The midlife crisis spread: why are the affluent so depressed?

‘You are here’, as those signs in windswept carparks unhelpfully point out. Yup. No mistaking it, you will tend to think glumly as you look at them. I had the same feeling when I looked at a new report from no less an institution than America’s National Bureau of Economic Research. The report is called The Midlife Crisis. It tells us that in the western world, one’s forties and early fifties are associated with problems with sleep, clinical depression and suicidal thoughts, disabling headaches and dependence on alcohol, alongside a decline in basic measures of life satisfaction. Well, fancy.

I don’t know about clinical depression and suicidal thoughts, I should say. Not so melodramatic, me. But I can tell you that I wander through the kitchen every day and turn upside-down the bowls and pans my wife has left on the draining board right-side-up, so the water runs out of them rather than pooling in the bottom.