Mind of the States
Call it the Great Depression, but we're not talking economics.
During the 1980s, the largest U.S. study of its kind demonstrated that clinical depression is about 10 times as frequent now as it was 50 years ago. The latest update indicates that the rates of depression are still increasing-particularly among the young.
According to the National Institutes of Mental Health, a culture of Pessimism is manifest in the decreasing age at which depression sets in, an increasing rate of teen suicide, and a two-to-three-times-higher rate for women.
Where once depression was seen as increasing with age, the opposite now appears to be true. The existence of temporal trends in rates of depression does not preclude the possibility that genetic makeup contributes to vulnerability to depression. It simply suggests that environmental factors have shifted recently in ways that aggravate whatever genetic vulnerability exists.
