> The results show strong correlations, but research that would prove a causal link is difficult because ethical experiments cannot deliberately expose people to harm.
This is kind of my hobby horse: you don't need to subject people to harm to test causuality. You can do the opposite: Remove harm and see what happens. Maybe give people free HVAC upgrades to filter more particles.
They kind of already did that experiment in southern California for schools, they just need to run the numbers before and after filters installed adjusted for regular pollution/suicide rates https://www.scpr.org/news/2018/02/05/80413/at-schools-near-f...
Anecdotally, I was diagnosed with asthma as a child and walked around with an inhaler for a few years. I liked it, it tasted funny and seemed like a cool gadget at the time. But I did not have asthma. And I'm convinced there's no way my parents would've been diagnosed with it 30 years ago with the minor symptoms I had.
So perhaps the asthma numbers are influenced by an increased willingness to diagnose it. Just a thought.
This kind of gets into philosophical questions about what could still be considered a causal link. If the increased chance of depression is caused by significant reduction in quality of life which is caused by pollution, do we still say air pollution has a causal link with depression? I'm leaning towards yes because removing the air pollution will through multiple steps reduce depression/suicide in that case.
About 20 years ago our society gained a deep understanding of the notion of
causality. (To learn more, search the web for "Judea Pearl".) According to the
terminology standardized at that time, yes, if adding particulate pollution to the air makes it more likely that a person breathing that air is depressed, then that is a casual link or a cause-and-effect relationship. It might be the case however that polluting the air reduces the person's quality of life and that if it were possible to effect an identical reduction of quality of life without polluting the air, then polluting the air would have no further effect on the likelihood of depression. if that is the case, we say that quality of life "screens off" the effect of air pollution on depression.
I feel that mere causation is sufficient to promote action. Waiting for causation feels like rationalizing laziness.
People don't wait to determine whether school district performance is caused by the staff or the selection effect of eager parents, they just move to good school districts.
Chase those good effects AND attempt to understand them. Understanding the mechanism is not necessary to select for good results.
(All ethics is utilitarian in effect. Kantians stop pretending.)
It's a lot harder to test without administering the subject in question because there are far more variables to control than (mostly) just A/B. HVAC may confound the study by removing the actual responsible substances, for example, if "air pollution" is not solely the cause.
Semantically, yes. But I assume they are referring to the what people would consider the usual suspects for "big city" pollution, i.e. exhaust, aerosols.
"HEPA filters reduce depression and suicide rate" might not be quite the causality we are looking for, but it would be a big stepping stone in addition to being a very useful result on its own.
The trick is to adjust only the parameter you were targeting. Say you also change temperature and humidity and they are the real culprits, or big contributors. This is why the unethical method would be more precise because conceivably it's easier to introduce specific pollutants in the experiment.
Of course this would be irresponsible so I'm hoping that by combining data from multiple studies and getting a better grip on how to control the test environment to selectively adjust (remove) only the studied parameters (pollutants) we can still get a good idea of what's happening.
Would it be unethical to provide a free filter that takes out all particles, then re-adds one specific pollutant back into the air at the exact same level?
On the one hand, the machine is specifically administering the pollutant to humans; on the other, without the device they'd be getting the exact same and worse.. I'd say yes if offered that for my house and it could help research.
It would definitely be very impractical and expensive to achieve. Also the fact that you add back those particles still feels at least a bit unethical. Definitely not a simple issue.
But using a filter that selectively removes just that pollutant and changes nothing[0] else would probably be the cleanest way to do it.
If the result to the user (getting a machine that leaves them with clean air except 1 type of polutant at exactly the level that polutant would be without the machine), is it really different ethically based on whether the machine leaves that polutant or removes then replaces it?
Seems kind of like saying (although this example is certainly less ethical to those of us who oppose murder and death penalties) that there's a difference ethically between killing someone by putting poison into their body vs. killing them by preventing food/water to go into their body.
But as to achieving it, sure I wasn't proposing it as necessarily a good or feasible option - other the little bit of research I did when choosing which air purifier for my bedroom I don't know much about the technology.
I was more just thinking about the ethical question if it were possible, since I can appreciate the argument against it but like I said, I personally would be completely happy for a research team to offer me the hypothetical machine.
This is probably more of a philosophical point. But if you removed all pollutants then by putting one back in you're actually poisoning your subject.
I guess it's the difference between a surgeon operating and taking out 90% of a tumor, and a surgeon taking out the whole tumor then putting a bit back in. But again, I am not an ethics expert, this is just me bouncing ideas.
If you are talking about things like PM10 or PM2.5, then it would be infeasible to re-add an identical or even plausibly equivalent pollutant, unless it's the one removed.
By definition, it is a concentration of things small and solid. Whether they are ground tires, engine soot, rock/dirt, pollen, mold spores or powdered cyanides, they are counted the same.
If you wish to replicate pollutants, then consider ethical implications of: Looks the same to me, my colleagues and everyone I know, yet it's not, or is it?
Which they've already done, many times. Here's one study where they either gave real or fake air purifiers to people in Shanghai and measured cardiopulmonary benefits of intervention: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26022815
I don't think that's the kind of causal chain they are going for. Article seems to suggest that the depression comes from damage to the body from the particles.
I have a friend Galant who cleans his room everyday and has wealth and happiness. I have another friend Goofus whose room is a mess.
I'm not suggesting that the things in a room cause depression. Correlation tells you more than strict causation ever could.
An example:
Income is higher among vim users than eclipse users. Does that suggest anything to you?
It does to me, but that's because I'm willing to let the evidence shape my decisions. If I waited for strictly-causal proof then I'm leaving money on the table.
Another tip:
When will it stop being the case that vim users make more money than eclipse users? When evidence mounts and marginally push the lazy-about-evidence-people toward vim. By the time the last eclipse user switches away there won't be any more money on the table to take. Also eclipse will be dead by then.
Be greedy with evidence and lazy with your attachments, not the reverse.
> Maybe give people free HVAC upgrades to filter more particles.
HVAC and indoor air quality (IAQ) is a fascinating topic and it takes good design to get it right. In most HVAC systems you can't just stick a higher MERV filter in and expect good results because they are designed for specific amounts of air flow. Thicker filters cause more air resistance which reduces air flow and fan efficiency which means less comfort and greater energy use.
Often a better strategy in a retrofit is to increase air sealing (a good energy recommendation anyway) and install an E/HRV to exchange indoor for outdoor air with a good filter in it. PM2.5 comes from outside so this should take care of it.
Was just about the say the same. He has an excellent chapter on the history of smoking research with an interesting anecdote (repeated here https://priceonomics.com/why-the-father-of-modern-statistics...) that the pipe-smoking Fischer refused to believe smoking caused harm well after the evidence was clear because correlation!=causation.
>Maybe give people free HVAC upgrades to filter more particles.
Or just reduce pollution in the first place! AFAIK, manufacturing and running HVAC would add more pollution and cost more than switching (for instance) from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. Or even better, cycling within cities. etc.
This is my hobby horse! A confounder would be an unobserved (unmeasured) variable that influences both the allocation to treatment and the outcome. In this case unfiltered air elsewhere is contaminating the magnitude of the treatment effect (in a conservative direction) but wouldn't undermine the validity of a properly conducted experiment.
That would also remove other things from the air, which ruins the experiment. The only way to measure if a particular type of pollution is responsible is to only filter that one out, which is basically impossible, or to increase the amount of that one, which is unethical because it's potentially harmful.
1. Does adding an air filter in peoples home improve health outcomes?
2. Does pumping a suspected noxious element into a room in lab harm some small group of people in some limited testable way?
Question 1 is better than 2. Why?
Because there are more people like those in question 1.
Answers to question 1 inform my future choices, answers to question 2 do not. I prefer answers that improve health to those that harm health.
Always prefer observational studies done in the field (in situ). Demanding experimental studies done in a lab will give you less bang for your buck. Let's all do our part to drive down health care costs, please.
You're changing the goal. The question being asked is whether polluted air is healthier than filtered air. The health effects of individual pollutants is a separate matter.
I live in Northern India which has heavy air pollution. I recently bought an air purifier. Just the difference in the quality of sleep is amazing. And it is not a placebo effect. The filters are already visibly grimy. The PM 2.5 consistently now is around mid 20s down from around 180-190.
I would recommend it to all in North India who can afford it, esp households with small children.
Sure, but this is misplaced skepticism. There have been many studies attesting to the harms of PM 2.5 and the benefits of intervention. The onus isn't on a single consumer to set up a double blind, randomized test for himself, the onus is on you to simply google for the many that have been already done.
Just because it has an effect on the average person doesn't mean it must have an effect on every person. It can still be a placebo for any one individual, and I don't see the harm of asking how does one double-check if the effect is real or not.
There isn't much harm, there just isn't much point either. We don't usually interrogate people's assumptions down to axioms and provable claims, because it's impossible to live that way. Do you have personal experimental data to prove that eating handfuls of mud is likely to hurt your stomach?
>Do you have personal experimental data to prove that eating handfuls of mud is likely to hurt your stomach?
I do have evidence that eating mud is likely to hurt my stomach: the relevant body of literature showing that this is a likely event for the population I'm part of.
In OP's case, however, considering that the relevant body of litetuare shows that placebos are very effective for improving sleep quality, I would say it's very reasonable to ask someone to elaborate on why they are so convinced that their method of treatment is not a placebo for sleep quality.
No one is saying they have to "prove" it--they can just elaborate on their conviction: perhaps OP had many insomnnia treatments before and this was the only one that showed efficiency. Not a proof, but it is some circumstatial evidence. On the other hand, maybe OP is not aware how effective placebos are, in which case his statement may be too strong to straight-out declare that "it's not a placebo effect."
> the relevant body of literature showing that this is a likely event for the population I'm part of
Please link some examples, because I somehow doubt that you referenced them before forming an opinion. I think we all know eating lots of mud is a bad idea without referencing literature, let alone qualifiers about population groups.
I'm curious if you've lived in any of these hyper-polluted cities. The health effects of breathing such smog is absolutely palpable.
Here's a couple of studies on how PM2.5 affects your arteries, blood pressure, stress hormones, etc. I don't doubt all of these effects can add up to a better or worse night's sleep.
- "significantly higher blood pressure, hormones, insulin resistance, and biomarkers of oxidative stress and inflammation among individuals exposed to higher PMs": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28808144/
>Please link some examples, because I somehow doubt that you referenced them before forming an opinion.
That's because I assumed it was meant to be a hypothetical example--I don't actually have an opinion on the health effects of eating mud.
The point is that one claim is regarding the likelihood of X happening due to Y (in general), and the other claim is about the affirmation that X happened because of Y (in a specific case.) Likelihood is confirmed by scientific articles that employ statistical inference methods such as the ones you have been posting, while the other claim is undemonstrable by the scientific method, so it is commonly supported through further circumstantial/anecdotal evidence, which is what I assumed the other poster asked for.
Anyway, given that most of your comment is posting more scientific articles, we're probably arguing about different things.
I've always thought it would be an interesting service where someone did this with medication/supplements. They sent you supplies of both the real and sugar pill meds for a certain duration and you recorded how you felt.
Yes. Recently moved to a high PM 2.5 area, running ionizers in the bedroom and the rest of the house improves things immensely. This is exactly how it feels.
Well the reasoning was pointing towards high chance of placebo though. He said there was lots of grime and also something he could measure was different, which means psychologically a lot greater chance and effect for placebo.
I don't think that's how it works. In the hypothetical world where he reports no grime on filters and no difference in readings yet his sleep is better, would you predict lower chance of placebo?
Most placebo effects are modest and the ones that aren't are usually mixed in with regression to the mean effects(which are usually pretty modest). So OP is implying that if an effect is especially large it's less likely to be placebo.
We've proven that the air filter can remove particulates from the air. We haven't proven that it's improvement on your sleep is any more than a placebo.
Are you sure? We had one of the bigger Blue Airs (605) in Beijing and I didn’t like using it at all. When it was a 150-200 day, I would just run it before sleep with the windows closed. On worse days, we ran it all night, but it was loud and made the air smell like ozone, giving me a headache. I’m so glad I live in the Seattle area now and can open the window at night.
Making the air smell like ozone means it’s probably doing something unhelpful/actively harmful in addition to filtering. Did it have an ionizer or similar?
Huh weird, seems highly rated, too. If it was loud in addition to the ozone smell and there was definitely no ionizer, I wonder if the motor was faulty.
It could have been fake. I bought it in a Chinese mall after all. 6000 kuai also. But I doubt it, I think it could have just been the stale air in the apartment getting to me, you can’t open the windows when you are using it of course.
A real HVAC with air filtering will circulate air from the outside, so is quite different.
You'll be getting a headache from the excess CO2 buildup with the windows closed.
If you want to effectively control and monitor indoor pollutants, you also need to buy a CO2+PM2.5 portable monitor. They cost about $80 on Aliexpress.
I'd bet than investing in cleaner vehicles (ICE > EV) and energy source (call > renewable/nuclear) would have much greater health and climate benefits and for much higher ROI.
Why not both? I’m temporarily in an area That regularly sustains pm2.5 levels the WHO considers dangerous at 24 hour exposure. I’d rather buy a cheap and effective air purifier and mask than change the entire population over to renewables and electronics.
It’s like refusing to wear a mask next to the california wildfires saying it’d be a cleaner solution to just put out the flames.
This is way beyond air, this is water we drink, the chemicals in processed food, the pesticides in the produce. The compounds in furniture, paints, stains, carpeting, general building materials including insulation, plastic plumbing,HVAC components, insistence on living in un-ventilated, year around closed windows spaces.
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.
How would you know this without any reliable data regarding pre-industrialization depression levels? Maybe depressed people congregate around urban areas, seeking fulfilment or acceptance, or any other explanation.
What I do have is reliable data regarding the working conditions of average people in industrializing economies, and the correlation between consumer debt, depression, and suicide:
> 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.
And what were the working conditions of the average people in pre-industrial economies?
>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)
The past is almost unanimously a worse place to live than the present, but this is due to a large number of social, political, and technological changes that have occurred over time. Part of the reason the industrial revolution improved standards of living overall was due to atrocious living and working conditions, along with higher access to information, driving workers to secure their own rights. I wouldn't argue that feudalism is a better way to live than industrialization, but I think there's room to question how it has caused direct negative impacts in our lives.
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:
> 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.
>this study shows that medium development countries have significantly lower suicide rates than high and very high development countries
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.
What conclusions can we make about the fact that Japan (an industrialized country) has a longer life span the US (also an industrialized country)?
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.)
Because the medicalization of depression is a convenient way to avoid thinking about the fact that it is a prominent feature of the status quo, not some aberration. Pollution correlates with industrial manufacturing and warehouse work environments and crushing poverty that forces people to live in a manner consistent with economic efficiency rather than with human happiness and well-being. Long work hours and little money contribute to social isolation. Debt traps put people in situations in which they could not possibly ever claw their way out.
> 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.
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.
I won't disagree with this, I'm sure that what your grandma struggled through was difficult. I wouldn't argue for us going back to pre-industrial society. Technology can be a massive unadulterated good when it is applied correctly to our problems.
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.
I agree that depression is a serious and systemic problem, but I don't see why that invalidates medical inquiry into physical causes as well. We can study a problem from multiple angles, because we're merely trying to understand better. Everything you said about depression is bad, and 24/7 smog is also a bad thing which may lead to depression, one does not preclude the other from being factual.
I don't disagree in principle with the idea that the physical aspects of/influences on depression are worth studying.
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?
I think this is essentially a complaint that the study does not share your political topspin. I pretty much agree with the view that depression is a holistic problem, and the causes run deep. Treating the symptom is not likely to be a cure for the systemic disease. But you can't dismiss scientific findings because they don't exactly share your ideological diagnosis.
For the record, I'm not dismissing them at all, I'm putting forth a hypothesis regarding them. My "political topspin" here is informed by the study, my main point of contention regards the interpretation of the direction these results are pointing in and where future research and resources should lie. I think investing in air filters is a silly approach to this problem if you're looking at root causes. Restructuring our economy to be friendlier to workers and their environment is a comparatively monumental task, but it's actually tackling both problems at their more fundamental causes.
> I think investing in air filters is a silly approach to this problem
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.
Fair critique, as the GP didn't say certainty but my response was pre-supposed. I would say that we don't have a well-founded, commonly known model linking air pollution and depression. However their confounding experience through poverty is accepted and easily understood.
My bad, I read “confidence” and put “certainty” in their mouth. I can agree other already understood factors exist, and may confound the problem. But confounding != negation. And the health effects of air pollution are well understood and bad enough that denying the link from pollution -> depression is equivalent to denying link from bad health -> depression.
Nice idea, unscientific though, since we have very good evidence that pollution crosses the blood brain barrier and damages cells, increasing dementia and mental health risk and poisoning cells in the brain, lung, and other systems.
Hypothetical Theories are nice, but not when actual evidence contradicts them. Do you have any actual evidence for your comment?
> About 11% of the workers reported suicidal ideation at follow-up, while 3% of them reported moderate/severe suicidal ideation at follow-up. After controlling for age, marital status, race, family history of suicide, and suicidal ideation at baseline, low skill discretion and job strain (a combination of low job control and high job demands) were associated with total suicidal ideation. After excluding those with suicidal ideation at baseline from analysis and further controlling for other work stressors, job strain was strongly associated with moderate/severe suicidal ideation: ORs, 4.29 (1.30–14.15) for quartile-based job strain and 3.77 (1.21–11.70) for median-based job strain. Long work hours (> 40 h/week vs. ≤ 40 h/week) also increased the likelihood for moderate/severe suicidal ideation: OR 4.06 (1.08–15.19).
> 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.
There are other thinkable causes: Air pollution reduces total daylight exposure of people, and light has been observed to have strong effects on mood and mental health, among other things.
No doubt pollution will make you sick, but I'm inclined to think that depression has a lot to do with just living in an over-crowded, unattractive, big industrial city environment, having little contact with the natural world.
Why imagine what is true when you can take a second and find out what is true? The truth is external to you, look for it.
I don't want to be a jerk, but you have generated a hypothesis(great), why not test it against the facts available to you? Maybe you owe it to yourself.
Let me know if you have better data. (I am aware that Indian Reservation tilt the scales big time toward rural areas, but do not think that removing them as outliers changes the balance)
That seems like it's likely mostly just conflated with one of the well known causes of suicide, financial instability and generally being poor. The better data would be studies that try to compare similar socioeconomic classes, age ranges, etc.
I wish it took only a second to find out what is true, but data is complicated and has lots of confounding variables, and it's too easy to not account for them and get totally untrue information out of the data.
Why insist on causality depending on a single variable? This is very strange to me. Of course the trust is confounded, the truth is multi-variable.
The algorithm to pursue truth:
1. Find out how you personally differ from happy and healthy people.
2. Reduce those differences however you can.
3. Watch yourself become happier and healthier.
4. That's the whole thing.
Does being poor suck? Yes. Reduce it's likelihood and it's impact.
Don't demand that information conform to your assumption before you can take action. Take action and document your assumptions and challenge them along your journey to improvement.
A neural network does not make demands of its data set. It changes itself to better match the limited truth that it does see.
Uncertainty and doubt are your enemies. Challenge them with data don't reduce yourself to paralysis. Look up "Epistemic learned helplessness".
An example:
Will flossing improve my health? Be the kind of person that wants to improve their health and tries to improve their health. Try flossing as matter of character, not based on whether it does independent of the social class of other flossers. If successful people think that other successful people floss, then they will too. There is no isolation among the variables. Don't demand that of reality.
That's a fair and valid point. I should have expanded on the list of possible factors to include living in a "bad" environment in general, where "bad" can be defined by a huge number of things, including poverty, hopelessness, and a million other things to numerous to mention... other than the one single factor of "air pollution" that this article suggests is the reason for depression and suicide. That was, after all, the point of my comment, in case you missed it; that idea which the article seems to promote - that air pollution causes suicide - is highly questionable.
Our brains spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that cramming into cities with unnatural lights and disrupting biological rhythm would make them go haywire
"Our bodies spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that taking showers with unnatural temperatures and disrupting biological skin bacteria would make them go haywire"
"Our teeth spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that scrubbing them with unnatural mint-flavored pastes and plastic bristles would make them go haywire"
"Our eyes spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that covering them with unnatural lenses would make them go haywire"
I appreciate your pedantry - the scientific community understands the mechanical physiological body (skin, eyes, hair) on a cause-and-affect level, but hardly understands the mind and mood because mental health is such a subjective experience, it's nearly impossible to fit into modern a scientific paradigm
Mental health isn't a strictly subjective experience though. You can measure days called-in-sick. You can measure suicide count.
Cause and effect isn't necessary to reduce harm. You with me?
It's nice to have certainly, but it is not required.
Imagine that I am a friend of yours. I tell you that my child is depressed and the doctor suggests pill1, it makes my child more lethargic. We try pill2 and the depression is gone.
I tell you that I am happy with the results of pill2 and that while I am interested in how it works and potential long-term consequences, I'm happy staying on pill2.
Is this imagined parent strictly better than a parent that refuses to try any pill until convinced of its mechanism and success? I would say yes.
Observation is the workhorse of the scientific paradigm, not idealized experimentation. The quantity, and thus value, of Inductive evidence is greater than that of Deductive evidence.
I suppose I'm advocating for prevention instead of treatment and what the ideal conditions would be for good mental health so that treatment could be avoided in the first place.
C'mon. The comment you're replying to with "makes sense" is about city living vs rural. You weren't commenting that it's unknowable. You stated that "unnatural lights" and "disrupting biological rhythm" (whatever that means) probably cause one's brain to go "haywire" (implication being: and commit suicide).
As if there aren't uncountable other variables that have changed dramatically over millions of years. Or hell, do you even know if suicide rates are higher today than they were millions of years ago? No. You came here to try to suggest city living was inferior to rural living, and used "millions of years of evolution", and some implication that modern rural life is somehow more similar to those millions of years than urban life.
"...makes sense that cramming into cities with unnatural lights and disrupting biological rhythm would make them go haywire"
Then what does this suggest? Why does "unnatural light" (ignoring that humans have built "unnatural light" fires for ~1.7 million years) make a brain go haywire, but not, say, clipping one's toenails? Or reading books, or sitting on chairs, or being blasted by radio waves, or running on treadmills, or traveling over 15mph, or wearing clothes, or flying in airplanes, etc. What are you saying?
As far as I know, rural and suburban dwellers do have lightbulbs, computers, televisions, cell phones, and this time of year, brightly lit christmas trees. Is your position that there are more light bulbs in cities than the countryside? Do you have any evidence that that's meaningful? Seems like a bit of a stretch to me, that the external lights—easily blocked by window curtains—have any meaningful impact on health beyond the artificial light sources we all deliberately use.
I made no implication that contemporary rural life is superior or in any way comparable to historical rural life.
Edit: I guess I'm being pedantic at this point. My personal position is industrial agriculture is failing rapidly and that the modern world will reconcile with the fact that either we will all starve, or learn how to farm again. I spend half the year working on an organic farm, and my life is immeasurably better than when I'm in the city (which is of course, only my personal subjective datum which and I realize how much HN hates anecdote as evidence)
There are many factors at work here but I am sure being forced to stay indoor is depressive as hell. The city where I live has been in constant smog with AQI in the range of 200~300* and every outdoor activities are stopped, I can't even talk a walk around the nearby lakes to relieve my stress.
* the air is terrible already and the government is going to build more coal plants, powered by the 'cleanest coal' approved by the POTUS, sigh. Instead of one nuclear power plant now we have four coal plants instead, great.
Not sure how to reconcile this with the fact that suicide rates in rural areas of the US far exceed suicide rates in urban areas. Do the availability of guns in rural areas really offset this effect that much?
In the UK there was a study on social isolation comparing rural and urban people to evaluate the assumption that people in "isolated" rural areas are lonely. It found the reverse - that people in urban areas are more socially isolated.
"The report briefly mentions the ‘rurality factor’ as presenting greater barriers to connection, with rural areas having fewer and more expensive support services such as transport links. However, it goes on to suggest that ‘rural communities were felt to be less closed off than their urban counterparts’, with rural participants more likely to ask how people are, or stop for chats."
There are multiple factors that lead to suicide. This study shows air pollution is one, but there are others that lead to an elevated suicide rate in rural areas of the US.
In NYC the overall pm 2.5 is really low, usually in the teens, so unless you live under a highway with your windows open its likely too little to affect suicide rates. There are probably other air pollutants in NYC but that could be true of rural areas working in agriculture/heavy industry as well. I imagine many US big cities follow this pattern except for a few unlucky places.
There are many causes for depression and suicide other than the hypothesized link to air pollution. Your observation indicates that these other factors have a larger effect size than air pollution.
Something that isn't immediately clear to me is whether they accounted for the causes of air pollution.
If not this is like observing that there are a lot of loud bangs in warzones and concluding loud noises kill people, even though they are at best just a side effect of the actual causes.
I'm questioning this as well. Air pollution is almost always an attribute of big cities, which mostly imply certain lifestyle. For example, living in concrete box for most of one's life is new to our species.
Way back in the 1920s, my great-great grandfather killed himself. The obituary paralleled the family story of his life: he'd been a drifter of sorts his whole life, always looking for some way out of the life of a dirt-poor, subsistence farmer. He was the first member of the family to leave the Amish / Mennonite colonies of the east and come west. When he died, he was far from home in the middle of nowhere, not a penny to his name.
Last night around the dinner table we were discussing an article from The Week about video game addiction. It described young men a lot like my great-great grandfather, with just the moment in history changed. It seems fairly straightforward that the root causes are:
-- Limited economic opportunities / safety net.
-- Lack (for whatever reason) of social ties and support. A lack of an outlet for emotional intimacy.
Are chemicals, including in our air, at play? Sure, possibly. But, it seems clear that in any case you hear about a suicide the story is basically the same - someone simply did not see a future for themselves. We have not come fully to grips with a post-industrial / post-agrarian economy here in the US, leaving many men in particular without much purpose.
The rural / urban divide is mentioned in this thread - living here in rural America (hi y'all!) is a microcosm of the rest of the country - we have the same problems as cities, just on a different but compressed scale. You see both the happiest and most miserable people up close. If you have the financial means to live away from the city, then you can be the big fish in the small pond, IE: both the financial and social I mentioned above. On the other hand, if you are living paycheck to paycheck, surrounded by a limited social network, etc, is it really that surprising it leads to depression? That's the same regardless of your physical location.
This article is a dumpster fire, read to actual journal article - DOI: 10.1289/EHP4595
"DISCUSSION: Our findings support the hypothesis of an association between long-term PM2:5 exposure and depression, as well as supporting hypotheses of possible associations between long-term PM2:5 exposure and anxiety and between short-term PM10 exposure and suicide. The limited literature
and methodological challenges in this field, including heterogeneous outcome definitions, exposure assessment, and residual confounding, suggest further high-quality studies are warranted to investigate potentially causal associations between air pollution and poor mental health."
Don't really get the point, not really sure the journal is P hacking with PM10 being suicide and PM2.5 being depression but PM2.5/10 gives you cancer's which is depressing, why wouldn't you clean your air?
Oh wow, this totally. My wife had a rough time in Beijing during long stretches of bad air, and I knew other people whose moods would visibly change during those times.
The suicide aspect I’m not sure of, but many people I knew had the option of leaving and did.
plug: if you're interested in air quality issues, we're hiring at Aclima. ping me at igor at aclima.io. we're deploying a distributed sensor grid to get actionable air-quality intelligence around the world, which we believe can motivate regulators to act, and motivate citizens to bug their regulators.
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Probably cheaper and easier to test your water and air.
If your air or water quality suck, take it to city hall
Also worth noting that the city can only do so much. A factory 3 counties over could spew noticeable smog, and you don't have any recourse outside of moving.
I can't find the link to the actual study. What I'd like to know is whether there was any research into the actual causal relationships (such as the other study that was linked with pollution particles found in brains), or if it was just statistical correlation between places with high pollution and places with high levels of depression and suicide. If the latter, it could well be a spurious correlation (e.g. pollution happens in big cities, people in big cities tend to have more stressful jobs, stressful jobs cause burnout and depression...)
Not unsurprising, though obvious caveat about correlation and causation. I wouldn't be surprised if pollution is correlated with other things like low quality of life, poverty, etc. All of these probably interact to create an environment that leads to poor mental health.
I'm all for cutting all pollution but is this just not a long shot to try link the two and get more results faster. linking it to more health issues and deaths
Surely not because industry-based jobs let people depressed and surely not because places with industries have been polluting air more than other places. Sure....
Anyone have a link to an effective air filter? So I can order one and benefit from the placebo effect. Preferably on the 'zon so I can get 2-day shipping.
The first tries to fit it into a predictive processing framework, the second rounds up a variety of findings, including correlation with inflammation and treatment with ketamine.
Quite a simple concept, it's particulate matter in the air, the greater the density the worse the effect on humans, animals, and ecology. It would be difficult to measure the effect of one specific particulate's effect.
Particle pollution — also called particulate matter (PM) — is made up of particles (tiny pieces) of solids or liquids that are in the air. These particles may include:
Dust
Dirt
Soot
Smoke
Drops of liquid
Some particles are big enough (or appear dark enough) to see — for example, you can often see smoke in the air. Others are so small that you can’t see them in the air.
"The air pollution disasters in London in 1952, the Meuse valley in 1930, and in Donoroa, Pennsylvania, in 1948 made it clear that extremely high levels of particulate-based smog could produce large increases in the daily mortality rate."
Temperature variability also factors into this. Though by itself is not a major factor, it seems to be a combination of things.
If anything we are not "killing the planet" we are destroying the conditions that allow life to thrive on Earth. I've been following these links since 2013 and more studies are showing this could be a "thing."
"Here we estimate associations between multiple environmental factors (air quality, residential greenness, mean temperature, and temperature variability) and self-assessed mental health scores for over 20,000 Chinese residents. Mental health scores were surveyed in 2010 and 2014, allowing us to link changes in mental health to the changes in environmental variables. Increases in air pollution and temperature variability are associated with higher probabilities of declined mental health. Mental health is statistically unrelated to mean temperature in this study, and the effect of greenness on mental health depends on model settings, suggesting a need for further study. Our findings suggest that the environmental policies to reduce emissions of air pollution or greenhouse gases can improve mental health of the public in China."
"The air pollution disasters in London in 1952, the Meuse valley in 1930, and in Donoroa, Pennsylvania, in 1948 made it clear that extremely high levels of particulate-based smog could produce large increases in the daily mortality rate."
Nothing was more depressing than growing up in LA in the 1970s, lungs hurting, and 30% of PE classes cancelled because of smog. I remember looking at the sickly yellow light casting this disgusting puce sheen on the asphalt. The city was all I knew, and I hated it. Once a year we would go up to the Eastern Sierra and I felt released, natural, like this was how the world should be. Returning home to the smog and traffic was a depressogenic gutpunch.
I didn't grow up there during that time, but moved there in the late 70's. There were indeed many smoggy days. But surprisingly it got much better after about 10 years. I assume it was a result of stricter regulations. These days the air quality in the LA area is generally pretty good, with historical PM2.5 data showing "green" most of the time http://aqicn.org/city/los-angeles/
The authors admit there is no causal relationship established between pollutants and depression. It's pure correlation. I don't understand how nebulous studies like this even get published. Still very convenient that we have yet another reason to abandon fossil fuels. Almost starting to feel like a trendy scapegoat and honestly an irrelevant comment given the total uncertainty behind the relationship.
But the Guardian made clear it's bias when it advertised for funding with a giant banner claiming "Trump must be impeached.". This isn't objective, fact based journalism, it's propagandist advocacy journalism.
I don't know why, but there are a lot of people where fasting works for depression.
Then there are ways of eating which seem to have an effect like low fodmaps. Etc.
anti nutrients causing inflammation(body uses nutrients to fight inflammation), leaving them out
calms the inflammation and the body can use the nutrients it has better.
Btw. supplementing zinc and magnesium seems to help ppl with depression.
Lectins(all seeds) as in beans, nuts, corn and wheat are binding to iron and zinc, I forgot what was with the magnesium, but it played a role as well...
Air pollution linked to overpopulation.
Overpopulation linked to high birth rates.
So, in conclusion :
Depression and suicide linked to high birth rates
Air pollution linked to overpopulation. Overpopulation linked to high birth rates. High birth rates linked to sex. So in conclusion: Celibacy cures depression and suicide.
Of course, why stop there? We could keep going deeper.
The cleanest observation would be Everything is Correlated (https://www.gwern.net/Causality) and correlation is not a productive way of investigating the world.
If A causes B and B causes C then we can only say that A and C are correlated. If the average chain of causality is 4 long then the Bs outnumber the As and Cs.
Inductive (observation) evidence is more available than deductive (purely logical) evidence. Why limit yourself to only deductive evidence?
I don't have to resort to a chemistry lesson to convince you that drinking bleach would be very harmful, right? Can't I merely show you photos of bleach-bellied-corpses?
The causal relationship seems like a stretch here. I highly doubt reducing air pollution will cure anyone’s depression.
That said, it has other value in signally regions of high air pollution are regions of higher proportional depression.
Areas of high pollution are less desirable to live in. If you live right next to a highway, garbage dump or power plant, your property value is going to be lower. (I must admit, I’m taking a US-centric perspective here)
With that in mind, you could just as easily conclude that living in poorer regions causes depression.
Anyone who thinks curing depression is as simple as cleaning up the air is oversimplifying a much more complicated relationship.
> If you live right next to a highway, garbage dump or power plant
In cities like London most of the city is like that. probably same as L.A. or New york, the whole place is next to a highway + powerplant + garbage dump
Depression has many causes. Some of them are super simple. Loss of a loved one. Or a lack of manganese. Why is it surprising that breathing things other than air might ne depressing?
This is kind of my hobby horse: you don't need to subject people to harm to test causuality. You can do the opposite: Remove harm and see what happens. Maybe give people free HVAC upgrades to filter more particles.