5 ms·

this is complete bullshit. Lack of sleep makes (my) depression worse.

by Ziomislaw 13y ago

cmutty 13y ago
simply put, everyone is different
- skrebbel 13y ago
  except me!
PaulHoule 13y ago
Not necessarily. They say it works 70% of the time. I'm a Bayesian, and looking at the posts here, I'd say the probability distribution of this probability is beta(5,2). The HDR runs from around 40 to 97 percent and it peaks around 0.8 so what you and the other guys are saying, plus a non-informative prior, agrees with what they say. You're just one of the unlucky beta(2,5). Too bad.
acomar 13y ago
Acute sleep deprivation can apparently make depression better, but the effect only lasts until you go to sleep. That's what this article is about. Chronic sleep deprivation is very different and can cause depression. This article is not describing a treatment, just progress in understanding a mental illness.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > This article is not describing a treatment, just progress in understanding a mental illness. If the article's thesis is correct, if depression can be modulated by way of brain chemistry, the it's not a mental illness, it's a physical illness with mental symptoms. I say this because over time, more and more "mental" illnesses have been recategorized as physical or genetic conditions that happen to have mental symptoms, including schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome, both of which respond dramatically to neurological treatments, and not at all to psychological treatments. This change in the status of "mental" illnesses was recently recognized by the director of the NIMH, who in Scientific American said, "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient's illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely "mental," and psychological therapies followed suit. Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses." Reference: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circuits http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...
  - SoftwareMaven 13y ago
    If the article's thesis is correct, if depression can be modulated by way of brain chemistry, the it's not a mental illness, it's a physical illness with mental symptoms. I bet there are few here that don't already believe that. Further, whether the article is correct or not, depression is a physical illness with mental symptoms. And I'm very glad the medical world has moved past the idiocy of the early and mid-20th century beliefs around mental illness. Maybe now we can get to some effective treatments. My money is on pharmacology being only a single piece of the treatment, with many required (diet, exercise) to achieve full health. But hopefully a pill will help people have enough hope and energy to fulfill the rest of the treatment.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - mjn 13y ago
    But it's trivially true that any "mental" state can at least be modulated by brain chemistry. Unless you posit some kind of free-floating mind that operates magically, all mental states supervene on physical, biological processes, whether we're talking about depression or programming ability or personality or food preferences.
    - kbutler 13y ago
      Not every computer problem is a hardware problem, even though the software is running on some hardware. Whether the "mind" is emergent or external, it is not particularly useful to ignore it. Brain injuries and hormonal problems are hardware. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a database problem. Illogic and a tendency to over-simplify or rely on metaphors are software bugs. grin Of course, the software and database are built in self-modifying firmware, so physical and mental issues do interact in interesting ways.
      - mjn 13y ago
        I agree with that as well. My point was the more limited one that showing "when I poke at the hardware the observed behavior changes" isn't particularly surprising, or on its own evidence of a uniquely "hardware" etiology for the behavior, since any behavior can be modulated by poking at the hardware, if you figure out exactly how to poke. In other words, it does successfully show that the behavior is "hardware-mediated", but then all behavior is hardware-mediated.
daok 13y ago
I guess not every human is the same. Saying it's a complete bullshit seem to be irrational.
lutusp 13y ago
> this is complete bullshit. Lack of sleep makes (my) depression worse. Science isn't usually about the experiences of individuals, it's about the experiences of populations. This effect isn't true for each individual in the population.
silverbax88 13y ago
Same here. This article is utter nonsense. I've battled depression for years (successfully) and one of my top rules is 'get enough sleep'.
JackFr 13y ago
I would say that the bulk of the work product of the depression industry is bullshit.
fusiongyro 13y ago
Well, it makes mine better. Shall we continue with battle-of-the-anecdotes, or maybe permit science to continue doing its thing with the understanding that statistical results apply statistically?
kyro 13y ago
And some people respond to medications in vastly different ways than others. That doesn't mean the medications don't work.

this is complete bullshit. Lack of sleep makes (my) depression worse.

cmutty 13y ago

simply put, everyone is different

skrebbel 13y ago
except me!

PaulHoule 13y ago

Not necessarily. They say it works 70% of the time. I'm a Bayesian, and looking at the posts here, I'd say the probability distribution of this probability is beta(5,2). The HDR runs from around 40 to 97 percent and it peaks around 0.8 so what you and the other guys are saying, plus a non-informative prior, agrees with what they say. You're just one of the unlucky beta(2,5). Too bad.

acomar 13y ago

Acute sleep deprivation can apparently make depression better, but the effect only lasts until you go to sleep. That's what this article is about. Chronic sleep deprivation is very different and can cause depression. This article is not describing a treatment, just progress in understanding a mental illness.

lutusp 13y ago
> This article is not describing a treatment, just progress in understanding a mental illness. If the article's thesis is correct, if depression can be modulated by way of brain chemistry, the it's not a mental illness, it's a physical illness with mental symptoms. I say this because over time, more and more "mental" illnesses have been recategorized as physical or genetic conditions that happen to have mental symptoms, including schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome, both of which respond dramatically to neurological treatments, and not at all to psychological treatments. This change in the status of "mental" illnesses was recently recognized by the director of the NIMH, who in Scientific American said, "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient's illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely "mental," and psychological therapies followed suit. Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses." Reference: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circuits http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...
- SoftwareMaven 13y ago
  If the article's thesis is correct, if depression can be modulated by way of brain chemistry, the it's not a mental illness, it's a physical illness with mental symptoms. I bet there are few here that don't already believe that. Further, whether the article is correct or not, depression is a physical illness with mental symptoms. And I'm very glad the medical world has moved past the idiocy of the early and mid-20th century beliefs around mental illness. Maybe now we can get to some effective treatments. My money is on pharmacology being only a single piece of the treatment, with many required (diet, exercise) to achieve full health. But hopefully a pill will help people have enough hope and energy to fulfill the rest of the treatment.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mjn 13y ago
  But it's trivially true that any "mental" state can at least be modulated by brain chemistry. Unless you posit some kind of free-floating mind that operates magically, all mental states supervene on physical, biological processes, whether we're talking about depression or programming ability or personality or food preferences.
  - kbutler 13y ago
    Not every computer problem is a hardware problem, even though the software is running on some hardware. Whether the "mind" is emergent or external, it is not particularly useful to ignore it. Brain injuries and hormonal problems are hardware. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a database problem. Illogic and a tendency to over-simplify or rely on metaphors are software bugs. grin Of course, the software and database are built in self-modifying firmware, so physical and mental issues do interact in interesting ways.
    - mjn 13y ago
      I agree with that as well. My point was the more limited one that showing "when I poke at the hardware the observed behavior changes" isn't particularly surprising, or on its own evidence of a uniquely "hardware" etiology for the behavior, since any behavior can be modulated by poking at the hardware, if you figure out exactly how to poke. In other words, it does successfully show that the behavior is "hardware-mediated", but then all behavior is hardware-mediated.

daok 13y ago

I guess not every human is the same. Saying it's a complete bullshit seem to be irrational.

lutusp 13y ago

> this is complete bullshit. Lack of sleep makes (my) depression worse. Science isn't usually about the experiences of individuals, it's about the experiences of populations. This effect isn't true for each individual in the population.

silverbax88 13y ago

Same here. This article is utter nonsense. I've battled depression for years (successfully) and one of my top rules is 'get enough sleep'.

JackFr 13y ago

I would say that the bulk of the work product of the depression industry is bullshit.

fusiongyro 13y ago

Well, it makes mine better. Shall we continue with battle-of-the-anecdotes, or maybe permit science to continue doing its thing with the understanding that statistical results apply statistically?

kyro 13y ago

And some people respond to medications in vastly different ways than others. That doesn't mean the medications don't work.