This is the most important thing to bear in mind with this study.
There’s a difference between thinking you’ve been depressed or anxious in your life and having a diagnosable psychological condition that has enough of an impact on your life as to be considered an illness.
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Total clickbait.
I don’t see what the big deal is. Maybe people with mental illness-(a loaded term if there ever was one) are more likely to play music or engage in some other artistic hobby in order to alleviate the pain.
Maybe people with mental illness are more likely to respond to web surveys. This is a non-statistic imho.
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Psychology student here. This does not seem to be a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal, so eyebrows. The questions are skewed.
“Have you ever experienced any negative emotions such as stress, anxiety and/or depression in relation to your music creation?” <- this got the famous 73%.
Heh, sure. Who wouldn’t get stressed out by things which are important to them, at least sometimes? 
Depression 69%, panic attacks 33% among musicians would be worrisome, but it takes a mental health professional to diagnose someone in person, self-diagnosing is almost always wrong due to lack of definition or competence. A checkbox on a survey is not a diagnosis (although I believe that a minority of responders are diagnosed). Some degree of suffering is not pathological and part of normal life if one can cope with it.
So the (scientific) validity is very questionable to me and the claims seem to be exaggerated, but nevertheless, the cause is a noble one, to prevent or treat mental illness (in this case, among music makers). There really are people out there (musicians or not) who need help.
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very well written! Helps taking the report with a grain of salt.
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73% of Mental Illness is caused by Musicians.
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I’m naturally sceptical of sentences that end with “study says”.
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73% of my beats are ill
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%100 of Octatrack users suffer mental illness… 
This study basically means nothing to me, the same stats could probably be come up with about all sorts of life paths or just people in general… It gives me a weird vibe that people would publish this kind of stuff…
Music makes me happy, I wish all the musicians and knob tweakers out there’s good vibes and happiness… 
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I wouldn’t put much faith in that study. One of the main reasons is because they asked people in a web survey and claiming you felt anxiety isn’t exactly being diagnosed with mental health issues. I’d put more Faith in a clinical study through psychologists and doctors who ask their patients what their profession is.
In saying that there has been studies showing people from creative arts and industries can suffer mental health more commonly from over assessing their output and measuring it’s quality on success etc which impacts how they value themselves.
As someone mentioned heavy drink and drug use associated with music industry would also impact mental health.
Click bait…
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i havent read all the thread , but i think if ‘we’ were on a architecture forum there’d be similar reports.
or a graphic design forum , game developer forum , or many other types of forum.
I dont want to downplay issues people have (I’ve been off work for nearly 2 years due to various mental health things ) but i think a lot of people have issues no matter what industry they’re in.
causation , that could be many things i think , being self employed , confidence , support systems (family , friends , social circles , being in groups / religion and all sorts) , financial security / insecurity …
i think overall being more open about it, reducing the stigma is helping.
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Does GAS count?
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speaking personally , buying lots of synths doesnt help with depression.
i just ended up with a lot of gear i barely used and felt guilty about spending lots of money on things that sat in boxes.
buying boxes didnt motivate me to use it beyond the 1st few hours of noodling/twiddling.
and having a desk full of synths became unusable and detracted from actually writing melodies / structure .
i havent bought anything for a long time.
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that’s one of the reasons I prescribe to a flexible version of the 1 in - 1 out rule nowadays. keeping my studio minimal and focused definitely reduces stress.
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Fake News. Load of Bull****
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Knowing that you do not know is the best.
Not knowing that you do not know is an illness.
Truly, only those who see illness as illness
Can avoid illness.
The sage is not ill,
Because he sees illness as illness.
Therefore he is not ill.
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Interesting topic for my first post. I’m schizoaffective, have had multiple psychotic episodes with it, some long lasting. I have things under control and am back in college making A’s and making the best music of my life. Took a LONG time to get it under control. It was not pleasant for me or family and friends. Music is what I can do again for joy and fulfillment and yes some extra income. It’s been a huge blessing in many ways. This survey wouldn’t surprise me if it was true, musicians minds work differently.
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Not that mental health isn’t an issue worth exploring among musicians. It definitely is. But this study is bullshit. Among other things, “stress”, “fear of failure”, “financial instability”, “loneliness”, “negative pressure” - these are not the same as having mental illness. Under their standards, I’m surprised the conclusions they came to weren’t that 100% of independent musicians suffer from mental illness.
Record Union (a PR and distribution firm, from what I can tell) are “not mental health professionals” by their own account, and they have no rigorous methodology. Their study wasn’t peer reviewed. They got the basic fundamental premise of what mental illness is completely wrong. They should delete this embarrassment of a site and PDF, frankly. Leave the studies to actual mental health professionals, psychologists, sociologists, or honestly, anyone who knows what they’re doing and isn’t trying to promote themselves and make a buck off of an issue that deserves real (properly vetted) study.
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Exactly