environmental depression?

There's been a lot of news recently about how beneficial it is to get out and interact with the natural environment, such as this one on LiveScience. I saw this article on Yahoo News today, about "eco-therapy" for environmental depression. Here's an excerpt:

Eco-therapists point out that human beings have evolved in synchrony with nature
for millions of years and that we are hard-wired to interact with our
environment - with the air, water, plants, other animals. But in the
past two centuries, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, people have
been steadily removed from the natural world, our lives regulated not by the sun
or moon but instead by the factory clock. Recently it's gotten worse, with the
rise of the Internet and other technologies, like iPhones and BlackBerrys, that
dominate our lives, pushing us even further from any appreciation of our natural
surroundings.
"We began to get the impression that we were somehow above and
separate from nature," says Craig Chalquist, an instructor at John F. Kennedy
University in San Francisco and co-editor with Buzzell-Saltzman of the new book
Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind.
Today, more than half of the
world's population lives in cities, and many people barely ever get a glimpse of
green. At the same time, human beings appear to be doing their best to destroy
what remains of the earth by contributing to climate change - a problem that in
itself causes some people deep anxiety. But what the average person feels as
stress or depression, eco-therapists suggest, is a longing for our natural home.
"People were embedded in nature once," says Buzzell-Saltzman. "We've lost that,
and we're paying the price."

So what does that have to do with living on a boat? The article goes on to say that many Americans can spend as little as 15-30 minutes per day outdoors (walking to their car, no doubt). Living aboard both enables and forces us to spend lots of great time connected to nature in ways we never were when we lived in a house. There's sitting in the sunny cockpit with morning coffee watching the day begin, or sleeping in the V-berth under an open hatch watching the stars and moon. For the rest, even when we're tied up in the slip we're made aware of nature and its cycles. We know the rise and fall of the tide, as the boat moves. We know the strength of the wind and whether it's calm or rough on the water - in extreme cases things slide off countertops and tables. The patter of rain is loud with only a thin shell of fiberglass between us and it. I don't know how strong a force "eco-depression" is if one is isolated from nature ... but I know that the alternative, living on a boat, in touch with nature, makes me very happy!