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.
