The world’s recent financial misfortune has left a bitter taste in many mouths.Those bitter tastes are well justified given the problems many are having finding jobs and keeping afloat financially.But justification doesn’t mean we should turn our attention away from other side effects of an economic downturn. They often have shocking benefits beneath the surface.Hard times often bring people together. I often joke with my friends from boarding school that we are all closer because we went through something traumatic together.In practice, it does work out that way for the most part. I say, “for the most part” because finding large-scale ways to measure contentment and unity are often difficult to come by outside of some sort of nationwide survey that asks people how happy they are.That type of survey is remarkably unlikely because of that nagging economic downturn.The tight-fitting structure imposed by financial and logistic issues often forces social researchers to look for proxy measures that may indicate difficult-to-measure trends such as social cohesion.Divorce rates were used previously to measure social cohesion.During the Great Depression divorce rates dropped fairly drastically. Likewise, a poll conducted by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers in 2008 showed a strong decrease in those rates.The most plausible explanation is couples can’t afford a divorce.That finding seems especially obvious when you consider the source of the survey.Regardless of reasoning for their cohesion, couples are forced to remain in contact with each other.  Census and other large-scale survey data of this current recession will not be available for a while, so we have poll information to work with. But the odds are good when more detail comes out, it will reflect similar results to the Great Depression.Social cohesion is a profound force in alleviating depressive symptoms and overall mental health and wellbeing.Emile Durkheim, sociological godfather, speculated social integration played an important role in keeping people from committing suicide.In the early days of the Depression, suicide rates increased sharply, but as people began to develop a sense of oneness in their plight, the rates began to drop.As with the divorce data, it will be difficult to find strong data for suicide rates or any other proxy for social cohesion.Further, the nature of our specific situation may make the data less meaningful than before, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider the importance of social cohesion.It’s safe to argue people going through harsh economic times are forced to deal with them in vastly different ways than their parents and grandparents.The past few months have brought successive waves of fear-mongering and paranoia about the world’s financial situation.According to the most extreme news outlets and their wacky shock-jock pundits, we currently live in a universe that is roughly similar to the tamer scenes in “Mad Max.”This contrasts sharply with the tact mainstream news agencies have taken, which is a constant bombardment of images of and comparisons to the Great Depression. I’m not so callous to say people benefit overall from an economic depression or that forced coexistence is a pleasure cruise — it’s nearly impossible to compare the respective values of financial drain and interpersonal improvement.In the end, these large-scale measures of unification are proof positive the durability of our social existence and the survivability of hard times.Skylar Gremillion is a 26-year-old sociology graduate student from Plaucheville.—-Contact the Daily Reveille’s opinion staff at [email protected]