Serious blues

So there’s a health condition that, according to new World Health Organization (WHO) research, is more harmful than diabetes, angina, arthritis and asthma. According to the National Institutes of Health, this condition affects 20 million Americans and “increases the risk of death for people of all ages.” It is considered easy to spot and simple to treat.

As some of you may have guessed, this condition would be depression, and its potential for harm is turning out to be far greater than previously thought.

It’s been established that mental and physical health can determine each other, but the WHO study of over 245,000 people found that after adjusting for variables like poverty, depression “had the largest effect on worsening health…and people with depression who also had one or more chronic diseases had the worst health scores of all the diseases looked at or combinations of diseases.”

To put it more plainly, depression often makes a physical ailment worse, and can also impede a sickly person’s recovery. How constantly amazing that so much of our physical well-being is dependent on our happiness.

Or, as is the case for a growing amount of people, unhappiness.

The researchers, as one might imagine, have called for increased funding for mental health services. As they should be, and as well should we. As much as awareness about depression has grown in our time, mental health still regularly takes a back seat in our collective minds and pocketbooks. This needs changing.

Depression (and its assorted pals, like anxiety and eating disorders) is not a problem we can push to the side. It demands recognition and treatment at the same level of physical health. Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity SANE, spoke to BBC News about the WHO study, saying: “We now have yet more evidence, as if it were needed, of the destructive and life-threatening effects of depression, which this global study shows can be an even greater danger than many chronic physical conditions.”

While this information might seem to imply more concern for older people, college students are more susceptible to depression than most. John Greden, M.D., executive director of the University of Michigan (UM) Depression Center, estimates that 15 percent of students in the United States may be struggling with depression, compared to roughly six percent for the whole country.

“Depression is a huge problem in the college student population,” Greden said in a UM Health System press release. “It’s essential that we not just attribute students’ symptoms to just ’emotional stress'”.

And yet, though increased funding and awareness from the powers that be are good things to push for, none of it counts if those with depression don’t take the steps to get the help they need.

It’s an easy thing not to do. It’s easy to pass off unhappiness and depression as something we can work through ourselves. It’s easy to refuse to recognize it as a problem. There’s little social precedent for the fact that a lot of us need help to shake our blues.

Society pressures us to be stoic and strong, to take our lumps. Movies and books are filled with heroes that endure pain and tragedy to make it in the end via the triumph of the human spirit. All of which is lovely, but not an accurate reflection of reality for a lot of people.

“It’s absolutely essential to recognize that depression is an illness,” Greden went on to say. “People don’t just routinely adjust, adapt and get over it.”

Symptoms of depression include (but are definitely not limited to) anxiety, sadness, decreased energy, problems with sleep, appetite and weight changes, thoughts of death or suicide, feelings of hopelessness and guilt, difficulty concentrating or making decisions, irritability, excessive crying and chronic aches or pains not explained by other physical conditions.

The pros and cons of the different ways to treat depression are beyond the scope of this column, but if those symptoms belong to you or someone you know, the important thing is to just get help in the first place.

Just get help. I’ll reiterate a part of the first paragraph: “Depression increases the risk of death for people of all ages.” It’s hard to get more serious than that. On an individual and institutional level, getting depression treated is of the utmost importance to ensure long and happy lives.

Remember all those stories in Chicken Soup for the Soul books about terminally ill people that were given one year to live, and how they stayed around for five because they were so determined to live their lives to the fullest and beat the odds? It’s no coincidence. The happier we are, the healthier we are.