Depression can contribute to obesity

“Depression can contribute to obesity,”
“It’s hard to stop smoking when you’re depressed. Depression keeps people out of the workplace in huge numbers, reduces productivity at school and work, and has tremendous ramifications for our economy.” People who suffer from depression are nearly 28 times more likely to miss work because of emotional disability.

Depression touches on issues fundamental to public health, such as mental health parity: who gets access to mental health care, when and how? Depression underscores racial and ethnic differences in health. African-American women, for example, have a significantly lower depression rate than white women, and overall, fewer blacks than whites commit suicide. At the same time, African Americans are less likely than whites to seek outpatient care for depression.

Socioeconomically disadvantaged populations are often at greater risk for depression.Social context shapes mental health, residents of so-called “bad” neighborhoods—neighborhoods with poor physical infrastructure, indoors and out, and high levels of income inequality—are more likely to suffer depression, “independent of individual characteristics,”

“So what that means is if you take me, and you put exactly me—the same person—in one environment versus another environment, I am more likely to be depressed if the environment is poor than if the environment is good.”