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Is Your Mood a Result of Where You Live?
Ed writes "Apparently, the Centers for Disease Control released a study indicating that geography can have a significant impact on mood. You may not be surprised to learn that Kentucky is more depressing than Hawaii. However, ranking up there with Hawaii are Minnesota, the Dakotas and Wisconsin. Frustratingly, they have not yet published the study on the web, so it is left as an exercise for the reader to find the original study and post a link for the rest of us."
Personally, I prefer noisy places to silent places. I currently reside part of the year in Finland, and the taciturn nature of the people and the strict noise laws only add to the depression caused by the lack of sunlight and long winters. When I leave Finland for somewhere like Cairo or Hong Kong, it's like rejoining civilization.
Back in the 1960s, Larry Niven (in World of Ptaavs, now collected in Three Books of Known Space ) suggested that the future will get ever noisier, thanks to a rising population and people living closer together in the metropolis, necessitating changes in human evolution. Well, nowadays sound-proofing materials and noise-canceling headphones are getting cheaper and cheaper, so noise is a nuisance that can be overcome.
My university network has fulltext access to the journal. The journal article doesn't seem to be available yet, but the publisher's press release is. From the Dread Publisher Elsevier:
San Diego, CA, 14 April 2009 - Frequent Mental Distress (FMD), defined as having 14 or more days in the previous month when stress, depression and emotional problems were not good , is not evenly distributed across the United States. In fact, certain geographic areas have consistently high or consistently low FMD incidence, as shown in a study published in the June 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Combining data from annual large-scale surveys in 1993-2001 and 2003-2006 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers found that the adult prevalence of FMD was 9.4% overall, ranging from 6.6% in Hawaii to 14.4% in Kentucky. FMD prevalence varied both over time and by geographic area within states. From the earlier period to the later period, the mean prevalence of FMD increased by at least 1 percentage point in 27 states and by more than 4 percentage points in Mississippi, Oklahoma and West Virginia. The Appalachian and the Mississippi Valley regions had high and increasing FMD prevalence, and the upper Midwest had low and decreasing FMD prevalence.
The state-based Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) has asked questions about mental health since 1993 and collects data from random telephone surveys of adult residents across the U.S. More than 1.2 million people were surveyed in each of the two periods. FMD prevalence was determined by county, and the results were smoothed to reduce variation from random sampling due to small sample sizes in less populous counties.
For the 1993-2001 period, the smoothed FMD prevalence was less than 8% in 31.8% of the 3112 counties analyzed and was 12.0% in 4.8% of the counties. For the 2003-2006 period, the smoothed FMD prevalence was "Because FMD often indicates potentially unmet health and social service needs, programs for public health, community mental health and social services whose jurisdictions include areas with high FMD levels should collaborate to identify and eliminate the specific preventable sources of this distress," said Dr. Matthew M. Zack, the study's lead investigator. "With the growing scientific literature linking FMD to treatable mental illnesses and preventable mental health problems, the increased use of these surveillance data in community mental health decision making is especially warranted. The continued surveillance of mental distress may help these programs to identify unmet needs and disparities, to focus their policies and interventions and to evaluate their performance over time."
The article is "Geographic Patterns of Frequent Mental Distress: U.S. Adults, 1993-2001 and 2003-2006" by David G. Moriarty, BS, Matthew M. Zack, MD, MPH, James B. Holt, PhD, Daniel P. Chapman, PhD, MSc and Marc A. Safran, MD, MPA, DFAPA, FACPM. It appears in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 36, Issue 6 (June 2009) published by Elsevier.
I moved FROM Wisconsin to Oregon 5 years ago and I have to say my life is far more diverse now, far more cheery. When I deal with people from "back home" they don't seem to be happy so much as living in willful ignorance.
I guess what I'm saying is my anecdotal experience is that people in the "more depressed" regions are more aware of their true mood and perhaps answer more honestly because of it?
No sig for you!!
Live in a crappy neighborhood makes for crappy moods? Lemme be the first to tell the CDC: DUUUH!
I don't know how many times I've read of someone discovering a self-reenforcing feedback loop of one kind or another and reporting it as a hitherto unknown and insightful fact.
Life, as many people have spotted, is, of course, terribly unfair. For instance, the first time the Heart of Gold ever crossed the galaxy the massive improbability field it generated caused two hundred and thirty-nine thousand lightly-fried eggs to materialize in a large, wobbly heap on the famine-struck land of Poghril in the Pansel system. The whole Poghril tribe had just died out from famine, except for one man who died of cholesterol-poisoning some weeks later.
The Poghrils, always a pessimistic race, had a little riddle, the asking of which used to give them the only tiny twinges of pleasure they ever experienced. One Poghril would ask another Poghril, "Why is life like hanging upside down with your head in a bucket of hyena offal?" to which the second Poghril would reply, "I don't know, why is life like hanging upside down with your head in a bucket of hyena offal?" to which the first Poghril would reply, "I don't know either. Wretched, isn't it?"
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I live in Southern California. A few years ago I went to stay with some family in Milwaukee. I was there for about a week and one of the things that I noticed was how much more relaxed everyone was. The pace of life was really different. People seemed to take their time getting places and nobody really seemed to be in a big hurry to get anywhere. When waiting in line at places, there wasn't an urgency to get to the front. People took the time to talk to each other. It seemed like for the most part nobody had anything else better to do, and they were all living in the moment.
I had an interesting experience when I got back to LA. After I got off of the plane, I was walking through the airport at Wisconson speed and seemed like people were hurrying by me. None the less, my mind was still in vacation mode and I was enjoying the tranquil feeling that was still with me. I got my car out of the parking lot and proceeded to drive home. As soon as I had to merge onto the freeway, I felt the rush of the rest of the world catch up with me. All of a sudden my brain kicked into high gear. It was like a survival mechanism. There was no way I could deal with the 405 freeway while in the Wisconson mindset.
Conversely, I know people who have grown up in Southern California who then leave and hate where they end up. Almost universally, those who leave and miss California all say almost the same thing. "Everything here is too slow. There isn't enough to do." Personally, I can't wait to get out of here. I think the pace of life here sucks.
"Lonely people back in town. I saw it in the supermarket and at the Laundromat and when we checked out from the motel. These pickup campers through the redwoods, full of lonely retired people looking at trees on their way to look at the ocean. You catch it in the first fraction of a glance from a new face...that searching look...then it's gone.
We see much more of this loneliness now. It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much.
The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.
It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV.
But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasn't much feeling of loneliness. That's the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. I'm undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true..."
Tweet, tweet.
I've lived in Minnesota, South Dakota (western & eastern), and Arizona, and it never ceases to amaze me how different lifestyles are from place to place. I think a lot of people's happiness issues could be solved by moving to a culture more suited to their personality.
I have SAD, and in MN/eastern SD I had horrible winter time depression. Just moving to western SD where the sun shines through most of the winter made an incredible difference!!! I really liked the winter time there, at least as compared to Minnesota. The culture there also suited my tastes better. SD has a very low population density, which makes a difference, and like another poster mentioned earlier about Wisconsin, the pace of life is much slower and more relaxed. People there were always friendly, you could easily strike up a conversation with the guy next to you in line, and random folks would look out for you if you were in a bind. That's amazing.
However, even though SD is sunny, my ancestry is from the middle-east and I am physically designed for a warm climate. Moving to Arizona was the ultimate realization of my American-continent destiny. :) I have never been happier.
In the end, what I'm trying to say is, listen to what your body and mind are telling you. If you don't like where you're at, think hard about WHY you don't like it, and try to find a place that suits you better. If you don't like it, you can always go back.
Exercise too. I moved from Denver (300+ days of sunshine per year) to just up the road from you in London. I think the first winter we had three months of grey overcast skies, which I found very tough. The second winter was still, but not so bad. Then I moved a little further up to Toronto which wasn't as grey. I've always found the winters there far easier though, which I think is more to do with me cycling and running all year around. If you get out in the winter properly, the winter isn't as bad. And those occasional days of low wind but brilliant sunshine when you can run by the lake with light reflecting of white snow and blue water, in light clothing even if it's below -10, are really really uplifting.
A related article is from Forbes: America's Most Livable Cities. They rate the Portland, Maine metropolitan statistical area as the most livable city based on income growth, cost of living, crime, leisure, and unemployment.
Really? From Florida Statute 316.293:
(2) OPERATING NOISE LIMITS.--No person shall operate or be permitted to operate a vehicle at any time or under any condition of roadway grade, load, acceleration, or deceleration in such a manner as to generate a sound level in excess of the following limit for the category of motor vehicle and applicable speed limit at a distance of 50 feet from the center of the lane of travel under measurement procedures established under subsection (3).
(a) For motorcycles other than motor-driven cycles:
Sound level limit
Speed limit
35 mph or less Speed limit
over 35 mph
Before January 1, 1979 82 dB A 86 dB A
On or after January 1, 1979 78 dB A 82 dB A
(b) For any motor vehicle with a GVWR or GCWR of 10,000 pounds or more:
Sound level limit
Speed limit
35 mph or less Speed limit
over 35 mph
On or after January 1, 1975 86 dB A 90 dB A
(c) For motor-driven cycles and any other motor vehicle not included in paragraph (a) or paragraph (b):
Sound level limit
Speed limit
35 mph or less Speed limit
over 35 mph
Before January 1, 1979 76 dB A 82 dB A
On or after January 1, 1979 72 dB A 79 dB A
There is also
(a) No person shall modify the exhaust system of a motor vehicle or any other noise-abatement device of a motor vehicle operated or to be operated upon the highways of this state in such a manner that the noise emitted by the motor vehicle is above that emitted by the vehicle as originally manufactured.
These are of course rather spottily enforced, and if you looked at the statistics I'm sure you'd find a large number of import cars cited and a much smaller number of domestics and motorcycles.