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I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the prominence of depression is largely caused by a broken interface with the world at large. The traps created by moder

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the prominence of depression is largely caused by a broken interface with the world at large. The traps created by modern society wherein you struggle for other people's benefit are better designed than ever before. What our social machine procedurally treats as progress is advances in subjugation. Depression may often be an artifact of "efficiency" with respect to extracting value from the population at large. We might need to dial back the exploitation of the currently-exploitable class to have a sustainable society, assuming pills don't work. In different terms, maybe we have too many rich people (exploiters) in a situation where it's clearly very foolish to keep growing in number (and productivity) to support them. Maybe we just need to rebalance our economy to make it work better for those currently exploited and endemically depressed people.

tptacek 4y ago
You're right: you've gone way out on a limb.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I've heard plenty of people involved in mental health care themselves lament the fact that they're often just trying to happy-talk people who genuinely have harrowing lives. I don't think the notion is absurd.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    All sorts of non-absurd-seeming notions turn out to be wrong, which is why people train for many years to conduct medical research.
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      How would you "medically disprove" the notion that some people are unhappy because the circumstances of their lives are bad rather than biological defects?
      - tptacek 4y ago
        Nobody needs to disprove the notion that some people are happy for reasons having nothing to do with clinical depression.
        emodendroket 4y ago
        OK. And the notion that psychiatry has been used to simply stamp anyone agitating for political change as insane is also attested (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protest_Psychosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protest_Psychosis for instance). So what's your objection to this line of inquiry?
        tptacek 4y ago
        I don't know what you're trying to argue here, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the claim at the root of the thread, and I apologize but I'm not interested in the tangent.
      - nl 4y ago
        Unhappy is dramatically, completely different to depression. I've been both and they don't even feel that similar.
        dr_dshiv 4y ago
        Sadness or distress vs not feeling anything and not having motivation?
        nl 4y ago
        Yes, this is roughly in the right area.
        dr_dshiv 4y ago
        I wonder how a week of low dose amphetamine usage, like adderall, might help disrupt no-motivation mood loops. A friend of mine (cycling through many antidepressants) seems like he would respond well to this. As in, he would feel better and be able to “shift gears.” Not to get more work done, but say, enjoy going to an art museum. And feel what it is like to be enthusiastic again.
  - JamesBarney 4y ago
    The idea that a terrible life can cause depression is not the limb he's going out on. It's the idea that somehow depression is caused by being way more exploited than our ancestors in the 1700's who were working on someone else's farms and factories as children is the limb he's going out on.
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      OK, well, that's an easy rhetorical maneuver but one that can be met with equally facile ripostes, such as "how do you determine that people weren't just as if not more depressed in the 18th Century when the concept was less familiar?" or "perhaps having the gulf between themselves and the wealthy rubbed in their faces every day is what causes the distress, since there can be little sense of exploitation if one is surrounded only by those in similar straits."
      - Thorrez 4y ago
        Didn't people in the olden days also see the castles and mansions of the rich on a daily basis?
        emodendroket 4y ago
        Daily I very much doubt because it’s not like most people were commuting to work. Would you sometimes see them, sure, but people also had a belief system that would have done more to justify the social order, and it would probably be limited to provincial elites for most.
        Thorrez 4y ago
        Weren't a lot of towns built basically surrounding a castle? I guess people in towns would see wealthy people often, but people in remote farms and villages wouldn't. I'm not sure exactly what wealth is being rubbed in my face today. News about rich people? I would assume there would also be news and gossip about rich people back then too.
    - 4y ago
JamesBarney 4y ago
You must be reading very different history books than the ones I've read. The idea that we're somehow way more exploited than the people who came before us does not seem compatible with any history book I've ever read.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  Before, the body was in chains, but the mind was free. Now, the mind is in chains.
  - becquerel 4y ago
    What evidence do you have for this? Do you think chattel slaves of the USA weren't broken in mind - indoctrinated into Christianity, stripped of their original languages, culture and names? That was not some novel evil created by Southerners - it's the tried-and-true method for enslaving populations throughout history. But I'm sure the existence of TikTok is an existential threat.
    - eurasiantiger 4y ago
      How successfully?
  - white_dragon88 4y ago
    [dead]
- smolder 4y ago
  It depends on the timespan and comparative frame you are thinking about. If we limit ourselves to post-WW2 MAD world, there are much different overall trends in quality of life than starting in the middle ages or from colonial times, where many people did not enjoy the rights or luxuries modern people would, not in small part because they couldn't, technologically speaking. It's easy to compare modern poverty to peasantry and say we have it good now, but it doesn't address modern problems in a meaningful way.
bawolff 4y ago
> In different terms, maybe we have too many rich people (exploiters) in a situation where it's clearly very foolish to keep growing in number (and productivity) to support them. Maybe we just need to rebalance our economy to make it work better for those currently exploited and endemically depressed people. Don't all those rich people also get depression? I think that rules out a marxist reading here. If you're going to go this general direction, i'd say a better way would be, we now live in a system where work is never done, stress is pretty constant, and labour is less physical but more mental in the modern world. Perhaps our mind is just not made for continous mental labour. Being a farmer in pre modern times sucked, but at least you could turn your brain off more often.
- hikingsimulator 4y ago
  Marx clearly stated that alienation was a phenomenon that affected all classes. Marxism explains alienation just intervenes in a different manner. Depression then also happens among rich people. But the source, and expression of it might differ. An anecdotal saying explains that wealth is often a barrier to create true friendships because it insulates you from society and creates antisocial thought processes: the "thinking people just want to be your friend because you're rich" rhetoric.
- smolder 4y ago
  Rich people aren't automatically immune to exploitation. It's more a finely tuned web of pressures than a strict hierarchy. I'm also aware of differences in genetics and diet and other behavior that predispose people to depression. I'm not rooting for Marxism exactly. I think it is an extreme overcorrection, but that some correction has been and is still warranted at times, given regulatory capture and other abuses that come from concentration of power. Anti-trust action and semi-effective democracy/representation are needed. I think we are in a society with solutions to almost every problem except for those that require cooperation on the scale we exist at, which is unprecedented. I sympathise with the idea of mindless hard labor being more fulfilling. Working food service in the backroom as a teenager worked my body but left me less stressed mentally than anything I've done post-graduation.
- imtringued 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
oq_computer 4y ago
'The Weariness of the Self' from Alain Ehrenberg gives a really good account about the history of the depression more or less along these lines.
dogcomplex 4y ago
Gonna attempt to short circuit the "you think WE have it bad? Whatabout 1700s?" argument by adding that the "broken interface" theory may be much more about the patient's perception and confidence of the trap we're in than the actual truth of relative conditions. There also might now be a greater philosophical understanding of the global picture than the average person back in the day. Back then we didn't have an internet to give us rigorous detail on both the widespread extent the human race is trapped in a broken system and the futility of the common man's attempts to change it. Even if this wasn't true (I'm hard pressed to find a more optimistic take, though I'm always searching and fighting for it - technology is the best hope imo), it is an easy perception to fall into, especially for anyone already a few steps into depression. It's a reasonable bet that even if people in the past were just as likely to get beaten down and depressed about their own lives, they still might have been able to look at the world around them and the future of humanity and see optimism and hope that the next day might be better/luckier. The world was also much more malleable at the local level - both politically and individually (i.e. go outside and chop a tree down) and less of a complex leviathan of laws and exploitations which immediately instills a feeling of being trapped in the jaws of something that you can't even explain or understand. Alternatively - or just, adjacently - with the internet (and big business, and widespread university education) we are culture-shocking vastly more people into a medium that can barely be understood from a detached intellectual and philosophical perspective, and is almost impossible to fathom from historical, traditional, ancestral or biological ways of understanding (the way humans operated for vast majority of our existence). We have little history to compare this new way of life to, and it's unsurprising if it's doomed to breed mental disease by its very nature. We have awakened far more people to an absurd reality, and "what is meaning?" is no longer just a question for a tiny group of overintellectual philosophers. Some of those philosophers say that one must walk through the valley of the shadow of death before we can find that answer for ourselves - but even they're gonna admit that a whole lot of people are gonna get stuck in that valley for a while if you just throw the masses in like we have. Hopefully that's just a temporary growing pain of our society as we gather our strength and do better but - time will tell! (P.S. rich people are just as trapped in this malaise of meaninglessness. They have more agency, sure, but they're also still part of the systemic trap and unlikely to have much better answer on how to change anything than the common man. Only so long even a rich person can hide in hedonism before the depression catches up - or they just embrace the cold reality and adopt the "I got mine" attitude which said system is naturally inclined to. Depression may very well be due to our moralistic social being nature chafing with a cruel capitalist system which has won by almost every measure possible)
raptorraver 4y ago
I tend to think that our disconnection from the nature causes depression to humans. We have come so far from our natural living conditions that we fall ill to depression and other diseases. Another aspect is the lack of physical work that is very unnatural for us. We sit in cubicles (or at home office nowadays), use our brains and fingers to do work and at best hit the gym few times a week. After which we eat our stomach full and entertain us with things that were invented during last generation. Life certainly is safer and better for us, but it's making us unhappy. We live like medieval royals and like them we suffer mental illnesses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mentally_ill_monarchs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mentally_ill_monarchs).
taurath 4y ago
Imagine a kid growing up in the US today, they are functionally under house arrest as neighborhoods are built for cars and not people. Everyone is isolated to their family unit almost entirely and all activity gated on parents time and willigness (or control).
randomopining 4y ago
Equal and opposite reaction. Right now may literally be the best time to be alive in the world history for those who have direction, purpose, inner strength. Endless possibilities and safety nets.

tptacek 4y ago

You're right: you've gone way out on a limb.

emodendroket 4y ago
I've heard plenty of people involved in mental health care themselves lament the fact that they're often just trying to happy-talk people who genuinely have harrowing lives. I don't think the notion is absurd.
- tptacek 4y ago
  All sorts of non-absurd-seeming notions turn out to be wrong, which is why people train for many years to conduct medical research.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    How would you "medically disprove" the notion that some people are unhappy because the circumstances of their lives are bad rather than biological defects?
    - tptacek 4y ago
      Nobody needs to disprove the notion that some people are happy for reasons having nothing to do with clinical depression.
      - emodendroket 4y ago
        OK. And the notion that psychiatry has been used to simply stamp anyone agitating for political change as insane is also attested (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protest_Psychosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protest_Psychosis for instance). So what's your objection to this line of inquiry?
        tptacek 4y ago
        I don't know what you're trying to argue here, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the claim at the root of the thread, and I apologize but I'm not interested in the tangent.
    - nl 4y ago
      Unhappy is dramatically, completely different to depression. I've been both and they don't even feel that similar.
      - dr_dshiv 4y ago
        Sadness or distress vs not feeling anything and not having motivation?
        nl 4y ago
        Yes, this is roughly in the right area.
        dr_dshiv 4y ago
        I wonder how a week of low dose amphetamine usage, like adderall, might help disrupt no-motivation mood loops. A friend of mine (cycling through many antidepressants) seems like he would respond well to this. As in, he would feel better and be able to “shift gears.” Not to get more work done, but say, enjoy going to an art museum. And feel what it is like to be enthusiastic again.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  The idea that a terrible life can cause depression is not the limb he's going out on. It's the idea that somehow depression is caused by being way more exploited than our ancestors in the 1700's who were working on someone else's farms and factories as children is the limb he's going out on.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    OK, well, that's an easy rhetorical maneuver but one that can be met with equally facile ripostes, such as "how do you determine that people weren't just as if not more depressed in the 18th Century when the concept was less familiar?" or "perhaps having the gulf between themselves and the wealthy rubbed in their faces every day is what causes the distress, since there can be little sense of exploitation if one is surrounded only by those in similar straits."
    - Thorrez 4y ago
      Didn't people in the olden days also see the castles and mansions of the rich on a daily basis?
      - emodendroket 4y ago
        Daily I very much doubt because it’s not like most people were commuting to work. Would you sometimes see them, sure, but people also had a belief system that would have done more to justify the social order, and it would probably be limited to provincial elites for most.
        Thorrez 4y ago
        Weren't a lot of towns built basically surrounding a castle? I guess people in towns would see wealthy people often, but people in remote farms and villages wouldn't. I'm not sure exactly what wealth is being rubbed in my face today. News about rich people? I would assume there would also be news and gossip about rich people back then too.
  - 4y ago

JamesBarney 4y ago

You must be reading very different history books than the ones I've read. The idea that we're somehow way more exploited than the people who came before us does not seem compatible with any history book I've ever read.

eurasiantiger 4y ago
Before, the body was in chains, but the mind was free. Now, the mind is in chains.
- becquerel 4y ago
  What evidence do you have for this? Do you think chattel slaves of the USA weren't broken in mind - indoctrinated into Christianity, stripped of their original languages, culture and names? That was not some novel evil created by Southerners - it's the tried-and-true method for enslaving populations throughout history. But I'm sure the existence of TikTok is an existential threat.
  - eurasiantiger 4y ago
    How successfully?
- white_dragon88 4y ago
  [dead]
smolder 4y ago
It depends on the timespan and comparative frame you are thinking about. If we limit ourselves to post-WW2 MAD world, there are much different overall trends in quality of life than starting in the middle ages or from colonial times, where many people did not enjoy the rights or luxuries modern people would, not in small part because they couldn't, technologically speaking. It's easy to compare modern poverty to peasantry and say we have it good now, but it doesn't address modern problems in a meaningful way.

bawolff 4y ago

> In different terms, maybe we have too many rich people (exploiters) in a situation where it's clearly very foolish to keep growing in number (and productivity) to support them. Maybe we just need to rebalance our economy to make it work better for those currently exploited and endemically depressed people. Don't all those rich people also get depression? I think that rules out a marxist reading here. If you're going to go this general direction, i'd say a better way would be, we now live in a system where work is never done, stress is pretty constant, and labour is less physical but more mental in the modern world. Perhaps our mind is just not made for continous mental labour. Being a farmer in pre modern times sucked, but at least you could turn your brain off more often.

hikingsimulator 4y ago
Marx clearly stated that alienation was a phenomenon that affected all classes. Marxism explains alienation just intervenes in a different manner. Depression then also happens among rich people. But the source, and expression of it might differ. An anecdotal saying explains that wealth is often a barrier to create true friendships because it insulates you from society and creates antisocial thought processes: the "thinking people just want to be your friend because you're rich" rhetoric.
smolder 4y ago
Rich people aren't automatically immune to exploitation. It's more a finely tuned web of pressures than a strict hierarchy. I'm also aware of differences in genetics and diet and other behavior that predispose people to depression. I'm not rooting for Marxism exactly. I think it is an extreme overcorrection, but that some correction has been and is still warranted at times, given regulatory capture and other abuses that come from concentration of power. Anti-trust action and semi-effective democracy/representation are needed. I think we are in a society with solutions to almost every problem except for those that require cooperation on the scale we exist at, which is unprecedented. I sympathise with the idea of mindless hard labor being more fulfilling. Working food service in the backroom as a teenager worked my body but left me less stressed mentally than anything I've done post-graduation.
imtringued 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

oq_computer 4y ago

'The Weariness of the Self' from Alain Ehrenberg gives a really good account about the history of the depression more or less along these lines.

dogcomplex 4y ago

Gonna attempt to short circuit the "you think WE have it bad? Whatabout 1700s?" argument by adding that the "broken interface" theory may be much more about the patient's perception and confidence of the trap we're in than the actual truth of relative conditions. There also might now be a greater philosophical understanding of the global picture than the average person back in the day. Back then we didn't have an internet to give us rigorous detail on both the widespread extent the human race is trapped in a broken system and the futility of the common man's attempts to change it. Even if this wasn't true (I'm hard pressed to find a more optimistic take, though I'm always searching and fighting for it - technology is the best hope imo), it is an easy perception to fall into, especially for anyone already a few steps into depression. It's a reasonable bet that even if people in the past were just as likely to get beaten down and depressed about their own lives, they still might have been able to look at the world around them and the future of humanity and see optimism and hope that the next day might be better/luckier. The world was also much more malleable at the local level - both politically and individually (i.e. go outside and chop a tree down) and less of a complex leviathan of laws and exploitations which immediately instills a feeling of being trapped in the jaws of something that you can't even explain or understand. Alternatively - or just, adjacently - with the internet (and big business, and widespread university education) we are culture-shocking vastly more people into a medium that can barely be understood from a detached intellectual and philosophical perspective, and is almost impossible to fathom from historical, traditional, ancestral or biological ways of understanding (the way humans operated for vast majority of our existence). We have little history to compare this new way of life to, and it's unsurprising if it's doomed to breed mental disease by its very nature. We have awakened far more people to an absurd reality, and "what is meaning?" is no longer just a question for a tiny group of overintellectual philosophers. Some of those philosophers say that one must walk through the valley of the shadow of death before we can find that answer for ourselves - but even they're gonna admit that a whole lot of people are gonna get stuck in that valley for a while if you just throw the masses in like we have. Hopefully that's just a temporary growing pain of our society as we gather our strength and do better but - time will tell! (P.S. rich people are just as trapped in this malaise of meaninglessness. They have more agency, sure, but they're also still part of the systemic trap and unlikely to have much better answer on how to change anything than the common man. Only so long even a rich person can hide in hedonism before the depression catches up - or they just embrace the cold reality and adopt the "I got mine" attitude which said system is naturally inclined to. Depression may very well be due to our moralistic social being nature chafing with a cruel capitalist system which has won by almost every measure possible)

raptorraver 4y ago

I tend to think that our disconnection from the nature causes depression to humans. We have come so far from our natural living conditions that we fall ill to depression and other diseases. Another aspect is the lack of physical work that is very unnatural for us. We sit in cubicles (or at home office nowadays), use our brains and fingers to do work and at best hit the gym few times a week. After which we eat our stomach full and entertain us with things that were invented during last generation. Life certainly is safer and better for us, but it's making us unhappy. We live like medieval royals and like them we suffer mental illnesses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mentally_ill_monarchs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mentally_ill_monarchs).

taurath 4y ago

Imagine a kid growing up in the US today, they are functionally under house arrest as neighborhoods are built for cars and not people. Everyone is isolated to their family unit almost entirely and all activity gated on parents time and willigness (or control).

randomopining 4y ago

Equal and opposite reaction. Right now may literally be the best time to be alive in the world history for those who have direction, purpose, inner strength. Endless possibilities and safety nets.