Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: SF Chinese (ID:kexuejiaodian), author: SF

On the night of July 5, the famous singer Coco, known as the "Asian diva", committed suicide because of depression and died of medical treatment at the age of 48. From the editor's point of view, Coco Lee on the stage and in public has always given people a sense of cheerfulness, enthusiasm and optimism, with a warm smile on her face. It is shocking and regrettable that such a person should suffer from such severe depression that he should commit suicide.

Editor | Zhao Jiaming

Excerpts from Science focus No. 9, No. 12, 2022; No. 1, No. 4, No. 5, No. 7, 2023

Depression, which has a great impact on people's psychology and physiology, has also been pushed to the forefront of public opinion again. There has been a lot of popular science about depression. We are not going to repeat here, today we will talk about a few truths about depression that may be ignored by our partners.

First of all, let's take a look at some data (data from the World Health Organization's WHO website):

It is estimated that 5% of adults worldwide suffer from depression.

More women are affected by depression than men (4% for men and 6% for women)

Depression can lead to suicide. More than 700,000 people commit suicide every year, and the risk of suicide is 20 times higher than the standardized death rate.

In high-income countries, about half of people with depression remain undiagnosed or treated, while in low-and middle-income countries, the proportion is 80-90%.

Is depression different from depression? Depression here is a kind of emotion, which is actually a change of mood and a feeling of daily life. Depression is a mental illness, which is different from depression. First of all, in terms of its impact on people, depression can affect all aspects of people's work, life and study, especially their relationships with family, friends, classmates and community members, while depression is usually a kind of emotional change. the impact is much smaller than depression. Secondly, in terms of duration, depression is a long-term disease, which lasts for at least two weeks and occurs most of the day, while depression is a temporary daily mood fluctuation, and the emotional impulse is over. Third, in terms of coping style, the impact of depression is short-lived, so it can be solved only by self-psychological resolution, while depression is a mental illness, once diagnosed, patients need to receive professional treatment, including psychotherapy and drug treatment.

Understand these, coupled with the popular science about depression has been a lot, in fact, we are no stranger to depression. However, here are some truths about depression that you may not have noticed at ordinary times.

Several truths about depression hyperprocessed foods are positively related to the risk of depression. Superprocessed foods are foods made from five or more ingredients, or from non-household basic condiments. For example, the assembly line produces bagged bread, biscuits, cakes, carbonated drinks, pizza, instant noodles, instant soup, chicken nuggets, sausages, hamburgers and so on. The latest study found that the intake of ultra-processed foods is positively correlated with the risk of depression. A French research team conducted a basic assessment of more than 26000 volunteers and then followed up about five years later. The results showed that there was a significant correlation between hyperprocessed food intake and depression.

You may have questions about why this is so. Scientists believe that this may be related to the loss of nutrients in food during the production of ultra-processed food. Bad eating habits such as eating too much hyperprocessed foods can lead to depression, which in turn may cause people to choose more bad eating habits, thus creating a vicious circle.

Does social media exacerbate a child's depression? The study found that the rates of anxiety and depression among children and adolescents of all ages have been increasing over the past decade. These 10 years have been the period of the rise of social media. As a result, many people believe that the use of social media makes children's psychological problems worse, and social media is regarded as the culprit of more and more children suffering from depression.

However, it is not that simple. In 2017, American psychologist Jean Twenge published an article pointing out that social media is the culprit for children's psychological problems. In this article, Twinger draws a chart with time as the horizontal axis and the percentage of American teenagers who choose the phrase "I often feel left out" as the vertical axis. Then, at this node in 2007, a vertical line is drawn perpendicular to the horizontal axis, dividing the chart into two parts. The changing trend of the data on the left side of the vertical line is relatively stable, while that on the right side rises sharply. Since 2007 was the first year of the emergence of smartphones, Twinger blamed smartphones for the aggravation of children's psychological problems. This is obviously unreasonable, because so many things happened in 2007, can it be concluded that it has something to do with the child's psychological problems?

If we want to find out why more and more children are suffering from mental illness such as depression, we should bear in mind that mental health problems are complex and subtle, and we can never explain them with a simple factor. Of course, we can not use several similar factors to analyze, this is no different from using a single factor to explain.

Of course, the rise of social media has had a more or less impact on children's mental health, but it must not be simply identified as the culprit. Other possible influencing factors include an increase in parents' mental health problems, a decrease in attitudes and behaviors towards stigmatization of mental illness, a general increase in people's awareness of mental illness, changes in diagnostic criteria, economic difficulties, education-related stress factors, and so on.

Lack of sleep can lead to depression. People often say "get eight hours of sleep", and the NHS recommends that adults get at least seven hours of sleep a day. If you don't get enough sleep for a long time, the long-term harm caused by it should not be underestimated. Studies have shown that if you sleep less than seven hours for a long time, the incidence of various chronic diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease, depression and dementia, will increase.

Eat a balanced diet, watch less news, and prevent depression? Spanish scientists have found that if you don't want to fall into anxiety and depression because of social problems, the best way may be to maintain a healthy diet and watch as little unnecessary news as possible. In addition, regular exercise, outdoor activities, appropriate leisure and relaxation are also beneficial to the prevention of depression. On the contrary, in the past, we thought that the methods of preventing and alleviating depression, such as chatting with friends and family, or focusing on our own interests, had little effect.

The leader of the study, Joaquim Radua of the Institute of Biomedical Research in Auguste Pisunere, Spain, was also cautious about the findings. He believes that the discovery of correlation does not necessarily mean that there is a causal relationship. Whether a balanced diet and watching less news relieve people's anxiety and depression, or after anxiety and depression are relieved, people are more inclined to eat a balanced diet and watch less news, which still needs further research by scientists.

Is the self-diagnosis of depression reliable? It can be said that psychological diagnosis is too responsible. This is true even for trained professional psychiatrists. Therefore, when you get involved in this field as an enthusiastic "psychiatrist", it will hardly lead to good results.

Give me a simple example. Some people may self-diagnose depression and then continue to confront or ignore their irrational negative emotions. For people with depression, this seems to make a lot of sense. But what if they actually have bipolar disorder? For people with bipolar disorder, if you suppress some irrational negative emotions, such as the feeling that you have done something wrong, the patient will only become more excited and the bipolar disorder will be more serious.

Not only that, but our brain's inherent negative bias (negativity bias) also makes us prefer the worst, meaning that people instinctively pay more attention to negative or dangerous possibilities-a self-defense mechanism. In this way, if you suffer from depression, the most common mental illness, you are more likely to magnify your negative biases and are more likely to come up with the worst self-diagnosis, which does nothing to cure the disease.

Bird calls and vitamin B can relieve depression, a study conducted by King's College London tells us that sometimes happiness is simple: look at the birds, listen to the birds, and the depressive symptoms may be improved. Scientists used mobile phone App to conduct a long-term questionnaire survey of more than 1300 volunteers in Europe and the United States. They found that if they could see or hear birds, their mental health would be good and the symptoms of depression would be alleviated.

Despite the fact that the study is simple and easy, but groundbreaking: in the past, people used to think that seeing and hearing birds could edify their morals and improve their mood, and that they had never tested the effects of birds on human mental health in the real world.

A research team at the University of Reading in the UK recruited nearly 500 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 58 (265 reported anxiety disorders and 146 depression). The research team divided the volunteers into three groups. The first group received daily 100mg vitamin B supplements, the second group received daily 1mg vitamin B supplements, and the third group received daily placebo for a month. During the experiment, the researchers assessed the emotional changes of the volunteers through a questionnaire survey.

Volunteers who took vitamin B reported a decline in anxiety and depression after taking supplements, the study found. The reason why vitamin B relieves symptoms of anxiety and depression is that it promotes the brain to secrete a neurotransmitter called GABA, which suppresses nerve impulses in the brain. At present, the study is still in its infancy, and the efficacy of vitamin B is limited and can not be used as an alternative to drugs.

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