Yule Heibel's Library tagged depression →  View Popular, Search in Google

An undoubtedly frightening article (or rather: an article reporting a frightening reality).
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"The whole face of homelessness is changing, and a lot of that has to do with unemployment," says Craig Billman, who was Michele's case manager when she arrived at Maple Street and is now associate program director at the facility. "People from the professional ranks are becoming more prevalent. You're seeing more first-time homeless than ever before."

That this is happening here, in the crucible of high-tech affluence, is a testament to the fact that it is happening almost everywhere in the country, part of a wave of suburban poverty that began in the 1990s and has accelerated since the beginning of the Great Recession.
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silicon_valley homelessness unemployment economy depression usa recession

Ok, remember to kick the depression if you want those synapses to fire well into old age...
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... a mathematical model to estimate how the seven risk factors affect the likelihood of someone developing the disease. The factors are:

Smoking
Depression
Low education
Diabetes
Too little exercise
Obesity
High blood pressure in mid-life

In the U.S., inactivity has the biggest impact on the number of cases because a third of the population is sedentary, Deborah Barnes, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California and lead author of the study, told The Associated Press.

Depression is also a key factor, followed by smoking and high blood pressure.
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depression mental_health alzheimer ctv

Well, d'oh. If you're depressed, you FAIL to remember joy. Self-reinforcing crap. Re-learn to remember joy. That would help. This, too:
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Dr. Williams has found that specificity can be increased with training in mindfulness, a form of meditation increasingly popular in combating some types of depression. Subjects are taught to focus on moment-to-moment experiences and to accept their negative thoughts rather than trying to avoid them. It may help by making people more tolerant of negative memories and short-circuit the impulse to escape them, which can lead to overgenerality.

Meditation means that for some, the past is no longer such a heavy burden.
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In other words, pay attention. Just pay attention.

nyt depression mindfulness

Fascinating article by Jonah Lehrer about depression. Closing paragraphs:
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And then there’s the virtue of self-loathing, which is one of the symptoms of depression. When people are stuck in the ruminative spiral, their achievements become invisible; the mind is only interested in what has gone wrong. While this condition is typically linked to withdrawal and silence — people become unwilling to communicate — there’s some suggestive evidence that states of unhappiness can actually improve our expressive abilities. Forgas said he has found that sadness correlates with clearer and more compelling sentences, and that negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

This line of research led Andrews to conduct his own experiment, as he sought to better understand the link between negative mood and improved analytical abilities. He gave 115 undergraduates an abstract-reasoning test known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which requires subjects to identify a missing segment in a larger pattern. (Performance on the task strongly predicts general intelligence.) The first thing Andrews found was that nondepressed students showed an increase in “depressed affect” after taking the test. In other words, the mere presence of a challenging problem — even an abstract puzzle — induced a kind of attentive trance, which led to feelings of sadness. It doesn’t matter if we’re working on a mathematical equation or working through a broken heart: the anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy. This suggests that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like a magnet to metal.
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nyt depression evolutionary_psychology jonah_lehrer

Maria wrote a really good post about creativity and depression - whether alleviating depressions (say, through medication) nixes the creative impetus - and I left a long(ish) comment, with references to Twyla Tharp's notion of the creative *habit*.

maria_benet depression creativity twyla_tharp habits comments