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This kind of rhetoric makes people who aren't depressed feel better, but it's kind of anathema to a depressed person if you tell them essentially that: 1. Thei

This kind of rhetoric makes people who aren't depressed feel better, but it's kind of anathema to a depressed person if you tell them essentially that: 1. Their feelings aren't valid, not even a little bit. In other words if they have an objection to what you're telling them they know darn well there's no point in voicing it. 2. You come off as out of touch with reality. Sometimes the world is shitty, and sometimes the world is shitty in ways that make us feel shitty. And yes, sometimes the world is shitty in ways that make people who are predisposed to feeling like shit for no good reason feel even worse. If you feel like everything is worthless and you have nothing to lose, somebody telling you that everything is happy rainbows is quite the opposite of helping. They're not meeting you where you are so much as coming at you from a place so foreign and distant it seems like they're on drugs. A lot of suicide prevention is deciding not to kill yourself today so you'll live to see tomorrow.

arunpn123 11y ago
You are wrong. I am depressed and this made me feel better. You are painting depressed people with too broad of a brush.
EGreg 11y ago
Listen, why do you automatically assume that depressed people need to be enouraged to feel like their depression is totally cool and normal? I think that people are social beings and a lot of the time something is missing... it is something that needs to be fixed before it gets out of hand. What about drug addictions for example?
Johnny555 11y ago
It seems that not all people suffering from depression are the same, what helps some might push others deeper into depression. But ignoring it and treating it like it's just a mood rather than a disease (as so often happens) helps no one. If this woman uses her sister's death to bring attention to depression as a disease that too often results in death, then good for her. She's not trying to cure the world, just trying to prevent her sister's death from being in vain.
maclaren 11y ago
I find a large part of depression is not being able to recognize the "sometimes" aspect of your second point. The author isn't pushing happy rainbows - "any time I was struggling, any time depression and anxiety overwhelmed me" -- it's about how difficult depression makes it to see a way through the shitty periods.
pmiller2 11y ago
This isn't telling depressed people "everything is happy rainbows" It recognizes that depression is shitty and makes people feel worthless, even though they aren't. Depression isn't necessarily "the world [being] shitty in ways that make people who are predisposed to feeling like shit for no good reason feel even worse." I know people who have pretty decent lives by pretty much any external measure you can imagine, and they're still depressed. Some of them are hanging on because they know people would miss them if they died. So, no, don't tell people who feel like "everything is worthless and [they] have nothing to lose" that everything is awesome, even if it looks like it. But, this article isn't doing that. It's about someone who was loved, who is missed and who died from a terrible illness.
Natsu 11y ago
The feelings are certainly real. That said, feelings aren't fully based on the external world for any of us. You're right that you can't just wake up and be happy or something, but you can slowly notice the disconnect and reshape it to your advantage. A lot of things in depression are downward spirals of energy, motivation, etc. Recognizing the fact that some of these spirals are self-causing and taking back control is one of the things that helped me turn things around.
titanomachy 11y ago
I believe that what the author is trying to say is that some of the feelings and ideas of a depressed person are disconnected from reality. Not all. This is part of the definition of depression: if all that you believe is rational and based in reality, then you are not depressed. If a person truly believes that they are worthless and have no hope of ever doing something good, then that is a delusional belief -- unless you suggest that some people really are worthless and can never change. Everybody will feel like shit sometimes. It's normal. Bad things happen. But when feeling like shit becomes totally disconnected from the reality of your situation, when guilt over the way you feel itself becomes the reason for continuing to feel worthless, that's depression. Once that feedback loop is connected it can be VERY HARD to escape. Some people come to believe that death is the only escape. Even though a depressed person will get angry at people who tell them they are not worthless, will say that they don't understand, I think it's still something that he needs to hear. Source: have lived through a major depressive episode, and will likely live through more.
javajosh 11y ago
There is a delusion, though. The world is constantly arising and passing away simultaneously. When you are depressed, all you see is decay (passing away); when you are manic, all you see is growth (arising). Both views are delusional. Although I freely admit that stating that so bluntly to a depressed person is usually a bad idea. The reason people give bad advice is myopia. Most "normal" people seem to get by with a system of habits that protect them from perceiving constant change over long-ish time-lines. When you deal with the same boundary conditions day after day you much of your life operates like an autonomic function. This is the ideal, for "normal" people: to have stable, risk-free lives for themselves and their families, at least for 20-30 years or so until the kids leave/you retire. And of course by then you have become your habits, and so you live a peaceful, boring life until you die. Note that there is an important minority of people who are inherently explorers, risk takers, who thrive on uncertainty and difficulty. Such people will even create difficulty in their own lives just to avoid being bored and disappointed in their own "ordinary" life. They challenge authority, challenge conventional wisdom, and more often then not, they suffer for their unique choices because an unstable life is a stressful one. This can create drama, and isolation, which leads to depression. An excellent life, I believe, lies somewhere in the middle: some sort of stable base from which you range out occasionally in adventure. Indiana Jones is a good (fictional) example: he had a fundamentally stable job as a professor, but he would also travel the world and have adventures. Victor Hugo and HG Wells seemed to delight in telling stories of such "gentlemen adventurers". A more mundane example would be a family man going on a month-long trek through the Amazon or through Africa or something like it every year (perhaps with Doctors without Borders or some-such). There are stories of programmers doing their thing while traveling the world, living out of a backpack on $20/month. There are also stories of programmers taking big risks in business, and winning! (and losing). But business adventures have everything to do with money and shrewdness, and therefore are rooted indelibly in greed, not curiosity. Of the people I know of, Rich Hickey (who took 2.5 years to do Clojure) and Bret Victor (who, AFAIK, has been talking on philosophical applied computer science purely for the love of it, and without compensation) are examples of curiosity-driven adventure-programmers. Most working programmers, though, are hired to build the applications someone else has conceived. We might stumble on a nice data-structure or algorithm and share it widely; but that's a perk, and not the main goal of their employment, which is also greed driven. A lot of us I think lead a double life of creating for someone else to pay the bills, and creating for ourselves to scratch that adventurer's itch.

arunpn123 11y ago

You are wrong. I am depressed and this made me feel better. You are painting depressed people with too broad of a brush.

EGreg 11y ago

Listen, why do you automatically assume that depressed people need to be enouraged to feel like their depression is totally cool and normal? I think that people are social beings and a lot of the time something is missing... it is something that needs to be fixed before it gets out of hand. What about drug addictions for example?

Johnny555 11y ago

It seems that not all people suffering from depression are the same, what helps some might push others deeper into depression. But ignoring it and treating it like it's just a mood rather than a disease (as so often happens) helps no one. If this woman uses her sister's death to bring attention to depression as a disease that too often results in death, then good for her. She's not trying to cure the world, just trying to prevent her sister's death from being in vain.

maclaren 11y ago

I find a large part of depression is not being able to recognize the "sometimes" aspect of your second point. The author isn't pushing happy rainbows - "any time I was struggling, any time depression and anxiety overwhelmed me" -- it's about how difficult depression makes it to see a way through the shitty periods.

pmiller2 11y ago

This isn't telling depressed people "everything is happy rainbows" It recognizes that depression is shitty and makes people feel worthless, even though they aren't. Depression isn't necessarily "the world [being] shitty in ways that make people who are predisposed to feeling like shit for no good reason feel even worse." I know people who have pretty decent lives by pretty much any external measure you can imagine, and they're still depressed. Some of them are hanging on because they know people would miss them if they died. So, no, don't tell people who feel like "everything is worthless and [they] have nothing to lose" that everything is awesome, even if it looks like it. But, this article isn't doing that. It's about someone who was loved, who is missed and who died from a terrible illness.

Natsu 11y ago

The feelings are certainly real. That said, feelings aren't fully based on the external world for any of us. You're right that you can't just wake up and be happy or something, but you can slowly notice the disconnect and reshape it to your advantage. A lot of things in depression are downward spirals of energy, motivation, etc. Recognizing the fact that some of these spirals are self-causing and taking back control is one of the things that helped me turn things around.

titanomachy 11y ago

I believe that what the author is trying to say is that some of the feelings and ideas of a depressed person are disconnected from reality. Not all. This is part of the definition of depression: if all that you believe is rational and based in reality, then you are not depressed. If a person truly believes that they are worthless and have no hope of ever doing something good, then that is a delusional belief -- unless you suggest that some people really are worthless and can never change. Everybody will feel like shit sometimes. It's normal. Bad things happen. But when feeling like shit becomes totally disconnected from the reality of your situation, when guilt over the way you feel itself becomes the reason for continuing to feel worthless, that's depression. Once that feedback loop is connected it can be VERY HARD to escape. Some people come to believe that death is the only escape. Even though a depressed person will get angry at people who tell them they are not worthless, will say that they don't understand, I think it's still something that he needs to hear. Source: have lived through a major depressive episode, and will likely live through more.

javajosh 11y ago

There is a delusion, though. The world is constantly arising and passing away simultaneously. When you are depressed, all you see is decay (passing away); when you are manic, all you see is growth (arising). Both views are delusional. Although I freely admit that stating that so bluntly to a depressed person is usually a bad idea. The reason people give bad advice is myopia. Most "normal" people seem to get by with a system of habits that protect them from perceiving constant change over long-ish time-lines. When you deal with the same boundary conditions day after day you much of your life operates like an autonomic function. This is the ideal, for "normal" people: to have stable, risk-free lives for themselves and their families, at least for 20-30 years or so until the kids leave/you retire. And of course by then you have become your habits, and so you live a peaceful, boring life until you die. Note that there is an important minority of people who are inherently explorers, risk takers, who thrive on uncertainty and difficulty. Such people will even create difficulty in their own lives just to avoid being bored and disappointed in their own "ordinary" life. They challenge authority, challenge conventional wisdom, and more often then not, they suffer for their unique choices because an unstable life is a stressful one. This can create drama, and isolation, which leads to depression. An excellent life, I believe, lies somewhere in the middle: some sort of stable base from which you range out occasionally in adventure. Indiana Jones is a good (fictional) example: he had a fundamentally stable job as a professor, but he would also travel the world and have adventures. Victor Hugo and HG Wells seemed to delight in telling stories of such "gentlemen adventurers". A more mundane example would be a family man going on a month-long trek through the Amazon or through Africa or something like it every year (perhaps with Doctors without Borders or some-such). There are stories of programmers doing their thing while traveling the world, living out of a backpack on $20/month. There are also stories of programmers taking big risks in business, and winning! (and losing). But business adventures have everything to do with money and shrewdness, and therefore are rooted indelibly in greed, not curiosity. Of the people I know of, Rich Hickey (who took 2.5 years to do Clojure) and Bret Victor (who, AFAIK, has been talking on philosophical applied computer science purely for the love of it, and without compensation) are examples of curiosity-driven adventure-programmers. Most working programmers, though, are hired to build the applications someone else has conceived. We might stumble on a nice data-structure or algorithm and share it widely; but that's a perk, and not the main goal of their employment, which is also greed driven. A lot of us I think lead a double life of creating for someone else to pay the bills, and creating for ourselves to scratch that adventurer's itch.