About that parallel you're drawing...

[firecat]

I have seen multiple posts about depression recently that compare it to diabetes and say something like "You wouldn't expect a diabetic to go without their insulin, right? Well you shouldn't expect a depressed person to 'just cheer up.'"

Here's the thing. There is lots of shaming of diabetics for being on meds or insulin. A lot of people think diabetes is a "lifestyle disease" and that one can choose whether to have it and how to treat it. There is probably considerable overlap between people with that view and the ones who think depression is a bad mood or a selfish play for attention.

I appreciate the attempt to educate people about depression and I'm not criticizing any particular person or post, but I'm thinking some other comparison would probably work better to get the point across that depression is a very difficult condition to manage.

Comments

[johnpalmer]

Nod. I've heard that twin studies show that if one twin has it, there's an 80% chance that the other does.

Now, an interesting thing is that some people do low carb diets. And some people exercise - a lot. I wonder if we were able to exclude both of those from the statistics if we'd see the correlation go even higher.

(A low carb diet doesn't exactly *prevent* diabetes, but it can prevent you from having any symptoms or problems, and prevent it from being detected. Heavy exercise may be the same way - or may be preventative. It's hard because we don't quite know what diabetes *is*, we just see its effects, an inability to control blood sugar.)

(ETA: Technically, we do sometimes know what diabetes is. e.g., some people have their insulin producing cells start to die. Well, we know what *that* is. And we have a name for blood sugar increasing when there's plenty of insulin present - "insulin resistance" - but I think that's just descriptive. I could be wrong - I'm not too up on the latest research.)