Live data from Hacker News

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

npr.org

281–290 of 301 posts

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If you break your leg, that's an injury, and you see a doctor. If you get pneumonia, you're sick and you need antibiotics. But if your brain isn't working right that's a moral failure.

I dislike modern notions of abdicating responsibility for one's own actions by pointing to other problems. I believe we're all personally responsible for our output. You can have the worst input in the history of mankind - and this should generate sympathy, understanding and a desire to help - but your output is still entirely your responsibility. The are circumstances where someone can be considered incapable of rea…

> You can have the worst input in the history of mankind

What if you have not the worst input but the worst hardware to process it?

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

#283

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…

> Only people close to me, people whom I've come to have expectations, can bring out my emotional side.

That's the key to happy life. Don't have expectations even towards people close to you. Appreciate good things you get. Ignore bad. If there's too much bad, move. Also seek people who don't expect things from you.

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I learned on my own is that it's very easy to lose track of what 'normal' is. You slip slowly into different spectrum of emotions without really knowing why. When your mind is not at peace, stress/struggle will leak out in any shape be it anger, negativity, somatic onset (psoriasis, spasms) .. I believe strongly that we ought to aim for positivity and if we recognize something's not right, acknowledge it, a…

My layperson's understanding of depression is that it's your brain lying to you. My wife's perception of things that happened to her were often 180 degrees different from mine. She would take compliments I would give her, process them through the “depression” filter, and they would come out the other end as insults. You could actually watch it happen; there was a perceptible mental lag as the filters worked. To this…

I've noticed that (warning: gross generalization incoming) women seem to communicate differently, on average, and tend to read between the lines to see if there is any hidden or implied meaning in a statement (negative or positive). Basically, there's an entire side channel of deeper communication that I'm much less capable of decoding or using.

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

#285

This was precisely my wife's symptoms when we were first married. She was angry nearly all the time. She could hold it together in public, but at home it was miserable. She would go a full day at a time, alternatively not speaking, stomping around and throwing things, and yelling. It took a long time for her to be correctly diagnosed. It wasn't clear to me that depression was the issue, because as discussed in the ar…

I had a similar experience with an ex-girlfriend. She was verbally abusive and sometimes even physically. I tried to break up with her multiple times but ended up being gaslight to stay. One time she removed the axel from my front bike tire hoping that I would crash and get injured when I went over a bump. She absolutely refused to get help even though I offered to take her.

Just chiming in to say that as a biker, the front axle thing is a horrible thing to do.

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

#286
post #98

Yup, this was me for 18 years. Doctor had me fixed in about 45 minutes. Massive life improvement all around. Feel dumb about waiting 18 years, so I talk about it to break down the stigma associated with mental health.

How did your doctor had you fixed in 45 minutes?

Well I took a written survey about my symptoms answered some questions. Doc said my brain did not produce enough of something and wrote me a script.

She's a funny old lady and was hilarious about how she liked these pills because it did not effect my funny hand gestures here.

I was sceptical, but took half a pill as she instructed. Next thing I know I am eating a sandwich at chick-fill-a not hating Chick-fil-A people thinking normal is going to be EASY.

I kept taking half pills a week longer that instructed because the positivity was a bit much to take.

I accidentally took 2 pills a couple times and I feel so positive I annoy myself.

If I forget a pill the old familiar negativity and muscle pain in my shoulders comes back.

I do still dislike Chick-fil-A people.

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

#287
post #152
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not much you can do in US politics if you're a techie working in the tech industry. Face it, you're probably not a highly charismatic person who has a chance of winning any serious election beyond the local school board. The answer is to go someplace else where you don't feel angry all the time.

In the last year employee pressure has forced Facebook to acknowledge their cafeteria staff right to unionize, stop Google from building military tech and a politically censored search engine, drop arbitration for sexual harassment cases, get BuzzFeed to pay for time off for all the employees that it laid off. It's true you might not get far if your only goal is to get into office. Meanwhile, there's plenty you can d…

>Meanwhile, there's plenty you can do at a local level. Going somewhere else is only delaying the problem.

Working at the local level isn't going to get you significant change very quickly at higher levels. Basically, you won't enjoy the fruits of your labor, but maybe your kids or grandkids will, if they stick around.

Going somewhere else will get you into a situation you like better right away, and is only "delaying the problem" for the people who stick around, who you're leaving behind to deal with it.

>In the last year employee pressure has forced Facebook to acknowledge their cafeteria staff right to unionize

Facebook remains a real problem for society, but their cafeteria stuff can unionize... I don't see how this really helps anyone except the cafeteria staff, and certainly doesn't help the billions of people whose privacy is threatened by Facebook.

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

#288
post #263
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those small towns and unincorporated areas are useless for someone who makes a living in the tech industry. It doesn't matter how nice a place is; if you can't get good-paying work there, it's not a place you can reasonably live. Face the facts: the tech jobs are mostly all in a handful of metro areas, where everything I said is completely true. And it's a completely reasonable assumption that the vast majori…

I'm in the tech industry in one of those metro areas, and I grew up in the midwest. Your comment has literally no basis in reality, and your follow-up defense to it has even less. There are good paying tech jobs all over "flyover country" that you discount -- the cost of living is also much lower. One can often work out a situation where their quality of life is better in those areas because of the low cost of living…

Flyover country is full of Trump voters, has no cultural events (unless you consider tractor pulls to be "cultural"), has locals who are generally very religious, and there's zero public transit there. It doesn't compare in any way to the large metro areas. The weather can be really brutal in the midwest too.

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

#289
post #288
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the tech industry in one of those metro areas, and I grew up in the midwest. Your comment has literally no basis in reality, and your follow-up defense to it has even less. There are good paying tech jobs all over "flyover country" that you discount -- the cost of living is also much lower. One can often work out a situation where their quality of life is better in those areas because of the low cost of living…

Flyover country is full of Trump voters, has no cultural events (unless you consider tractor pulls to be "cultural"), has locals who are generally very religious, and there's zero public transit there. It doesn't compare in any way to the large metro areas. The weather can be really brutal in the midwest too.

You should really educate yourself about what you denigrate before you do it. The culture in "flyover country" is different. It's not non-existent. In fact, in many ways there is far greater diversity throughout the midwest than in your metros -- not everyone votes or thinks the way you want them to think in "flyover country", they tend to be pretty independent.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did your doctor had you fixed in 45 minutes?

Well I took a written survey about my symptoms answered some questions. Doc said my brain did not produce enough of something and wrote me a script. She's a funny old lady and was hilarious about how she liked these pills because it did not effect my funny hand gestures here . I was sceptical, but took half a pill as she instructed. Next thing I know I am eating a sandwich at chick-fill-a not hating Chick-fil-A peopl…

Make sure you educate yourself on what those pills you're taking do and follow through a treatment, not just take them indefinitely.
Post reply on HN