“Depression is a disease of civilization” This is very alarming because according to a study and in a wonderful talk by Dr. Stephan Illardi - One in four people in this generation are clinically depressed and one million (10,00,000) people commit suicide due to it every year. And the percentage of people with this disease increases with every generation. For the generation which is now 60+ years old right now only 10% experience it. But now, from among our age group of 19-29 years, almost 25% experience it, and by the time we reach the age of 60+ almost an estimate of 50% are bound to experience it which is very dangerous. Illardi highlights the difference between sadness and depression, sadness being the normal reaction to uncomfortable things that happen in our lives, which lasts for a short period of time and depression the torment, the agony that a person feels for a very long period of time. And what is the reason behind it? There can be lots of reasons why a person can be sad which is normal, but what is the main cause of depression? A prolonged stress that keeps us thinking of the problem a lot and thus causing our brain to be inflamed and always stressed and hard. The whirling tornado of thoughts consumes and takes up all your energy and makes you feel drained and not wanting to do anything sometimes. We do come across a lot of stress in our lives. And the inflamed brain is a depressed brain. So handling stress more efficiently can make you feel a lot better. Sometimes the problem keeps coming and will never go away. Waiting for it to go away will not do because sometimes the storm might take forever to go, so you need to become strong and learn to sail your ship in it so you will then be okay. But the question is why is the number rising shockingly like that every generation? The answer given by him is quite simple – There was a sudden lifestyle change that man has experienced over the past two centuries - the sudden advancement of technology and machines and almost everything that comes with it. For almost 1.8 million years (99.9% of mans time on earth) man has lived a life in the hunter gatherer context. So human beings are extremely well adapted to that. And this sudden change, which he termed as “Radical Environmental mutation” is very discontinuous to everything that came before it. The entire environment which we live in has changed, but we have not evolved to fit into it yet because two centuries was just not enough for it. “We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, socially isolated, sleep deprived and frenzied pace of modern life” The result is depression. He supports this statement by a research done at a Kaluli tribe which still lives in the old context. They have very harsh lives, high mortality rate, etc and everything is bad for them and yet, only one in two thousand people were found to have been depressed. So they are in that way a hundred times better off than us. What? How?! The difference was that the tribe got much more sunlight, hours of physical activity (Not exercise mind you, exercise is seemingly strange to them) to do and spent a lot of face-to-face time with the people that they loved. All unlike our generation, where only sports people, Moms and people with dogs do the physical activity and texting seems to be the means of talking for 65% of the time spent with loved ones. Which is very depressing? The link to the talk is here; I hope it helps whoever might need it. youtube/watch?v=drv3BP0Fdi8 Yes, it did.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 14:41:53 +0000