Inductivist

Atheists, gays, and depression: I finally got around to seeing the movie Milk. One theme that emerged is that many homosexuals are suicidal. Mr. Milk said that most of his lovers had thoughts of killing themselves because of how society rejects gay men.

Reader Jason Malloy suggested in the comments section of previous post that atheists might be more depressed than believers. I'm a relatively happy person, but my dreariest times were certainly the years when I was an atheist. Anyway, let's tackle the depression issue for both of these groups at the same time.

GSS respondents were asked how much they felt down and blue in the past month. Answers ranged from "all of the time" (=1) to "none of the time" (=6) so the higher the score, the more depression-free the person.


Mean lack of depression score

Straight men 5.04
Gay men 4.86

Doesn't believe in God 4.91
No way of knowing 4.86
Some higher power 4.92
Believes sometimes 4.54
Believes but has doubts 4.95
Knows there is a God 4.90

Gay men do suffer from more depression than straights, although the two-tenths of a standard deviation difference is not large. Milk probably exaggerated the problem, although there was more homophobia in the 70s than in 2000 when these survey questions were asked.

Belief, on the other hand, seems to be unrelated to depression. The only group reporting greater sadness is "believes sometimes." We saw in the last post that atheists suffer less from mental health problems overall; it is probably the case, as readers have suggested, that it takes a strong mind to be an atheist, so there might be few non-believing psychotics. Some of those folks even think they are God, right?

Charles Adams: While watching Charles Adams, the son of the great American Founding Father, drink himself to death in the HBO mini-series John Adams (it's great--I recommend seeing it) I wondered if this was a tendency among the sons of great men.

The General Social Survey asked 1,479 men about their father's occupation, and if they sometimes drink too much. I compared the group with fathers in the highest one percent of occupational prestige with everyone else:


Percent who drink too much

Men with very prestigious fathers 70.6
All other men 43.6


There is a clear difference here. Now it might be that these guys from elite families just party more or are more willing to report their excesses, but I wonder if some of it reflects the difficulty in having every advantage but not measuring up to such a successful father.

If I'm right, this phenomenon shows the destructive nature of knee-jerk blank slatism. Junior was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so why isn't he matching or even surpassing the old man's achievements?

Someone with even a basic understanding of reality knows that, using Adam's family as an example, his children were unlikely to match their father's accomplishments because they would likely regress toward the mean.

These sons need to be told that their fathers are freaks--why would you expect lightning to strike twice? No one should expect you to be a carbon copy of Poppy, and if they do, they are ignorant people with harmful beliefs.

But it makes me compassionate to believe that people have tremendous potential, and that only disadvantage holds them down, says the liberal. No, it does not make you compassionate. It destroys lives.

Ignore your sociology professor who comments on blogs: A sociologist commented in an earlier post that married women are, on average, more likely to be depressed than unmarried women. I'm not sure if he means never-married women or all unmarried women of all types, but either way the General Social Survey says he's wrong. Here are the percent of women by marital status who felt depressed in the past 30 days, either some, a good bit of, most, or all of the time:


Percent of women feeling depressed

Married 26.6
Never married 33.2
Separated 58.9
Divorced 23.7
Widowed 45.0

Here we have another sociologist rattling off facts that make marriage look bad that are false. I can understand how a discipline could get wrong results because of study flaws, but isn't it funny how errors always somehow support the liberal/feminist view?