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)
