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Before I actually experienced depression first hand I might have made a comment pretty similar to yours. Before you actually experience the sapping, frightenin
by SeanDav 14y ago
Before I actually experienced depression first hand I might have made a comment pretty similar to yours.
Before you actually experience the sapping, frightening, frustrating, even debilitating condition that is depression, it is easy to stand on the sidelines and make all kinds of logical arguments and find bits and pieces of research supposedly supporting any particular viewpoint, for or against.
I would even have been quite judgemental about the character of people claiming they had depression. After all it just in the mind isn't it? Pull yourself together, get some exercise, eat a healthy diet, would have been my advice. I would also have been missing the point completely. Those are of course all good things to do and will help with depression. The point, is that depression makes you almost incapable of doing these things. Until you experience, either in your own self of through someone very close to you, the full manifestation of depression, you just actually don't have a clue.
You are a virgin trying to talk about sex. You may think you know the theory, you may be very widely read, but you are still a virgin.
Depression is a highly complicated and very subjective condition that cannot easily be diagnosed. It is far from scientifically understood. No one knows exactly why certain drugs work or don't work. This just makes it harder for the sufferers, who often have to undergo all sorts of different drugs/treatments to find one that works for them, that is if they are lucky enough to actually find a treatment that works.
I personally was lucky to find a treatment that worked. It was a combination of CBT and drugs. You can call it placebo effect, you can call it anything you want but for me it works.
I personally know 4 other people who suffer or suffered from depression. 2 of them recovered without drugs after many months, 1 without any treatment and 1 with the "wrong" treatment, i.e. tranquillisers. The third person, like me responded to CBT and drugs, albeit different drugs. The 4th person is not fully cured and suffers bouts. Any amount of different drugs and treatments have not completely controlled the condition.
I am not even sure why I am posting this, other than to try raise awareness that Depression is not simple, it can happen to anyone and often happens to highly intelligent, motivated people as well as your average Joe.
- jdietrich 14y agoYou seem to be refuting an argument that I haven't made. Firstly, how very presumptuous of you to assume that I haven't suffered from depression. Anecdote is not the singular of data. Whether I have or have not suffered from depression has no bearing whatsoever on my ability to analyse the available data. Having had cancer gives you no insight whatsoever into the biology of cell division. Depression is known to spontaneously resolve in the vast majority of cases without any treatment, which creates a wholly misleading picture of the efficacy of treatments for depression amongst patients. Our most effective treatments for depression only shorten the duration of depressive episodes by a few weeks and reduce the likelihood of relapse by a few percent. I am not arguing that depression is a simple phenomenon, but rather that it is a complex psychosocial problem for which our best treatments are utterly marginal, and that the clinical model may be a fundamentally inappropriate approach.
- SeanDav 14y agoHave you, personally suffered from depression or are you just making more logical arguments?
- 1123581321 14y agoI have suffered from depression and agree with jdietrich. I hope that is enough for you to rest the "sex and virgins" argument, which is logically fallacious and makes rational discussion of published information difficult.
- larrys 14y agoFWIW I get your point totally and agree. Never having suffered depression, I had a completely new view of it after having a relationship with someone who was on at least three meds. Spending time like that completely changed my view on what it mean to suffer from depression.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoour best treatments And that's the point, isn't it. These are our best treatments. Are they great? Hell no, they aren't. If you are being subjected to them, it can be downright uncomfortable. But for some percentage of people, they work. Your comment makes it seem like you think antidepressants are snake oil. They aren't. The problem is that the problem they are solving is incredibly complex (maybe what we call "depressions" is 5000 different syndromes) and we've just barely started to do anything remotely like real science in this arena (Freud, anyone?). So rather than say "I'm surprised HN would think anti-depressants are worth anything", perhaps we should be saying "we need more and better research into mental illnesses."
- vlisivka 14y agoSocial animals also has depressions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_model_of_depression http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_model_of_depression . IMHO, it is form of protection of social group. It's like self-shutdown of node in cluster, when it detects malfunctioning of hardware.