- 21 Dec 2018 15:12
#14974442
Finally, proof of what many of us have known for years ….. work sucks.
Between 2011 and 2012, the polling company Gallup conducted the most detailed study ever carried out of how people feel about the thing we spend most of our waking lives doing – our paid work. They found that 13% of people say they are “engaged” in their work – they find it meaningful and look forward to it. Some 63% say they are “not engaged”, which is defined as “sleepwalking through their workday”. And 24% are “actively disengaged”: they hate it.
It turns out if you have no control over your work, you are far more likely to become stressed – and, crucially, depressed. Humans have an innate need to feel that what we are doing, day-to-day, is meaningful. When you are controlled, you can’t create meaning out of your work.
Long story short ….. doctors and drug companies have long been treating depression as a chemical imbalance that can be cured/alleviated with a pill/drug. This is true but, it seems, hardly the whole picture.
Drug companies – who fund almost all the research into these drugs – were taking this approach to studying chemical antidepressants. They would fund huge numbers of studies, throw away all the ones that suggested the drugs had very limited effects, and then only release the ones that showed success. To give one example: in one trial, the drug was given to 245 patients, but the drug company published the results for only 27 of them. Those 27 patients happened to be the ones the drug seemed to work for.
In many situations depression is caused by depressing situations that people feel themselves trapped in and can be alleviated by life style changes. These situations vary. Being alone and friendless or, possibly the most common, being stuck in a shitty job so that room and food may be purchased. Frequently a change in life situations would better alleviate depression than a change in brain chemistry.
Between 2011 and 2012, the polling company Gallup conducted the most detailed study ever carried out of how people feel about the thing we spend most of our waking lives doing – our paid work. They found that 13% of people say they are “engaged” in their work – they find it meaningful and look forward to it. Some 63% say they are “not engaged”, which is defined as “sleepwalking through their workday”. And 24% are “actively disengaged”: they hate it.
It turns out if you have no control over your work, you are far more likely to become stressed – and, crucially, depressed. Humans have an innate need to feel that what we are doing, day-to-day, is meaningful. When you are controlled, you can’t create meaning out of your work.
Long story short ….. doctors and drug companies have long been treating depression as a chemical imbalance that can be cured/alleviated with a pill/drug. This is true but, it seems, hardly the whole picture.
Drug companies – who fund almost all the research into these drugs – were taking this approach to studying chemical antidepressants. They would fund huge numbers of studies, throw away all the ones that suggested the drugs had very limited effects, and then only release the ones that showed success. To give one example: in one trial, the drug was given to 245 patients, but the drug company published the results for only 27 of them. Those 27 patients happened to be the ones the drug seemed to work for.
In many situations depression is caused by depressing situations that people feel themselves trapped in and can be alleviated by life style changes. These situations vary. Being alone and friendless or, possibly the most common, being stuck in a shitty job so that room and food may be purchased. Frequently a change in life situations would better alleviate depression than a change in brain chemistry.
"Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine." Virginia Woolf 1897
- By Pants-of-dog
- By FiveofSwords