
Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study - breck
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/18/depression-and-suicide-linked-to-air-pollution-in-new-global-study
======
im3w1l
> The results show strong correlations, but research that would prove a causal
> link is difficult because ethical experiments cannot deliberately expose
> people to harm.

This is kind of my hobby horse: you don't need to subject people to harm to
test causuality. You can do the opposite: Remove harm and see what happens.
Maybe give people free HVAC upgrades to filter more particles.

~~~
homulilly
Or, like, reduce air pollution since in addition to this possibility it's
already known to cause asthma, lung cancer, and heart disease.

~~~
barney54
This is not true of asthma. Outdoor air quality in the United States has
improved over time [1] and asthma rates has increased.

[1] [https://www.epa.gov/air-trends](https://www.epa.gov/air-trends)

~~~
dtwest
Anecdotally, I was diagnosed with asthma as a child and walked around with an
inhaler for a few years. I liked it, it tasted funny and seemed like a cool
gadget at the time. But I did not have asthma. And I'm convinced there's no
way my parents would've been diagnosed with it 30 years ago with the minor
symptoms I had.

So perhaps the asthma numbers are influenced by an increased willingness to
diagnose it. Just a thought.

~~~
icandoit
The guys say that death by asthma (severe cases certainly) are gently falling,
but it looks pretty flat to me.

[https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/asthma_stats/asthma_underlying_de...](https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/asthma_stats/asthma_underlying_death.html)

Do you have any intuition for how to identify an increased willingness to
over-diagnose? It may be true, but how do we test this hypothesis?

------
sn41
I live in Northern India which has heavy air pollution. I recently bought an
air purifier. Just the difference in the quality of sleep is amazing. And it
is not a placebo effect. The filters are already visibly grimy. The PM 2.5
consistently now is around mid 20s down from around 180-190.

I would recommend it to all in North India who can afford it, esp households
with small children.

~~~
saagarjha
> And it is not a placebo effect.

How do you know?

~~~
JamesBarney
I think he means based on the size of the effect it's unlikely to be a
placebo.

~~~
dhshahsndeisjwn
right, but 50% of the effect of opiates is placebo, so we shouldn't be too
surprised.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11207392](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11207392)

~~~
JamesBarney
Placebo's effect on pain is one of if not the largest placebo effect, but the
effect size on sleep is much smaller.

------
pointillistic
This is way beyond air, this is water we drink, the chemicals in processed
food, the pesticides in the produce. The compounds in furniture, paints,
stains, carpeting, general building materials including insulation, plastic
plumbing,HVAC components, insistence on living in un-ventilated, year around
closed windows spaces.

~~~
arpa
This is also about population density and the lifestyle in more populated
(denser) areas.

------
aalleavitch
I'm pretty confident that depression is not a result of air pollution, but
rather that both air pollution and depression are results of
industrialization. The problem is not chemical. The problem is how we live.

~~~
sooheon
What gives you this certainty?

~~~
aalleavitch
Because the medicalization of depression is a convenient way to avoid thinking
about the fact that it is a prominent feature of the status quo, not some
aberration. Pollution correlates with industrial manufacturing and warehouse
work environments and crushing poverty that forces people to live in a manner
consistent with economic efficiency rather than with human happiness and well-
being. Long work hours and little money contribute to social isolation. Debt
traps put people in situations in which they could not possibly ever claw
their way out.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24121465](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24121465)

> A meta-analysis of pooled odds ratios showed a significant relationship
> between debt and mental disorder (OR=3.24), depression (OR=2.77), suicide
> completion (OR=7.9), suicide completion or attempt (OR=5.76), problem
> drinking (OR=2.68), drug dependence (OR=8.57), neurotic disorder (OR=3.21)
> and psychotic disorders (OR=4.03).

When are we going to start designing our economies around creating a healthy
and enjoyable environment for humans to actually live in, and not arranging
human lives around squeezing the greatest amount of economic efficiency out of
them as possible? The way we make ourselves live is tantamount to animal
abuse.

~~~
badpun
> crushing poverty

My grandma lived in what essentially was a pre-industrial society. She lived
in crushing poverty (i.e. being hungry most of the time). Then, our country
industrialized and she was never hungry again.

~~~
aalleavitch
I won't disagree with this, I'm sure that what your grandma struggled through
was difficult. I wouldn't argue for us going back to pre-industrial society.
Technology can be a massive unadulterated good when it is applied correctly to
our problems.

That doesn't mean, however, that the way we live doesn't desperately need to
be improved upon. We may have lost hunger but we gained depression. Maybe we
should be lucky to die of suicide rather than to starve, but I think we can
and should try to build a world where we don't have to do either.

EDIT: I also want to add that debt is an entirely different but very real and
horrible kind of crushing poverty. People in debt have their basic needs met,
but they are slaves to a number they carry over their heads, often for the
rest of their lives. I can't honestly say that is always a better life than to
be free to do what you want even if you must constantly contend with hunger.

------
drderidder
No doubt pollution will make you sick, but I'm inclined to think that
depression has a lot to do with just living in an over-crowded, unattractive,
big industrial city environment, having little contact with the natural world.

~~~
icandoit
Suicide rates are higher in rural America than in urban America.

[https://www.cdc.gov/ruralhealth/Suicide.html](https://www.cdc.gov/ruralhealth/Suicide.html)

Why imagine what is true when you can take a second and find out what is true?
The truth is external to you, look for it. I don't want to be a jerk, but you
have generated a hypothesis(great), why not test it against the facts
available to you? Maybe you owe it to yourself.

According to this, it is also true of Germany:

[https://ij-healthgeographics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...](https://ij-
healthgeographics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12942-017-0112-x)

Let me know if you have better data. (I am aware that Indian Reservation tilt
the scales big time toward rural areas, but do not think that removing them as
outliers changes the balance)

~~~
kazagistar
That seems like it's likely mostly just conflated with one of the well known
causes of suicide, financial instability and generally being poor. The better
data would be studies that try to compare similar socioeconomic classes, age
ranges, etc.

I wish it took only a second to find out what is true, but data is complicated
and has lots of confounding variables, and it's too easy to not account for
them and get totally untrue information out of the data.

~~~
icandoit
Why insist on causality depending on a single variable? This is very strange
to me. Of course the trust is confounded, the truth is multi-variable.

The algorithm to pursue truth:

    
    
        1. Find out how you personally differ from happy and healthy people.
        2. Reduce those differences however you can.
        3. Watch yourself become happier and healthier.
        4. That's the whole thing.
    

Does being poor suck? Yes. Reduce it's likelihood and it's impact.

Don't demand that information conform to your assumption before you can take
action. Take action and document your assumptions and challenge them along
your journey to improvement.

A neural network does not make demands of its data set. It changes itself to
better match the limited truth that it does see.

Uncertainty and doubt are your enemies. Challenge them with data don't reduce
yourself to paralysis. Look up "Epistemic learned helplessness".

An example: Will flossing improve my health? Be the kind of person that wants
to improve their health and tries to improve their health. Try flossing as
matter of character, not based on whether it does independent of the social
class of other flossers. If successful people think that other successful
people floss, then they will too. There is no isolation among the variables.
Don't demand that of reality.

------
coconut_crab
There are many factors at work here but I am sure being forced to stay indoor
is depressive as hell. The city where I live has been in constant smog with
AQI in the range of 200~300* and every outdoor activities are stopped, I can't
even talk a walk around the nearby lakes to relieve my stress.

* the air is terrible already and the government is going to build more coal plants, powered by the 'cleanest coal' approved by the POTUS, sigh. Instead of one nuclear power plant now we have four coal plants instead, great.

~~~
yalok
What city & country is this?

~~~
hnuser123456
POTUS = prez of US

------
zby
"Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation: Causal Nets Cause Common Confounding"
[https://www.gwern.net/Causality](https://www.gwern.net/Causality) \- that
should be a required reading.

~~~
Rowern
So much this.

------
tstrimple
Not sure how to reconcile this with the fact that suicide rates in rural areas
of the US far exceed suicide rates in urban areas. Do the availability of guns
in rural areas really offset this effect that much?

~~~
chippy
In the UK there was a study on social isolation comparing rural and urban
people to evaluate the assumption that people in "isolated" rural areas are
lonely. It found the reverse - that people in urban areas are more socially
isolated.

[https://www.co-operative.coop/campaigning/loneliness](https://www.co-
operative.coop/campaigning/loneliness)

"The report briefly mentions the ‘rurality factor’ as presenting greater
barriers to connection, with rural areas having fewer and more expensive
support services such as transport links. However, it goes on to suggest that
‘rural communities were felt to be less closed off than their urban
counterparts’, with rural participants more likely to ask how people are, or
stop for chats."

------
chmod775
Something that isn't immediately clear to me is whether they accounted for the
causes of air pollution.

If not this is like observing that there are a lot of loud bangs in warzones
and concluding loud noises kill people, even though they are at best just a
side effect of the actual causes.

~~~
IanSanders
I'm questioning this as well. Air pollution is almost always an attribute of
big cities, which mostly imply certain lifestyle. For example, living in
concrete box for most of one's life is new to our species.

~~~
JamesBarney
Also air pollution is usually highest near freeways and plants which are also
notoriously poorer areas.

------
poulsbohemian
Way back in the 1920s, my great-great grandfather killed himself. The obituary
paralleled the family story of his life: he'd been a drifter of sorts his
whole life, always looking for some way out of the life of a dirt-poor,
subsistence farmer. He was the first member of the family to leave the Amish /
Mennonite colonies of the east and come west. When he died, he was far from
home in the middle of nowhere, not a penny to his name.

Last night around the dinner table we were discussing an article from The Week
about video game addiction. It described young men a lot like my great-great
grandfather, with just the moment in history changed. It seems fairly
straightforward that the root causes are:

\-- Limited economic opportunities / safety net. \-- Lack (for whatever
reason) of social ties and support. A lack of an outlet for emotional
intimacy.

Are chemicals, including in our air, at play? Sure, possibly. But, it seems
clear that in any case you hear about a suicide the story is basically the
same - someone simply did not see a future for themselves. We have not come
fully to grips with a post-industrial / post-agrarian economy here in the US,
leaving many _men_ in particular without much purpose.

The rural / urban divide is mentioned in this thread - living here in rural
America (hi y'all!) is a microcosm of the rest of the country - we have the
same problems as cities, just on a different but compressed scale. You see
both the happiest and most miserable people up close. If you have the
financial means to live away from the city, then you can be the big fish in
the small pond, IE: both the financial and social I mentioned above. On the
other hand, if you are living paycheck to paycheck, surrounded by a limited
social network, etc, is it really that surprising it leads to depression?
That's the same regardless of your physical location.

------
grandinj
Oh more likely, both of them are correlated with a third variable (i.e.
confounding) which is most likely living in a dense city

~~~
conjectures
This. Unless the Guardian is doing a big disservice to the underlying
material, this sounds like sloppy science.

------
aaron695
This article is a dumpster fire, read to actual journal article - DOI:
10.1289/EHP4595

"DISCUSSION: Our findings support the hypothesis of an association between
long-term PM2:5 exposure and depression, as well as supporting hypotheses of
possible associations between long-term PM2:5 exposure and anxiety and between
short-term PM10 exposure and suicide. The limited literature and
methodological challenges in this field, including heterogeneous outcome
definitions, exposure assessment, and residual confounding, suggest further
high-quality studies are warranted to investigate potentially causal
associations between air pollution and poor mental health."

Don't really get the point, not really sure the journal is P hacking with PM10
being suicide and PM2.5 being depression but PM2.5/10 gives you cancer's which
is depressing, why wouldn't you clean your air?

------
seanmcdirmid
Oh wow, this totally. My wife had a rough time in Beijing during long
stretches of bad air, and I knew other people whose moods would visibly change
during those times.

The suicide aspect I’m not sure of, but many people I knew had the option of
leaving and did.

------
igor47
plug: if you're interested in air quality issues, we're hiring at Aclima. ping
me at igor at aclima.io. we're deploying a distributed sensor grid to get
actionable air-quality intelligence around the world, which we believe can
motivate regulators to act, and motivate citizens to bug their regulators.

we're looking for folks interested in: * data engineering * firmware and IoT
platforms * full-stack and internal tooling * data scientists and other kinds
of scientists interested in data, air quality, and atmospheric/environmental
modeling

------
hyfgfh
[https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-
correlations](https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)

------
sgspace
Buy a personal HEPA air filter on Amazon and get purified water delivered.
Quit trusting your city officials with your health.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Probably cheaper and easier to test your water and air.

If your air or water quality suck, take it to city hall

Also worth noting that the city can only do so much. A factory 3 counties over
could spew noticeable smog, and you don't have any recourse outside of moving.

------
stakhanov
I can't find the link to the actual study. What I'd like to know is whether
there was any research into the actual causal relationships (such as the other
study that was linked with pollution particles found in brains), or if it was
just statistical correlation between places with high pollution and places
with high levels of depression and suicide. If the latter, it could well be a
spurious correlation (e.g. pollution happens in big cities, people in big
cities tend to have more stressful jobs, stressful jobs cause burnout and
depression...)

~~~
smcleod
[https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP4595](https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP4595)

------
pintable
Not unsurprising, though obvious caveat about correlation and causation. I
wouldn't be surprised if pollution is correlated with other things like low
quality of life, poverty, etc. All of these probably interact to create an
environment that leads to poor mental health.

------
adam0c
I'm all for cutting all pollution but is this just not a long shot to try link
the two and get more results faster. linking it to more health issues and
deaths

------
motbus4
Surely not because industry-based jobs let people depressed and surely not
because places with industries have been polluting air more than other places.
Sure....

------
wufufufu
Anyone have a link to an effective air filter? So I can order one and benefit
from the placebo effect. Preferably on the 'zon so I can get 2-day shipping.

------
vonnik
Fwiw, Scott Alexander wrote a couple great articles about depression in 2017:

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/12/toward-a-predictive-
th...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/12/toward-a-predictive-theory-of-
depression/)

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/13/what-is-depression-
any...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/13/what-is-depression-anyway-the-
synapse-hypothesis/)

The first tries to fit it into a predictive processing framework, the second
rounds up a variety of findings, including correlation with inflammation and
treatment with ketamine.

------
ainiriand
The more we look at the data the more it seems that if we want to save lives
we have to replace coal plants with nuclear plants.

------
gfs78
So, living conditions in your typical high polluted city have nothing to do
with being depressed or suicidal?

------
dunderinit
Whenever I go to the countryside and start breathing the pure air I start to
feel drowzy AF. Also allergic AF.

------
larrywright
Isn’t air pollution tightly correlated to living in large cities? How do these
studies factor that in?

~~~
bagacrap
[http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-
Modules/BS/BS704-EP713_Co...](http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-
Modules/BS/BS704-EP713_Confounding-EM/BS704-EP713_Confounding-EM5.html)

------
winrid
Based on my travels it always seemed the more humidity the more relaxed the
environment/people.

------
nashashmi
What counts as air pollution? Smog? Sulfur dioxide?

~~~
higeyuki
Quite a simple concept, it's particulate matter in the air, the greater the
density the worse the effect on humans, animals, and ecology. It would be
difficult to measure the effect of one specific particulate's effect.

Particle pollution — also called particulate matter (PM) — is made up of
particles (tiny pieces) of solids or liquids that are in the air. These
particles may include:

    
    
        Dust
        Dirt
        Soot
        Smoke
        Drops of liquid
    

Some particles are big enough (or appear dark enough) to see — for example,
you can often see smoke in the air. Others are so small that you can’t see
them in the air.

[https://www.cdc.gov/air/particulate_matter.html](https://www.cdc.gov/air/particulate_matter.html)

What Are People Dying of on High Air Pollution Days?
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935184710048)

"The air pollution disasters in London in 1952, the Meuse valley in 1930, and
in Donoroa, Pennsylvania, in 1948 made it clear that extremely high levels of
particulate-based smog could produce large increases in the daily mortality
rate."

------
higeyuki
Temperature variability also factors into this. Though by itself is not a
major factor, it seems to be a combination of things.

If anything we are not "killing the planet" we are destroying the conditions
that allow life to thrive on Earth. I've been following these links since 2013
and more studies are showing this could be a "thing."

"Here we estimate associations between multiple environmental factors (air
quality, residential greenness, mean temperature, and temperature variability)
and self-assessed mental health scores for over 20,000 Chinese residents.
Mental health scores were surveyed in 2010 and 2014, allowing us to link
changes in mental health to the changes in environmental variables. Increases
in air pollution and temperature variability are associated with higher
probabilities of declined mental health. Mental health is statistically
unrelated to mean temperature in this study, and the effect of greenness on
mental health depends on model settings, suggesting a need for further study.
Our findings suggest that the environmental policies to reduce emissions of
air pollution or greenhouse gases can improve mental health of the public in
China."

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10196-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10196-y)

 __ _More importantly:

1\. Air Pollution Linked to Mutations
[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2002/12/air-pollution-
linked...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2002/12/air-pollution-linked-
mutations)

2\. Air pollution causes sperm mutations
[https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080113/full/news.2008.439.h...](https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080113/full/news.2008.439.html)

3\. January 1994 What Are People Dying of on High Air Pollution Days?
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935184710048)

"The air pollution disasters in London in 1952, the Meuse valley in 1930, and
in Donoroa, Pennsylvania, in 1948 made it clear that extremely high levels of
particulate-based smog could produce large increases in the daily mortality
rate."_ __

Edit: A Few more from earlier times:

1996 Feb: Psychiatric aspects of air pollution.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8637739](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8637739)

December 1984: Air pollution and depressive symptomatology: Exploratory
analyses of intervening psychosocial factors
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01256411](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01256411)

Nov. 2, 1999 Air Pollution Linked to Increased Heart Rate
[https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/19991102/air-pollution-
linke...](https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/19991102/air-pollution-linked-to-
increased-heart-rate#1)

1981 Dec The psychological effects of indoor air pollution.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805416/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805416/)

June 1989 Psychological effects of air pollution on healthy residents—A time-
series approach
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02724...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494489800027)

------
QuamStiver
Nothing was more depressing than growing up in LA in the 1970s, lungs hurting,
and 30% of PE classes cancelled because of smog. I remember looking at the
sickly yellow light casting this disgusting puce sheen on the asphalt. The
city was all I knew, and I hated it. Once a year we would go up to the Eastern
Sierra and I felt released, natural, like this was how the world should be.
Returning home to the smog and traffic was a depressogenic gutpunch.

~~~
geomark
I didn't grow up there during that time, but moved there in the late 70's.
There were indeed many smoggy days. But surprisingly it got much better after
about 10 years. I assume it was a result of stricter regulations. These days
the air quality in the LA area is generally pretty good, with historical PM2.5
data showing "green" most of the time [http://aqicn.org/city/los-
angeles/](http://aqicn.org/city/los-angeles/)

------
allovernow
The authors admit there is no causal relationship established between
pollutants and depression. It's pure correlation. I don't understand how
nebulous studies like this even get published. Still very convenient that we
have _yet another_ reason to abandon fossil fuels. Almost starting to feel
like a trendy scapegoat and honestly an irrelevant comment given the total
uncertainty behind the relationship.

But the Guardian made clear it's bias when it advertised for funding with a
giant banner claiming "Trump must be impeached.". This isn't objective, fact
based journalism, it's propagandist advocacy journalism.

------
aszantu
also: look into anti nutrients, some of the depression might just be nutrient
deficiency. Can be tested by fasting for 4 days.

~~~
IanSanders
If that's the case, how would fasting work? Wouldn't it just reliably deprive
you from nutrients hence give you a depression?

~~~
aszantu
I don't know why, but there are a lot of people where fasting works for
depression. Then there are ways of eating which seem to have an effect like
low fodmaps. Etc.

~~~
icandoit
Being the kind of person that is willing to experiment to solve their problems
is better than being a person that is miserable and changes nothing.

A random walk may not get you out a bad situation, but staying put is strictly
worse less likely to get you out.

What would a reinforcement learning agent do?

~~~
IanSanders
I'm just trying to understand the connection between

>some of the depression might just be nutrient deficiency.

>Can be tested by fasting for 4 days

~~~
aszantu
anti nutrients causing inflammation(body uses nutrients to fight
inflammation), leaving them out calms the inflammation and the body can use
the nutrients it has better. Btw. supplementing zinc and magnesium seems to
help ppl with depression. Lectins(all seeds) as in beans, nuts, corn and wheat
are binding to iron and zinc, I forgot what was with the magnesium, but it
played a role as well...

------
boyadjian
Air pollution linked to overpopulation. Overpopulation linked to high birth
rates. So, in conclusion : Depression and suicide linked to high birth rates

~~~
cjslep
You didn't go far enough:

Air pollution linked to overpopulation. Overpopulation linked to high birth
rates. High birth rates linked to sex. So in conclusion: Celibacy cures
depression and suicide.

Of course, why stop there? We could keep going deeper.

------
mkhpalm
Wouldn't a cleaner observation be: "depression and suicide linked to the
largest cities in new global study"?

~~~
Noumenon72
The cleanest observation would be Everything is Correlated
([https://www.gwern.net/Causality](https://www.gwern.net/Causality)) and
correlation is not a productive way of investigating the world.

~~~
icandoit
Correlation is all we have to go on mostly.

If A causes B and B causes C then we can only say that A and C are correlated.
If the average chain of causality is 4 long then the Bs outnumber the As and
Cs.

Inductive (observation) evidence is more available than deductive (purely
logical) evidence. Why limit yourself to only deductive evidence?

I don't have to resort to a chemistry lesson to convince you that drinking
bleach would be very harmful, right? Can't I merely show you photos of bleach-
bellied-corpses?

------
bransonf
The causal relationship seems like a stretch here. I highly doubt reducing air
pollution will cure anyone’s depression.

That said, it has other value in signally regions of high air pollution are
regions of higher proportional depression.

Areas of high pollution are less desirable to live in. If you live right next
to a highway, garbage dump or power plant, your property value is going to be
lower. (I must admit, I’m taking a US-centric perspective here)

With that in mind, you could just as easily conclude that living in poorer
regions causes depression.

Anyone who thinks curing depression is as simple as cleaning up the air is
oversimplifying a much more complicated relationship.

~~~
ptah
> If you live right next to a highway, garbage dump or power plant

In cities like London most of the city is like that. probably same as L.A. or
New york, the whole place is next to a highway + powerplant + garbage dump

