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If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

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Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#231
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who knows. When I eat too much wheat I feel like I have a hangover for two days. Over here they started adding selenium to the soil in 60s, and my grandmother tells me no one complained about bread making them sick before that. Perhaps it's that additive that makes tractor fuel oil exhaust blue, or too much selective breeding without thought to nutrition, or some kind of preservation practice which 99% of people don'…

Where is "over here" for you? The only place I've found which has wheat which doesn't make me feel icky is Italy. And the only thing I can figure out about it is fructans (they have a finicky milling process), which seems insane. I've been all over, and as I don't actually have celiac disease (but a very direct and obvious reaction to something in wheat; sleepy internal itchy feeling) I always try the local breads. U…

Interesting. For me it's a probablistic scale:

Coppenhagen: 100% of the what makes me feel icky immediately.

New York, London, Tel-Aviv: About 50% to feel icky.

Rome, Paris: About 25% to feel icky, usually not very icky.

Iceland: Can eat as many and as much wheat products as I want, feel great.

(Only listing places I spent enough time in to have reasonable statistics)

Following the Icelandic epihphany, I've started supplementing with sulphur (currently at 10g MSM/day and rising), and it makes otherwise-unbearable wheat much more bearable, but that's not the entire story.

Iceland has sulpher everywhere (drinking water, air, every food ..) but also has PH 8.8 drinking water - that's going to be my next experiment.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mental health and gut bacteria seem to be heavily correlated. Anecdotally, if I don't eat sugary "reward" food I tend to feel better. That is also why I adopted intermittent fasting. I tend to fell better mentally if I fast 24h once a week.

How exactly do you fast? Is it like the extreme fasting of muslims where you don't eat or drink anything from dawn to dusk, or is it like the hindu fasting where you only eat fruits and vegetables?

The best and most scientific take i've seen on this is by Dr. Jason Fung in "The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets" (https://www.amazon.com/Obesity-Code-Unlocking-Secrets-Weight...)

He specifically references Muslim/Buddhist/Jewish fasts but clarifies that for the purposes of intermittent fasting, water,tea,coffee are OK.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#233

Clinical Depression is often caused by a chemical imbalance, usually serotonin. It isn't being "sad" and doesn't usually have root cause in a certain event or direct emotion - though those things can trigger the already existing issue. We have to remember that the term Depression in this sense doesn't mean what it means in the common sense. Just like words like "Theory" have different meanings in the common vernacula…

There's a lot of evidence against the industry standard "Serotonin deficiency" being the silver bullet that can be, guess what, cured by buying a pill from $BIG_PHARMA.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#234
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are constantly constructing internal narratives to explain their actions. From the perspective of the narrator, with a life’s worth of context, those actions fit into the narrative in a perfectly logical way. From the perspective of others who lack that context, those actions can seem illogical. Maybe you really are more logical than the people around you, but on the other hand you can’t read minds - maybe you…

I'm willing to share my reasoning and logic with anybody who asks, and will refine it if it lacks clarity. I enjoy having my logic tuned by other minds; it makes me even MORE logical to be challenged, even if it hurts my pride in the short-term. Others are not so open and don't want their thinking process challenged. I don't know why, other than pride, ego, or office politics. If you know why, please tell me. Don't b…

This is a real thing and not just some dude who thinks he's really smart and everybody else isn't. I coached a public HS debate team in Chicago for eight years and the problem really does start there in school. Most teenagers are not only frightened of public speaking (I had a student vomit on the podium out of anxiety) they have almost zero experience with someone asking them to give an account of themselves, neither from an adult or a peer. Because college in this country is equally unchallenging, a lot of these issues are being taken unmodified into adulthood

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#235
Does this new information, namely that depression can cause anger, change the advice for distinguishing between depression and burnout?

I.e.

Burnout: no energy for specific thing or things eg work, but plenty of inspiration for other things

Depression: no energy for anything?

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#236
post #26

I have had to deal with inexplicable anger and irritability for a long time. It is possible this traces back to being misdiagnosed and prescribed 5 antibiotic recipes back-to-back as a child. Long and tedious story short, when I cut milk, gluten/short carbs/whatever pesticide they use for wheat, and excess sugar from e.g. prefabbed food from my diet I gained 10kg and my life basically turned around. Turns out having…

Interesting... I had the same experience recently.

I took 3 (increasingly more powerful) antibiotics in a short period until the docs found one that worked.

Then I spent the following days feeling super stressed/anxious for no apparent reason, but figured out it could be a side-effect of the meds. It got better though.

Also, since then, I can't stand cow milk or cheese. Learned that goat cheese is fine, for some reason.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#237
My personal challenges with anger/depression came from attempts to escape reality. It started out as a way to spend my down time (video games). Then over time it became what I looked forward to doing. I would skip outings with friends and ignore my family in favor of playing games. Then it morphed into other forms of impulsive behavior.

After about 20 years (2/3 of my life to that point) I had become an extremely selfish and self-centered person. I would feel empty, so I'd go do something selfish to make myself feel better. But it only lasted for the moment. Afterwards I'd feel upset that I wasted all my time but also not want to quit. So I'd be angry about it and the anger didn't just stay inside. I'd take it out on those who were preventing me from returning to my cave (family mostly).

The big turning point to me was my faith. My addictions (which were various) had put me into a marital and even existential crisis. I basically had to hit rock bottom (and bounce a couple times). I had to be faced with fighting for everything I loved.

Every single day is a struggle, depressed or not. I am always a few breaths away from going back down the rabbit hole. What a wretched man I am. There's no "cure" for me in this life I don't think, but giving up the fight can be deadly and hurt a lot of people I love, so I choose to fight.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we're supposed to be intelligent. Early on in my life I felt something, I never get angry at nature, no matter harmful, but disappointment by other beings hurts deeply. Nature doesn't pretend to choose, it just is. That made me a lot more at ease with objects than people.

One might consider it somewhat condescending but I find that I rarely have emotional reactions to people I don't know. Only people close to me, people whom I've come to have expectations, can bring out my emotional side. The rest, I chalk it up to forces of nature. Terrorism? Force of nature. Someone being shitty on public transit? Force of nature. Littering? Force of nature. We can change our environment though and…

It is completely possible to eschew those feelings of expectations from other people as well. It makes life much easier.

All suffering comes from a desire unfulfilled. To desire others to act as you would and not as they would is to set yourself up for disappointment.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#239
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen YouTube videos of American expats coming back home and saying the one big thing they noticed, after spending significant time in someplace like Europe, was how utterly paranoid Americas are. I've felt this myself just after having a short vacation out of the country. It's not really unsafe here (unless you're in downtown Baltimore or Detroit or something), but everyone is just so paranoid that it feels like…

I'm not surprised by the paranoia. I think it's a natural reaction to the disgusting state of America, one which encourages a kill-or-be-killed mentality. There is very little of a safety net if you fall through the cracks (and the safety net built up during the 20th century is rapidly being torn down). Health care costs are the number one cause of bankruptcy in America. And if you can't afford your rent/mortgage and…

Maybe, but as one who grew up in this country, I can say that this state of paranoia simply did not exist to this extent decades ago. Personally, I think it happened after 9/11. People just weren't like this back in the 80s and 90s, and many of those factors were, if anything, worse than they are now. At least now, with ObamaCare, you aren't totally screwed on pre-existing conditions. And if you go back before the New Deal, or into the Gilded Age, things really were dog-eat-dog back then with zero safety net, but middle-class Americans weren't generally paranoid back then.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Humans in general are pretty shitty, driven mostly by self-interest. Water takes the path of least resistance, Humans take the path of least expected effort expenditure to accomplish their desires Both are just doing as nature does, being themselves. Why be sad that every person will do the least amount of work to satisfy their desires, when it is an inevitability, but your sadness is not.

I have to say, this is the best way I've seen this explained. And it takes no sides. Good comment

Thank you for your kind words. My words were mildly plagiarized from Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty. He is where the idea of people fulfilling their desires with the minimum exertion came from in my comment. I also love myself some stoic reading which ties in nicely with Mr. George's theory of minimum effort.

Progress and Poverty is a great book and I am constantly stopping and thinking how well supported his ideas are.

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