28 ms·

I have been depressed a significant fraction of my adult life. I am also a biologist who abhors the medical description of this problem. I don't even like the w

I have been depressed a significant fraction of my adult life. I am also a biologist who abhors the medical description of this problem. I don't even like the word 'mental illness'. This shit is not an illness, its a normal response to a fucked up life! Can I get at least some acknowledgment of this fact? The sine qua non for me was an issue of Nature a few years back that focused on depression, talked about how prevalent it is, how it is a 'drain on productivity', etc. Included therein was a graph of the worst affected populations, topping the list was Afghanistan. This passed without comment. How about: 'hey, the cause of depression seems to be human misery, like war, unemployment, alienation, etc.' But you can't sell a fucking pill to cure war and alienation, so ...

johnchristopher 11y ago
> This shit is not an illness, its a normal response to a fucked up life! Can I get at least some acknowledgment of this fact? Well, no you can't because it seems a lot of people with really good life are just struck by it. Although I believe the environment (physical, emotional, relational [edit: in recovery or/and prevention]) plays a huge role there still seems to be something extra going on.
- nprz 11y ago
  Maybe a distinction should be made between people who are aware of their source of depression and people who are not? Like it makes sense to be depressed if you're living in abject poverty. People can point to it and say I know why I'm depressed. That seems different from someone who lives in a secure environment, feels valued, has meaningful relationships, engages in rewarding work, etc. All these things that should lead to a happy life but this person still feels bad. That's definitely a different thing, no?
  - andywood 11y ago
    During times when I lack rewarding work and relationships, I get diagnosed with clinical depression. During times when I have those things, I feel great. I don't think everybody will ever agree on the distinction.
- manmal 11y ago
  They might have a good life now, but experienced bad things in their first 6 years - left alone too long, suppressed by relatives, outcast at kindergarten... We are so formable in those years, and dents are easy to be made that don't go away all by themself.
  - tomhoward 11y ago
    Or, they might have what looks like a good life to outsiders - eg super-rich celebrities with lifestyles idealised by the media - but actually living it is hell. But I still strongly agree with your point. My strongest influence on this stuff is The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton, who explains how it all works on a cellular and genetic level.
- pc2g4d 11y ago
  Many people who believe they are just being struck randomly by depression are simply not aware of the reasons they are feeling depressed. That doesn't mean there aren't emotional/psychological reasons for what they're experiencing---only that they don't see those things as the cause. For the first decade or so after being diagnosed with depression I believed it could only be explained by brain chemistry or something like that. Only later in life when I learned more about healthy relationships and what does and doesn't work for me emotionally did I realize that my depression was an obvious reaction to the dysfunctional environment I was raised in. My ignorance of the non-chemical causes of my depression made me feel I was "just struck by it". But there really was a cause in my environment. I believe this is true for many other people as well. Depression and anxiety in particular I think are better explained as a mismatch between human adaptation and current human environment. They are signals that things are unsafe/insecure. It seems to me more wise to focus on improving our environment than on constantly blaming the brain, whether through the serotonin hypothesis or this new neuroconnectivity approach.
  - pool 11y ago
    I also didn't realize how much I was shaped by my awful upbringing. I just thought I'd get away and that I was a rational person and everything would be all right.
stouset 11y ago
Unfortunately, there are two types of depression, neither of which seemingly have anything to do with one-another. One is situational depression, where you're unhappy because, well, shit sucks. The other is clinical depression which can happen completely independent of your life circumstances.
- tomhoward 11y ago
  Yeah I used to believe that but having but having lived through a lengthy episode of being in a somewhat depressed and fatigued state, and having researched and observed it in myself and others, I no longer buy that depression can "happen completely independent of your life circumstances". The main reason for this is that it's fallacious to think that your emotions are "completely independent of your life circumstances". They're symbiotic. I was born into modest privilege and had an upbringing that was free of abuse or major trauma, and the only things that have gone severely wrong for me in life have been through my own poor decisions. Yet I can now easily see how the depression I've experienced was due to a combination of living in a somewhat unhealthy environment and having a propensity to respond to that environment by becoming depressed and fatigued. I can now see the same applies to everyone else I know of who experiences depression. The explanation you've given is embraced by mental health professionals as it allows them to justify attempting to cure it with pharmaceuticals and short therapy consultations, but as the data shows, that approach has a pretty low success rate.
  - sean-duffy 11y ago
    What you're describing is "exogenous depression", which occurs due to environmental causes. Its existence doesn't change the fact that a lot of people suffer from endogenous depression, which requires no external circumstances or stimuli. A lot of mental illness can be summarised as people reacting to things with the wrong emotions or the wrong intensity of emotion, and some forms of depression fall under this category.
    - tomhoward 11y ago
      I understand your position, as it's one I held very strongly for a long time. I also agree with your point about "people reacting to things with the wrong emotions or the wrong intensity of emotion"; understanding and addressing this has been fundamental to my own recovery. What I'm disputing is the notion that there is a clear-cut distinction between "exogenous" and "endogenous" depression, and that one is "totally unrelated" to the other. Nothing in biology - or in and truly complex system - works like that. That said, I'm not presuming to be able to change your mind, but more pointing out that the premise your position relies on - that one's environment and one's emotional response to their environment are completely independent - is neither an undisputed scientific fact nor true in my own experience or anyone else I've observed.
openasocket 11y ago
I hear this sentiment a lot. Psychologists are aware of this distinction. In the DSM one of the requirements for a diagnosis of clinical depression is that the symptoms are not due to bereavement. While psychiatry and pills are often talked about in the context of depression, there are psychologists and talk therapy also. If you haven't, I recommend seeing a psychologist.
escape_goat 11y ago
I have also been depressed for a significant fraction of my life, a period that spanned over two decades. In my case it was primarily caused by what was called "anxiety" until recently and is now generally called a "stress disorder," but for most of that period the stress disorder was entirely cryptic; I had no idea that I was a particularly 'anxious' or fearful person. I can tell you that my condition eventually responded dramatically to medication, and that I would not be able to live the life I live now if it were not for that medication; furthermore, that because of the medication and my experience during the years I have been on it, I can look forwards to continuing to reduce my dependence on that medication. Depression is indeed a normal response to ongoing helplessness and despair. I probably share your experience of depression in this regard, because the 'depression' that I had been treated for for years was suddenly completely irrelevant the moment my brain finally responded to medication. However, there are several things that this account leaves out. You can't scoff and say that depression is just an normal response any more than people can scoff and say the reason you don't want to take a shower is because you're lazy. For one, as you know, depression can be very self-perpetuating. People come to believe things that keep them depressed, ruminating on their depressed state over and over again. People always see verification and never contradiction of their worldview, even though the entire world has somehow failed to just lay down and die over the course of many thousands of years, which is what it would do if that understanding of reality was valid. And people very definitely do encounter depression that does not have a proximate external cause to justify the response; many of those Afghanis, for instance, will suffer from the bleakest of depressions for many years after the wars in Afghanistan are ended. All of these things constitute a medical condition. If you don't like the word "illness" because of how it makes you feel, I can sympathize. But that doesn't invalidate the fact that depression is something that frequently does become a genuine medical problem and frequently does require a solution beyond the reach of the person suffering from it.
tomhoward 11y ago
Yes, you can certainly get some acknowledgement of this from me, having lived it and researched it for many years (and also having succeeded in overcoming it by accepting this position). Sure the propensity to feel depressed in response to a given experience may differ from person to person, but it is a product of evolution, and is far too common to be pathologised as a "disorder". We have this assumption that a materially privileged life in a rich society should entitle us to a life of happiness, and any divergence from that is an "illness". This ignores the fact that there is much that is unhealthy about modern western society, and the proliferation of depression among seemingly well-off people in rich societies is a natural reaction to that.
choicewords 11y ago
Or the fixation with materialism as the end all be all
pool 11y ago
Even before selling the current pills, I've seen mentions from the mid-1800s of how something horrible would happen to someone and it would be lamented in mere economic terms, lost productivity.
jgord 11y ago
Maybe its useful to discern between 'rational depression' and 'medical depression' .. by firstly labeling them as such ? I don't know how you'd differentiate between this formally, but it seems there is a massive difference - and they need different solutions. [ edit readability ]
- sean-duffy 11y ago
  I believe the medical terminology is exogenous and endogenous depression, where exogenous is due to external factors and endogenous is independent of them.
  - jgord 11y ago
    .. awareness of the distinction seems absent from the article, and from a lot of popular articles I've read. My point is that it would help if this distinction permeated into the popular discourse on depression ... [ Awareness of the distinction might make the general public more likely to question the morality of pumping up soldiers with anti-depressant drugs before they go into battle, for example ]
slapshot 11y ago
I am close to somebody who has been strongly affected by depression. She has, in any material respect, a perfect life. She has food, clothes, a supportive family, a great job, plenty of money, etc. There is nothing "wrong" with her life. But she suffers off-and-on depression. Not just "I feel bad" depression. Crippling, "can't get out of bed" depression. Periodic suicidal ideation. Occasional suicide attempts. She knows she has depression. She talks about it. And she wants to be done with it. She knows how she feels when her brain is "in balance" and how it feels when she's depressed. One of these states is much more preferable to the other. She's tried drugs, ECT, talk therapy, etc. And, yes, she's tried ketamine. Anything that will put her back to a state where she is able to get out of bed and function, and reduce the odds of her killing herself when she's depressed. I'm sure there are a lot of people who are depressed due to outside factors -- poverty, oppression, war, etc. But I can tell you quite certainly that there are people who have "perfect" lives who find themselves clinically depressed. And at least some of those people want to get back to a non-depressed state. This research helps them. TL;DR: Not all people are depressed because their life sucks, nor is depression something that all people can "cure" by thinking harder or trying harder. Some people have a brain imbalance and would like to fix it so they can have a life. Literally.
- emmelaich 11y ago
  I agree mostly, but how do you know for sure that there is some stress or thought there which is perhaps unacknowledged? I think that someone can be affected by somethings in their earlier life that can affect them forever. I'm not talk about repressed memories, I'm talking about the lack of positively formative experiences at critical moments of their life. Example - what happens when say someone starts school or is a teenager at the same time their mother is undergoing menopause and their father has lost their job and they're both starting to drink? The child will feel a lack of something but not sure what. If they do think of it all, they'll think of it as partly their fault.
  - kstenerud 11y ago
    How do you know for sure that it's not something in the water? How can you be sure it's not WiFi radio waves messing with her brain? Can you really rule out space aliens trying to stop her from reaching her potential? There's a reason we use the scientific method.
ossreality 11y ago
Or how about fuck off because you obviously don't know what actual depression is. sorry, but this your comment is extremely condescending. The day after I graduated from college with a 4.0 and a 6 figure job in the city of my dreams lined up... I had an existential crisis and started going through a depressive/suicidal stage that lasted 4 months. It had absolutely not a god damn thing to do with my social or financial situation. It had nothing to do with global politics. It had to do with being depressed. And no, it wasn't stress because I'd lived in the city before and was dying to get there. THE IRONY is how insulting it is for people like you to use the word "depressed", when you actually mean sad.
ninjakeyboard 11y ago
Clinical medical illness is often fabricated. Most of the research and analysis and awareness is also funded by the companies that sell the drugs. Calling ADD or Depression "mental illness" is asserting that it's not normal and is a treatable illness randomly encountered - it's almost often a factor of your environment and psychology. It's interesting that the Ketamine research comes to the conclusion that depression is not a mental imbalance but is a product of the environment causing structural changes in the brain - this seems more in line with what eg ADD and Depression ACTUALLY are - it's not that I can't focus because I caught something from my neighbour - I can't focus because I'm berated with stimuli and I can't pick just one thing to focus on. I'm not depressed because my brain isn't producing enough seratonin, it's because I've been wore down supressing my wants and needs and extended myself trying to make other people happy or overstimulated myself or whatever. We don't know but the picture is getting clearer - depression isn't a common cold that you need drugs for - it's more like liver disease caused from chronic drinking. Stop drinking, and let your liver recover only science just barely understands the processes of the psyche and environment that cause those physical changes in the brain yet. Addiction itself is very much an obvious facet - it's not a degenrate behavior but a degenerative structural change to the brain that cause inner behavioral and perceptual changes that need a physical restructuring of the brain to overcome. It will take time but science will get clearer. The problem is that there are many motives - the whole "sitting is the new smoking" awareness is evidence that we focus on the wrong things - why is this just coming out now? because there is no profit motive to fund that research.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Personally, I'm strictly on the pragmatic side of thing. As Scott Alexander says[0], "society is fixed; biology is mutable". If we can't on Earth figure out an effective social solution to a problem, but we have a pill that fixes it outright, maybe let's try the pill so that people don't have to go miserable all their lives. Calling something a disease is really about assigning blame[1]. If I'm ill, it's not (entirely) my fault and I need a cure. If it's not a disease, all I'll get from people is pep talks at best, at worst I'll be called lazy and told to get my shit together. We clearly know that latter doesn't work; depression is pretty much defined as a state where you can't just "get your shit together". BTW. I always considered ADD, ADHD, etc. to be a bit of a fake disease, a product of environment, but I'm no longer sure. I've been struggling with depression and anxiety for many years and responded relatively well to SSRIs which stabilized my mood and helped me quit the recurring panic attacks. The problem is not gone, but with a little more stable emotional situation I managed to figure out that what really causes most of my problems now is total lack of focus. I can't hold my attention on any kind of work-related task (the task doesn't matter; what matters is that it's work) for more than 30 seconds without compulsively seeking something else to do. Be it HN or IMs. With no easy distraction source available, I'll get anxious and sleepy. I can be perfectly well-rested but will still occasionally get sleepy at work just because I refuse to distract myself with Hacker News. A considerable amount of my mental energy goes to fighting this and forcing myself to focus. Now that I've finally dug that up from underneath the layers of anxiety, it's going to be a topic of the next conversation with my doctor. #HNTherapy Also, this is what I got googling for ADD[2]. What the shit? [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolog... [1] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_questions_about/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que... [2] - http://i.imgur.com/n5nhyWt.png http://i.imgur.com/n5nhyWt.png
tajen 11y ago
I wish alcohol were seen as a depressant too...

johnchristopher 11y ago

> This shit is not an illness, its a normal response to a fucked up life! Can I get at least some acknowledgment of this fact? Well, no you can't because it seems a lot of people with really good life are just struck by it. Although I believe the environment (physical, emotional, relational [edit: in recovery or/and prevention]) plays a huge role there still seems to be something extra going on.

nprz 11y ago
Maybe a distinction should be made between people who are aware of their source of depression and people who are not? Like it makes sense to be depressed if you're living in abject poverty. People can point to it and say I know why I'm depressed. That seems different from someone who lives in a secure environment, feels valued, has meaningful relationships, engages in rewarding work, etc. All these things that should lead to a happy life but this person still feels bad. That's definitely a different thing, no?
- andywood 11y ago
  During times when I lack rewarding work and relationships, I get diagnosed with clinical depression. During times when I have those things, I feel great. I don't think everybody will ever agree on the distinction.
manmal 11y ago
They might have a good life now, but experienced bad things in their first 6 years - left alone too long, suppressed by relatives, outcast at kindergarten... We are so formable in those years, and dents are easy to be made that don't go away all by themself.
- tomhoward 11y ago
  Or, they might have what looks like a good life to outsiders - eg super-rich celebrities with lifestyles idealised by the media - but actually living it is hell. But I still strongly agree with your point. My strongest influence on this stuff is The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton, who explains how it all works on a cellular and genetic level.
pc2g4d 11y ago
Many people who believe they are just being struck randomly by depression are simply not aware of the reasons they are feeling depressed. That doesn't mean there aren't emotional/psychological reasons for what they're experiencing---only that they don't see those things as the cause. For the first decade or so after being diagnosed with depression I believed it could only be explained by brain chemistry or something like that. Only later in life when I learned more about healthy relationships and what does and doesn't work for me emotionally did I realize that my depression was an obvious reaction to the dysfunctional environment I was raised in. My ignorance of the non-chemical causes of my depression made me feel I was "just struck by it". But there really was a cause in my environment. I believe this is true for many other people as well. Depression and anxiety in particular I think are better explained as a mismatch between human adaptation and current human environment. They are signals that things are unsafe/insecure. It seems to me more wise to focus on improving our environment than on constantly blaming the brain, whether through the serotonin hypothesis or this new neuroconnectivity approach.
- pool 11y ago
  I also didn't realize how much I was shaped by my awful upbringing. I just thought I'd get away and that I was a rational person and everything would be all right.

stouset 11y ago

Unfortunately, there are two types of depression, neither of which seemingly have anything to do with one-another. One is situational depression, where you're unhappy because, well, shit sucks. The other is clinical depression which can happen completely independent of your life circumstances.

tomhoward 11y ago
Yeah I used to believe that but having but having lived through a lengthy episode of being in a somewhat depressed and fatigued state, and having researched and observed it in myself and others, I no longer buy that depression can "happen completely independent of your life circumstances". The main reason for this is that it's fallacious to think that your emotions are "completely independent of your life circumstances". They're symbiotic. I was born into modest privilege and had an upbringing that was free of abuse or major trauma, and the only things that have gone severely wrong for me in life have been through my own poor decisions. Yet I can now easily see how the depression I've experienced was due to a combination of living in a somewhat unhealthy environment and having a propensity to respond to that environment by becoming depressed and fatigued. I can now see the same applies to everyone else I know of who experiences depression. The explanation you've given is embraced by mental health professionals as it allows them to justify attempting to cure it with pharmaceuticals and short therapy consultations, but as the data shows, that approach has a pretty low success rate.
- sean-duffy 11y ago
  What you're describing is "exogenous depression", which occurs due to environmental causes. Its existence doesn't change the fact that a lot of people suffer from endogenous depression, which requires no external circumstances or stimuli. A lot of mental illness can be summarised as people reacting to things with the wrong emotions or the wrong intensity of emotion, and some forms of depression fall under this category.
  - tomhoward 11y ago
    I understand your position, as it's one I held very strongly for a long time. I also agree with your point about "people reacting to things with the wrong emotions or the wrong intensity of emotion"; understanding and addressing this has been fundamental to my own recovery. What I'm disputing is the notion that there is a clear-cut distinction between "exogenous" and "endogenous" depression, and that one is "totally unrelated" to the other. Nothing in biology - or in and truly complex system - works like that. That said, I'm not presuming to be able to change your mind, but more pointing out that the premise your position relies on - that one's environment and one's emotional response to their environment are completely independent - is neither an undisputed scientific fact nor true in my own experience or anyone else I've observed.

openasocket 11y ago

I hear this sentiment a lot. Psychologists are aware of this distinction. In the DSM one of the requirements for a diagnosis of clinical depression is that the symptoms are not due to bereavement. While psychiatry and pills are often talked about in the context of depression, there are psychologists and talk therapy also. If you haven't, I recommend seeing a psychologist.

escape_goat 11y ago

I have also been depressed for a significant fraction of my life, a period that spanned over two decades. In my case it was primarily caused by what was called "anxiety" until recently and is now generally called a "stress disorder," but for most of that period the stress disorder was entirely cryptic; I had no idea that I was a particularly 'anxious' or fearful person. I can tell you that my condition eventually responded dramatically to medication, and that I would not be able to live the life I live now if it were not for that medication; furthermore, that because of the medication and my experience during the years I have been on it, I can look forwards to continuing to reduce my dependence on that medication. Depression is indeed a normal response to ongoing helplessness and despair. I probably share your experience of depression in this regard, because the 'depression' that I had been treated for for years was suddenly completely irrelevant the moment my brain finally responded to medication. However, there are several things that this account leaves out. You can't scoff and say that depression is just an normal response any more than people can scoff and say the reason you don't want to take a shower is because you're lazy. For one, as you know, depression can be very self-perpetuating. People come to believe things that keep them depressed, ruminating on their depressed state over and over again. People always see verification and never contradiction of their worldview, even though the entire world has somehow failed to just lay down and die over the course of many thousands of years, which is what it would do if that understanding of reality was valid. And people very definitely do encounter depression that does not have a proximate external cause to justify the response; many of those Afghanis, for instance, will suffer from the bleakest of depressions for many years after the wars in Afghanistan are ended. All of these things constitute a medical condition. If you don't like the word "illness" because of how it makes you feel, I can sympathize. But that doesn't invalidate the fact that depression is something that frequently does become a genuine medical problem and frequently does require a solution beyond the reach of the person suffering from it.

tomhoward 11y ago

Yes, you can certainly get some acknowledgement of this from me, having lived it and researched it for many years (and also having succeeded in overcoming it by accepting this position). Sure the propensity to feel depressed in response to a given experience may differ from person to person, but it is a product of evolution, and is far too common to be pathologised as a "disorder". We have this assumption that a materially privileged life in a rich society should entitle us to a life of happiness, and any divergence from that is an "illness". This ignores the fact that there is much that is unhealthy about modern western society, and the proliferation of depression among seemingly well-off people in rich societies is a natural reaction to that.

choicewords 11y ago

Or the fixation with materialism as the end all be all

pool 11y ago

Even before selling the current pills, I've seen mentions from the mid-1800s of how something horrible would happen to someone and it would be lamented in mere economic terms, lost productivity.

jgord 11y ago

Maybe its useful to discern between 'rational depression' and 'medical depression' .. by firstly labeling them as such ? I don't know how you'd differentiate between this formally, but it seems there is a massive difference - and they need different solutions. [ edit readability ]

sean-duffy 11y ago
I believe the medical terminology is exogenous and endogenous depression, where exogenous is due to external factors and endogenous is independent of them.
- jgord 11y ago
  .. awareness of the distinction seems absent from the article, and from a lot of popular articles I've read. My point is that it would help if this distinction permeated into the popular discourse on depression ... [ Awareness of the distinction might make the general public more likely to question the morality of pumping up soldiers with anti-depressant drugs before they go into battle, for example ]

slapshot 11y ago

I am close to somebody who has been strongly affected by depression. She has, in any material respect, a perfect life. She has food, clothes, a supportive family, a great job, plenty of money, etc. There is nothing "wrong" with her life. But she suffers off-and-on depression. Not just "I feel bad" depression. Crippling, "can't get out of bed" depression. Periodic suicidal ideation. Occasional suicide attempts. She knows she has depression. She talks about it. And she wants to be done with it. She knows how she feels when her brain is "in balance" and how it feels when she's depressed. One of these states is much more preferable to the other. She's tried drugs, ECT, talk therapy, etc. And, yes, she's tried ketamine. Anything that will put her back to a state where she is able to get out of bed and function, and reduce the odds of her killing herself when she's depressed. I'm sure there are a lot of people who are depressed due to outside factors -- poverty, oppression, war, etc. But I can tell you quite certainly that there are people who have "perfect" lives who find themselves clinically depressed. And at least some of those people want to get back to a non-depressed state. This research helps them. TL;DR: Not all people are depressed because their life sucks, nor is depression something that all people can "cure" by thinking harder or trying harder. Some people have a brain imbalance and would like to fix it so they can have a life. Literally.

emmelaich 11y ago
I agree mostly, but how do you know for sure that there is some stress or thought there which is perhaps unacknowledged? I think that someone can be affected by somethings in their earlier life that can affect them forever. I'm not talk about repressed memories, I'm talking about the lack of positively formative experiences at critical moments of their life. Example - what happens when say someone starts school or is a teenager at the same time their mother is undergoing menopause and their father has lost their job and they're both starting to drink? The child will feel a lack of something but not sure what. If they do think of it all, they'll think of it as partly their fault.
- kstenerud 11y ago
  How do you know for sure that it's not something in the water? How can you be sure it's not WiFi radio waves messing with her brain? Can you really rule out space aliens trying to stop her from reaching her potential? There's a reason we use the scientific method.

ossreality 11y ago

Or how about fuck off because you obviously don't know what actual depression is. sorry, but this your comment is extremely condescending. The day after I graduated from college with a 4.0 and a 6 figure job in the city of my dreams lined up... I had an existential crisis and started going through a depressive/suicidal stage that lasted 4 months. It had absolutely not a god damn thing to do with my social or financial situation. It had nothing to do with global politics. It had to do with being depressed. And no, it wasn't stress because I'd lived in the city before and was dying to get there. THE IRONY is how insulting it is for people like you to use the word "depressed", when you actually mean sad.

ninjakeyboard 11y ago

Clinical medical illness is often fabricated. Most of the research and analysis and awareness is also funded by the companies that sell the drugs. Calling ADD or Depression "mental illness" is asserting that it's not normal and is a treatable illness randomly encountered - it's almost often a factor of your environment and psychology. It's interesting that the Ketamine research comes to the conclusion that depression is not a mental imbalance but is a product of the environment causing structural changes in the brain - this seems more in line with what eg ADD and Depression ACTUALLY are - it's not that I can't focus because I caught something from my neighbour - I can't focus because I'm berated with stimuli and I can't pick just one thing to focus on. I'm not depressed because my brain isn't producing enough seratonin, it's because I've been wore down supressing my wants and needs and extended myself trying to make other people happy or overstimulated myself or whatever. We don't know but the picture is getting clearer - depression isn't a common cold that you need drugs for - it's more like liver disease caused from chronic drinking. Stop drinking, and let your liver recover only science just barely understands the processes of the psyche and environment that cause those physical changes in the brain yet. Addiction itself is very much an obvious facet - it's not a degenrate behavior but a degenerative structural change to the brain that cause inner behavioral and perceptual changes that need a physical restructuring of the brain to overcome. It will take time but science will get clearer. The problem is that there are many motives - the whole "sitting is the new smoking" awareness is evidence that we focus on the wrong things - why is this just coming out now? because there is no profit motive to fund that research.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Personally, I'm strictly on the pragmatic side of thing. As Scott Alexander says[0], "society is fixed; biology is mutable". If we can't on Earth figure out an effective social solution to a problem, but we have a pill that fixes it outright, maybe let's try the pill so that people don't have to go miserable all their lives. Calling something a disease is really about assigning blame[1]. If I'm ill, it's not (entirely) my fault and I need a cure. If it's not a disease, all I'll get from people is pep talks at best, at worst I'll be called lazy and told to get my shit together. We clearly know that latter doesn't work; depression is pretty much defined as a state where you can't just "get your shit together". BTW. I always considered ADD, ADHD, etc. to be a bit of a fake disease, a product of environment, but I'm no longer sure. I've been struggling with depression and anxiety for many years and responded relatively well to SSRIs which stabilized my mood and helped me quit the recurring panic attacks. The problem is not gone, but with a little more stable emotional situation I managed to figure out that what really causes most of my problems now is total lack of focus. I can't hold my attention on any kind of work-related task (the task doesn't matter; what matters is that it's work) for more than 30 seconds without compulsively seeking something else to do. Be it HN or IMs. With no easy distraction source available, I'll get anxious and sleepy. I can be perfectly well-rested but will still occasionally get sleepy at work just because I refuse to distract myself with Hacker News. A considerable amount of my mental energy goes to fighting this and forcing myself to focus. Now that I've finally dug that up from underneath the layers of anxiety, it's going to be a topic of the next conversation with my doctor. #HNTherapy Also, this is what I got googling for ADD[2]. What the shit? [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolog... [1] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_questions_about/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que... [2] - http://i.imgur.com/n5nhyWt.png http://i.imgur.com/n5nhyWt.png

tajen 11y ago

I wish alcohol were seen as a depressant too...