Latino Culture Hampers Depression Treatment

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.on March 23, 2011

The stigma of mental illness, weak patient-physician communication and an underuse of medications combine to hinder Latinos’ recovery from depression.

A study appearing in the March-April issue of General Hospital Psychiatry confirms that cultural barriers impede appropriate mental health care.

Authors followed the recovery of 220 Latinos who screened positive for depression at two clinics in Los Angeles County over 30 months.

Overall, they found that nearly 70 percent of participants improved, albeit slowly, following a course of antidepressants and with the benefit of good physician-patient communication, but stigma remained an important barrier.

Most of the participants were underemployed, Spanish-speaking Latinas with limited education, who had access to health care insurance.

“Doctor-patient communication is often the primary tool for bridging the gap between patients’ perspectives and the biomedical model that underlies medication-based treatments for depression,” said lead author Alejandro Interian, Ph.D.

Previous studies affiliated with the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research show that only 36 percent of depressed Latinos receive treatment compared with 60 percent of non-Latino whites. Latinos also are less likely to start on a course of antidepressants than whites and more likely to stop before the course runs out.

Sherrie Segovia, Ph.D., the mental health coordinator at the Hope Street Family Center/CHMC in Los Angeles, works predominantly with Latino immigrants. Her experience is consistent with Interian’s results.

“A high number of women receive prescriptions for antidepressants while complaining of headaches, backaches and stomach aches,” Segovia said.

“Once confronted with the possibility of mental illness, they are unwilling or afraid to take medication. Some of their beliefs are associated with religion and cultural mores, while others have concerns with the stigma of being ‘crazy’.”

Interian said that skilled physician-patient communication could allay these worries while respecting cultural concerns.

He recommended increasing the number of mental health professionals who speak other languages and understand different cultures, while ensuring that quality care is available to socially disadvantaged populations.

Segovia said, “The challenges from a clinician’s perspective are related to treatment that is culturally sensitive, as many Latinos also suffer from the effects of immigration, isolation and poverty.”

Source: Health Behavior News Service

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Americans Count Lost Love, Family Spats Among Common Regrets

By Psych Central News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.on March 23, 2011

We all have regrets in our lives. A past love gone wrong. A family argument with someone who has since passed away. 

A new study suggests not only do we all have them — but that we share a lot of the same types of regrets about past relationships, family arguments, education and career choices.

Researchers conducted a survey of 370 adult Americans by telephone, asking subjects to describe one regret in detail, including the time in which the regret happened and whether the regret was based on an action or inaction.

“We found that one’s life circumstances, such as accomplishments or shortcomings, inject considerable fuel into the fires of regret,” Neal Roese, lead researcher of the study said. “Although regret is painful, it is an essential component of the human experience.”

Romance led the charge in American regrets, but women significantly led men in this regret, 44 percent compared to 19 percent. Single adults were more likely to have regrets in the romance area, compared to those in a relationship.

While women had more family regrets than men, men had more education regrets than women.

About 34 percent of men reported having work-oriented regrets versus 27 percent of women reporting similar regrets.

The researchers found that people were evenly divided on regrets of situations that they acted on versus those that they did not act on. People who regretted events that they did not act on tended to hold on longer to that regret over time.

Individuals with low levels of education were likely to regret their lack of education. Americans with high levels of education had the most career-related regrets.

“Past research on regrets focused on samples of college students, which made it difficult to glean insights into the wider population,” Roese said. “This research, however, offers a unique and more thorough look into the psychology of regret to further understand how regret connects to life circumstances and its impact on decision making.”

The study will be published in a forthcoming issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Source: Kellogg School of Management

Related News Articles
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 From Our News Bureau Many Teens Naïve About Risks of Social Networking Emotional Wealth Trumps Financial Wealth
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What's HotWhen Your Therapist Treats You Like a DogadvertisementMost Popular News Many Teens Naïve About Risks of Social Networking Emotional Wealth Trumps Financial Wealth Beliefs About Memory Are Often Wrong Latino Culture Hampers Depression Treatment Football Outcomes Can Increase Domestic Violence Increased Cardiac Risk Linked to Occasional Exertion, Sex For Anger Management, Say a Prayer Comfort Foods Calm Emotions Transcendental Meditation May Improve Academic Performance Most Popular Blog PostsDoes the Internet Promote or Damage Marriage? Why Is Religion Important to Mental Health? I Think I'm in Love with My Therapist What Hurts Your Facebook Friends? Naked Therapy or Just Cam-Girl Soft Porn? 6 Signs It's Time to Dump Your Therapist How Well Do You Multitask Between the TV and the Computer? Yelp and Therapist Reviews Does Interpersonal Psychotherapy Work for Depression? The Surprising History of the Lobotomy Subscribe to Our Weekly Newsletter

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La Información es Bella

December 22, 2010

I wanted to say a grateful, heartfelt thank you to everyone who has bought my book this year. It’s been doing really well. Thank you!

It’s broken the Top 100 books on Amazon.co.uk. While the Visual Miscellaneum has cracked the top 2,000 on Amazon.com. Thank you!

For something that took nearly three years of my life to write, research, design and promote, it’s immensely gratifying that it’s resonated with so many people. Thank you!

Overseas Editions

Thanks to this amazing response, Information Is Beautiful is now out / due out in ten countries. They include Finland, Hungary, Holland, Spain, South Korea, Brazil and China.

I didn’t think such an image-dense book could be translated. But these amazing publishers have proven me wrong. Just check out awesome covers from Finland and Germany!

The Finnish publishers called their version ‘Tieto On Kaunista‘. This, I believe, translates as ‘Rainbow Information Icicles Pierce The Bubble Of Your Mind’. (maybe)

The German publishers, Knauss, opted out of the awesome – but somewhat imperative – Informationen Ist Schöne. Instead they went for “The Picture Book” (Das Bilder Book). Which I guess the book is. They also put together a brilliant quiz based on some of the images. Check it out. (buy link on Amazon.de)

But here’s my favourite cover so far…

Glad they didn’t go through the torturous 90 version process we did to get the UK cover right.

Guess I should’ve done this self-promo way before Christmas. But if you are interested in purchasing, here are the links. US – UK – DE

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Debtris

single postid-2715 s-y2010 s-m12 s-d31 s-h12 s-category-datavisualisation s-category-economics s-category-fun s-category-video s-tag-animation s-tag-david-mccandless s-tag- s-tag-infodesign s-tag-infographia s-tag-infographic s-tag-infographics s-tag-infomation s-tag-information-design s-tag-information-graphics s-tag-information-is-beautiful s-tag-infovisualisation s-tag-motion-infographics s-tag-tetris s-tag-the-visual-miscellaneum s-tag-visual-miscellaneum s-author-admin s-comments-open s-pings-open unknown-os unknown-browser"> Information Is Beautiful Ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualized! Skip to content HomeHelloVisualizationsHoroscopedGoogle NGram ExperimentsThe Varieties of Intimate RelationshipWikipedia’s Lamest Edit WarsThe Billion Dollar-o-Gram 2009Because Every Country Is The Best At SomethingColours In CulturesCover VersionsWhat Does China Censor Online?Snake oil? Scientific evidence for health supplementsWhen Sea Levels AttackThe Billion Pound O GramClimate Change Deniers vs The Consensus2012: The End Of The World?Left vs Right (World)Left vs. Right (US)The Hierarchy Of Digital DistractionsTimelines: Time travel in popular film and tvThe Billion Dollar GramCaffeine and CaloriesReduce Your Chances of Dying in a Plane CrashDrugs WorldMountains Out of MolehillsPlayMountains Out Of Molehills InteractiveSnake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplementsHow Much CO2BooksCreating The BookExecuting the ExosVersioningDesigning The CoverTime Travel In TV and FilmDataHelp!Collaboration?Help – What Does Your Soul Look Like?Help! – CEOsHelp – If the world was 100 people…ContactStoreCart SUBSCRIBE:RSSTwitterFBemail « La Información es BellaA Decade Of Fear »December 31, 2010

Our first animation. Enjoy!

$US version – see the video on youtube

£UK version – see the video on youtube

Data: http://bit.ly/

We’ve been honing our animation skills. Expect more films, motion infographics and ‘info-mations’ in 2011. Follow us on Youtube for more.

If you’re an motion graphics type person looking to collaborate or work with us on similar projects, get in touch!

Design & direction: David McCandless
Animation: Miles Tudor, Dom Del Torto @ Big Animal
Music: Daniel Pemberton
Data: http://bit.ly/

Posted in Data Visualisation, Economics, Fun, video.
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A Decade Of Fear

January 6, 2011

What would a timeline of the world’s greatest fears look like? Like this.

A spiced up, interactive version of Mountains Out Of Molehills. Now sporting filters, click-throughs to the data and a ‘scale by deaths’ button. Just like Bond villains have.

RESEARCH & DESIGN: David McCandless // FLASH: Joshua Lee
SOURCE: Google Insights & Google News Timeline
DATA: Click through on the appPosted in Data Visualisation, Disease, InfoVisualisation.
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8 GREAT INFOGRAPHICS No.11

January 10, 2011

Great work out there. I’m a bit behind so I’m giving you a double dose of great infographics.

Moon Flower – Dimitre Lima creates a beautiful poster of lunar cycles, shaping them organically and a silver-on-silkscreen finish.

The Evolution Of Alphabets – Petrogylph – Heirogylph – Syllabic – Alphabet – Just awesome! (via)

The Who-Where-Venn of Web Censorship – Evan You’s visualization piece on Internet Censorship is worth a look. Especially for the Venn, depicting the reasons for censorship. Twin it with this piece on internet access as a human right (from FloatingSheep).

London On Sea – A sweet perspective on sea level rises using the tube map from PracticalAction.

The United State Of Health – Slick interactive site offering comparisons on the quality of health care across the US. While the subject matter doesn’t exactly grab me, I loved the comparison engine. By RockFishInteractive.

Data Done Right – Creative Review has a great showcase of the superb infographics featured in New York Magazine. Great examples of combining wit and info and graphics.

An Exoplanet Atlas – Little thing we did for Wired about planets discovered in other solar systems. Can you spot the glaring error that slipped through 2 researchers, 3 designers and various editors?

Breaking The Strain – Super-slow motion infovideo from GE showing the power of hybrid dynamic breaking. Not sure what information is being conveyed to me here. But I’m mesmerised.

and one for luck

An infographic magazine – A new mag with the minimum of text. Hmmm, sounds familiar… From Golden Section Graphics

You can follow my shares: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/david.mccandless or follow @infobeautiful

Posted in Great Infographics.
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How much carbon…

How much carbon… Information Is Beautiful Ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualized! Skip to content HomeHelloVisualizationsHoroscopedGoogle NGram ExperimentsThe Varieties of Intimate RelationshipWikipedia’s Lamest Edit WarsThe Billion Dollar-o-Gram 2009Because Every Country Is The Best At SomethingColours In CulturesCover VersionsWhat Does China Censor Online?Snake oil? Scientific evidence for health supplementsWhen Sea Levels AttackThe Billion Pound O GramClimate Change Deniers vs The Consensus2012: The End Of The World?Left vs Right (World)Left vs. Right (US)The Hierarchy Of Digital DistractionsTimelines: Time travel in popular film and tvThe Billion Dollar GramCaffeine and CaloriesReduce Your Chances of Dying in a Plane CrashDrugs WorldMountains Out of MolehillsPlayMountains Out Of Molehills InteractiveSnake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplementsHow Much CO2BooksCreating The BookExecuting the ExosVersioningDesigning The CoverTime Travel In TV and FilmDataHelp!Collaboration?Help – What Does Your Soul Look Like?Help! – CEOsHelp – If the world was 100 people…ContactStoreCart SUBSCRIBE:RSSTwitterFBemail « 8 GREAT INFOGRAPHICS No.11Horoscoped »How much carbon…January 17, 2011

How much CO2 is created by a banana? A wedding? A flight to New York?

We teamed up with GE to turn ‘tons of carbon’ into an interactive visual landscape.

Enter a CO2 value. Hit the ‘random’ button for serendipity. Or just click through objects like stepping stones.

(There are nearly 200 objects so it may take a second to load)

Designed by David McCandless | Code by Daniel Goldsworthy.

cool things I like about this app

Like billions of dollars, “tons of CO2″ is another widely-used metric that is deeply abstracted from our lives. What is a ton of CO2? It’s impossible to imagine. But perhaps it can be better understood relatively and visually?

The data here mixes direct CO2 emissions with CO2-equivalent emissions. CO2e is a calculation that includes the supply chain and production process of a given object. So for a banana, the emissions involved in growing, packaging and getting the fruit to your supermarket.

All the numbers are sourced from reputable news outlets, government studies and from the awesome book How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berner’s-Lee (US | UK)

The app features deep-linking. Each object in the app has its own web-address. So you can link directly to it.

And, like Snake Oil, this is a ‘living app’ which spawns itself from a Google Docs datasheet. That means the moment we edit, add or subtract info, it’s instantly rippled into the app.
See the data here: http://bit.ly/tonsofcarbon

So if you find any CO2 amounts in news reports or studies, post a comment below with a link to the source and we’ll try to add it. Or if you want to know the carbon emissions of XXXX, we’ll try to find it out for you.

GE have some other vizzes on their Visualization blog, including some recent work from maestro Ben Fry.

Design: David McCandless
Research: David McCandless, Alexia Wdowski, Mike Berners-Lee.
Illustration: Joe Swainson, Matt Hancock
Flash: Daniel Goldsworthy
Sources: Guardian, JP Morgan, The New York Times and others.
Data: http://bit.ly/tonsofcarbonPosted in Climate, Data Visualisation, Environment, Generative, Interactive.
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Horoscoped

single postid-2807 s-y2011 s-m01 s-d19 s-h11 s-category-datajournalism s-category-datavisualisation s-category-esoteria s-category-fun s-category-infovisualisation s-tag-aquarius s-tag-aries s-tag-cancer s-tag-capricorn s-tag-daily-horoscope s-tag-data-visualisation s-tag-david-mccandless s-tag-diagram s-tag-gemini s-tag-horoscopes s-tag-infobeautiful s-tag-infodesign s-tag-infographia s-tag-infographic s-tag-infographics s-tag-information-design s-tag-information-graphics s-tag-information-is-beautiful s-tag-infovisualisation s-tag-leo s-tag-libra s-tag-pisces s-tag-sagitarius s-tag-scorpio s-tag-star-sign s-tag-star-sign-prediction s-tag-taurus s-tag-the-visual-miscellaneum s-tag-virgo s-tag-visual-miscellaneum s-tag-yahoo-shine s-author-admin s-comments-open s-pings-open unknown-os unknown-browser"> Information Is Beautiful Ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualized! Skip to content HomeHelloVisualizationsGoogle NGram ExperimentsThe Varieties of Intimate RelationshipWikipedia’s Lamest Edit WarsThe Billion Dollar-o-Gram 2009Because Every Country Is The Best At SomethingColours In CulturesCover VersionsWhat Does China Censor Online?Snake oil? Scientific evidence for health supplementsWhen Sea Levels AttackThe Billion Pound O GramClimate Change Deniers vs The Consensus2012: The End Of The World?Left vs Right (World)Left vs. Right (US)The Hierarchy Of Digital DistractionsTimelines: Time travel in popular film and tvThe Billion Dollar GramCaffeine and CaloriesReduce Your Chances of Dying in a Plane CrashDrugs WorldMountains Out of MolehillsPlayMountains Out Of Molehills InteractiveSnake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplementsHow Much CO2BooksCreating The BookExecuting the ExosVersioningDesigning The CoverTime Travel In TV and FilmDataHelp!Collaboration?Help – What Does Your Soul Look Like?Help! – CEOsHelp – If the world was 100 people…ContactStoreCart SUBSCRIBE:RSSTwitterFBemail « How much carbon…Learning How To Visualize »January 19, 2011

Do horoscopes really all just say the same thing? We scraped & analysed 22,000 to see.

See our completed meta-horoscope chart and make up your own mind.

We’ve also created a single meta-prediction out of the most common words..

How we did it

How do you gather 22,000 horoscopes? Obviously you could manually cut and paste them from one of the many online Zodiac pages. But that, we calculated, would take about a week of solid work (84.44 hours). So we engaged the services of arch-coder Thomas Winnigham to do a bit of hacking.

Yahoo Shine kindly archive their daily predictions in a simple and very hackable format (example). Thank you! So Thomas wrote a Python script to screen-scrape 22,186 horoscopes into a single massive spreadsheet. Screen-scraping is pulling the text off a website after it’s displayed. Python is a programming language. You can use it to write scripts that only gather the specific text you want. Then you run it multiple times so it mines an entire website.

Well, it’s not quite that easy. Big sites like Yahoo have ‘rate-limiting’ on their servers. That means if you access a page too many times too quickly, it thinks you’re a hacker and deploys all kinds of anti-hacking counter-measures. Initially, Thomas set his scraping speed too high (once every 10th of a second) and his IP got instantly banned from Yahoo for 24 hours. After some experimenting (and more bans), he found that a two second delay between scrapes prevented the defense mechanisms from kicking in. The script was set to run in the background (while we smoked cigars and discussed the empire). 12 hours later, we had our 22,000 horoscopes in a single file!

We can’t share the 9.5MB spreadsheet with you because it’s Yahoo’s copyright. But here are the Python scripts should you feel like recreating the experiment.

https://gist.github.com/776219
https://gist.github.com/776228

Filtering it down

So every different type of horoscope got sucked up – career, teen, love, daily overview. Who knew there were so many? It was felt, though, that career & love predictions would have their internal biases i.e. lots of mentions of work, career, love, marriage etc. So we opted to just analyse the generic daily horoscopes for each sign. A total of 4,380 (365 per star sign).

Word Analysis Version 1

We used an online tool called TagCrowd to find the most common words. I prefer it to Wordle. You’ve got better control over any ‘noise’ in the signal, because you can not only filter common words (“and”, “for”, “is” etc) but also a special ‘stoplist’ of words you’ve chosen.

So we broke down the most common 50 words to see if there are any patterns of unique words. This is what was revealed:

You can see the full data in a Google spreadsheet here.

Word Analysis 2

It struck me that several words in the top 50 – like “someone”, “really”, “quite” – were just qualifiers and not really that revealing. You’d find them in any English word analysis.

So we stripped those kinds of words out (see our stoplist). And lo! A fresh set of unique, revealing and more accurate words appeared in the top words per sign.

Can I just say that I have no personal interest in horoscopes. I don’t know what the various characteristics of each star sign are meant to be. So you’ll have to tell me if any of this corresponds to folklore.

This was the data we used to create our meta-chart. Check out the final image. Or see all the data in this Google spreadsheet.

Meta-Prediction

One more thing though. This analysis appears to reveal something. The bulk of the words in horoscopes (at least 90%) are the same. That’s not a full, proper statistical analysis. (If you are a statistician and you want to do a proper analysis, please get in touch)

The cool thing is, once you’ve isolated the most common words, you can actually write a generic, meta prediction that would apply to all star signs, every day of the year. Here it is.

The Future

As ever, I’ve laid out my whole process and all the data here: http://bit.ly/.
That way it’s all balanced and you can make up your own mind. Typical Libran!

Concept & research & design: David McCandless
Additional design: Matt Hancock
Additional research: Miriam Quick
Hacking: Thomas Winningham
Source: Yahoo Shine Horoscopes
Code & Scripts: Here and here
Data & workings: bit.ly/Posted in Data Journalism, Data Visualisation, Esoteria, Fun, InfoVisualisation.
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Learning How To Visualize

February 21, 2011

Been getting a ton of requests for ‘how to’s and guides for creating decent visualizations and information designs. Made me think: maybe I could do some workshops in this area. I like developing ideas and working with people. Could be fun!

So if you think you’d like to attend a workshop on visualization or organize one for your organisation, please fill in this quick form (30 seconds).

some guides

In the meantime, you might be interested in a section I’ve been building in a far-flung corner of the site. It documents my process for creating infographics.

The most recent one explores the stages we went through creating an infographic for Wired magazine about planets in other solar systems – or “exoplanets”.

(Microscopic, dark and unimaginably far away, these tiny celestial objects should be impossible to spot. But thanks to extreme telescopy, deep data analysis, and ingenuous hacking, astronomers have now detecting over 500 bizarre and exotic alien worlds thousands of lights years away. So cool!)

Here’s how we created it.

some other examples

Timelines: TimeTravel in TV and Film
Yup, we went through 36 drafts of this. Yes, I am a rampant perfectionist. Yes I can be difficult to work with.




Information is Agonizing: Designing The Cover of the book
Creating the UK cover for Information Is Beautiful was an agonizing yet gloriously creative pain in the ass involving over 90 – yes nine-ty – different versions.


Versioning: Because Every Design Is Good For Something
How do you flag and label 142 countries on a single map without choking the result? With great difficulty.




I hope this is helpful. And again if you think you’d like to attend a workshop to learn how to create these kind of images, please fill in this quick form (30 seconds).

Posted in Data Journalism, Data Visualisation, Fun, workshops.
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