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If my sports team has lost a match I am sad, disappointed or angry. In a situation like this I would never use the word "depressed", but I am not a native speak

If my sports team has lost a match I am sad, disappointed or angry. In a situation like this I would never use the word "depressed", but I am not a native speaker, so who knows, maybe I am wrong at this point. IMHO the main question is whether you take responsibility for your situation or not. Actually great responsibility comes with great power and not vice versa. Calling depression an illness you give up your responsibility and give up also your power over it. On the other hand depression is an illness, obesity is an illness, homelessness is caused mainly by mental illness (we had this newly on HN), there were times where under average intelligence was considered as an illness. A brave new world of lack of responsibility...

thaumaturgy 10y ago
> Calling depression an illness you give up your responsibility and give up also your power over it. No, not at all. You merely change the tactics you use for dealing with it.
curun1r 10y ago
The most frustrating part of the depressed vs depression terminology was that it led people who've never had depression to feel like they can relate to what someone going through depression is going through. It made them feel qualified to talk about depression, offer advice or try to "help" in all those ways that people try to help that are just so counterproductive. Plainly put, if you've never experienced depression, you have no idea what it's like...even people who have experienced depression often have no idea what it's like for other sufferers. The normal downs that you've experienced have nothing in common with what a depressed person experiences. It's like someone who only sees in black and white trying to talk about colors by talking about shades of greys. Until you experience real color, you're only qualified to make second-hand observations. I get where people are coming from when they want to call it an illness. I believe that rather than an attempt to offload responsibility, it's an attempt to clarify a very poorly chosen label for the condition. Depression, as a word, just feels too accessible to someone who hasn't been in it.
- NumberCruncher 10y ago
  You can make getting out of "the condition" to your own responsibility, if you want, even if getting there was not your fault. Or you can discuss the terminology of depression and clarify the label of "the condition" believing that this is not offloading the responsibility. It is your life, it is up to you what you make out of it. Unfortunately I can not build a 500 billion $ industry on this advice. My suggested lack of first hand experience is irrelevant.
  - retsibsi 10y ago
    To understand why people who disagree with you find this kind of advice frustrating, substitute some unambiguously physical, serious illness for 'depression', and re-read your comment. You need to start by convincing people that your preferred theory of depression is accurate, rather than giving them advice that only makes sense from that perspective. And on a topic like this, where first-person experience is a crucial part of the subject matter and third-person science is still inconclusive, of course your own (lack of?) experience is relevant.
    - NumberCruncher 10y ago
      Knowing how it feels to have a broken arm does not make us to a doctor and this experience is irrelevant if we talk about healing a broken arm. A short story [1]: George Dantzig was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Near the beginning of a class for which Dantzig was late, professor Jerzy Neyman wrote two examples of famously unsolved statistics problems on the blackboard. When Dantzig arrived, he assumed that the two problems were a homework assignment and wrote them down. According to Dantzig, the problems "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for the two problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. tl;dr: You can deal with hard problems if you think that dealing with them is your job and your own responsibility. Calling negative emotions "depression" and labelling as an illness means offloading responsibility and giving up the fight. You define yourself by the fights you pick and not by the pills you take. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig
david-given 10y ago
> IMHO the main question is whether you take responsibility for your situation or not. ... Calling depression an illness you give up your responsibility and give up also your power over it. Except the terrifying thing about depression is that you don't have any power over it. It takes your ability to make decisions away. You can't take responsibility over it, because you can't take responsibility over anything --- it's just not physically possible. > A brave new world of lack of responsibility... Be very careful; you're extremely close to saying that if people have depression then it's their own fault.

thaumaturgy 10y ago

> Calling depression an illness you give up your responsibility and give up also your power over it. No, not at all. You merely change the tactics you use for dealing with it.

curun1r 10y ago

The most frustrating part of the depressed vs depression terminology was that it led people who've never had depression to feel like they can relate to what someone going through depression is going through. It made them feel qualified to talk about depression, offer advice or try to "help" in all those ways that people try to help that are just so counterproductive. Plainly put, if you've never experienced depression, you have no idea what it's like...even people who have experienced depression often have no idea what it's like for other sufferers. The normal downs that you've experienced have nothing in common with what a depressed person experiences. It's like someone who only sees in black and white trying to talk about colors by talking about shades of greys. Until you experience real color, you're only qualified to make second-hand observations. I get where people are coming from when they want to call it an illness. I believe that rather than an attempt to offload responsibility, it's an attempt to clarify a very poorly chosen label for the condition. Depression, as a word, just feels too accessible to someone who hasn't been in it.

NumberCruncher 10y ago
You can make getting out of "the condition" to your own responsibility, if you want, even if getting there was not your fault. Or you can discuss the terminology of depression and clarify the label of "the condition" believing that this is not offloading the responsibility. It is your life, it is up to you what you make out of it. Unfortunately I can not build a 500 billion $ industry on this advice. My suggested lack of first hand experience is irrelevant.
- retsibsi 10y ago
  To understand why people who disagree with you find this kind of advice frustrating, substitute some unambiguously physical, serious illness for 'depression', and re-read your comment. You need to start by convincing people that your preferred theory of depression is accurate, rather than giving them advice that only makes sense from that perspective. And on a topic like this, where first-person experience is a crucial part of the subject matter and third-person science is still inconclusive, of course your own (lack of?) experience is relevant.
  - NumberCruncher 10y ago
    Knowing how it feels to have a broken arm does not make us to a doctor and this experience is irrelevant if we talk about healing a broken arm. A short story [1]: George Dantzig was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Near the beginning of a class for which Dantzig was late, professor Jerzy Neyman wrote two examples of famously unsolved statistics problems on the blackboard. When Dantzig arrived, he assumed that the two problems were a homework assignment and wrote them down. According to Dantzig, the problems "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for the two problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. tl;dr: You can deal with hard problems if you think that dealing with them is your job and your own responsibility. Calling negative emotions "depression" and labelling as an illness means offloading responsibility and giving up the fight. You define yourself by the fights you pick and not by the pills you take. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig

david-given 10y ago

> IMHO the main question is whether you take responsibility for your situation or not. ... Calling depression an illness you give up your responsibility and give up also your power over it. Except the terrifying thing about depression is that you don't have any power over it. It takes your ability to make decisions away. You can't take responsibility over it, because you can't take responsibility over anything --- it's just not physically possible. > A brave new world of lack of responsibility... Be very careful; you're extremely close to saying that if people have depression then it's their own fault.