Youngsters report problems with anxiety, depression, sleep and “FoMO”
.. Roughly a quarter of British adults have been diagnosed at some point with a psychiatric disorder, costing the economy an estimated 4.5% of GDP per year... On average, they reported that these social networks gave them extra scope for self-expression and community-building. But they also said that the platforms exacerbated anxiety and depression, deprived them of sleep, exposed them to bullying and created worries about their body image and “FOMO”.. Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, has admitted that the product works by “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology”.. Indeed, an experiment by five neuroscientists in 2014 concluded that Facebook triggers the same impulsive part of the brain as gambling and substance abuse.
Long-Term Effects Of Psychotropic Drugs Are ‘Cloaked In Mystery’
Antidepressants and medications for bipolar disorder can be life-changing and even lifesaving, but journalist Lauren Slater warns that the long-term side effects of these drugs are “cloaked in mystery.”
Blue Dreams
The Science and the Story of the Drugs That Changed Our Minds
“As a nation, we’re consuming them; we’re gobbling them down,” she says. “And we don’t really know what we’re taking into our bodies.”
Slater, who suffers from depression and bipolar disorder, has firsthand experience with psychotropic drugs; she has been taking medication for 35 years. Her new book,Blue Dreams, dedicates separate chapters to drugs such as Thorazine, lithium and psilocybin.
Does Depression Have an Evolutionary Purpose?
Some psychologists believe suicide and depression can be strategic.
A Hedge-Fund Titan Puts Away the Punch Bowl
Ray Dalio of Bridgewater sees Americans’ debt as a coming drag on growth and markets
.. While he doesn’t see another crisis in the offing, he does see the same underlying stresses at work: Americans have accumulated far more debt than they have assets and income to support.
.. Not only will this drag on growth and markets, it will leave the economy acutely vulnerable to higher interest rates. The relevant parallel, he says, is not the early 1930s, when the economy imploded, but the late 1930s when the Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy and inadvertently extended the Great Depression. Today, the central bank must balance the short-term need for higher interest rates to contain inflation against the long-term need for low rates to work off the debt overhang and sustain high asset prices.
.. “It may not be a problem in the next year or two, but the risk of not getting it right increases with time.”
.. “We ‘finance people’ see the world very differently from the way economists do,”
.. The views of finance people tend to be shaped more by trading experience than by formal economics. They assign much more weight to financial factors such as debt, asset prices and cash flow than do economists who emphasize “real economy” factors such as employment and investment
.. Finance people are wary of how macroeconomic data obscures crucial details of individual companies and households. Some economists do think like finance people, such as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, but they are in the minority.
.. since the 1970s, inflation-adjusted interest rates have steadily declined while investors have accepted ever lower compensation for risks such as bankruptcy, recession and volatility (i.e. the “risk premium” has declined). This directly raises asset values and indirectly lifts growth by spurring borrowing.
.. His team estimates this has contributed three percentage points a year to stock returns since the 1970s while boosting private and government debt to 325% of gross domestic product.
.. In 2007, Mr. Dalio’s team concluded that the cost of servicing Americans’ debts was growing faster than their cash flows, creating the conditions for a crisis.
.. By slashing short-term interest rates to zero and buying bonds to push down long-term rates, it engineered the right combination of economic growth, debt write-offs and low interest rates necessary to start the painful process of “deleveraging,” or working off all that debt.
.. it can’t raise them much either, or debt servicingwould swamp cash flow and asset prices would sink. Thus Mr. Dalio foresees years of low interest rates, and while he thinks stocks are appropriately valued, he thinks returns to a typical stock-bond portfolio over the next decade will be around zero after inflation and taxes.
.. his biggest worry is that lower corporate taxes and higher stock prices do nothing for the bottom 60% of households who own almost no assets and whose stagnant wages are the mirror image of expanding profit margins, feeding resentment and political polarization. Says Mr. Dalio: “If we do have an economic downturn, I worry we will be at each other’s throats.”