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Why did my comment get flagged? I assume this was a mistake, so reposting: tl;dr: Many people diagnosed with depression are actually just sad because modern so

Why did my comment get flagged? I assume this was a mistake, so reposting: tl;dr: Many people diagnosed with depression are actually just sad because modern society is kinda lame. (The article argues this point cogently, and I agree with it.) [I slightly edited this because I think people thought I was saying that I think all depressed people are faking or something]

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
EGreg 9y ago
I found, over the years of being on HN, that there's a sort of forceful response that always comes to these types of comments about depression, along with downvoting. The responses say basically, "Don't talk about what you don't know. Many people have real, chemical depression, and your comment that it's a product of life circumstances is not helpful". I was always a but puzzled about the regularity with which that above formula appeared on HN. Sure, many entrepreneurs and especially developers lead lonely, stressful lives. I am a developer and entrepreneur myself! But I also felt there is a sort of "groupthink" or "bullying" element to this, because there was hardly much substantive discussion about facts or statistics or science, in effect it was shaming the commenter into shutting up. This bothers me. I like to see real fact based discussion when there is disagreement. Not just downvoting and vague assertions. In this case I am sure you were downvoted by that exact same sentiment. Even if you had summarized the article, the content of the summary was enough to trigger the downvote.
- foobarbecue 9y ago
  Oddly, it was upvoted twice /and/ flagged. I guess anyone with enough reputation can bury things just by hitting a "flag" button.
  - greenyoda 9y ago
    It could have been flagged multiple times (flags are additive). Even articles that have hundreds of upvotes can be killed by flagging if enough people flag them.
    - foobarbecue 9y ago
      Is flagging the same thing as clicking the [-] button? Is this explained somewhere? My flagged comment has +2 points, and my unflagged version of it has -2 points. Very confusing, and if I did something wrong, nobody is telling me what it is. I can't find any documentation for HN, which is a little ironic...
      - grzm 9y ago
        The [-] collapses your view of the thread. The flag link appears when you have sufficient karma (I don’t recall the threshold). Click on the time stamp for the comment you want to act on. If you have enough karma, the flag link appears between the “parent” and “favorite” links.
- greenyoda 9y ago
  A couple more points regarding "Don't talk about what you don't know": 1. How would we even know whether the person who posted the comment has no personal experience with depression? They may be agreeing with the author of the article because they've both had long experience with depression, and have both become skeptical about the mainstream views of it. 2. Just because someone has had personal experience with depression does not necessarily make them an authority on that topic. Lots of people on HN express strong opinions about things that they're not personally experienced with: poverty, sexual harassment, etc. (not to mention tons of technical topics). If we stopped talking about everything we have no personal experience with, discussion on HN would dry up pretty quickly.
- rwnspace 9y ago
  In my subjective experience, I am much more inclined to respond very negatively to others' discussions on depression, when I am myself depressed. My personal experiences with it are confused by PTSD and ADHD, but I've got a few (too many) years under my belt, and I have hit absolute zero multiple times. The problem with reading online discussions, /I think/, is that it's super easy to end up with a polluted perspective and bipolar esteem/locus of control: everything sucks, catastrophically so, I'm stupid, and it's all entirely my fault; even if it isn't, everyone is stupid & the world has conspired to ruin me. So a description of patterns of thought, of pitfalls hidden as cultural ambitions - patterns socially or environmentally derived - are parsed into "so it's my fault? F___ off -- or it's the fault of society, well I bear that crushing realisation daily, thank you". Our highly individualistic culture poisons perfectly good advice for the people it might benefit, and/or adds to the weight many others can do without. Although "you can change your environment by changing your perception of it" is definitely sound, for so many peoples' valuations it's just another string in the bow of uselessness. There are also, in my experience, two gates that must be open at the same time to allow for slow repair work, or larger positive changes. Unfortunately, they also depend on each other, and when things are truly awful neither are plausible. These are a) a surplus of willpower, no matter how little above the level required to minimally function, and b) a regular sleep pattern. Since depression reduces willpower dramatically, and we are very poor judges of what drains our willpower, the repair process can often feel like Sisyphean whackamole... But eventually, at least for me, I found little willpower exercises I could do every day. At one point, this was quite literally just attempting not to visit my 'stim' websites on first impulse. Eventually I'd still visit them. Didn't matter. That was it. Not even every day. Just every day I could was enough. Until I could do a little more.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Probably because there are many comments along the lines 'it's just life circumstances! Just change those!' without regard for the disabling effects of depression, the difficulty of unilaterally altering said circumstances, or known failures of prior attempts to do so. What's not helpful is to have people with little first hand experience of a situation offer a simplistic causal diagnosis and then treat the problem as solved-by-identification. It's kinda like the conversation where someone is trying to describe a problem with a piece of software or UI trope, and people chime in with unhelpful workarounds rather than addressing the issue itself. substantive discussion about facts or statistics or science Given the subjective nature of consciousness, dismissal of anecdotal responses as counterfactual or invalid is intensely alienating to the depressed subject.
TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
Maybe depression, with it's concomitant disinterest in life and society, and increased risk of suicide, is a global immune reaction to humans unabated efforts to destroy the biosphere and each other. Or, with slightly less woo-woo: is it any wonder so many of us feel hopeless when we are, collectively, shitting in the pool and force feeding each other hollow materialistic junk via brainwashing advertising. Yeah, I'm gonna say it: this disease, this depression so many of us suffer, is a result of a sick society. But our hyper-individualistic culture blames the individual, then lets, no expects, that doctors prescribe them addictive drugs that don't work and are terrible to try to stop taking. Seriously, what the hell are we doing? If I treated my dog like this I'd end up in court for animal cruelty.
jamesrom 9y ago
I think "modern society" is a scapegoat here. You aren't yearning for a more antique society. You are romanticising the past. The part you are looking for is being connected to a community, and there's many more ways to do that today than ever before.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Um, no. You can critique the present as being flawed in some manner without necessarily wishing to go backwards. Your argument seems to rest on the notion that we are at some sort of optimum and any changes to society will inevitably make things worse. You overlook, for example, the possibility that the GP is able to imagine superior future(s) the most probable one and is expressing disappointment at our failure to pursue them.
dang 9y ago
Reposting a flagged comment is obviously an abuse of the flagging system, and complaining about being flagged falls under the same rule as "please don't comment about voting": it makes boring reading and does no good. So please don't do those things. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

EGreg 9y ago

I found, over the years of being on HN, that there's a sort of forceful response that always comes to these types of comments about depression, along with downvoting. The responses say basically, "Don't talk about what you don't know. Many people have real, chemical depression, and your comment that it's a product of life circumstances is not helpful". I was always a but puzzled about the regularity with which that above formula appeared on HN. Sure, many entrepreneurs and especially developers lead lonely, stressful lives. I am a developer and entrepreneur myself! But I also felt there is a sort of "groupthink" or "bullying" element to this, because there was hardly much substantive discussion about facts or statistics or science, in effect it was shaming the commenter into shutting up. This bothers me. I like to see real fact based discussion when there is disagreement. Not just downvoting and vague assertions. In this case I am sure you were downvoted by that exact same sentiment. Even if you had summarized the article, the content of the summary was enough to trigger the downvote.

foobarbecue 9y ago
Oddly, it was upvoted twice /and/ flagged. I guess anyone with enough reputation can bury things just by hitting a "flag" button.
- greenyoda 9y ago
  It could have been flagged multiple times (flags are additive). Even articles that have hundreds of upvotes can be killed by flagging if enough people flag them.
  - foobarbecue 9y ago
    Is flagging the same thing as clicking the [-] button? Is this explained somewhere? My flagged comment has +2 points, and my unflagged version of it has -2 points. Very confusing, and if I did something wrong, nobody is telling me what it is. I can't find any documentation for HN, which is a little ironic...
    - grzm 9y ago
      The [-] collapses your view of the thread. The flag link appears when you have sufficient karma (I don’t recall the threshold). Click on the time stamp for the comment you want to act on. If you have enough karma, the flag link appears between the “parent” and “favorite” links.
greenyoda 9y ago
A couple more points regarding "Don't talk about what you don't know": 1. How would we even know whether the person who posted the comment has no personal experience with depression? They may be agreeing with the author of the article because they've both had long experience with depression, and have both become skeptical about the mainstream views of it. 2. Just because someone has had personal experience with depression does not necessarily make them an authority on that topic. Lots of people on HN express strong opinions about things that they're not personally experienced with: poverty, sexual harassment, etc. (not to mention tons of technical topics). If we stopped talking about everything we have no personal experience with, discussion on HN would dry up pretty quickly.
rwnspace 9y ago
In my subjective experience, I am much more inclined to respond very negatively to others' discussions on depression, when I am myself depressed. My personal experiences with it are confused by PTSD and ADHD, but I've got a few (too many) years under my belt, and I have hit absolute zero multiple times. The problem with reading online discussions, /I think/, is that it's super easy to end up with a polluted perspective and bipolar esteem/locus of control: everything sucks, catastrophically so, I'm stupid, and it's all entirely my fault; even if it isn't, everyone is stupid & the world has conspired to ruin me. So a description of patterns of thought, of pitfalls hidden as cultural ambitions - patterns socially or environmentally derived - are parsed into "so it's my fault? F___ off -- or it's the fault of society, well I bear that crushing realisation daily, thank you". Our highly individualistic culture poisons perfectly good advice for the people it might benefit, and/or adds to the weight many others can do without. Although "you can change your environment by changing your perception of it" is definitely sound, for so many peoples' valuations it's just another string in the bow of uselessness. There are also, in my experience, two gates that must be open at the same time to allow for slow repair work, or larger positive changes. Unfortunately, they also depend on each other, and when things are truly awful neither are plausible. These are a) a surplus of willpower, no matter how little above the level required to minimally function, and b) a regular sleep pattern. Since depression reduces willpower dramatically, and we are very poor judges of what drains our willpower, the repair process can often feel like Sisyphean whackamole... But eventually, at least for me, I found little willpower exercises I could do every day. At one point, this was quite literally just attempting not to visit my 'stim' websites on first impulse. Eventually I'd still visit them. Didn't matter. That was it. Not even every day. Just every day I could was enough. Until I could do a little more.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Probably because there are many comments along the lines 'it's just life circumstances! Just change those!' without regard for the disabling effects of depression, the difficulty of unilaterally altering said circumstances, or known failures of prior attempts to do so. What's not helpful is to have people with little first hand experience of a situation offer a simplistic causal diagnosis and then treat the problem as solved-by-identification. It's kinda like the conversation where someone is trying to describe a problem with a piece of software or UI trope, and people chime in with unhelpful workarounds rather than addressing the issue itself. substantive discussion about facts or statistics or science Given the subjective nature of consciousness, dismissal of anecdotal responses as counterfactual or invalid is intensely alienating to the depressed subject.

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago

Maybe depression, with it's concomitant disinterest in life and society, and increased risk of suicide, is a global immune reaction to humans unabated efforts to destroy the biosphere and each other. Or, with slightly less woo-woo: is it any wonder so many of us feel hopeless when we are, collectively, shitting in the pool and force feeding each other hollow materialistic junk via brainwashing advertising. Yeah, I'm gonna say it: this disease, this depression so many of us suffer, is a result of a sick society. But our hyper-individualistic culture blames the individual, then lets, no expects, that doctors prescribe them addictive drugs that don't work and are terrible to try to stop taking. Seriously, what the hell are we doing? If I treated my dog like this I'd end up in court for animal cruelty.

jamesrom 9y ago

I think "modern society" is a scapegoat here. You aren't yearning for a more antique society. You are romanticising the past. The part you are looking for is being connected to a community, and there's many more ways to do that today than ever before.

anigbrowl 9y ago
Um, no. You can critique the present as being flawed in some manner without necessarily wishing to go backwards. Your argument seems to rest on the notion that we are at some sort of optimum and any changes to society will inevitably make things worse. You overlook, for example, the possibility that the GP is able to imagine superior future(s) the most probable one and is expressing disappointment at our failure to pursue them.

dang 9y ago

Reposting a flagged comment is obviously an abuse of the flagging system, and complaining about being flagged falls under the same rule as "please don't comment about voting": it makes boring reading and does no good. So please don't do those things. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html