10 ms·

We've Got Depression All Wrong. It's Trying to Save Us

113 points by andrewfromx 2y ago

ndarray 2y ago
> It is time that we start honoring the courage and strength of depressed people. It is time we start valuing the incredible capacity of our biology to find a way in hard times. And it is time that we stop pretending depressed people are any different than anyone else. The article's conclusion ends in a call for society to change its ways. Such an appeal is easy to make. What's not so easy is telling a depressed person what to do right now under the circumstance that society hasn't changed and likely isn't going to change.
- lupire 2y ago
  It's easy to tell depressed people what to do. What's hard is convincing their brain to tear down the barriers it has erected.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    But do you know we're in high demand Laura, us, people who suffer Because we don't take to arguing And we're quick to surrender
    - janderland 2y ago
      What’s this from?
      - BizarroLand 2y ago
        https://genius.com/Bright-eyes-laura-laurent-lyrics https://genius.com/Bright-eyes-laura-laurent-lyrics
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Yeah, uh, ever lived with a depressed person? You cannot get them to do anything. They only care about how sad they feel and care nothing about the effects their constant bed hiding imposes on all the people around them. It is utterly impossible to get them to treat themselves because... That involves getting out of bed . The depressive loop in the mind has built in defenses that keep it from being treated. A depressed person often wants to be depressed because they take condition it and don't want to face all the things they could have been doing instead, a sort of procrastination on media steroids. The best treatment for depression, exercise, involves setting all the micro behaviors that depression uses to perpetuate itself.
- nrr 2y ago
  "A depressed person often wants to be depressed ..." I'd caution against expressing it this way. It's less a want and more a ground state. I am one of these depressives, and I definitely do not want to spend all day in bed. It is, however, a ground state that takes an amazing amount of energy to escape, so my usual inclination is to conserve energy and not escape. It may outwardly look to non-depressives as a strong desire to spend the day in bed and away from the world except through whatever portal the Internet gives us, but it's my experience that having someone to come by to help with the parts of living that fatigue me is direly, overwhelmingly underrated. And, like, it isn't often chores or errands that are the most helpful. (Indeed, when my depression saps me enough, I find that just going on a cleaning binge is a cheap way to recover for a while.) No, rather, it's stupid shit like having someone make decisions for me so that I can get un-stuck from whatever mental hell I've fallen into. The challenge is usually articulating which decisions I need made because merely unpacking them has a high energy cost. It's only when I've gotten a handle on the fatigue each day that I'm truly able to get moving.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > ground state I often find myself reaching for the term "anticipatory anhedonia": When someone doesn't feel happiness looking forward to things that are coming. Oh, they might be happy during the activity, and they might abstractly know that they'll enjoy it a lot, the gut-reaction during the planning phase is that it's a to-do item that might be a big hassle.
Mathnerd314 2y ago
2020, judging from the URL.
lupire 2y ago
Content behind Clickbait headline: Depression is a "freeze" reaction to stress, effectively shutting down to avoid triggering a dangerous response from the environment. To me this seems quite a stretch, and maybe some conflation with "learned helplessness". In my experience, depression is an irrational fear reaction. When something good happens, the brain suddenly thinks "this is not good, failed, it's worthless, a waste of effort" or "this was a mistake; this is going to end in disaster for me, I shouldn't have done this." It's not adaptive just because it's occasionally a correct prediction by chance. A more common adaptive reaction to adversity is carefulness/stress: heightened awareness of the world and intense effort to choose safe decisions, and to fantasize ways to escape.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  One way I would think of depression is, it's a condition that is triggered by a case where it seems like you fundamentally as an identity don't fit the current environment, and there doesn't seem to be a way to change the environment, or yourself to adapt to that environment. Nothing is going to make you happy, because there is something fundamentally wrong. And in many cases it won't be obvious that something is fundamentally wrong. It could be that you are genetically not wired to adapt to modern environment, which was never there. For example you are forced to go to school when it doesn't fit you, later in life forced to work at something that is not according to your talent or passion. I wouldn't call it like a reaction to fear.
  - nullindividual 2y ago
    I think depression can lead to apathy, anhedonia, even nihilism but having that as an origin point for depression seems quite out of place. The last sentence of your main paragraph is the reason for my username. It’s certainly not the origin point for that feeling, however. It isn’t fun to realize that everything you touch within your own lifetime is temporary. Work is largely meaningless. Abusive partners, officials getting away with clear (attempted) murder because they can hide behind a piece of paper, and so on. Sure life is “unfair”, but it is unfair for the vast majority due to it being stacked for the vanishingly tiny minority. And the majority is powerless to stop the abuses. Why bother?
bankcust08385 2y ago
Maybe in the context of hunter-gathering societies, but not today.
bentt 2y ago
Ok then... why does depression potentially lead to suicide? Is that also adaptive? (stick with me, I'm not being facetious) Consider the possibility that suicide is an adaptive response by the microbiome. After all, the microbes that colonize our body would survive (and subsequently participate in consuming the body, a process called autolysis). It might be their collective way of saying "this vessel is no longer viable, let's take our chances on the outside". Think of it as a self-destruct button and they're ejecting in the escape pods. This challenges our ideas about self.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  Since no individual exists standalone, we must see the individual not only as such, but also part of the larger organism/society. It is easy to see the many ways of how suicide of an individual may well be adaptive, at least historically, for the larger organism/society of which that individual is part. It may be possible to speculatively frame it such that survival of the larger system would also benefit microbes that coexist with it (by way of colonising the bodies of its members), but I would warn against literally attributing suicide to microbes—the causal relationship is far from clear (over-simplifying, a person who feels unnecessary could incur stress manifesting as impaired immune response and over-representation of particular microbes).
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    So some kind of... individual apoptosis? I think that hypothesis would need more support in terms of some kind of, er, cancerous outcome being the alternative.
    - strogonoff 2y ago
      What exactly are you calling “hypothesis”? The first paragraph of my comment is just an observation, the second is a view I specifically do not hold. If you seek examples where “malfunctioning” people who harm society’s fitness survive and reproduce you can probably find those, too, but I would not take a literal comparison to apopotisis and cancer (which we do not understand nearly enough anyway) too far.
LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago
I feel that this is exactly what it is. In fact, I've got a two year old journal entry detailing a theory very close to this, that I wrote in the depths of a scorching case of depression. My depression was preceded by several months of extreme psychological stress and was, in my belief, a result of that. After getting rid of the source of the stress, and 18 months of anti-depressant medication, I am now much better.
- effingwewt 2y ago
  I'm glad you found a way out and if you ever decide to publish that journal I'd love to read it and see if it has any similarities to my own struggles. I've always felt that if good times make time fly, depression stops it like a black hole. And I hope you have or will find something to make you feel the struggle was worth it.
  - LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago
    Reading back, there's a lot of whinging and moaning in it, with the occasional flash of insight. I don't think there's much of value to the community there. Thanks for the kind words, and I hope you have, or will, overcome your own struggles. There are people out here who understand.
owenpalmer 2y ago
> Sometimes the threat is so bad or goes on for so long, that the nervous system decides there is no way to fight or to flee. At that point, there is only one option left: immobilization. Gabor Maté has expressed a similar sentiment in regards to ADHD. According to him, when you encounter stress while both fight and flight are not an option, the only option left is for your mind to distract itself. Gabor Maté on Rogan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jQSOSi2DA8&t=133s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jQSOSi2DA8&t=133s
- acchow 2y ago
  This video blew my mind and hit me in my soul.
crotho 2y ago
[dead]
bombi 2y ago
[flagged]
- em-bee 2y ago
  i know you mean well, but randomly listing a bunch of medications without more explanation is not very wise. at best it can help people compare what their doctor recommended. what do each of these items do? why are they needed and how are they dosed? (often doses depend on the size and weight of the person, also on the symptoms the person is experiencing. what happened when you took D3 without K2MK7? i feel there is a story there.
  - unaindz 2y ago
    D3 increases your calcium levels in the blood while K2 regulates the usage of calcium, favoring the usage of it in bones and teeth and reduces the deposit of it in soft tissue like blood vessels and organs. Of course you wont notice anything for years but in the long term it would increase your risk of cardiovascular disease and probably some organ diseases.
  - horns4lyfe 2y ago
    “Take some well known vitamins” and “walk a lot” are hardly controversial advice
    - em-bee 2y ago
      they are not well known everywhere, in particular not in places where vitamin supplements are not commonly used. also overdosing on vitamins can be risky. that's why it is important to explain what these are for, and also the expected effect, so that someone taking them can judge whether that is what they need and also ask better questions and explore alternatives to achieve the desired outcome
      - mewpmewp2 2y ago
        Where are they not well known? I think I've heard or seen this typical advice 10,000+ times.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Some previous discussion in 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25546043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25546043
poulpy123 2y ago
yeah it's trying to save us like an allergic reaction is trying to save us
AStonesThrow 2y ago
Depression was my soul's reaction to about 16 years of systematic abuse, emotional neglect, ridicule and bullying. My intellect finally shut down and I withdrew from reality entirely, or at least that was the goal. At the time my new abuser would ask things like what I was thinking. This was a novelty for me but she was probably trying to figure out ways to torment me more effectively. She also explained that I was trying to hide by sleeping all the time. One teacher wrote a note about my laziness, and I knew he was correct. Depression wasn't my fault, and it wasn't within my capacity to recover from it. But my family turned it into something exclusively my responsibility. I was drugged over and over; I was permitted to leave home without any means of support or homemaking skills, and I was eventually discarded by means of restraining orders and physical assaults, so I left the state. If a child is depressed then the worst thing to do is blame, medicate, and isolate them with individual treatment. My counselor encouraged morally reprehensible behavior and never questioned my home life. If your child is depressed then you'd better consider their environment and social networks to be suspect. If you can't identify problems, then YOU ARE the problem and you'll need to address that with decisive action, in a practical and honest manner.
- crotho 2y ago
  [dead]
- southernplaces7 2y ago
  >If your child is depressed then you'd better consider their environment and social networks to be suspect. If you can't identify problems, then YOU ARE the problem I don't know your personal story in detail, but with this, you seem to focus way too definitively on external causes for depression. There's ample clinical and other evidence that many cases of chronic depression are largely internal, chemical and won't be fixed by changes in environment, surrounding people etc.
rayiner 2y ago
The article seems to just be a call to change how society views depression. But is there any science here? The premise that depression is not a deviation from normal functioning, but rather a biologically rooted response could be applied to any behavior. Indeed, it can be applied to the societal opprobrium towards depressed people, which exists across cultures. Maybe that’s just a biologically rooted response that protects society at large? That’s equally plausible if you posit that just because a psychological phenomenon exists it must serve some function.
- tim333 2y ago
  It does seem pretty light on science. There's maybe a better discussion on it from a "Trying to Save Us" perspective on Wikipedia under "Evolutionary approaches to depression".
- morbicer 2y ago
  There is no science in psychology, period. By nature of dealing with humans you can't really run thorough experiments like on rats. On top of of that, psychology is mired with quackery, big egos and partisanship (nature vs nurture, CBBT vs psychoanalysis, humanistic vs psychodynamic, approach to DSM,..) I totally believe in good psychologists that can help you, I just don't believe there's much rigor and objectivity. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delivers-bleak-verdict-on-validity-of-psychology-experiment-results https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delive...
  - acchow 2y ago
    You are unfairly being downvoted. The reproducibility project attempted to reproduce the results of 97 experiments in psychology that originally had "statistically significant" results and was only able to find 37 with statistically significant results during replication. That is not to say that psychology is not helpful - it can help a great deal. But we need to stop pretending it is "science".
    - jononor 2y ago
penguin_booze 2y ago
Immobilization, to me, sounds like learned helplessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness.
- janderland 2y ago
  Yes. I think these are related. I’ve struggled with depression for most of my life and “learned helplessness” is something that intuitively matches my thought patterns.

113 points by andrewfromx 2y ago

> It is time that we start honoring the courage and strength of depressed people. It is time we start valuing the incredible capacity of our biology to find a way in hard times. And it is time that we stop pretending depressed people are any different than anyone else. The article's conclusion ends in a call for society to change its ways. Such an appeal is easy to make. What's not so easy is telling a depressed person what to do right now under the circumstance that society hasn't changed and likely isn't going to change.

lupire 2y ago
It's easy to tell depressed people what to do. What's hard is convincing their brain to tear down the barriers it has erected.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  But do you know we're in high demand Laura, us, people who suffer Because we don't take to arguing And we're quick to surrender
  - janderland 2y ago
    What’s this from?
    - BizarroLand 2y ago
      https://genius.com/Bright-eyes-laura-laurent-lyrics https://genius.com/Bright-eyes-laura-laurent-lyrics

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

Yeah, uh, ever lived with a depressed person? You cannot get them to do anything. They only care about how sad they feel and care nothing about the effects their constant bed hiding imposes on all the people around them. It is utterly impossible to get them to treat themselves because... That involves getting out of bed . The depressive loop in the mind has built in defenses that keep it from being treated. A depressed person often wants to be depressed because they take condition it and don't want to face all the things they could have been doing instead, a sort of procrastination on media steroids. The best treatment for depression, exercise, involves setting all the micro behaviors that depression uses to perpetuate itself.

nrr 2y ago
"A depressed person often wants to be depressed ..." I'd caution against expressing it this way. It's less a want and more a ground state. I am one of these depressives, and I definitely do not want to spend all day in bed. It is, however, a ground state that takes an amazing amount of energy to escape, so my usual inclination is to conserve energy and not escape. It may outwardly look to non-depressives as a strong desire to spend the day in bed and away from the world except through whatever portal the Internet gives us, but it's my experience that having someone to come by to help with the parts of living that fatigue me is direly, overwhelmingly underrated. And, like, it isn't often chores or errands that are the most helpful. (Indeed, when my depression saps me enough, I find that just going on a cleaning binge is a cheap way to recover for a while.) No, rather, it's stupid shit like having someone make decisions for me so that I can get un-stuck from whatever mental hell I've fallen into. The challenge is usually articulating which decisions I need made because merely unpacking them has a high energy cost. It's only when I've gotten a handle on the fatigue each day that I'm truly able to get moving.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > ground state I often find myself reaching for the term "anticipatory anhedonia": When someone doesn't feel happiness looking forward to things that are coming. Oh, they might be happy during the activity, and they might abstractly know that they'll enjoy it a lot, the gut-reaction during the planning phase is that it's a to-do item that might be a big hassle.

Mathnerd314 2y ago

2020, judging from the URL.

lupire 2y ago

Content behind Clickbait headline: Depression is a "freeze" reaction to stress, effectively shutting down to avoid triggering a dangerous response from the environment. To me this seems quite a stretch, and maybe some conflation with "learned helplessness". In my experience, depression is an irrational fear reaction. When something good happens, the brain suddenly thinks "this is not good, failed, it's worthless, a waste of effort" or "this was a mistake; this is going to end in disaster for me, I shouldn't have done this." It's not adaptive just because it's occasionally a correct prediction by chance. A more common adaptive reaction to adversity is carefulness/stress: heightened awareness of the world and intense effort to choose safe decisions, and to fantasize ways to escape.

mewpmewp2 2y ago
One way I would think of depression is, it's a condition that is triggered by a case where it seems like you fundamentally as an identity don't fit the current environment, and there doesn't seem to be a way to change the environment, or yourself to adapt to that environment. Nothing is going to make you happy, because there is something fundamentally wrong. And in many cases it won't be obvious that something is fundamentally wrong. It could be that you are genetically not wired to adapt to modern environment, which was never there. For example you are forced to go to school when it doesn't fit you, later in life forced to work at something that is not according to your talent or passion. I wouldn't call it like a reaction to fear.
- nullindividual 2y ago
  I think depression can lead to apathy, anhedonia, even nihilism but having that as an origin point for depression seems quite out of place. The last sentence of your main paragraph is the reason for my username. It’s certainly not the origin point for that feeling, however. It isn’t fun to realize that everything you touch within your own lifetime is temporary. Work is largely meaningless. Abusive partners, officials getting away with clear (attempted) murder because they can hide behind a piece of paper, and so on. Sure life is “unfair”, but it is unfair for the vast majority due to it being stacked for the vanishingly tiny minority. And the majority is powerless to stop the abuses. Why bother?

bankcust08385 2y ago

Maybe in the context of hunter-gathering societies, but not today.

bentt 2y ago

Ok then... why does depression potentially lead to suicide? Is that also adaptive? (stick with me, I'm not being facetious) Consider the possibility that suicide is an adaptive response by the microbiome. After all, the microbes that colonize our body would survive (and subsequently participate in consuming the body, a process called autolysis). It might be their collective way of saying "this vessel is no longer viable, let's take our chances on the outside". Think of it as a self-destruct button and they're ejecting in the escape pods. This challenges our ideas about self.

strogonoff 2y ago
Since no individual exists standalone, we must see the individual not only as such, but also part of the larger organism/society. It is easy to see the many ways of how suicide of an individual may well be adaptive, at least historically, for the larger organism/society of which that individual is part. It may be possible to speculatively frame it such that survival of the larger system would also benefit microbes that coexist with it (by way of colonising the bodies of its members), but I would warn against literally attributing suicide to microbes—the causal relationship is far from clear (over-simplifying, a person who feels unnecessary could incur stress manifesting as impaired immune response and over-representation of particular microbes).
- Terr_ 2y ago
  So some kind of... individual apoptosis? I think that hypothesis would need more support in terms of some kind of, er, cancerous outcome being the alternative.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    What exactly are you calling “hypothesis”? The first paragraph of my comment is just an observation, the second is a view I specifically do not hold. If you seek examples where “malfunctioning” people who harm society’s fitness survive and reproduce you can probably find those, too, but I would not take a literal comparison to apopotisis and cancer (which we do not understand nearly enough anyway) too far.

LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago

I feel that this is exactly what it is. In fact, I've got a two year old journal entry detailing a theory very close to this, that I wrote in the depths of a scorching case of depression. My depression was preceded by several months of extreme psychological stress and was, in my belief, a result of that. After getting rid of the source of the stress, and 18 months of anti-depressant medication, I am now much better.

effingwewt 2y ago
I'm glad you found a way out and if you ever decide to publish that journal I'd love to read it and see if it has any similarities to my own struggles. I've always felt that if good times make time fly, depression stops it like a black hole. And I hope you have or will find something to make you feel the struggle was worth it.
- LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago
  Reading back, there's a lot of whinging and moaning in it, with the occasional flash of insight. I don't think there's much of value to the community there. Thanks for the kind words, and I hope you have, or will, overcome your own struggles. There are people out here who understand.

owenpalmer 2y ago

> Sometimes the threat is so bad or goes on for so long, that the nervous system decides there is no way to fight or to flee. At that point, there is only one option left: immobilization. Gabor Maté has expressed a similar sentiment in regards to ADHD. According to him, when you encounter stress while both fight and flight are not an option, the only option left is for your mind to distract itself. Gabor Maté on Rogan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jQSOSi2DA8&t=133s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jQSOSi2DA8&t=133s

acchow 2y ago
This video blew my mind and hit me in my soul.

crotho 2y ago

[dead]

bombi 2y ago

[flagged]

em-bee 2y ago
i know you mean well, but randomly listing a bunch of medications without more explanation is not very wise. at best it can help people compare what their doctor recommended. what do each of these items do? why are they needed and how are they dosed? (often doses depend on the size and weight of the person, also on the symptoms the person is experiencing. what happened when you took D3 without K2MK7? i feel there is a story there.
- unaindz 2y ago
  D3 increases your calcium levels in the blood while K2 regulates the usage of calcium, favoring the usage of it in bones and teeth and reduces the deposit of it in soft tissue like blood vessels and organs. Of course you wont notice anything for years but in the long term it would increase your risk of cardiovascular disease and probably some organ diseases.
- horns4lyfe 2y ago
  “Take some well known vitamins” and “walk a lot” are hardly controversial advice
  - em-bee 2y ago
    they are not well known everywhere, in particular not in places where vitamin supplements are not commonly used. also overdosing on vitamins can be risky. that's why it is important to explain what these are for, and also the expected effect, so that someone taking them can judge whether that is what they need and also ask better questions and explore alternatives to achieve the desired outcome
    - mewpmewp2 2y ago
      Where are they not well known? I think I've heard or seen this typical advice 10,000+ times.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Some previous discussion in 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25546043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25546043

poulpy123 2y ago

yeah it's trying to save us like an allergic reaction is trying to save us

AStonesThrow 2y ago

Depression was my soul's reaction to about 16 years of systematic abuse, emotional neglect, ridicule and bullying. My intellect finally shut down and I withdrew from reality entirely, or at least that was the goal. At the time my new abuser would ask things like what I was thinking. This was a novelty for me but she was probably trying to figure out ways to torment me more effectively. She also explained that I was trying to hide by sleeping all the time. One teacher wrote a note about my laziness, and I knew he was correct. Depression wasn't my fault, and it wasn't within my capacity to recover from it. But my family turned it into something exclusively my responsibility. I was drugged over and over; I was permitted to leave home without any means of support or homemaking skills, and I was eventually discarded by means of restraining orders and physical assaults, so I left the state. If a child is depressed then the worst thing to do is blame, medicate, and isolate them with individual treatment. My counselor encouraged morally reprehensible behavior and never questioned my home life. If your child is depressed then you'd better consider their environment and social networks to be suspect. If you can't identify problems, then YOU ARE the problem and you'll need to address that with decisive action, in a practical and honest manner.

crotho 2y ago
[dead]
southernplaces7 2y ago
>If your child is depressed then you'd better consider their environment and social networks to be suspect. If you can't identify problems, then YOU ARE the problem I don't know your personal story in detail, but with this, you seem to focus way too definitively on external causes for depression. There's ample clinical and other evidence that many cases of chronic depression are largely internal, chemical and won't be fixed by changes in environment, surrounding people etc.

rayiner 2y ago

The article seems to just be a call to change how society views depression. But is there any science here? The premise that depression is not a deviation from normal functioning, but rather a biologically rooted response could be applied to any behavior. Indeed, it can be applied to the societal opprobrium towards depressed people, which exists across cultures. Maybe that’s just a biologically rooted response that protects society at large? That’s equally plausible if you posit that just because a psychological phenomenon exists it must serve some function.

tim333 2y ago
It does seem pretty light on science. There's maybe a better discussion on it from a "Trying to Save Us" perspective on Wikipedia under "Evolutionary approaches to depression".
morbicer 2y ago
There is no science in psychology, period. By nature of dealing with humans you can't really run thorough experiments like on rats. On top of of that, psychology is mired with quackery, big egos and partisanship (nature vs nurture, CBBT vs psychoanalysis, humanistic vs psychodynamic, approach to DSM,..) I totally believe in good psychologists that can help you, I just don't believe there's much rigor and objectivity. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delivers-bleak-verdict-on-validity-of-psychology-experiment-results https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/27/study-delive...
- acchow 2y ago
  You are unfairly being downvoted. The reproducibility project attempted to reproduce the results of 97 experiments in psychology that originally had "statistically significant" results and was only able to find 37 with statistically significant results during replication. That is not to say that psychology is not helpful - it can help a great deal. But we need to stop pretending it is "science".
  - jononor 2y ago

penguin_booze 2y ago

Immobilization, to me, sounds like learned helplessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness.

janderland 2y ago
Yes. I think these are related. I’ve struggled with depression for most of my life and “learned helplessness” is something that intuitively matches my thought patterns.