Ok, so I don't know where I put all these articles that I looked up earlier in the year (basically, while we were doing our psychiatry block in school I became interested in depression prevalence and looked up some stuff on pubmed). But if I wait until I actually have time to find them, I'll never get around to posting anything.
If anyone really wants actual literature, though, I recommend doing a search for depression prevalence on pubmed. There are a lot of papers and I don't have time to dig through them again and find what I found, but it's a good place to search if you're interested (and do it on campus if you're a student somewhere if you can so you can get full text). From what I remember, though, the prevalence of major depression is basically the same in high, middle, and low income countries. And the idea that depression prevalence has actually increased in recent years is controversial. There's not a lot of good data to go back very far (like hundreds of years) and compare prevalences, but there are studies that have found that over the past few decades the actual prevalence has not increased. We just hear about it more because it's more ok to talk about it now.
And because I know people here are probably particularly interested in the claim the Utah has really high rates of depression compared with the rest of the US, I did a little searching just now to see what I could find. I found this report from the Utah department of health that shows that depression rates in Utah are comparable with the national average.
http://health.utah.gov/opha/publication ... on/CMD.pdf I've only skimmed it, but it looks like an interesting read.
And just some comments about depression in general. In psychiatry (and really in all of medicine), people use a biopsychosocial approach to mental illness (and physical illness). If you break up that word, you will see that there are three main types of factors that contribute to mental health problems - biological factors, psychological factors, and social factors. Some mental illnesses like schizophrenia are very biological. Depression tends to have a lot of contributors from all three areas. So when make claims that Utah has really high rates of depression and it's obviously because of the social factors involved in being in the LDS church and pressure to be perfect, that really shows a lack of understanding that there are biological factors (like imbalances of various neurotransmitters in the brain) and psychological factors that contribute as well. Pressure to be perfect and lack of social support can certainly make depression worse and can be a barrier to treatment. But even if we fixed all of the unsupportive social environments in the world, some people will still have depression because they will still have an imbalance of neurotransmitters in their brains.
And when I say that the biopsychosocial approach applies to physical illness as well, I don't mean people get diabetes, for example, because they have psychological issues or an unsupportive social environment. What I mean is that those factors affect how people cope with illness and what resources they have to deal with their medical problems. Two people with the exact same physical disease state may have very different levels of functioning because of those factors. It's an interesting concept, and the wikipedia article on it is actually pretty good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopsychosocial_model
Something else people here may find interesting if they haven't encountered it before are the social determinants of health (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_det ... _of_health) although that's getting a bit further from the main topic here.
If I come across anything else interesting I'll post it.