3 ms·

The fact that people in here are considering waiting to have a kid till they can self-diagnose themselves as mentally stable enough not to kill themselves, is i

by GDC7 5y ago

The fact that people in here are considering waiting to have a kid till they can self-diagnose themselves as mentally stable enough not to kill themselves, is itself an indicator that people who clicked on this HN thread are at higher risk for depression. Me included. The non-depressed person goes about the world as they owned it, thinking nothing but good things will come their way, they have the confidence to try half-court shots and so forth. People were never made to think about all the negative stuff potentially happening to them. That was the state of the world back in the African plains, if we had enough data to plot the diminishing of interpersonal violence and the rise of depression I have a feeling that there'd be a strong correlation between the two Matter of fact widespread interpersonal violence is what happens when most (if not all people) go about the world with as they owned it.

rainonmoon 5y ago
You'd probably find a lot to like in the book Lost Connections by Johann Hari. The main thrust is the impact society has had on mental health, in contradiction to the notion that depression is merely a "chemical imbalance".
- kirrent 5y ago
  I'd steer clear of Hari. Having listened to an interview with him I found interesting I did a fair amount of digging into the sources of his claims. Some of his claims were known and fairly uncontroversial in the medical establishment but the manner he presented them, against some straw-man of medical practice, was a bit misleading (examples - https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2018/jan/08/is-everything-johann-hari-knows-about-depression-wrong-lost-connections https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2018/jan/...). Still, that didn't worry me because I'm sure plenty of people do receive the standard of care he was arguing against. As that article above suggests, best practice care is expensive and time-consuming. Where he really lost me was that every fascinating and surprising claim presented by him with absolute certainty that I looked into was either an exaggeration or wrong. As an example, he had a striking statistic that the modal number of friends people used to be able to rely on in an emergency was something like 4 or 5. Ten years later in the present day that number has dropped to 0. Putting aside the fact that a mode can be pretty misleading, I still thought it was an interesting difference in only ten years so I was disappointed to find that the most credible explanation in the literature seems to be that it's an artefact of survey design. Even the original paper he got the statistic from was pretty equivocal on the validity of the finding, so even if he was a bit lazy in not reading through later papers, he still should have been less confident. I haven't read his book though. The above is just to say, caveat lector.
  - rainonmoon 5y ago
    I always appreciate a good fact checking, thanks! I'll have to look into it more for myself, great counter-perspective. I'll add an anecdote about the book's effect re: the claims about brain chemistry: talking to the friend who recommended the book about Hari's claims to the ineffectiveness of medication, she said "Even if my medication only makes a few percent difference, for me it's the difference between killing myself and not." I liked that reading of Hari's book not as anti-medicine, but as an explanation for why people who've been ratcheting up their dosage over the years, as a lot of my friends have, still feel totally insane: medication can't fix the whole problem itself.
quadrangle 5y ago
Your "own the world" idea sounds more like the manic side of bipolar disorder rather than a healthy moderation that represents a "non-depressed person". You're right that "own the world" mania is dangerous and destructive. I hope you're not suggesting that this is the inevitable tragic state as the only alternative to depression. People in the thousands-of-years-ago African plains were still people. They weren't in a constant state of narcissistic mania. And the idea that they were violent and dangerous until civilization or depression moderated them is as contrived as the idea that they were noble-savages who lived in peace and harmony. I fear that a lot of depressed people wallow in their depression by critiquing non-depressed people as though they were all manic and dangerous, and thus this is a defense of staying depressed and doing nothing about it. There really are healthy moderated ways to live. For tons of different reasons, we see huge variations in the level of difficulty people have in finding or maintaining that healthy moderation.
- GDC7 5y ago
  > There really are healthy moderated ways to live. Nature doesn't like moderation. It likes a variety of many extremes so that it can reward those extremes which are particularly adapted/lucky to win in that particular moment. And win big.
  - rackjack 5y ago
    What kind of people have you been interacting with that your impression of the non-depressed is "they think they own the world"?
  - quadrangle 5y ago
    Nature doesn't have likes. Yes, there are various sorts of equilibria that are stable and other conditions that are unstable. And some forms of moderation that might be ideal are inherently unstable. But people still work to maintain moderation, and they would have done so 20,000 years ago as well. Most extremes are themselves unstable and do not persist over the long-term. Winning big in the short-term does not correlate to long-term thriving. Cultures and species that have been dominant but then went extinct are numerous. Meanwhile, a lot of non-dominant forms of life have survived the eons. The entire nature of life is a battle against extremes. We moderate in how much we eat, sleep, drink… Homeostasis is not a condition of being truly static and unchanging, it's a constant struggle against entropy. We constantly put in effort toward maintaining our moderation that defines a thriving life, and eventually we all fail and return to dust. Those of us who fall into extremes tend to lose our homeostasis sooner and return to dust faster. I'm not saying that maintaining moderation is trivial. But the way most people live is through maintaining moderation via all the effort it takes to do that, to resist the pitfalls of the extremes. That includes getting support from others (e.g. therapists). If there's one thing we can say confidently about humans across the ages, it's that we are social and live in supportive groups that help each other. It's not a matter of somehow just passively finding moderation. It's an active process, and we also don't do it alone.

by GDC7 5y ago

rainonmoon 5y ago

You'd probably find a lot to like in the book Lost Connections by Johann Hari. The main thrust is the impact society has had on mental health, in contradiction to the notion that depression is merely a "chemical imbalance".

kirrent 5y ago
I'd steer clear of Hari. Having listened to an interview with him I found interesting I did a fair amount of digging into the sources of his claims. Some of his claims were known and fairly uncontroversial in the medical establishment but the manner he presented them, against some straw-man of medical practice, was a bit misleading (examples - https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2018/jan/08/is-everything-johann-hari-knows-about-depression-wrong-lost-connections https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2018/jan/...). Still, that didn't worry me because I'm sure plenty of people do receive the standard of care he was arguing against. As that article above suggests, best practice care is expensive and time-consuming. Where he really lost me was that every fascinating and surprising claim presented by him with absolute certainty that I looked into was either an exaggeration or wrong. As an example, he had a striking statistic that the modal number of friends people used to be able to rely on in an emergency was something like 4 or 5. Ten years later in the present day that number has dropped to 0. Putting aside the fact that a mode can be pretty misleading, I still thought it was an interesting difference in only ten years so I was disappointed to find that the most credible explanation in the literature seems to be that it's an artefact of survey design. Even the original paper he got the statistic from was pretty equivocal on the validity of the finding, so even if he was a bit lazy in not reading through later papers, he still should have been less confident. I haven't read his book though. The above is just to say, caveat lector.
- rainonmoon 5y ago
  I always appreciate a good fact checking, thanks! I'll have to look into it more for myself, great counter-perspective. I'll add an anecdote about the book's effect re: the claims about brain chemistry: talking to the friend who recommended the book about Hari's claims to the ineffectiveness of medication, she said "Even if my medication only makes a few percent difference, for me it's the difference between killing myself and not." I liked that reading of Hari's book not as anti-medicine, but as an explanation for why people who've been ratcheting up their dosage over the years, as a lot of my friends have, still feel totally insane: medication can't fix the whole problem itself.

quadrangle 5y ago

Your "own the world" idea sounds more like the manic side of bipolar disorder rather than a healthy moderation that represents a "non-depressed person". You're right that "own the world" mania is dangerous and destructive. I hope you're not suggesting that this is the inevitable tragic state as the only alternative to depression. People in the thousands-of-years-ago African plains were still people. They weren't in a constant state of narcissistic mania. And the idea that they were violent and dangerous until civilization or depression moderated them is as contrived as the idea that they were noble-savages who lived in peace and harmony. I fear that a lot of depressed people wallow in their depression by critiquing non-depressed people as though they were all manic and dangerous, and thus this is a defense of staying depressed and doing nothing about it. There really are healthy moderated ways to live. For tons of different reasons, we see huge variations in the level of difficulty people have in finding or maintaining that healthy moderation.

GDC7 5y ago
> There really are healthy moderated ways to live. Nature doesn't like moderation. It likes a variety of many extremes so that it can reward those extremes which are particularly adapted/lucky to win in that particular moment. And win big.
- rackjack 5y ago
  What kind of people have you been interacting with that your impression of the non-depressed is "they think they own the world"?
- quadrangle 5y ago
  Nature doesn't have likes. Yes, there are various sorts of equilibria that are stable and other conditions that are unstable. And some forms of moderation that might be ideal are inherently unstable. But people still work to maintain moderation, and they would have done so 20,000 years ago as well. Most extremes are themselves unstable and do not persist over the long-term. Winning big in the short-term does not correlate to long-term thriving. Cultures and species that have been dominant but then went extinct are numerous. Meanwhile, a lot of non-dominant forms of life have survived the eons. The entire nature of life is a battle against extremes. We moderate in how much we eat, sleep, drink… Homeostasis is not a condition of being truly static and unchanging, it's a constant struggle against entropy. We constantly put in effort toward maintaining our moderation that defines a thriving life, and eventually we all fail and return to dust. Those of us who fall into extremes tend to lose our homeostasis sooner and return to dust faster. I'm not saying that maintaining moderation is trivial. But the way most people live is through maintaining moderation via all the effort it takes to do that, to resist the pitfalls of the extremes. That includes getting support from others (e.g. therapists). If there's one thing we can say confidently about humans across the ages, it's that we are social and live in supportive groups that help each other. It's not a matter of somehow just passively finding moderation. It's an active process, and we also don't do it alone.