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This may seem like an insensitive question and I don't mean it in that way but why can't you "think your way out of those problems". For example when I noticed

This may seem like an insensitive question and I don't mean it in that way but why can't you "think your way out of those problems". For example when I noticed myself being quiet as a teen I applied for a job in a shop to shore up my social skills. I had the keen awareness that ultimately no one cares about me having depression and only me alone can make efforts to treat it. How did your analysis compare?

vorpalhex 7y ago
Similar situation. I was terriby uncharismatic and it was killing my ability to make friends and deal with the office well - so I studied charisma and practiced the skills. Lots of social A/B testing (that's a bit of a cold way to look at it) and evolving and now my situation is generally improved.
- anon1m0us 7y ago
  What would you say are some of the things that helped the most? What did you practice? What did you study? How did you study? Reading? Watching?
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    I started with reading books on basic etiquette and manners as a baseline. I also asked folks who I trusted (my sister, fellow geeky/awkward folks) for genuine feedback which helped identify the issues no book can help - for years I would actually look at someones mouth instead of their eyes and didn't realize this until a girlfriend told me. Like most skills, it's a slow walk up a mountain - just keep taking a step every day, have conversations with strangers, pick up an on topic blog or book as it's useful.
- starpilot 7y ago
  I was able to get better at rock climbing, but some people never get over a fear of heights. I've got borderline personality disorder. Consider a bad social encounter: for you, there might be some shame but your brush yourself off and figure out what to do differently next time. Now imagine instead, when you get home from the party or whatever, someone there follows you and screams at you for hours that you're a pathetic failure, how being social is hopeless, how you'll never make it, dissecting everything you did, until you're on the floor crying. Except that person is inside your own head. You'd probably just try to never go out and socialize again, it's just too painful. If you did, you'd then have double the painful memories, and what good would that do?
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    So obviously social anxiety in the formal, medical sense is a real thing. I've had friends who have struggled with it, and had very good luck working with therapists. I'm sure that it's still a struggle for them, but at least from an external perspective, they seem to socialize and form relationships just as well as everyone else now. Outside the formal anxiety sense, most people struggle with the negative feedback loop. The trick is that you can't simply turn it off - even if you're the best socializer in the history of humanity. For me, I set an informal timer (usually while journaling or in the shower) to intentionally introspect my interactions and pick one thing I felt I could have improved on ("I really wish I had said more than 'fine' when So-and-so asked me how my day was") and then move on. One lesson that's hard, for me and I suspect others, is that while it's very important to be polite, it's not your job to make everyone else feel happy or complete - that's not an excuse to go around being a jerk, but also don't feel you owe anyone else something by default. It's enough to have a conversation about the weather or let the other person complain about their boss some and offer a bit of empathy.
throwaway_bad 7y ago
That's usually how smart people get depressed in the first place, by thinking too much. You realize that there's no point to anything you do. You will die. Humanity will die. The universe will die.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  This is why people have religion. Regardless of your personal views on the fact, it's a darn good way to avoid getting depressed by this sort of nihilism. You believe the universe will go on; you'll see your family one day and spend eternity in paradise. You may think it's BS, but have to admit it doesn't really matter for most people, it still does the job.
  - NeoBasilisk 7y ago
    As someone who has been on both sides of that belief, I can agree that it generally has a stabilizing effect on people's mental state. However, once you lose that belief, it is very difficult to make yourself believe it again. And probably even harder for people that never believed in the first place.
  - flatline 7y ago
    And yet millennia of philosophy have also attempted to address it. Epicurus comes first to mind from the materialist camp. Religion is not the only source of solace for existential dread, there are more rationalist approaches that can be viable. I think these have been sufficiently overshadowed by religion that they are only recently re-entering the public discourse.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    Another way to deal with nihilism is to embrace it. Once you accept that nothing matters, you can stop beating yourself up for mistakes and failures. You can strip the urgency from your goals. It allows you to proceed with outcome independence. This needs to be paired with some form of motivation too, but I think that's more up to the individual.
    - 7y ago
DoreenMichele 7y ago
Depression can be due to situational factors or biological factors. If you are smart and your depression is situational, yeah, problem solving can do wonders. But fixing biologically-based depression is much harder and, even if you try to do it, it's not guaranteed to work. We don't have a solid enough understanding of the biology of biologically-based depression.
- solomontribe 7y ago
  Situation can bring change of genetic expression. Read : Epigenetics
- slg 7y ago
  And the two things that can generally best help combat biologically-based depression, therapy and medication, also happen to be extremely expensive and probably haven't been readily available as an option for someone who is just now reaching a middle class income.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    I think there are complicating factors here that I intentionally chose to leave out of my comment because I get so much flak for thinking I know anything with confidence that isn't "common knowledge." I was involved with The TAG Project because I was homeschooling my two 2xe sons. I basically believe that people with very high IQs have different nutritional needs specifically to support their weird brains. My extra smart son gets really difficult to deal with when he's deficient in B vitamins, a vitamin class important to the brain. He easily gets deficient and there is no point arguing with him when he's deficient. So if you are basically chronically malnourished because of special nutritional needs that are currently unrecognized, there's little hope of getting that issue redressed. It snowballs from there: nutritional deficiency causes poorer cognition and more mental health issues which suppresses your ability to cope and becomes a general downward spiral that the world currently can't even properly diagnose. (The above is opinion based in part on being sort of a subject matter expert. Please don't ask me to "cite my source." My pro bono professional experience and personal experience is the source of my opinion. I'm not writing a PhD thesis here. I'm having a conversation. Thank you.)
starpilot 7y ago
A depressed person would say, "Doing X will not improve my situation or make me happy." And he might be right. With treatment-resistant depression, it's like your "happiness muscles" respond minimally or not at all to training. You're trying to light a pile of ashes. This is similar with many persistent mental conditions. Why not just tell an obese person to eat less food? Why doesn't someone with a phobia just stop being scared? And so on.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  Why doesn't someone with a phobia just stop being scared? Exposure therapy works for phobias; people exposed to their phobia in a way that increases their anxiety, long enough for their brain to notice they haven't died and recalibrate its fear response, stop being scared. Why not just tell an obese person to eat less food? Because they enjoy eating food? Eating food isn't what they want to stop, being fat or sick is what they want to stop. Eating food is delicious, comforting, filling, reassuring, is it any wonder people resist giving that up? It's not that their eat-less muscle won't respond to training, it's that they won't work their eat-less muscle because that involves eating less, and they like eating. A depressed person would say, "Doing X will not improve my situation or make me happy." And he might be right. That doesn't say his happiness muscle is broken and won't respond, it says he has unexplored reasons for preferring the status quo more. He gets more benefit from unhappiness than from doing X. Go explore those reasons.
on_and_off 7y ago
>no one cares about me having depression This :( It is a hard truth but chances are that you are the only one that can improve your life.
- on_and_off 7y ago
  In case somebody reads this. My life has started getting better when I got off my ass and worked to make it better. I got the job I wanted, started working out, started going out more (still working on that one tbh), went from being single to several long term relationships, etc. None of it was easy, all of it was and is a struggle. At some point, I realized that nobody else was going to work on all these things if I did not.
grzm 7y ago
> why can't you "think your way out of those problems" The tool you're trying to use to fix the problem is itself failing in some way. This is part of the pernicious nature of depression.
jack_h 7y ago
I'm in a similar situation to the OP. For me personally it's really difficult to "think my way out" of these sorts of problems. First they're large intertwined problems, second they're existential in nature, and third as you get older time becomes a huge factor. It's a vicious cycle really. Everyone has some idea of what they want out of life and whether or not they are "on track" to attain it. The further behind you are, the more this leads to increased depression, anxiety, anger, etc. At that point it's hard to effectively think or do anything at all, so the situation deteriorates further. Sometimes something works out; you get a girlfriend, you get a good job, whatever it happens to be. You start to feel like you can make a come back, you start making progress turning your life into what you want it to be. The problem is if that initial pillar gets knocked out from under you (break-up, laid off, etc) things can go down hill really damn fast; I know this from experience. You're right that largely speaking no one cares about a person having depression, or rather people say they care but their actions rarely line up with their words. That can be a very self-destructive realization though, because often times help is what you need. Some people can push past these adversities seemingly without issue. Others like myself have a much more difficult time with it. Perhaps "thinking through" the problem is the problem, maybe that leads to analysis paralysis. Maybe that's why those with higher IQs have this problem. I honestly have no idea.
zigzaggy 7y ago
As my old therapist would say, “a broken mind can’t fix a broken mind.” I suffer from pretty intense social anxiety. It turns out I was comparing the way I felt to the way other people appeared, and felt like a failure for a long time. I finally shelved all the old ideas I could shed and wrote my own definition of success. I can’t speak for others but I couldn’t think myself whole because my perspective was all wrong. It took talking through all that garbage and getting to the truth before I started getting healthy and whole.
- TurkishPoptart 7y ago
  how did you find your therapist? what criteria did you look at to find them? I've had bad luck with them lately.
skraaa2913 7y ago
This is really interesting! You are quite the "doer". I think for a lot of people the problem is that they think and plan a lot, but never do anything. You seem to be able to identify a problem and then proceed to solve it, which is a pretty good quality, I think. You take control of your life and do things instead of waiting for the "right time". Tell me, what do you think about your actions? "I need to do it because nobody else will"? Maybe "It's my responsibility, so I need to get it done"?
lallysingh 7y ago
Compute != Data != Models Wise people could figure it out, but there's only a partial overlap between wise and intelligent.
naasking 7y ago
> This may seem like an insensitive question and I don't mean it in that way but why can't you "think your way out of those problems" Because in your mind, motivation follows naturally from logically deduced need. Motivation isn't so connected in most people's minds; it's an emotional thing, which isn't necessarily driven by rational thought. I'm sure you've seen people doing something wrong even though they know it's wrong.
- bsanr2 7y ago
  I don't think it's necessarily emotional. The world does not have set inputs and outputs, and effort can be expended on activities that turn out to be arbitrarily fruitless. Decoupling expenditure of effort from expectation of reward would naturally and logically reduce motivation for even logically-deduced need. I think trauma and disappointment are far more prevalent than true sloth or vice, if such things as the later two exist at all.
emmelaich 7y ago
Jobs are important. Also team sports. Any team sports at all.

vorpalhex 7y ago

Similar situation. I was terriby uncharismatic and it was killing my ability to make friends and deal with the office well - so I studied charisma and practiced the skills. Lots of social A/B testing (that's a bit of a cold way to look at it) and evolving and now my situation is generally improved.

anon1m0us 7y ago
What would you say are some of the things that helped the most? What did you practice? What did you study? How did you study? Reading? Watching?
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  I started with reading books on basic etiquette and manners as a baseline. I also asked folks who I trusted (my sister, fellow geeky/awkward folks) for genuine feedback which helped identify the issues no book can help - for years I would actually look at someones mouth instead of their eyes and didn't realize this until a girlfriend told me. Like most skills, it's a slow walk up a mountain - just keep taking a step every day, have conversations with strangers, pick up an on topic blog or book as it's useful.
starpilot 7y ago
I was able to get better at rock climbing, but some people never get over a fear of heights. I've got borderline personality disorder. Consider a bad social encounter: for you, there might be some shame but your brush yourself off and figure out what to do differently next time. Now imagine instead, when you get home from the party or whatever, someone there follows you and screams at you for hours that you're a pathetic failure, how being social is hopeless, how you'll never make it, dissecting everything you did, until you're on the floor crying. Except that person is inside your own head. You'd probably just try to never go out and socialize again, it's just too painful. If you did, you'd then have double the painful memories, and what good would that do?
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  So obviously social anxiety in the formal, medical sense is a real thing. I've had friends who have struggled with it, and had very good luck working with therapists. I'm sure that it's still a struggle for them, but at least from an external perspective, they seem to socialize and form relationships just as well as everyone else now. Outside the formal anxiety sense, most people struggle with the negative feedback loop. The trick is that you can't simply turn it off - even if you're the best socializer in the history of humanity. For me, I set an informal timer (usually while journaling or in the shower) to intentionally introspect my interactions and pick one thing I felt I could have improved on ("I really wish I had said more than 'fine' when So-and-so asked me how my day was") and then move on. One lesson that's hard, for me and I suspect others, is that while it's very important to be polite, it's not your job to make everyone else feel happy or complete - that's not an excuse to go around being a jerk, but also don't feel you owe anyone else something by default. It's enough to have a conversation about the weather or let the other person complain about their boss some and offer a bit of empathy.

throwaway_bad 7y ago

That's usually how smart people get depressed in the first place, by thinking too much. You realize that there's no point to anything you do. You will die. Humanity will die. The universe will die.

big_chungus 7y ago
This is why people have religion. Regardless of your personal views on the fact, it's a darn good way to avoid getting depressed by this sort of nihilism. You believe the universe will go on; you'll see your family one day and spend eternity in paradise. You may think it's BS, but have to admit it doesn't really matter for most people, it still does the job.
- NeoBasilisk 7y ago
  As someone who has been on both sides of that belief, I can agree that it generally has a stabilizing effect on people's mental state. However, once you lose that belief, it is very difficult to make yourself believe it again. And probably even harder for people that never believed in the first place.
- flatline 7y ago
  And yet millennia of philosophy have also attempted to address it. Epicurus comes first to mind from the materialist camp. Religion is not the only source of solace for existential dread, there are more rationalist approaches that can be viable. I think these have been sufficiently overshadowed by religion that they are only recently re-entering the public discourse.
- phkahler 7y ago
  Another way to deal with nihilism is to embrace it. Once you accept that nothing matters, you can stop beating yourself up for mistakes and failures. You can strip the urgency from your goals. It allows you to proceed with outcome independence. This needs to be paired with some form of motivation too, but I think that's more up to the individual.
  - 7y ago

DoreenMichele 7y ago

Depression can be due to situational factors or biological factors. If you are smart and your depression is situational, yeah, problem solving can do wonders. But fixing biologically-based depression is much harder and, even if you try to do it, it's not guaranteed to work. We don't have a solid enough understanding of the biology of biologically-based depression.

solomontribe 7y ago
Situation can bring change of genetic expression. Read : Epigenetics
slg 7y ago
And the two things that can generally best help combat biologically-based depression, therapy and medication, also happen to be extremely expensive and probably haven't been readily available as an option for someone who is just now reaching a middle class income.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  I think there are complicating factors here that I intentionally chose to leave out of my comment because I get so much flak for thinking I know anything with confidence that isn't "common knowledge." I was involved with The TAG Project because I was homeschooling my two 2xe sons. I basically believe that people with very high IQs have different nutritional needs specifically to support their weird brains. My extra smart son gets really difficult to deal with when he's deficient in B vitamins, a vitamin class important to the brain. He easily gets deficient and there is no point arguing with him when he's deficient. So if you are basically chronically malnourished because of special nutritional needs that are currently unrecognized, there's little hope of getting that issue redressed. It snowballs from there: nutritional deficiency causes poorer cognition and more mental health issues which suppresses your ability to cope and becomes a general downward spiral that the world currently can't even properly diagnose. (The above is opinion based in part on being sort of a subject matter expert. Please don't ask me to "cite my source." My pro bono professional experience and personal experience is the source of my opinion. I'm not writing a PhD thesis here. I'm having a conversation. Thank you.)

starpilot 7y ago

A depressed person would say, "Doing X will not improve my situation or make me happy." And he might be right. With treatment-resistant depression, it's like your "happiness muscles" respond minimally or not at all to training. You're trying to light a pile of ashes. This is similar with many persistent mental conditions. Why not just tell an obese person to eat less food? Why doesn't someone with a phobia just stop being scared? And so on.

jodrellblank 7y ago
Why doesn't someone with a phobia just stop being scared? Exposure therapy works for phobias; people exposed to their phobia in a way that increases their anxiety, long enough for their brain to notice they haven't died and recalibrate its fear response, stop being scared. Why not just tell an obese person to eat less food? Because they enjoy eating food? Eating food isn't what they want to stop, being fat or sick is what they want to stop. Eating food is delicious, comforting, filling, reassuring, is it any wonder people resist giving that up? It's not that their eat-less muscle won't respond to training, it's that they won't work their eat-less muscle because that involves eating less, and they like eating. A depressed person would say, "Doing X will not improve my situation or make me happy." And he might be right. That doesn't say his happiness muscle is broken and won't respond, it says he has unexplored reasons for preferring the status quo more. He gets more benefit from unhappiness than from doing X. Go explore those reasons.

on_and_off 7y ago

>no one cares about me having depression This :( It is a hard truth but chances are that you are the only one that can improve your life.

on_and_off 7y ago
In case somebody reads this. My life has started getting better when I got off my ass and worked to make it better. I got the job I wanted, started working out, started going out more (still working on that one tbh), went from being single to several long term relationships, etc. None of it was easy, all of it was and is a struggle. At some point, I realized that nobody else was going to work on all these things if I did not.

grzm 7y ago

> why can't you "think your way out of those problems" The tool you're trying to use to fix the problem is itself failing in some way. This is part of the pernicious nature of depression.

jack_h 7y ago

I'm in a similar situation to the OP. For me personally it's really difficult to "think my way out" of these sorts of problems. First they're large intertwined problems, second they're existential in nature, and third as you get older time becomes a huge factor. It's a vicious cycle really. Everyone has some idea of what they want out of life and whether or not they are "on track" to attain it. The further behind you are, the more this leads to increased depression, anxiety, anger, etc. At that point it's hard to effectively think or do anything at all, so the situation deteriorates further. Sometimes something works out; you get a girlfriend, you get a good job, whatever it happens to be. You start to feel like you can make a come back, you start making progress turning your life into what you want it to be. The problem is if that initial pillar gets knocked out from under you (break-up, laid off, etc) things can go down hill really damn fast; I know this from experience. You're right that largely speaking no one cares about a person having depression, or rather people say they care but their actions rarely line up with their words. That can be a very self-destructive realization though, because often times help is what you need. Some people can push past these adversities seemingly without issue. Others like myself have a much more difficult time with it. Perhaps "thinking through" the problem is the problem, maybe that leads to analysis paralysis. Maybe that's why those with higher IQs have this problem. I honestly have no idea.

zigzaggy 7y ago

As my old therapist would say, “a broken mind can’t fix a broken mind.” I suffer from pretty intense social anxiety. It turns out I was comparing the way I felt to the way other people appeared, and felt like a failure for a long time. I finally shelved all the old ideas I could shed and wrote my own definition of success. I can’t speak for others but I couldn’t think myself whole because my perspective was all wrong. It took talking through all that garbage and getting to the truth before I started getting healthy and whole.

TurkishPoptart 7y ago
how did you find your therapist? what criteria did you look at to find them? I've had bad luck with them lately.

skraaa2913 7y ago

This is really interesting! You are quite the "doer". I think for a lot of people the problem is that they think and plan a lot, but never do anything. You seem to be able to identify a problem and then proceed to solve it, which is a pretty good quality, I think. You take control of your life and do things instead of waiting for the "right time". Tell me, what do you think about your actions? "I need to do it because nobody else will"? Maybe "It's my responsibility, so I need to get it done"?

lallysingh 7y ago

Compute != Data != Models Wise people could figure it out, but there's only a partial overlap between wise and intelligent.

naasking 7y ago

> This may seem like an insensitive question and I don't mean it in that way but why can't you "think your way out of those problems" Because in your mind, motivation follows naturally from logically deduced need. Motivation isn't so connected in most people's minds; it's an emotional thing, which isn't necessarily driven by rational thought. I'm sure you've seen people doing something wrong even though they know it's wrong.

bsanr2 7y ago
I don't think it's necessarily emotional. The world does not have set inputs and outputs, and effort can be expended on activities that turn out to be arbitrarily fruitless. Decoupling expenditure of effort from expectation of reward would naturally and logically reduce motivation for even logically-deduced need. I think trauma and disappointment are far more prevalent than true sloth or vice, if such things as the later two exist at all.

emmelaich 7y ago

Jobs are important. Also team sports. Any team sports at all.