Andy: I’m currently experiencing pretty much the same thing as poke—chronic depression from my early teens up to today (my early 20s). (I’ve currently found a treatment that’s helping some, after going through several meds.) I think that there was a period of about five or six years in there that I thought there was something about my life I could change to fix the depression, but in the past couple years, my viewpoint has changed to match poke’s.
I think it’s important to note that we don’t have any direct perception about what causes depression. We can’t even directly perceive what causes basic emotions. In the case of emotions, we can get pretty good at identifying causes, but there are situations psychologists have tested where our higher brain can be tricked into misidentifying causes.
Since depression is such a long term process, I don’t think it would be possible, period, to identify causes for it without a theory about what underlies depression. And I think that the naive theory that it follows from negative life events or states is, even if partially true, woefully incomplete and inadequate for knowing the actual causes of the depression.
Andrew Brown, in The Noonday Demon, suggested that the first few episodes of depression are indeed tied to life events or states, but the more a person is depressed, the easier a depressive episode can be triggered, until the actual causes become so endemic that they’re basically uncorrelated to life events.
Andy: I’m currently experiencing pretty much the same thing as poke—chronic depression from my early teens up to today (my early 20s). (I’ve currently found a treatment that’s helping some, after going through several meds.) I think that there was a period of about five or six years in there that I thought there was something about my life I could change to fix the depression, but in the past couple years, my viewpoint has changed to match poke’s.
I think it’s important to note that we don’t have any direct perception about what causes depression. We can’t even directly perceive what causes basic emotions. In the case of emotions, we can get pretty good at identifying causes, but there are situations psychologists have tested where our higher brain can be tricked into misidentifying causes.
Since depression is such a long term process, I don’t think it would be possible, period, to identify causes for it without a theory about what underlies depression. And I think that the naive theory that it follows from negative life events or states is, even if partially true, woefully incomplete and inadequate for knowing the actual causes of the depression.
Andrew Brown, in The Noonday Demon, suggested that the first few episodes of depression are indeed tied to life events or states, but the more a person is depressed, the easier a depressive episode can be triggered, until the actual causes become so endemic that they’re basically uncorrelated to life events.