On 2010-02-15, at 11:29 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
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> On Feb 15, 2010, at 11:21 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
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>> The problem (or a problem) lies in having an accurate estimate on
>> depression rates in the past
>
> One reason it's annoying that that article contained no footnotes is that it claimed that it wasn't a matter of frequency of diagnosis, but actual increase in prevalence. You're right - who knows for sure? But I swear I remember nothing like the ubiquity of depression among college students now back when I was a sprite.
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Could it be because of how stigmatized depression and anxiety was then that no one would admit to it, not even to themselves? Seems to me depression came up from underground with the development and widespread adoption of SSRI's. I have friends and relatives taking these medications now and freely discussing their condition in a way that was once unimaginable, contributing to the impression that it is the new normal.
As for students, this is really the first generation which has grown up without conviction, and I think this helps explain the deeper sense of alienation and depression which I observed first hand in our son and his cohort. My college generation, broadly speaking, was able to define itself politically; there was still a international socialist movement leading national liberation struggles. Previous generations had religious as well as political convictions which gave a certain coherence and purpose to their lives.
The intense competition to find a good job and a good mate has also heightened stresses on young people. In traditional immobile societies - or even as recently my parents' generation - these pressures were largely absent; you knew you were either going to work the family farm or be apprenticed to a trade, and your prospective mate lived in the same community and may have already been chosen for you. I wouldn't go back to those days, of course, but the additional freedom resulting from mass education, social and geographic mobility, and the profound economic and cultural changes affecting the sexes seem to have brought with them correspondingly greater insecurity and the pathologies it produces, especially among young males. So, too, has the shift in global growth and the expansion of the international labour market over the past quarter century which left this generation with far fewer job opportunities and much greater job insecurity than my relatively privileged generation enjoyed.
But if you looked for it in earlier times, especially during economic downturns, you could still uncover a widespread incidence of depression:
"In her classic sociology of the Depression, The Unemployed Man and His Family, Mirra Komarovsky vividly describes how joblessness strained - and in many cases fundamentally altered - family relationships in the 1930s. During 1935 and 1936, Komarovsky and her research team interviewed the members of 59 white middle-class families in which the husband and father had been out of work for at least a year. Her research revealed deep psychological wounds. 'It is awful to be old and discarded at 40,' said one father. 'A man is not a man without work.' Another said plainly, 'During the depression, I lost something. Maybe you call it self-respect' but in losing it I also lost the respect of my children, and I am afraid I am losing my wife." Noted one woman of her husband, 'I still love him, but he doesn't seem as 'big' a man.
"Taken together, the stories paint a picture of diminished men, bereft of familial authority. Household power - over children, spending, and daily decisions of all types - generally shifted to wives over time (and some women were happier overall as a result). Amid general anxiety, fears of pregnancy, and men's loss of self-worth and loss of respect from their wives, sex lives withered. Socializing all but ceased as well, a casualty of poverty and embarrassment. Although some men embraced family life and drew their wife and children closer, most became distant. Children described their father as "mean". "nasty". or "bossy", and didn't want to bring friends around, for fear of what he might say. "There was less physical violence towards the wife than towards the child," Komarovsky wrote.
"In the 70 years that have passed since the publication of The Unemployed Man and His Family, American society has become vastly more wealthy, and a more comprehensive social safety net - however frayed it may seem - now stretches beneath it. Two-earner households have become the norm, cushioning the economic blow of many layoffs. And of course, relationships between men and women have evolved.
"Yet when read today, large parts of Komarovsky's book still seem disconcertingly up-to-date. All available evidence suggests that long bouts of unemployment - particularly male unemployment - still enfeeble the jobless and warp their families to a similar degree, and in many of the same ways. Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick in the UK, and a pioneer in the field of happiness studies, says no other circumstance produces a larger decline in mental health and well-being than being involuntarily out of work for six months or more. It is the worst thing that can happen, he says, equivalent to the death of a spouse, and "a kind of bereavement" in its own right.
"Only a small fraction of the decline can be tied directly to losing a paycheck, Oswald says; most of it appears to be the result of a tarnished identity and a loss of self-worth. Unemployment leaves psychological scars that remain even after work is found again, and, because the happiness of husbands and the happiness of wives are usually closely related, the misery spreads throughout the home."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/LB17Dj05.html