A note in passing

[kaberett]

Should you wish to horrify people with Academic Citations, Whisman & Richardson (2015) gives a Beck Depression Inventory mode score of 0, on a sample of 15233 US college students.

Comments

[cadenzamuse]

!!!

[kaberett]

right

[niqaeli]

I still find this baffling. Like, I know it's TRUE, but I genuinely cannot comprehend how in the fuck it is even possible to score a 0 on the BDI, much less for that to be the most common score.

[kaberett]

Y U P

(M is obviously the source of this Charming Fact, but I went to actually look up the citation this evening because of a conversation elsenet, and HAVING dug it out I wanted to stick it somewhere I could find it again in future.)

[recessional]

I have managed to make it make sense when I make myself stop and consider each and every question individually, and from the mindset of "okay but should [name of randomly picked friend] feel like that?"

So like:

- I do not feel guilty
- I sometimes feel guilty
- I feel guilty most of the time
- I always feel guilty.

I ask myself: should Niq feel guilty? And like: no, you shouldn't. There is no reality that reflects one in which you should feel guilty. So . . . that's at best a 1.

And so on.

[delight]

So I work at a psychiatric hospital!

I grabbed everyone on my floor who is actually trained in psychology (because of my position I'm technically 'admin,' so that's only 4 out of like 20 people -- the majority of the people here are finance, I run a program -- to clarify, I am one of the four people) to show them this and everyone just stared for a minute.

Then sent the link to the clinical directors. They can choose whether or not to make their staff cry.

[kaberett]

AHAHAHAHAHA YOU'RE WELCOME

[recessional]

My psych, before she went on sabbatical to write her book, mostly worked with military veterans and refugees and so on (it's part of why we got on well - I was her LIGHT trauma-patient!) and I shared that one with her when we were talking about some of the times we want to throttle a Certain Type of CBT practitioner and the assumptions they make.

She stared at me BLANKLY.

(I originally got the Knowings from staranise I should mention, I just SHARE IT AGGRESSIVELY because I feel like the lot of us fucking KNOWING how much harder a setting we're going through the universe on is actually important.)

[alexseanchai]

...what am I missing here?

[kaberett]

Are you familiar with the BDI questions? I ask because A Bunch Of Us hereabouts hover at a score of around ~20, and just sort of stare in blank disbelief at the idea that the most common score is 0, because howwwwwwwww can people not score even ONE point?!

[rmc28]

I just had to look this up, but wikipedia sez the BDI measures from 0 to 63, the higher the number the more depressed. So 0 means not at all depressed, and modal score means that was the most common score in that US College population.

I don't find this surprising or horrifying, but I've never been chronically or severely depressed[1], so I think this is about differences in perspective ...


[1] I have had several episodes of mild to moderate depression, but all but one seem to have been triggered by lengthy periods of stress, and went away when I got enough support to do something about the stress (even my formally diagnosed post-natal depression fits that pattern). The exception was a specific birth control pill, and the depression went away amazingly fast when I stopped taking it.

[batrachian]

I'm not seeing it in the link, but am now deeply curious what the actual distribution WAS (other than "non-normal")

Also, um. Haven't seen the questions m'self and not sure what I'd score.

(Probably not a fucking zero.)

[kaberett]

Want me to dig out a link to the questions for you, or would that be too much hitting-your-brain-over-the-head for one week? <3

[sporky_rat]

Zero?!

Well.

(My BDI runs about 21, and that's on good meds.)

[sporky_rat]

(My PHQ-9 has been on the 16-17 range for the last year even with meds. My NP is getting grumpy about how my depression isn't eating up with meds, but her nurse is pretty well at the point of 'are you functional? Can you get through the day and and do what you need to do? Then for now, we'll keep doing what we can.' my NP's nurse is Eminently Practical.)

[vass]

16 right now and I'm actually way better than I was a month or so ago.

[mathemagicalschema]

That is absolutely wild. Who are these people???

(Right now my score is 30. I am on meds and in therapy.)

[recessional]

So my bff is our Token Hetero and also our Token Neurotypical.

When she was having SERIOUS DOUBTS about her life path, and things were very very difficult, and she was struggling, and basically was doing the worst she'd ever done, she got a bit worried that she might be depressed and took the test.

She did not make it past single digits.

[vass]

Oh good, thank you. I knew the (incredible) fact, but I didn't have a citation for it. That sounds like a very healthy sample size.

[kaberett]

Doesn't it! I was having a conversation elsenet in which a friend (who... possibly doesn't actually know that I'm chronically depressed and probably living with a personality disorder and so on and so forth) expressed disbelief at my assertion that normal healthy people get a hit of The Good Brain ChemicalsTM when they Achieve A Thing, rather than just a temporary lessening of the all-pervasive dread and horror of Imminent Failure, and that the latter is pathological and leads to burn-out. And, like, I absolutely get the sense of disbelief, but also I Have Citations, The Data Is On My Side Here, Absurd As It Sounds.

[steorra]

Hm. I think I'm probably at 5-ish. I don't think I've ever been Actually Depressed, unless maybe one definitely-situational few weeks.

[jedusor]

Without background knowledge of the measure, this post reads as if college students are extraordinarily depressed. I can understand being surprised by the actual fact, but why would it be horrifying that most people aren't depressed?

I took the online version of the test linked somewhere in the comments here and was annoyed that it didn't spit out an actual number, but I think it was something like 7 or 8. It seems better at not getting a false positive off my ADHD/anxiety symptoms than the PHQ-9; the shrink I used to see always had me do one of those at every visit and I eventually started refusing because I didn't think it was measuring what it was trying to measure. (I don't think I ever got a worrying score, but it was definitely skewed in that direction on bad ADHD days.)

[kaberett]

Re PHQ-9: yup, absolutely, it is definitely the case that actual appropriate scores for the individual gotta take into account their life circumstances.

I can understand being surprised by the actual fact, but why would it be horrifying that most people aren't depressed?

I think the reason it's horrifying is mostly the perspective-shift: I'm very used to hanging-out-in-the-low-20s-on-the-BDI being a good score, a Normal Baseline What People Deal With; when I try to wrap my head around the fact that this is absolutely not The Normative Experience I tend to short out a bit. So much of depression boils down to "if I just tried harder... if I were just less useless... everyone else handles this better, I'm just pathetic..." that the absolute irrefutable evidence that, in fact, everybody else is by and large not handling this... necessarily forces a shift in perspective and worldview, and involves taking a good hard look at, actually, how horrifying the inside of your own head... is. By default. On a good day.

[chiasmata]

Ahahahahahaha. I’m scoring, what, about 10? And I’m doing really rather well, for me.

[ewt]

I ... cannot actually brain this. I keep thinking "well, that's a flawed test then."

Possibly because of a peer selection effect, i.e. university students I knew socially when I was at university were almost certainly unrepresentative. But that isn't very many people, because mature student.

[ewt]

Like, my score is in the moderate range, and I'm... actually doing really well given that a) it's December and b) I have a pile of PhD stress currently. If I were to exclude my childhood and teens (when I was obviously unhappy), and then look back at my adult life and exclude periods of depression bad enough that I sought medication? I would still say I'm currently doing *considerably better* than my baseline. I don't really consider myself depressed in this state; tired, yes. (And even there, I'm doing better than a few years ago.)

Yet my "considerably better than baseline" is a well person's "maybe seek medical attention for this".

No wonder being normal seems so hard.

[sebenikela]

...my score is "ffs mo find a fucking therapist already" and also "hopefully once my thesis is in my brain will improve because I really don't want to do another round of meds roulette"

urgh brains why are they Like This