Swimming in the Frying Pan?

There are lots of reasons people become depressed. Among them are a relationship gone sour; work; illness; loss of a loved one; divorce, just to name a few.

But worse than knowing when you’re depressed is not realizing or accepting that depression has its cold hands around your neck. That’s when we’re like the proverbial frog in the frying pan, slowly cooking as the heat is gradually turned up.

Fortunately, there is now an alternative method of helping identify the signs that depression is at hand (The “black dog” as Winston Churchill called it). It’s all about how we use language.

Here’s the story:

People With Depression Use Language Differently -- Here's How to Spot It, Mohammed Al-Mosaiwi, The Conversation, alternet.org, 15 Apr 2018.

“Scientists have long tried to pin down the exact relationship between depression and language, and technology is helping us get closer to a full picture.”

“From the way you move and sleep, to how you interact with people around you, depression changes just about everything. It is even noticeable in the way you speak and express yourself in writing. Sometimes this “language of depression” can have a powerful effect on others. Just consider the impact of the poetry and song lyrics of Sylvia Plath and Kurt Cobain, who both killed themselves after suffering from depression.”

“Scientists have long tried to pin down the exact relationship between depression and language, and technology is helping us get closer to a full picture. Our new study, published in Clinical Psychological Science, has now unveiled a class of words that can help accurately predict whether someone is suffering from depression.”

“Traditionally, linguistic analyses in this field have been carried out by researchers reading and taking notes. Nowadays, computerised text analysis methods allow the processing of extremely large data banks in minutes. This can help spot linguistic features which humans may miss, calculating the percentage prevalence of words and classes of words, lexical diversity, average sentence length, grammatical patterns and many other metrics.”

Please go here for the rest of the story.

Three Dog Night - Joy To The World - "Jeremiah was a bullfrog" - 1971