Posts Tagged ‘depression’

The UK: a nation of indecision?

In case you hadn’t noticed, a much-hyped single called Choices is released this week. Written by the mildly irritating English-Swedish pop outfit The Hoosiers, it is a record-breaking 43 minutes long. As if one gimmick wasn’t enough, the band invited fans to write some of the verses and appear in the music video. But even though Choices is a pygmy of a tune compared with the iconic songs of previous eras such as All You Need Is Love, Purple Haze and Smells Like Teen Spirit, The Hoosiers’ new single might one day rank among them as the song of this generation.

The reason? It’s the lyrics, stupid. “Stop giving me choices. Stop giving me choices,” whines Irwin Sparkes, the elfin lead singer. “I’m the victim of this day and age, I’ve forgotten how to feel, I’ve forgotten how to change.”

According to Harriet Bradley, professor of sociology at the University of Bristol, this is an apt summary of the way things are. This week she published the results of a ten-month project looking at how people in the UK deal with choice. The report, State of Confusion, presents the results of a study of 6,000 people from across the UK. The conclusion is resounding: Britain is a “nation crippled by too much choice”. Read the rest of this entry »

20% of the UK population will suffer from depression – double 30 years ago

Dr Steve Ilardi is slim and enthusiastic, with intense eyes. The clinical psychologist is 4,400 miles away, in Kansas, and we are chatting about his new book via Skype, the online videophone service. “I’ve spent a lot of time pondering Skype,” he says. “On the one hand it provides a degree of social connectedness. On the other, you’re still essentially by yourself.” But, he concludes, “a large part of the human cortex is devoted to the processing of visual information, so I guess Skype is less alienating than voice calls.”

Social connectedness is important to Ilardi. In The Depression Cure, he argues that the brain mistakenly interprets the pain of depression as an infection. Thinking that isolation is needed, it sends messages to the sufferer to “crawl into a hole and wait for it all to go away”. This can be disastrous because what depressed people really need is the opposite: more human contact.

Which is why social connectedness forms one-sixth of his “lifestyle based” cure for depression. The other five elements are meaningful activity (to prevent “ruminating” on negative thoughts); regular exercise; a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids; daily exposure to sunlight; and good quality, restorative sleep. Read the rest of this entry »