Proposal: If you’re depressed, maybe your life sucks. A meta-contrarian post where I argue that you can’t always “have a positive attitude” towards bad things in your life, and that fixing your life’s problems might be a better strategy than learning to cope with them.
Yes! I see so many arguments that the environment simply doesn’t matter in depression, and most of them seem to come from, say, grad school administrators who benefit from denying that they’re creating a horrible environment with no clear expectations, no positive feedback, no opportunities to socialize, etc. If depression is always a purely random chemical imbalance, well, it’s a pretty neat coincidence that mine vanished within a week of my quitting grad school.
Also, I think something that contributes to depression at my end is a background mental script that I’m always feeling the wrong thing, and part of that script is that I should be tough enough to not be affected negatively.
At the time, I had a moral system in which it was not permissible to leave grad school because science was the thing I should be doing. However, towards the end of my first year I became too depressed to do any problem sets and as a result I had to drop all my classes at the last minute and would then have had to reapply to get back in, which wasn’t happening. If I’d been slightly less vulnerable to stress-related depression, I suppose I’d still be there (and still be quite unhappy, so maybe the whole thing was adaptive after all).
I don’t have a good link to post, but if I write more extensively I’ll put it here.
Omid, do you mean “If you’re depressed, maybe it’s because your life sucks” ? Just curious if you’re implying causation. I don’t think the claim that the two are correlated is all that controversial.
That seems just obviously true. What precisely is “If you’re depressed, maybe your life sucks” designed to refute?
Who/when/why endorses any of these statements:
Depression is not significantly correlated with actual life problems to feel bad about.
It’s practically impossible to have a positive attitude about some really bad things if they happen to you. And if you could, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea.
If there’s a problem that’s making you depressed, it’s better to learn to cope with it and adopt a positive attitude, then to try to fix the problem.
A lot of people (eg on Reddit) seem to believe that depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance” and that the solution is antidepressant drugs. That’s a bit different from the “positive attitude” case but also something that might be disagreed with.
The drugs we have today are not a good solution. I’ve suffered from depression myself and have been prescribed many different drugs at times. The best match was still only a partial solution. I’ve read enough to know that this is pretty typical: few people get ‘total remission’ from depression on psychiatric drugs alone. Most have some degree of improvement, but have to try many drugs first (i.e. there’s no good prediction of a drug will do to a person) and usually have at least minor side effects (i.e. the drugs are not very specific in their action).
It’s hard to argue that some hypothetical not-yet-invented drug might be a perfect cure to depression; that’s just one step removed from the truism that our minds are our brains and so susceptible to neurochemical intervention.
I am assign a pretty high likelihood that what we call depression is in fact several distinct disorders that merely present similar symptoms, and that for this reason we are never going to get really effective treatment’s for depression until we get better diagnostics. It would explain why people have such varying drug responses—if you have depression type a and get medication effective for depression type d…
This post seems relevant. Advice shouldn’t be formulated as pushing behavior in a certain direction, because different people benefit from pushing behavior in different directions.
Proposal: If you’re depressed, maybe your life sucks. A meta-contrarian post where I argue that you can’t always “have a positive attitude” towards bad things in your life, and that fixing your life’s problems might be a better strategy than learning to cope with them.
Yes! I see so many arguments that the environment simply doesn’t matter in depression, and most of them seem to come from, say, grad school administrators who benefit from denying that they’re creating a horrible environment with no clear expectations, no positive feedback, no opportunities to socialize, etc. If depression is always a purely random chemical imbalance, well, it’s a pretty neat coincidence that mine vanished within a week of my quitting grad school.
Also, I think something that contributes to depression at my end is a background mental script that I’m always feeling the wrong thing, and part of that script is that I should be tough enough to not be affected negatively.
Please write about this or link me to someone who has already. Congratulations on your escape.
At the time, I had a moral system in which it was not permissible to leave grad school because science was the thing I should be doing. However, towards the end of my first year I became too depressed to do any problem sets and as a result I had to drop all my classes at the last minute and would then have had to reapply to get back in, which wasn’t happening. If I’d been slightly less vulnerable to stress-related depression, I suppose I’d still be there (and still be quite unhappy, so maybe the whole thing was adaptive after all).
I don’t have a good link to post, but if I write more extensively I’ll put it here.
There was an RSA clip about this awhile back. Smile or Die
It’s a summary of Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided (Smile or Die in the UK), and very good.
Omid, do you mean “If you’re depressed, maybe it’s because your life sucks” ? Just curious if you’re implying causation. I don’t think the claim that the two are correlated is all that controversial.
That seems just obviously true. What precisely is “If you’re depressed, maybe your life sucks” designed to refute?
Who/when/why endorses any of these statements:
Depression is not significantly correlated with actual life problems to feel bad about.
It’s practically impossible to have a positive attitude about some really bad things if they happen to you. And if you could, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea.
If there’s a problem that’s making you depressed, it’s better to learn to cope with it and adopt a positive attitude, then to try to fix the problem.
A lot of people (eg on Reddit) seem to believe that depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance” and that the solution is antidepressant drugs. That’s a bit different from the “positive attitude” case but also something that might be disagreed with.
The drugs we have today are not a good solution. I’ve suffered from depression myself and have been prescribed many different drugs at times. The best match was still only a partial solution. I’ve read enough to know that this is pretty typical: few people get ‘total remission’ from depression on psychiatric drugs alone. Most have some degree of improvement, but have to try many drugs first (i.e. there’s no good prediction of a drug will do to a person) and usually have at least minor side effects (i.e. the drugs are not very specific in their action).
It’s hard to argue that some hypothetical not-yet-invented drug might be a perfect cure to depression; that’s just one step removed from the truism that our minds are our brains and so susceptible to neurochemical intervention.
I am assign a pretty high likelihood that what we call depression is in fact several distinct disorders that merely present similar symptoms, and that for this reason we are never going to get really effective treatment’s for depression until we get better diagnostics. It would explain why people have such varying drug responses—if you have depression type a and get medication effective for depression type d…
This post seems relevant. Advice shouldn’t be formulated as pushing behavior in a certain direction, because different people benefit from pushing behavior in different directions.
Existential angst?