Comments: Environment As An Anti-Depressant
Are we machines or animals? Intellectually we can cope with living in a small place/space. But then theres that joke... I'm living in a small apartment ,I'ld like to get a pet like a dog for company, but the place is so small it would be too cruel to the dog.
I believe criminal prisoners by law get an hour of daylight a day, if only psychiatric "patients" had the same right.
Posted by Mark at February 22, 2007 09:51 AM
Daylight, sunshine and psychiatric inpatients:
After 6 weeks of lock-down, and very rare outside time on a patio that housed no living plant life:(at one hospital)
My family member walked outside into the (next) hospital's outside area and hugged a tree. That outside time was under 30 minutes a day, if that.
Posted by Stephany at February 22, 2007 11:14 AM
How long do we have to wait before they start producing the environment in pill form?
Posted by J Schnapp at February 22, 2007 12:36 PM
Sunshine; of course! I should have snagged that patent years ago! I'd be rich. --and I wouldn't have to leave Seattle to find it.
Posted by Priscilla at February 22, 2007 01:44 PM
It makes me wonder. Here in the Czech Republic, they still have cage beds and generally an attitude even among professionals that is left over from Communism: the only real diseases are those with specific physical causes and specific physical treatments and the rest of it is bourgeoise indolence.
They can sometimes take it a bit far here. A colleague's American flatmate took herself to the hospital after trying to kill herself. They told her she had been a very stupid girl, but lucky that she failed, and that she should go back home and not try it again.
At the same time, following practices dating back to the Empire, mental hospitals are always built in the middle of huge tracts of parkland and they try to get patients out beneath the trees and sun as much as possible.
The point about our current work practices not being 'naturally' anti-depressive is one point, but I think another is that Westerners of all social classes now have a lot more 'down time' in their heads, where they are not concentrating on their hazardous physical work or worrying about feeding their families, etc. I think that without more pressing problems, the mind starts to devour itself. Completely unscientific, I know, and it would be damned hard to set up a study.
...Just remembered my student days, reading a paper by a Sri Lankan psychiatric anth saying that many of the characteristics of the clinically depressed are also those of an enlightened Buddhist.
Posted by Antiquated Tory at February 23, 2007 03:50 AM
The hypothesis by Ilardi begs the question of whether depression is a modern invention. I sincerely doubt it, though modern (or more appropriately) postmodern life may accentuate and amplify depressive status.
Moreover "light therapy" is not a novel approach. Its been studied in animals for decades, and the results have often been seen in a change in thyroid receptor level output in seasonal changes of light exposure.
This was further evidenced in recent human studies in Antartica which resulted in the discovery of Polar T3 syndrome.
Posted by zipzip at February 23, 2007 02:13 PM