Calling for a new approach to depression
theguardian.com
Calling for a new approach to depression
1–10 of 155 posts
Re: Calling for a new approach to depression
#2Is everything you think you know about headlines wrong?
Is depression caused primarily by clickbait?
Re: Calling for a new approach to depression
#3tl;dr: Depression is just sadness resulting from modern society being kinda lame.
(The article argues this point cogently, and I agree with it.)
Re: Calling for a new approach to depression
#4Suggest alternate title: Many people are depressed because they lack control over their work.
Re: Calling for a new approach to depression
#5This explanation does not work for all types of depression. There are people who have wonderful lives, fulfilling jobs, happy families, who are still depressed.
We need to be more careful in our language, the word depression has become overused, much like the drugs used to treat it.
Re: Calling for a new approach to depression
#6Why did my comment get flagged? I assume this was a mistake, so reposting:
tl;dr: Many people diagnosed with depression are actually just sad because modern society is kinda lame.
(The article argues this point cogently, and I agree with it.)
[I slightly edited this because I think people thought I was saying that I think all depressed people are faking or something]
Re: Calling for a new approach to depression
#7This explanation does not work for all types of depression. There are people who have wonderful lives, fulfilling jobs, happy families, who are still depressed. We need to be more careful in our language, the word depression has become overused, much like the drugs used to treat it.
>There are people who have wonderful lives, fulfilling jobs, happy families, who are still depressed.
If someone truly feels and believes they have a "wonderful" life, it would seem they are not suffering from crippling depression.
Though what I think you're trying to say is there are people who are depressed even though they seem to have all of their basic human needs being met.
Re: Calling for a new approach to depression
#8Why did my comment get flagged? I assume this was a mistake, so reposting: tl;dr: Many people diagnosed with depression are actually just sad because modern society is kinda lame. (The article argues this point cogently, and I agree with it.) [I slightly edited this because I think people thought I was saying that I think all depressed people are faking or something]
[deleted]
Re: Calling for a new approach to depression
#9Why did my comment get flagged? I assume this was a mistake, so reposting: tl;dr: Many people diagnosed with depression are actually just sad because modern society is kinda lame. (The article argues this point cogently, and I agree with it.) [I slightly edited this because I think people thought I was saying that I think all depressed people are faking or something]
I found, over the years of being on HN, that there's a sort of forceful response that always comes to these types of comments about depression, along with downvoting. The responses say basically,
"Don't talk about what you don't know. Many people have real, chemical depression, and your comment that it's a product of life circumstances is not helpful".
I was always a but puzzled about the regularity with which that above formula appeared on HN. Sure, many entrepreneurs and especially developers lead lonely, stressful lives. I am a developer and entrepreneur myself!
But I also felt there is a sort of "groupthink" or "bullying" element to this, because there was hardly much substantive discussion about facts or statistics or science, in effect it was shaming the commenter into shutting up.
This bothers me. I like to see real fact based discussion when there is disagreement. Not just downvoting and vague assertions.
In this case I am sure you were downvoted by that exact same sentiment. Even if you had summarized the article, the content of the summary was enough to trigger the downvote.
Re: Calling for a new approach to depression
#10This explanation does not work for all types of depression. There are people who have wonderful lives, fulfilling jobs, happy families, who are still depressed. We need to be more careful in our language, the word depression has become overused, much like the drugs used to treat it.
>There are people who have wonderful lives, fulfilling jobs, happy families, who are still depressed. If someone truly feels and believes they have a "wonderful" life, it would seem they are not suffering from crippling depression. Though what I think you're trying to say is there are people who are depressed even though they seem to have all of their basic human needs being met.
For most of us depression is something that just comes from different expectations from our life from what we have. For a long time I thought that this is depression until.I got to know a real person who has everything he wants to.have (he's very moderate person with moderate needs, a family supporting him), but he can't control his illness. When he gets depressed, he's not even mentally capable of doing very simple tasks.