Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Yeah. It'd be interesting to do an analysis of the political economy
> of depression. Why are so many people depressed? It seems endemic
> among young people now - but I don't remember anything like it when I
> was young. Is it the alienation of capitalist work and the emptiness
> of affluence, or is that just banal and obvious?
One can speculate, but those who suffer from depression are varied enough that one can put little confidence in any speculation as to cause.
PTSD is one major cause, but not everyone who suffers stress suffers from PTSD, and possibly some proportion of those who suffer PTSD do so have a very delicate stress which would not affect many.
One cause for shift in perception, however, is that it is only in the last couple decades that people, _particularly_ young people and/or their parents, are apt to braodcast the fact that tthey suffer depression. Hence the rate _could_ have been as high or higher when you were young. When I first started mentioning to my classes that I suffered from depression, I got a whole stream of students in my office saying that they or some friend or relative did - and in most cases I was the first outsider they mentioned it to. Also I had a couple students who _knew_ they suffered from depression but could not cnvince their parents of the fact - "no daughere of MINE is crazy."
Incvidentally, those who suffer from schizophrenia, bipolar, or autism have thinner sheets of myelin around their axons - causal direction not known, but practices or experiences _can_ thicken or thin those coatings.
Carrol