I can give you my general class of answers to this kind of problem: I will always attempt to the best of my ability to talk someone I care about out of doing something that will cause them to irretrievably cease to function as a person—a category which includes both suicide and wireheading. However, if in spite of my best persuasive efforts—which are likely to have a significant effect, if I’m actually friends with the person—they still want to go through with such a thing, I will support them in doing so.
The specific implementation of the first part in this case would be to try to talk them into trying the meds, with the (accurate) promise that I would be willing to help them suicide if they still wanted to do that after a certain number of months (dependent on how long the meds take to work).
There are so many different anti-depressants and the methods for choosing which ones are optimal basically come down to the intuition of the psychiatrist. It can take years to iterate through all the possible combinations of psychiatric medication if they keep failing to fix the neurotransmitter imbalance. I think anything short of 2 years is not long enough to conclude that a person’s brain is irreparably broken. It’s also a field that has a good chance of rapid development, such that a brain that seems irreparably broken today will certainly not always be unfixable.
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I explored a business in psychiatric genetic testing, and identified about 20 different mutations that could help psychiatrists make treatment decisions, but it was infeasible to bring to market right now without having millions of dollars for research, and the business case is not strong enough for me to raise millions of dollars for research. It’ll hit the market within 10 years, sooner if the business case becomes stronger for me doing it or if I have the spare $20k to go out and get the relevant patent to see what doors that opens.
I expect the first consequence of widespread genetic testing for mental health is for NRIs to become much more widely prescribed as the firstline treatment for depression.
I can give you my general class of answers to this kind of problem: I will always attempt to the best of my ability to talk someone I care about out of doing something that will cause them to irretrievably cease to function as a person—a category which includes both suicide and wireheading. However, if in spite of my best persuasive efforts—which are likely to have a significant effect, if I’m actually friends with the person—they still want to go through with such a thing, I will support them in doing so.
The specific implementation of the first part in this case would be to try to talk them into trying the meds, with the (accurate) promise that I would be willing to help them suicide if they still wanted to do that after a certain number of months (dependent on how long the meds take to work).
There are so many different anti-depressants and the methods for choosing which ones are optimal basically come down to the intuition of the psychiatrist. It can take years to iterate through all the possible combinations of psychiatric medication if they keep failing to fix the neurotransmitter imbalance. I think anything short of 2 years is not long enough to conclude that a person’s brain is irreparably broken. It’s also a field that has a good chance of rapid development, such that a brain that seems irreparably broken today will certainly not always be unfixable.
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I explored a business in psychiatric genetic testing, and identified about 20 different mutations that could help psychiatrists make treatment decisions, but it was infeasible to bring to market right now without having millions of dollars for research, and the business case is not strong enough for me to raise millions of dollars for research. It’ll hit the market within 10 years, sooner if the business case becomes stronger for me doing it or if I have the spare $20k to go out and get the relevant patent to see what doors that opens.
I expect the first consequence of widespread genetic testing for mental health is for NRIs to become much more widely prescribed as the firstline treatment for depression.