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The comments here are depressing. People who are actually depressed are saying that the author is completely wrong about their depression, while others with no

The comments here are depressing. People who are actually depressed are saying that the author is completely wrong about their depression, while others with no experience of depression are nitpicking at them with for what passes for logic on the internet. The truth is, this PhD is not a psychiatrist, appears to have little clinical experience except whatever his "practice" has thrown his way, and, tellingly, refers to "clients" instead of "patients". Some depression is situational, for sure, but this is not a deep observation or original thinking. The author is perhaps qualified to treat situational, temporary depression but cannot speak to clinical depression or depression that arises from mood disorders. To the extent he is in denial that these forms exist he is mistreating his "clients", and he shouldn't have the support of a bunch of smarty-pants nerds when he does it.

argonaut 11y ago
His bio states: "Gregg Henriques, Ph.D., author of A New Unified Theory of Psychology, directs the Combined Clinical and School Psychology Doctoral Program at James Madison University. He is a licensed clinical psychologist..." You're right that he isn't a psychiatrist, but he is a clinical psychologist. My educated layman's understanding is that this informs the more behaviorally/environmentally-driven view in his article, but because psychiatrists are trained from a traditional medicine/biology-focus, they are just as likely to be shifted towards the (also valid) biochemical explanations of depression (and the pharmaceutical treatments).
jglauche 11y ago
From my own experience, I do trust anyone doing actual psychotherapy more (hence 'client') than a psychiatrist who see their patients for 10 minutes max. My therapist knows me so much better than any of the doctors. I've been enjoying going to my therapist, even though they force me to go there. Not so much the doctors they force me to go there (see http://jglauche.de/posts/misc/2016-01-30-discrimination-by-law/ http://jglauche.de/posts/misc/2016-01-30-discrimination-by-l... )
cairo_x 11y ago
Right on. Most people with actual depression are rarely able to visit a doctor, let alone survive the hoop jumping required to see a psychiatrist, yet alone get a referral for a psychologist, yet alone participate in a study. Frankly, I doubt there has ever been a study ever done on depression where the majority of participants actually had it. It is simply not realistic. You'd have more luck getting a paraplegic into the Olympics than a depressed person into anything more an appointment with a GP. But every man and his dog has claimed they've had depression. It's like listening to a student who had to survive on ramen noodles for a few years, claim they know what starvation and poverty is like. Unbelievable.
- studentrob 11y ago
  Perhaps there are some who exaggerate. But I wonder how many people who never experienced life-altering depression would be interested in this thread, and how many people who did would follow it. My intuition says the second number is bigger and that generally speaking, most people here have had experience with either meds, therapy, or untreated life-altering depression.
  - cairo_x 11y ago
    Everyone likes to think they've had depression. It's the human struggle -- only it's not. It is the inability for neurons to recover from stress. Most people are able to recover. People with depression are not. Everyone who is a human being, who has gone through grief, may entertain the idea they've had depression, and may follow this thread, but very few both to pay attention to the state of the art. Instead people fall back to high school level psychology. Amazing how psychologists, too, are somehow exempt from paying attention to the state of neuroscience. Psychology is to neuroscience what philosophy is to physics. Only psychology has done a lot more damage. Nice to see that meta study after meta study is slow debunking all those years of phony studies. Meanwhile they wine and rage and refuse to go back to university, and instead take to the blogs and snake oil. It makes me sick.
    - studentrob 11y ago
studentrob 11y ago
> People who are actually depressed are saying that the author is completely wrong about their depression, while others with no experience of depression are nitpicking at them with for what passes for logic on the internet. There are a number of comments in here from people who say they were depressed for years and found some solution. People share their personal stories on the internet. It's an anonymous outlet. It is what we do. Readers can make up their own minds who to listen to. I don't hold any power over you with the words I write and nor do you over me. "For clinical depression, you must have five or more of the following symptoms over a two-week period, most of the day, nearly every day" [1] [1] http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/expert-answers/clinical-depression/faq-20057770 http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/exp...
erdojo 11y ago
Depression isn't the disease, it's a symptom. Perhaps he should have clarified that the cause of the symptom might be situational, or it might be the result of another medical problem, e.g. brain malfunction/chemicals, genetics, nervous system disorder, cortisol issues, thyroid, hormone disorders etc., all shown to correlate with high levels of depression. Most people who I've talked to who say it's a disease seem to believe so because they haven't identified the cause, and that brings them comfort. But the meds, while necessary in some cases, should be avoided when possible, or weaned off quickly. They're bad news pushed by an industry that's making so much money from them, and the side effects are worse than what's being disclosed.
- cairo_x 11y ago
  You are wrong. Many mental illnesses, over the past decade, have been proven to be diseases. They can be tested for. Currently there are a whole hosts of tests and treatments going through the phases. Gregg and his ideas run parallel to a line of thought associated with The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a group hell bent on denouncing mental illness as a disease. CCHR are/were a nonprofit organization established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. I can't believe people are still pushing these ideas, but this thread is rife with them. Please review your position, and make an effort to update yourself to the state of the art.
  - erdojo 11y ago
    A syndrome is a collection of symptoms. A disease is a when a symptom or collection of symptoms can be traced back to a root cause.
spangry 11y ago
Indeed. Speaking as a sufferer of a serious depressive disorder, one well educated on the current medical science, I find these discussions incredibly frustrating. Everyone brings out their anecdotes about how their aunt 'just got better through positive thinking, and you can too!' Or people just throw in whatever pop-psychology is currently in fashion. If we were having this conversation in the 1950s, all the smarty-pants would be talking about how depression is simply one of the many materialisations of conflicts between the concious and unconscious mind a la Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Thankfully our methods of scientific inquiry (if you could categorise past efforts as such) have advanced significantly, and continue to do so. Our understanding of genomics suggests that mood disorders like unipolar and bipolar depression, and even psychotic disorders like schizophrenia, represent a spectrum of possibly thousands of different 'diseases', rather than the few 'categories' arbitrarily delineated in the DSM. Advances in neuroscience and medical imaging allow us to directly observe how different symptoms are associated with inefficient information processing in different topographically localised brain regions. As we gather more data and the verisimilitude of our observations increases (as tends to occur with rigorous scientific study), we will be able to develop new treatments; be they psycho pharmacological (e.g. drugs) or physical (e.g. trans-cranial magnetic stimulation). Yes, psychological therapy has its use, and has proven effective in certain situations. But it is just one tool in our ever-growing toolbox. To just blithely deem the rest of the tools to be useless and throw them out is to condemn people like me to a (short) life filled with suffering.
- alfapla 11y ago
  At the risk of sounding snarky or disrespectful, I can't fail to notice how often people suffering from depression become all passionate and fiery when discussing the cause of (their) depression.
  - spangry 11y ago
    No worries, I get what you're saying and it's something I've observed in myself. I'm usually very calm when discussing my depression with an open-minded person. And by open-minded I mean someone who just genuinely wants to know, asks the question and then listens to the answer. The thing that gets me (and others) worked up is when people make sweeping generalisations regarding the causes and treatments of depression. No one likes being painted with a broad-brush, but it adds insult to injury when something that has caused me so much suffering is dismissed as trivial and easy to solve. I've spent more than a decade trying to treat my condition. It's not as simple or easy as most people think. I guess it's also an issue of semantics: 'depression' is a very broad term that gets narrowed down in our minds, based on our own personal experiences. When I hear it, I tend to think of the more serious kind because that's what I've lived through: not leaving my house for two weeks, not showering, eating or sleeping for three days etc... I can understand why some others might think of it more like 'that time my goldfish died and I was sad': this is the fortunate extent of their experience of low moods. Or maybe I just envy those without brain cooties...
tma-1 11y ago
I have a close family member that suffers from treatment-resistant rapid cycling depression. Basically, throughout the year, she cycles from hypomania to normal to depression. And there's no real/consistent trigger for these episodes. There's a history of bipolar disorder in the family, so clearly it's genetic.
drrob 11y ago
Couldn't agree with you more; out of the half dozen bouts of serious depression I've had in my life (I'm 32) only 1 of them had a series of direct triggers. The rest had no basis, and this is what makes them all the more discomforting; you know in your bones that there is simply nothing you can rectify in your life to make them go away.

argonaut 11y ago

His bio states: "Gregg Henriques, Ph.D., author of A New Unified Theory of Psychology, directs the Combined Clinical and School Psychology Doctoral Program at James Madison University. He is a licensed clinical psychologist..." You're right that he isn't a psychiatrist, but he is a clinical psychologist. My educated layman's understanding is that this informs the more behaviorally/environmentally-driven view in his article, but because psychiatrists are trained from a traditional medicine/biology-focus, they are just as likely to be shifted towards the (also valid) biochemical explanations of depression (and the pharmaceutical treatments).

jglauche 11y ago

From my own experience, I do trust anyone doing actual psychotherapy more (hence 'client') than a psychiatrist who see their patients for 10 minutes max. My therapist knows me so much better than any of the doctors. I've been enjoying going to my therapist, even though they force me to go there. Not so much the doctors they force me to go there (see http://jglauche.de/posts/misc/2016-01-30-discrimination-by-law/ http://jglauche.de/posts/misc/2016-01-30-discrimination-by-l... )

cairo_x 11y ago

Right on. Most people with actual depression are rarely able to visit a doctor, let alone survive the hoop jumping required to see a psychiatrist, yet alone get a referral for a psychologist, yet alone participate in a study. Frankly, I doubt there has ever been a study ever done on depression where the majority of participants actually had it. It is simply not realistic. You'd have more luck getting a paraplegic into the Olympics than a depressed person into anything more an appointment with a GP. But every man and his dog has claimed they've had depression. It's like listening to a student who had to survive on ramen noodles for a few years, claim they know what starvation and poverty is like. Unbelievable.

studentrob 11y ago
Perhaps there are some who exaggerate. But I wonder how many people who never experienced life-altering depression would be interested in this thread, and how many people who did would follow it. My intuition says the second number is bigger and that generally speaking, most people here have had experience with either meds, therapy, or untreated life-altering depression.
- cairo_x 11y ago
  Everyone likes to think they've had depression. It's the human struggle -- only it's not. It is the inability for neurons to recover from stress. Most people are able to recover. People with depression are not. Everyone who is a human being, who has gone through grief, may entertain the idea they've had depression, and may follow this thread, but very few both to pay attention to the state of the art. Instead people fall back to high school level psychology. Amazing how psychologists, too, are somehow exempt from paying attention to the state of neuroscience. Psychology is to neuroscience what philosophy is to physics. Only psychology has done a lot more damage. Nice to see that meta study after meta study is slow debunking all those years of phony studies. Meanwhile they wine and rage and refuse to go back to university, and instead take to the blogs and snake oil. It makes me sick.
  - studentrob 11y ago

studentrob 11y ago

> People who are actually depressed are saying that the author is completely wrong about their depression, while others with no experience of depression are nitpicking at them with for what passes for logic on the internet. There are a number of comments in here from people who say they were depressed for years and found some solution. People share their personal stories on the internet. It's an anonymous outlet. It is what we do. Readers can make up their own minds who to listen to. I don't hold any power over you with the words I write and nor do you over me. "For clinical depression, you must have five or more of the following symptoms over a two-week period, most of the day, nearly every day" [1] [1] http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/expert-answers/clinical-depression/faq-20057770 http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/exp...

erdojo 11y ago

Depression isn't the disease, it's a symptom. Perhaps he should have clarified that the cause of the symptom might be situational, or it might be the result of another medical problem, e.g. brain malfunction/chemicals, genetics, nervous system disorder, cortisol issues, thyroid, hormone disorders etc., all shown to correlate with high levels of depression. Most people who I've talked to who say it's a disease seem to believe so because they haven't identified the cause, and that brings them comfort. But the meds, while necessary in some cases, should be avoided when possible, or weaned off quickly. They're bad news pushed by an industry that's making so much money from them, and the side effects are worse than what's being disclosed.

cairo_x 11y ago
You are wrong. Many mental illnesses, over the past decade, have been proven to be diseases. They can be tested for. Currently there are a whole hosts of tests and treatments going through the phases. Gregg and his ideas run parallel to a line of thought associated with The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a group hell bent on denouncing mental illness as a disease. CCHR are/were a nonprofit organization established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. I can't believe people are still pushing these ideas, but this thread is rife with them. Please review your position, and make an effort to update yourself to the state of the art.
- erdojo 11y ago
  A syndrome is a collection of symptoms. A disease is a when a symptom or collection of symptoms can be traced back to a root cause.

spangry 11y ago

Indeed. Speaking as a sufferer of a serious depressive disorder, one well educated on the current medical science, I find these discussions incredibly frustrating. Everyone brings out their anecdotes about how their aunt 'just got better through positive thinking, and you can too!' Or people just throw in whatever pop-psychology is currently in fashion. If we were having this conversation in the 1950s, all the smarty-pants would be talking about how depression is simply one of the many materialisations of conflicts between the concious and unconscious mind a la Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Thankfully our methods of scientific inquiry (if you could categorise past efforts as such) have advanced significantly, and continue to do so. Our understanding of genomics suggests that mood disorders like unipolar and bipolar depression, and even psychotic disorders like schizophrenia, represent a spectrum of possibly thousands of different 'diseases', rather than the few 'categories' arbitrarily delineated in the DSM. Advances in neuroscience and medical imaging allow us to directly observe how different symptoms are associated with inefficient information processing in different topographically localised brain regions. As we gather more data and the verisimilitude of our observations increases (as tends to occur with rigorous scientific study), we will be able to develop new treatments; be they psycho pharmacological (e.g. drugs) or physical (e.g. trans-cranial magnetic stimulation). Yes, psychological therapy has its use, and has proven effective in certain situations. But it is just one tool in our ever-growing toolbox. To just blithely deem the rest of the tools to be useless and throw them out is to condemn people like me to a (short) life filled with suffering.

alfapla 11y ago
At the risk of sounding snarky or disrespectful, I can't fail to notice how often people suffering from depression become all passionate and fiery when discussing the cause of (their) depression.
- spangry 11y ago
  No worries, I get what you're saying and it's something I've observed in myself. I'm usually very calm when discussing my depression with an open-minded person. And by open-minded I mean someone who just genuinely wants to know, asks the question and then listens to the answer. The thing that gets me (and others) worked up is when people make sweeping generalisations regarding the causes and treatments of depression. No one likes being painted with a broad-brush, but it adds insult to injury when something that has caused me so much suffering is dismissed as trivial and easy to solve. I've spent more than a decade trying to treat my condition. It's not as simple or easy as most people think. I guess it's also an issue of semantics: 'depression' is a very broad term that gets narrowed down in our minds, based on our own personal experiences. When I hear it, I tend to think of the more serious kind because that's what I've lived through: not leaving my house for two weeks, not showering, eating or sleeping for three days etc... I can understand why some others might think of it more like 'that time my goldfish died and I was sad': this is the fortunate extent of their experience of low moods. Or maybe I just envy those without brain cooties...

tma-1 11y ago

I have a close family member that suffers from treatment-resistant rapid cycling depression. Basically, throughout the year, she cycles from hypomania to normal to depression. And there's no real/consistent trigger for these episodes. There's a history of bipolar disorder in the family, so clearly it's genetic.

drrob 11y ago

Couldn't agree with you more; out of the half dozen bouts of serious depression I've had in my life (I'm 32) only 1 of them had a series of direct triggers. The rest had no basis, and this is what makes them all the more discomforting; you know in your bones that there is simply nothing you can rectify in your life to make them go away.