Hello, i'm mentally ill.. and also British

[Razzle]

Hello to you Saxmoof!

Why do  those two things seem to go together?

A mentally-ill Briton? What a surprise.

j/k, hiyas.

Seriously! I've not been here long but it seems all us Brits are mentally ill, and vice versa.  

Welcome!

Boy am I jealous about meeting 4 religious people your whole life. It should be we American atheists that are depressed.

I thought depression just went with being British... Sorry, I was thinking of the Irish. My bad. Seriously though welcome. Many of us, including myself , struggle with depression. I'm pretty sure you'll find that you are in good company.

Is there a correlation between atheism and depression? Is it the god-shaped hole in our soul?

Britons don't have a higher rate of depression than Americans, it's probably just a coincidence that we seem to here.

Is there a correlation between atheism and depression? Is it the god-shaped hole in our soul?

I don't think there is any correlation, but you would have to look for research on the topic to be sure.  I expect, though, if there were a connection, the religionists would be trumpeting that to discourage people from being atheists, so I am pretty sure there must be no such connection.

They do in fact do that. There have been numerous studies, mostly in the US, finding that atheists have a higher rate of depression than Christians, which I've seen Christians point to many times, however more careful and detailed research is suggesting it's a lot more complicated than that. Without going too much into it on this thread (would make an interesting discussion in its own right though), the higher depression rate of atheists in the US and other very religious countries could very well be caused by minority stress and/or lack of substitutes for the supportive communities that churches can be, rather than the lack of a god belief to give them hope or comfort. There isn't enough evidence to conclude whether the cause of the correlation is anything like what some Christians suggest it is. Also, while American atheists get more often depressed than American theists, the theists who do get depressed, on average get more severely depressed than depressed atheists. Finally, no study I'm aware of has yet examined the effect of denomination and doctrine on depressive or anxiety disorders.

I hope that last one is studied thoroughly one day, because it seems likely to me that fundamentalist and even moderate monotheistic religions are bad for the mental health of at least some people. How can living in fear of hell for yourself and others not cause at least occasional anxiety, whether you'll admit to it or not? Even in monotheistic religions that don't have hell, like Judaism and Mormonism, there is still sexual repression in the moderate and fundamentalist groups, including not being allowed to masturbate or have sex during the horniest period of your life (teenage years), and being forced into a closet and to suppress your own sexual feelings and thoughts if you're gay or transgendered.

At least some people raised with religion, who happen to have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (the real thing, associated with embarrassment, secrecy, distress and impairment, not the bullshit "OCD" label that people clamour to wear as a sign of how neat or clean or other-favourable-trait they are  ) develop religious obsessions, such as terror that they haven't prayed the right way and must keep doing it until they get it perfect, terror that they keep having blasphemous thoughts, and often underlying it all an obsessive fear of going to hell or even somehow causing other people to go there. Although these people would have OCD anyway, their religious background is what causes that particular manifestation, and as someone who has worked my way through quite a range of different OCD obsessions since childhood, I can't imagine an obsessive fear that would be worse than one of burning forever. I'm very grateful I've never had that particular "theme", as we call them. There is substantial evidence that obsessions like this are more common in Roman Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox Jews than in other religions common in the Western world, so there is the first piece of real scientific evidence that different religions and denominations of those religions can affect people's mental health in different ways. Yet all the research into depression that I've seen, lumps everyone into simplistic categories like "religious" and "non-religious".

I had to write a boring essay on major depressive disorder a few weeks ago. For those who don't know, major depression is the most common clinically diagnosed depressive disorder. Once a patient has had it for two years they are re-diagnosed as having persistent depressive disorder. Pharmacotherapy is by far the most cost-effective medical intervention; and treatment from all forms of health care (pharmacotherapy, counselling/psychotherapy, proactive care, etc) is only around 50% effective (see Andrews et al. 2004). One in three patients do not respond positively to any form of treatment. Partly because patients, such as yourself, need another disorder treated first before the depression treatment will work.

The distinction between major depression and persistent depression is fairly arbitrary. The distinction allows healthcare workers to claim that all people who suffer from major depression are suffering a non-chronic form of depression, since 100% of them will eventually be diagnosed as being free from it; unfortunately for people such as yourself you don't get diagnosed as being well, you get diagnosed with persistent depression and the treatment plan then reflects whatever they think is best for the treatment of persistent depression rather than the treatment of major depression.

That's not quite right. http://www.mentalhealth.com/home/dx/dysthymic.html