A map of depression rates around the world

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/11/07/a-stunning-map-of-depression-rates-around-the-world/

by wallzz • 13 years ago

61 43 13 years ago

danso• 13 years ago

Without commenting on the science or validity of the study...the map implementation here could be improved, in fact, it's about as confusingly implemented as an infographic could be.

First of all, it violates the "rainbow map" rule, in that a wide spectrum of color is used to graph what is basically a very simple continuum: more depression vs. less depression.

http://eagereyes.org/basics/rainbow-color-map

Second of all, and most egregiously, it uses the most confusing color scheme possible. At least in America, which is the WaPo's main audience, the color blue is widely used to describe "depression" ('feeling the blues'). While red is often used to describe a dangerous or very intense situation...it's not really appropriate here, as red is also used for "passion", which is not mutually exclusive to depression, but is not usually associated with it either.

And the purple, rather than acting as a middle ground between "more" and "less" depression, comes off as its own weird symbolism.

And why the f-ck is "gray" in between blue and purple?

And of course, in America (and especially among the audience that the Washington Post serves), red and blue often indicate political thought.

It's hard to think of how this map could be any more confusing, even without getting into the discussion of how country/state-color maps greatly distort the quantities involved.

----

That said, I was surprised to see that the United States ranked on the low side...my intuition was that well-off countries had higher rates of reported and diagnosed depression (first world problems and all that). But I had to stare at the map for quite awhile to make sure I was reading it right...

Edit: Also, this stuck out:

The most depressed country is Afghanistan, where more than one in five people suffer from the disorder. The least depressed is Japan, with a diagnosed rate of less than 2.5 percent.

I know Japanese culture has the propensity to be greatly distorted by outside observers...but how is it that a country that has among the highest suicide rates in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan) also happens to have the lowest rates of depression? I mean, it's certainly mathematically possible (e.g. clinically depressed Japanese, few as they are, are also at the extreme edges of depression, or, Japanese suicides are committed for reasons other than depression)...it's just a bit unexpected.

rafcavallaro• 13 years ago

The rates for east Asia (as was noted in the article) are almost certainly misleadingly low because mental health issues of any kind are so highly stigmatized in these cultures, much more so than in Europe and North Ametica.

jrkatz• 13 years ago

Regarding your edit, at no point is it said Japan has low incidence of depression; the claim made is that they have few diagnoses of depression. The article takes care to point this out. I would take these numbers to mean that Japanese people are not receiving adequate treatment for their depression (of which diagnosis is an obvious first step), contributing to the suicide rate.

mchaver• 13 years ago

I would say that the title is slightly misleading. The map and article clearly say that is clinically diagnosed depression, but that is not clear from the title. By leaving out "clinically diagnosed" the title makes the article feel like it has a stronger claim.

dualogy• 13 years ago

but how is it that a country that has among the highest suicide rates in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan) also happens to have the lowest rates of depression

If more depressed people commit suicide, then there's fewer depressed people showing up in the stats, right?

Camillo• 13 years ago

That map is a really bad visualization. They're showing a single numeric variable with a limited scale, so all they need to express graphically is a level between "empty" and "full". They should have mapped it to a single axis that intuitively corresponds to that notion: for example, a simple scale between white and red would have been perfect.

But instead, they decided to have a scale between red and blue, which goes through purple if it's an admixture of the two colors. But then they would just have had a few colors with more or less the sale lightness and saturation, but different hues, and there's really no intuitive reason why purple should be perceived as "more" or "less" than blue. So instead they made a three-point scale going from red to white and then to blue (look at the pink and light blue colors next to the center to see that this is what they did); except that now white looks like "empty", and redder and bluer colors look increasingle "full", except in opposite directions: the only situation where this makes sense is when you have relative numbers, and white is zero, red is positive and blue is negative. But then it would look like Iran has lots of depression, Brazil has no depression, and Australia has... negative depression?

They could tell that something looked wrong, but what? "A-ha! Of course!" - thought the graphic designer - "a mix of red and blue is purple, not white!" So he replaced the white in the middle cell with purple, leaving the neighboring pinks and light blues unchanged. So now the scale goes "red, red but a little whiter, white but a little redder, PURPLE, white but a little bluer, blue but a little whiter, blue", and nothing makes sense. Good job!

msutherl• 13 years ago

I think I agree, but the existing scale does have one redeeming property which is that it makes very clear which countries have the most and which have the lest depression. Both the red and the blue stand out against the middling regions, which would not be the case if white was the bottom of the scale.

hajderr2• 13 years ago

What do you think is the reason for this? A bunch of propaganda that we're well off here in the 'safe' part of the world?

Love this comment from the article

"I'm sure we've got high quality, nationally representative data out of the Congo."

roel_v4• 13 years ago

Your paranoia is not only annoying, but also quite insulting to the researchers involved. Contrary to your perceived 'the Man is holding me down', not everybody is out to 'deceive' you. The reason is likely purely functional, as I explained in a comment above, and I'd even agree with the choices of colors of the authors - they show more clearly than the proposed white-red where in the world there is more depression.

Furthermore, if you don't believe this particular studies' findings of depression rates, I would invite you to look into the decades of research into suicide rates, depression or just the flow of immigrants from the countries in the red in the map to those in the blue as a proxy for overall happiness and perceived life opportunities, and to draw your own conclusions.

roel_v4• 13 years ago

I agree with you that replacing white with purple is not consistent, but I don't agree with your conclusion.

Depression is not something (as far as the current state of knowledge goes) that can be completely eradicated. The study was about comparing depression rates globally. In that context, taking the average (or mean, but let's assume it's distributed normally) depression rate as the 'baseline' (i.e., the middle) is not that strange. This way, the map shows not absolute depression rates, but rather the position of each country relative to the baseline value. Which is, I think, what people are most interested in - if you tell me 'country xyz has a depression rate of 2%', most people have no idea. The whole study is not about absolute depression rates, but about rates relative to other countries.

I'd even go as far as defending the purple. Remember, cartography is not about choosing color according to a rigid logical scheme, it's about conveying information. Now, I think these colors convey the message of which areas in the world have the highest depression rates, and which ones the lowest, quite well. If white would have been left in as the color for countries with baseline values, those white blobs would have been distracting and would have looked as if no data was available. Instead, what we have is a map that shows in a visually uninterrupted way the rate of depression relative to the baseline, with intensity increasing where you go further away from the baseline.

You proposal for using white to red would be OK if it were about showing absolute depression rates, but that's a far less interesting way of looking at the data.

jader2013• 13 years ago

Your defense almost makes sense, but it still leaves out the fact that it grades from red to white, and blue to white, until it hits the middle -- at which point it suddenly turns purple.

To go with your defense, it should grade from red to purple between the highest point and the mean, and blue to purple between the lowest point and the mean.

imperio59• 13 years ago

If you read between the lines, it's clear the methodology used to extrapolate this data is shaky at best, and borders on "you've never taken a statistics class in your life" at worse.

Complete garbage... Favorite snippets: " The paper further cautions that reliable depression surveys don’t even exist for some low-income countries -- a common issue with global studies -- forcing the researchers to come up with their own estimates based on statistical regression models."

My interpretation: "There was no data so we guessed".

Terrible.

greenyoda• 13 years ago

What's even more depressing (no pun intended) is that this kind of junk science is published by the Washington Post, one of our nation's most highly esteemed newspapers.

tgb• 13 years ago

It really annoys me to see people judging studies based off of press coverage of them. If you're going to accuse it of being shoddy, at least take five minutes to read the paper. I'm not saying you're wrong, since I just spent five minutes reading the paper and they do use an modelling tool in the way that you suggest (and also use it to combine multiple reports from over the years or reports with only partial information). It's just that it's very easy to see something and wisely claim "Oh I bet they're making this laughable mistake based off of some vague claim in an article I'm criticizing" which is kind of harmful. I've said things in the past like "I read a study that X" and immediately the other person was like "Oh but that's just correlation", which is a good thing to think but seriously, it's not like the people writing these studies don't know that correlation-isn't-causation and might have thought to address that. I hadn't mentioned any methods used in the study because I didn't recall any of them, yet the gross assumption that it was wrong was still lept to. So if communities like Hacker News want to ever believe any science report ever (and they probably do), then I really think people should slow down and at least give the study the benefit of the doubt. You shouldn't have to read between the lines - the actual study is free on PLOS. If you don't have the time or expertise to read the paper, just pose this complaint as a question instead and probably someone else here will do the work for you.

kintamanimatt• 13 years ago

What in the world is going on in the Netherlands? Why is this country such an anomaly in terms of reported depression rates?

alwaysinshade• 13 years ago

Good question - looking at the OECD Better Life Index [1] for the Netherlands:

In general, 86% of people in the Netherlands say they have more positive experiences in an average day (feelings of rest, pride in accomplishment, enjoyment, etc) than negative ones (pain, worry, sadness, boredom, etc), more than the OECD average of 80%.

Perhaps it's a case of better access to health services, so more people in the Netherlands are able to be diagnosed and treated with depression whereas countries with poor health services and high levels of depression are ultimately under-reported?

[1] http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/netherlands/

gpvos• 13 years ago

I don't know; the contrast with Belgium, which despite cultural differences has health services with similar quality, and I imagine has similar awareness, is surprising. However, I have read anecdotal stories that mental health service here in the Netherlands is rather bad compared to other countries. Pressure to perform here may be on the high side, but I can't imagine it's much higher than in the US or Germany.

Ihmahr• 13 years ago

This is especially strange if you consider that dutch children are among the happiest [1].

Maybe their adulthood is comparatively worse because of their great childhood.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6360517.stm

MrBuddyCasino• 13 years ago

Yeah, this seems fishy. Wikipedia gives low rates for suicide in Netherlands, which I would expect to be correlated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suicide-deaths-per-100000-...

jader2013• 13 years ago

Am I missing something fundamental here?

Is depression diagnoses really so objective that we can not only compare diagnosis rates across the country, but across the world? Sort of like comparing how good the pizza is in countries across the world, is it not?

It doesn't seem like this analysis holds much value, if any.

city41• 13 years ago

I thought the same thing. I also think first world countries will diagnose the disease far more. If for no other reason, there are expensive pharmaceuticals to be sold.

harvestmoon• 13 years ago

10% of Americans are on antidepressants. I really hope that rate isn't consistent around the world.

hkmurakami3• 13 years ago

There is NO way Japan's depression rate is that low. The culture does't treat depression as a legitimate medical issue (their main remedy is along the lines of "man up!") and I have to imagine that it's being severely underreported.

Alterlife• 13 years ago

It is the same on a varying scale with ALL cultures.

India is is similar. A person who goes to a therapist is a mad person.

minikomi• 13 years ago

As someone living here who was today late due to "person threw themselves on the train tracks" ... "Diagnosed" is the critical word I believe.

mahranch3• 13 years ago

Depression is over-exaggerated in Japan.

It's like those reports on how the salarymen work these long and crazy hours and are ready to throw themselves off a building any minute but it's massively overblown.

Virtually everything is overblown or sensationalized about Japan. It reminds me of those herbivore men and "declining sex" articles that popped up recently. Writers like to write about some obscure sub-culture or push some misleading statistic and then write about it as if it applies the entire country.

I lived there for 14 months and it wasn't what I expected at all. I was prepared for massive culture shock but it just never happened. There was some, but no more than one would experience on an extended vacation. Japan, in my experience, is just like anywhere else.

Shinkei• 13 years ago

Where in Japan were you living? I found people in the country to be much more balanced and well-adjusted. But living in Tokyo and expecting to see 'culture shock' may be disappointing because people are not so 'open' about their social lives. A lot of the personal problems are kept away from the public eye until it's too late and they are throwing themselves in front of a train, hanging themselves in a forest or comitting seppuku in their homes. It's classic honne/tatemae--you never saw what was beneath the surface.

hkmurakami3• 13 years ago

I have to ask: did you work in a traditional Japanese bigco?

ivanbrussik• 13 years ago

communist / 3rd world countries pretty much win this one

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

Ukraine having opposite result from Russia and Belarus lights the red immediately. Why would it be so? The rest of data on the chart may be noise too.

telephonetemp• 13 years ago

That struck me as very questionably, too. Based on personal experience and what I know about the economic state of the three countries I find it hard to believe that Ukraine is somehow doing such better psychologically.

To convey an anecdote, on several occasions I was told by fairly well-traveled people that the Eastern regions of Ukraine were the most miserable place they'd been to in Europe.

mkesper• 13 years ago

I read the text...and got no usable info. Plus the awful map and a table that's not sorted by rank but by region (thus only doubling the "information" of the map).

Where can we downvote? ;)

porker• 13 years ago

I can't believe the UK is that low either. I wonder if it's because of the clinical depression is defined as something more serious than "taking anti-depressants or having CBT/Counselling"?

DanBC2• 13 years ago

Anti-depressants should be limited to people with moderate to severe depression, not used by people with mild depression. So anti-depressant use would be a sign that the person needs to be included.

I agree with you - I don't understand how they got such a low rate for their map.

NHS data for 2010-2011 gives 4.7 million people.

For a population of about 60 million that's 7.8%.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19967037

roel_v4• 13 years ago

Therapy and medication work to treat depression (not for everybody, but considered at macro level, they work). If you'd actually read the paper (which it seems few people commenting have done, or maybe you/they don't understand), by using DALY's (an accepted (by the community) proxy for 'impact' of a disease), they account for the fact that since people in Western countries get treatment at higher levels, the effects are less. E.g. if I get depressed and get treatment, and work through this in a year, and somebody in Central Africa gets it and lives with it for 15 years, then objectively I am better off and should be counted at 1/15 th in the study (well actually you can debate that - you can say 'I study the amount of people who get depressed'. Which is fine, but different, and imo not nearly as interesting, except maybe for when you look at the genetic disposition for depression).

I don't understand why people in this thread are so keen on trying to hold on to the position that depression in the West is high compared to other places, or even how they get to this position in the first place. To me it's quite self-evident that living in constant fear of being shot, blown up or just starving to death is more depressing than having to go through the agony of standing in traffic an hour before you can go home and eat a warm meal before falling asleep in front of the tv (to just name an example of what I've heard people as reasons on why life in the West is so 'stressing' and 'depressing').

DanBC2• 13 years ago

The map is titled "Prevalence of diagnosed clinical depression".

It seems reasonable to complain that the diagram is confusing when it gives a rate of 4% for the UK, when UK NHS figures give higher rates.

I don't understand why people in this thread are so keen on trying to hold on to the position that depression in the West is high compared to other places

I don't think that's happened in this particular sub-thread. One reason it happens is that some countries have better diagnosis than others. (Rates may be higher in developing nations, but cases are undiagnosed.)

To me it's quite self-evident that living in constant fear of being shot, blown up or just starving to death is more depressing than having to go through the agony of standing in traffic an hour before you can go home and eat a warm meal before falling asleep in front of the tv (to just name an example of what I've heard people as reasons on why life in the West is so 'stressing' and 'depressing').

That manages to be fantastically ignorant of developing nations and mental illness.

EDIT: Maybe I'm being stupid but I can't find that map in the linked research. I go to figures and scroll through. http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...

trurl123• 13 years ago

I live in Russia, but I don't know anybody who diagnosed with depression. This is very uncommon diagnosis. I think that these researchers used invalid data.

A map of depression rates around the world

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