"Participants reported time spent in TV viewing (mentally-passive sedentary behavior) and sitting during work or driving (mentally-active sedentary behavior) at age 44. Waist circumference, C-reactive protein, and glycated hemoglobin were also measured at age 44. Depression diagnosis was self-reported at ages 44, 46, 50, and 55. ]"
If you are unemployed and not in school and living alone, watching TV is a default activity. The cause of depression may not be watching TV but the circumstances leading to it. You could do a study where in the treatment group people's cable TV is turned off. I doubt it will make people happier.
Everybody involved with mental health is sick. Especially when the healthiest thing I can do would be going outside, but I cant without police harassment. And I am an extremely attractive person who dresses well. Seems like a societal problem.
This is not a judgement in the slightest, just an observation:
Your post history on HN shows a very negative streak, about pretty much everything. Is this because of your depression, or is it the cause?
If you frame everything you see negatively, it will have an effect on your emotions. Maybe try seeing the positive in something you don't agree with offhand once a day and see if that helps at all?
1. People are paid to find topics to publish. Whether you are a media person that is forced to find something to write about to buy bread or you are a researcher that needs to show results. You are looking for anything with any value that can be put out there and create some traffic.
2. For any piece of research, you don't get from zero to hero immediately. You first find a correlation, then it takes time to gather some more facts and maybe, if you are lucky, find causation.
Nowadays, if you are waiting for the whole proof, you are already late. Somebody will publish it before you and by the time it really is ready to publish, it is old news.
If you are homebound due to illness or disability, this may be true.
For other groups of people, this is unlikely to be true. Stay at home parents likely have a full day of work taking care of a child or doing house chores.
Being unemployed doesn't mean that you have endless amount of free time either. Applying for jobs and preparing for tests and interviews is itself a full-time job or close to it.
Action is required to overcome depression, even if its just action to seek help.
Easy access to anything that can alleviate bordom (including TV) is going to increase the chances that someone is stuck in depression.
"induces" clearly implies causality. This is not true, the research only found association. Awful. These articles are at the point now where they just outright lie
Being sedentary absolutely does worsen my state, too, but let's be honest you're not gonna do much else when you're dying of exhaustion and malaise.
I’m the last person to tell someone to simply “cheer up”; I noted that almost every post the OP made was framed negatively and thought that may be a single factor that might help a little. It’s not a solution, but depression can be a fight of a thousand small things. Maybe that one thing helps them or someone else that reads it. Maybe not.