>> Depressives miss drinking? Time magazine reports on a study that shows alcohol abstainers tend to have higher rates of depression. “The most powerful explanation seems to be that abstainers have fewer close friends than drinkers, even though they tend to participate more often in organized social activities. Abstainers seem to have a harder time making strong friendship bonds, perhaps because they don’t have alcohol to lubricate their social interactions.”
>> Mad Men drink and work — so why can’t I? The women at feminist web mag Double X gave alcohol-fueled office work a try — and ended up giggling a lot. My opinion’s that you gotta get into the habit of drinking and working to make it work. One-day attempts just end up feeling like an unproductive vacation. (via kottke)
>> Did feminism make women miserable? Barbara Ehrenreich argues no — and points out some of the problems behind the study that seems to link up women’s lib with depression. While I agree with most of what Barbara has to say, I’d like to point out Barbara’s own analysis has its flaws.
Barbara argues “the idea that women have been sliding toward despair is contradicted by the one objective measure of unhappiness the authors offer: suicide rates,” which have been falling for women. “Happiness is, of course, a subjective state, but suicide is a cold, hard fact,” Barbara says. But closer examinations of suicide show that suicide rates are heavily influenced by societal factors that make suicide numbers less than “cold, hard” indicators of human happiness.
Another reason not mentioned about why people might be more “depressed” if they don’t drink is that the non-drinking people may feel responsible for the people that are drinking. For example they may end up taking care of adults because they are too drunk to care for themselves (providing rides, helping with legal problems and violence), taking care of fractured families and social groups due to alcoholic tendencies or else they have seen and experienced first hand what damage alcohol can do to innocent people. The result is that the whole alcohol-related environment is a bit more loaded for some people than to the people drinking. Maybe people are honest about this sort of reasoning for a study, but in social situations people feel very uncomfortable hearing someone say they are not drinking because they have close family members that died, someone close to them was nearly killed by someone that was very drunk or was severely injured by alcohol.
Comment by M — October 17, 2009 @ 8:16 am