Things that work for depression: writing, composing music, exercise, playing video games. Things that don't help: alcohol nor drugs. Role of family and community: YMMV. I envy lots of folks with supportive and kind families, but I also witnessed much suffering and terrible loss caused by a loving family that doesn't quite get the loving part right.

With that out of the way, I'll say that for as long as suicide mortality is well below cancer mortality, society doesn't really have a suicide problem.

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Devont 10 hours ago | parent [-]

1. fun and creative things do not strictly help everyone facing depression. Anhedonia will likely strip that enjoyment from you. Maybe they help with colloquial depressions, but the article discusses people facing practical, systemic issues that emotional regulation doesn’t solve and if anything likely makes hobbies feel like they being unproductive against a tide rising around them. Many hobbies also have barriers to entry

2. drugs may help. both in the traditional medicinal sense and recreational sense (given psilocybin is showing great results and is not widely available medicinally)

3. By your logic there is no cancer problem till the heart disease problem is solved (which is well above cancer). And widespread suffering of individuals should be ignored and belittled.

	▲	dsign 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> By your logic there is no cancer problem till the heart disease problem is solved (which is well above cancer) That's one of those things that causes me depression and anxiety: in many places cancer is actually above heart disease. From my vantage, that's a bad thing because people that die from sudden heart disease or from the sudden disintegration of their brains as the bullet from their gun travels through it get a better deal than those who die from cancer. Suicide is sometimes a good solution to a problem (cancer) with no other solution. Make no mistake, I think that people should live forever even if we have to boil the oceans to get there; yes, I'm that kind of monster. But I'm not the kind that says that people should die in horrible agony just because of the stigma that doing otherwise imply. Agree with everything else you said.