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This explanation does not work for all types of depression. There are people who have wonderful lives, fulfilling jobs, happy families, who are still depressed.

This explanation does not work for all types of depression. There are people who have wonderful lives, fulfilling jobs, happy families, who are still depressed. We need to be more careful in our language, the word depression has become overused, much like the drugs used to treat it.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
>There are people who have wonderful lives, fulfilling jobs, happy families, who are still depressed. If someone truly feels and believes they have a "wonderful" life, it would seem they are not suffering from crippling depression. Though what I think you're trying to say is there are people who are depressed even though they seem to have all of their basic human needs being met.
- xiphias 9y ago
  For most of us depression is something that just comes from different expectations from our life from what we have. For a long time I thought that this is depression until.I got to know a real person who has everything he wants to.have (he's very moderate person with moderate needs, a family supporting him), but he can't control his illness. When he gets depressed, he's not even mentally capable of doing very simple tasks.
- whichdan 9y ago
  It's entirely possible for someone to suffer from depression despite knowing that they have a good life.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    The questions, then, are: Why? How can this be the case? What are we not taking in to consideration in order to properly treat, or at least understand the condition(s)? Maybe having all those things actually isn't what leads people to feel grateful for being alive.
  - juicyfroot 9y ago
    What's a good life? A lot of people would say that making 75k and healthy is a "good life". Yet we know that most of us are in dead end jobs and in a constant rat race. A lot of people,including researchers, have such low standards and they look at other people with those standards and think "but they have a good life!"
  - nixpulvis 9y ago
    Sure they have a good life when they try to enumerate the qualities of a good life, what they forget is that some "needs" may be unknown to them, though if they listen the needs aren't usually very quite.
    - com2kid 9y ago
      Or they have bi-polar disorder and are on a downswing. That alone will do it. Some forms of depression are medical, people need to be aware of this. Thinking that everyone can be cured by running off and finding one's true self is incredibly dangerous. For some people, that is the solution, but for others, running away from their support network is the exact wrong thing to do. All that said, soul crushing jobs are soul crushing. The modern world's insistence that we all have true purpose in life has not helped things any. A lot of people used to just be happy getting married, having kids, and seeing their kids do well. Now, we all want some sort of higher purpose (I'm guilty of this as well), which makes obtaining happiness really hard. For the longest time, success was "at least a few of your kids survived". Since then, standards have been raised to a point that only a fraction of the population can meet the current bar.
      - nixpulvis 9y ago
        I think a very large percent of people would be happy with your old time antidote, but it's more an issue of security in realizing that. I would personally change your word meaningful, to my word, sustainable. P.S. Who said anything about running away from support networks? Listening to your needs I suspect might look like asking someone for help, or something along those lines. But that's just it, everyone's needs aren't the same.
        com2kid 9y ago
        > P.S. Who said anything about running away from support networks? The article, and popular mythos. Leaving one's job, running off to explore one's true self. Society is full of stories of people fed up with everything so they leave behind all they know. Heck sometimes it even works. But I'm countering the article's main thesis, which seems to be "depression is from having a crappy job" with the point that there are other causes as well.
- tasty_freeze 9y ago
  You must not know anyone well who has depression then. A person can intellectually see that their life is not so bad ... but their emotional and corresponding physical state are an entirely different matter. An analogy I make sometimes is this. Have you ever been scared while watching a scary movie, or laughed at a comedy or teared up at a fictional drama? Even though your intellect knows the thing you are watching is an artificial event that never really happened, your emotional state and your physical state don't care what your intellectual understanding is.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    You're assuming our intellectual assessment of our lives is always right and without bias. Just because we don't recognize something as being "real" doesn't mean it can't have real effects on your mental wellbeing.
nixpulvis 9y ago
Seems to me this person has a secret issue you're not aware of then...
- ravenstine 9y ago
  That's why I have doubts as to how often depression is actually caused by a medical condition. Judging by myself, I suspect that a lot of people, including people who are seemingly happy and successful, have hidden disappointments that even a psychologist can't pry out of them.
- mabbo 9y ago
  You're missing the point, I think. What they are saying is that some depression is just purely a disease and not caused by events in life, or not caused by any psychological problem. If you disagree, that's fine, but it sounds to me like you're simply dismissing that idea. Consider it like this: most qualities in humans fall into some sort of normal distribution. Some 1% of the population are the 1% with the least natural serotonin production. Genetics play a large role in that. Could that cause of depression not exist?
  - nixpulvis 9y ago
    I don't think I'm missing the point. And I'm not saying people aren't effected by chemical levels and biological systems I don't fully understand... what I am saying is, anyone who tells you they have a wonderful life and then tells you they are depressed is leaving out something important. Now for the critique, the OP didn't really make it clear who's idea of a wonderful life it is. I also use the word secrect as a way to throw some shade, because the word secret implies the owners knowledge of the secret, which is not alway the case here, I should have just said "... has a secret."
    - newfoundglory 9y ago
      What you're saying is nonsense, and I know that for certain because I have been the person who had a wonderful life and was depressed, and I wasn't keeping anything from myself.
mabbo 9y ago
That's how I've often described it before. Feeling like shit when your life is terrible is normal. Feeling like shit when your life is awesome is not. The problem is that the pill often works regardless of why you feel like shit.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  >Feeling like shit when your life is terrible is normal. Feeling like shit when your life is awesome is not. Could it possibly be that our idea of an "awesome life" is mistaken?
  - nixpulvis 9y ago
    BOOM, exactly.
- EdwardDiego 9y ago
  I was very depressed because life was shit, and the symptoms were preventing me from fixing the issues causing it. So I take antidepressants not to fix the issues, but to alleviate the symptoms so that I am able to take on the actual problems.
- kps 9y ago
  > The problem is that the pill often works regardless of why you feel like shit. Why is that a problem, if you're not a Luddite or Puritan?

wu-ikkyu 9y ago

>There are people who have wonderful lives, fulfilling jobs, happy families, who are still depressed. If someone truly feels and believes they have a "wonderful" life, it would seem they are not suffering from crippling depression. Though what I think you're trying to say is there are people who are depressed even though they seem to have all of their basic human needs being met.

xiphias 9y ago
For most of us depression is something that just comes from different expectations from our life from what we have. For a long time I thought that this is depression until.I got to know a real person who has everything he wants to.have (he's very moderate person with moderate needs, a family supporting him), but he can't control his illness. When he gets depressed, he's not even mentally capable of doing very simple tasks.
whichdan 9y ago
It's entirely possible for someone to suffer from depression despite knowing that they have a good life.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  The questions, then, are: Why? How can this be the case? What are we not taking in to consideration in order to properly treat, or at least understand the condition(s)? Maybe having all those things actually isn't what leads people to feel grateful for being alive.
- juicyfroot 9y ago
  What's a good life? A lot of people would say that making 75k and healthy is a "good life". Yet we know that most of us are in dead end jobs and in a constant rat race. A lot of people,including researchers, have such low standards and they look at other people with those standards and think "but they have a good life!"
- nixpulvis 9y ago
  Sure they have a good life when they try to enumerate the qualities of a good life, what they forget is that some "needs" may be unknown to them, though if they listen the needs aren't usually very quite.
  - com2kid 9y ago
    Or they have bi-polar disorder and are on a downswing. That alone will do it. Some forms of depression are medical, people need to be aware of this. Thinking that everyone can be cured by running off and finding one's true self is incredibly dangerous. For some people, that is the solution, but for others, running away from their support network is the exact wrong thing to do. All that said, soul crushing jobs are soul crushing. The modern world's insistence that we all have true purpose in life has not helped things any. A lot of people used to just be happy getting married, having kids, and seeing their kids do well. Now, we all want some sort of higher purpose (I'm guilty of this as well), which makes obtaining happiness really hard. For the longest time, success was "at least a few of your kids survived". Since then, standards have been raised to a point that only a fraction of the population can meet the current bar.
    - nixpulvis 9y ago
      I think a very large percent of people would be happy with your old time antidote, but it's more an issue of security in realizing that. I would personally change your word meaningful, to my word, sustainable. P.S. Who said anything about running away from support networks? Listening to your needs I suspect might look like asking someone for help, or something along those lines. But that's just it, everyone's needs aren't the same.
      - com2kid 9y ago
        > P.S. Who said anything about running away from support networks? The article, and popular mythos. Leaving one's job, running off to explore one's true self. Society is full of stories of people fed up with everything so they leave behind all they know. Heck sometimes it even works. But I'm countering the article's main thesis, which seems to be "depression is from having a crappy job" with the point that there are other causes as well.
tasty_freeze 9y ago
You must not know anyone well who has depression then. A person can intellectually see that their life is not so bad ... but their emotional and corresponding physical state are an entirely different matter. An analogy I make sometimes is this. Have you ever been scared while watching a scary movie, or laughed at a comedy or teared up at a fictional drama? Even though your intellect knows the thing you are watching is an artificial event that never really happened, your emotional state and your physical state don't care what your intellectual understanding is.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  You're assuming our intellectual assessment of our lives is always right and without bias. Just because we don't recognize something as being "real" doesn't mean it can't have real effects on your mental wellbeing.

nixpulvis 9y ago

Seems to me this person has a secret issue you're not aware of then...

ravenstine 9y ago
That's why I have doubts as to how often depression is actually caused by a medical condition. Judging by myself, I suspect that a lot of people, including people who are seemingly happy and successful, have hidden disappointments that even a psychologist can't pry out of them.
mabbo 9y ago
You're missing the point, I think. What they are saying is that some depression is just purely a disease and not caused by events in life, or not caused by any psychological problem. If you disagree, that's fine, but it sounds to me like you're simply dismissing that idea. Consider it like this: most qualities in humans fall into some sort of normal distribution. Some 1% of the population are the 1% with the least natural serotonin production. Genetics play a large role in that. Could that cause of depression not exist?
- nixpulvis 9y ago
  I don't think I'm missing the point. And I'm not saying people aren't effected by chemical levels and biological systems I don't fully understand... what I am saying is, anyone who tells you they have a wonderful life and then tells you they are depressed is leaving out something important. Now for the critique, the OP didn't really make it clear who's idea of a wonderful life it is. I also use the word secrect as a way to throw some shade, because the word secret implies the owners knowledge of the secret, which is not alway the case here, I should have just said "... has a secret."
  - newfoundglory 9y ago
    What you're saying is nonsense, and I know that for certain because I have been the person who had a wonderful life and was depressed, and I wasn't keeping anything from myself.

mabbo 9y ago

That's how I've often described it before. Feeling like shit when your life is terrible is normal. Feeling like shit when your life is awesome is not. The problem is that the pill often works regardless of why you feel like shit.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
>Feeling like shit when your life is terrible is normal. Feeling like shit when your life is awesome is not. Could it possibly be that our idea of an "awesome life" is mistaken?
- nixpulvis 9y ago
  BOOM, exactly.
EdwardDiego 9y ago
I was very depressed because life was shit, and the symptoms were preventing me from fixing the issues causing it. So I take antidepressants not to fix the issues, but to alleviate the symptoms so that I am able to take on the actual problems.
kps 9y ago
> The problem is that the pill often works regardless of why you feel like shit. Why is that a problem, if you're not a Luddite or Puritan?