours were longitudinally associated with moderate/severe suicidal ideation. Increasing job control and ensuring optimal level of work demands, including 40 h or less of work per week may be an important strategy for the prevention of suicide in working populations.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00420-018-1330-7
Here's a study showing that suicide risk varies with workplace, workplace environment, and financial strain: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-suicide-occupation...
Also: http://electronicswatch.org/the-link-between-employment-cond...
>actual evidence contradicts them
Where exactly?
Joking aside, I tend to agree