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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."
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!!
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..."
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