ABSTRACT
We are living in depressed times. The epidemic is rising globally (Everyday Health, 2013): the incidence doubled in the 1990s (Plomin et al., 2013), and is increasing by twenty per cent per year (www.healthline.com). Major depression affects more than fifteen per cent of people in their lifetime (twenty per cent in developed countries—Cruwys et al., 2014), and is hitting people at ever younger ages. In the UK, rates of emotional distress have doubled between people born in 1946 and 1970 (James, 2008). Worldwide, those in the eighteen to twenty-year-old cohort are already more likely to have experienced depression than those in the sixty-plus age group, although they have been alive less than a third of the time (Rottenberg, 2014), and the prevalence has more than doubled between the early 1990s and the early 2000s (Plomin et al., 2013). While social disadvantage increases the likelihood of depression, it is on the rise amongst the apparently privileged classes as well. Anxiety disorders have a massive lifetime prevalence of twenty-nine per cent and can lead to other disorders such as depression and alcoholism (ibid.). Depression is in fact today the leading cause of disability worldwide, beating heart disease, traffic accidents, and cerebrovascular disease (World Health Organization, 2012). There may be a rise in reporting and diagnosis, but equally 138something must be changing in our culture on a global scale to vastly increase the frequency of this debilitating condition.
