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Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

psyche.co

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Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#161

Post by cmehdy »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #33
sillysaurusx wrote: post #13

they struggled against the dehumanising notion that their thoughts, feelings or behaviour were mechanistically caused. Finally, a thread where I can point out my own experiences. Around four years ago, it would be fair to call me slightly crazy. It was a harmless sort of crazy, but it was quite self-destructive. I used to wake up wishing to die, genuinely, and not knowing why. All of that changed after going on Proza…

> All of that changed after going on Prozac. I don't know why, and I've heard from many others that Prozac was harmful to them. SSRIs are some of the most widely-used medications. Tens of millions of people in the United States alone use SSRIs regularly with good results. No medication is perfect, obviously, and at scale we're bound to see a percentage of people have negative experiences. The problem is that when ten…

There are also other categories of medications which people forget, with the spotlight being on SSRI. Off the top of my head there's also SNRI[0], NRI[1], MAOI[2], RIMA[2], and TCA[3].

Arguably for low to moderate depressive disorders there hasn't been conclusive evidence that psychiatric prescriptions work, however there IS conclusive evidence that for major depression the benefits are at a minimum "small" and up to "substantial" ([4],[5]).

So as soon as we discuss depression, everyone might mean something different. It's a sad state of affairs because now people think they're talking about the same things but they're really not - they just happen to have had different psychiatrists who assessed things and behaved perhaps differently, and where one might have really mostly needed therapy and the other both therapy and antidepressants, in the end everyone went home with a prescription for the fancy SSRI of the year. Psychiatrists as a whole need to reevaluate the rate of prescriptions, the tools to assess major depressive disorder, and the actual array of treatments that are available to them.

I've had wrong diagnoses. I've had appointments that my doctors missed without rescheduling even though I was there. I've had those 15-minutes-and-you're-out meetings with a psychiatrist, whose prescriptions for what conveniently is the "newest pill" were given along with free samples until one day you have to pay for something you can't afford or switch treatment and deal with weeks of uncertainty, and so on.

I have been saved from death and cycles of immense self-destruction by a healthy relationship with a knowledgeable and experienced psychiatrist willing to take me, when my legal troubles had by then reduced my options and driven me further to the edge. Some real discussions, a carefully explained switch from SSRI to RIMA, which worked. "Is that what it is to feel somewhat normal? I can't believe people feel like that most of the time!!"

It allowed me to truly know what therapy is, because there was more to the day than being unconscious or wanting to be dead or death-by-proxy. Therapy gave out some tools to live and interact in a healthy way with myself and others, and to seek more tools too.

The struggle still exists entirely and comes back in heavy waves some days. A lot more difficulties are now an inherent part of my life and rebuilding things will take time and struggles. But psychiatric treatment gave me legs I had lost for nearly all of my life, and therapy taught me to walk again, and I'm well intent on walking out of everything I fell into - regardless of how long and arduous the path is. And whenever I'm able to, to take others out of the pit too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin%E2%80%93norepinephri...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norepinephrine_reuptake_inhibi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_inhibitor

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricyclic_antidepressant

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3712503/

[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2253608/

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#162

Post by cryptica »

I think it's normal to become 'depressed' after being deceived by someone you trusted. Medicating the victim seems like the wrong approach. It's like telling the victim that this kind of deception is OK and they're the ones who need to be fixed for not being able to cope with it better. There are a lot of psychopaths out there, it doesn't make it OK. Also, the realization of this should be painful and depressing. It is depressing. We live in a depressing time. Most people today are completely messed up in the head. Most people.

We should try to fix this problem not patch it up with medication. In terms of evolution, our social system selects for mental illness. Rewards the psychopaths and medicates the altruists so that they learn to tolerate it.

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#163

Post by shoes_for_thee »

pantaloony wrote: post #101
wincy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started having disturbing, invasive thoughts a few months before the pandemic hit. I’d be watching a movie with my family after dinner then boom, I’d feel insane. It wasn’t suicidal just things like “soon you will be DEAD!” kind of stuff. Turned out it was me reacting to some of the food we were eating at home. The GP I saw suggested Lexapro which I’ve taken before and it’s not for me. I told him the problem had a…

Hold up. Is the specter of existential angst, rising to outright horror if left unchecked, not just, like, a normal part of life that rises to conscious thought as soon as you’re not distracted, for the entire non-religious population?

It depends on whether or not you engage with your hobbies.

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#164

Post by DavidVoid »

seesawtron wrote: post #106

It reminds me of what Aldous Huxley wrote (about people in distress): “The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are…

Reminds me of what Martin Luther King, Jr., had to say about the word "maladjusted" [1].

“You who are in the field of psychology have given us a great word. It is the word maladjusted. This word is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is a good word; certainly it is good that in dealing with what the word implies you are declaring that destructive maladjustment should be destroyed. You are saying that all must seek the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But on the other hand, I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.”

[1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/features/king-challenge

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#165

Post by Bx6667 »

throwaway_kufu wrote: post #74
sillysaurusx wrote: post #13

they struggled against the dehumanising notion that their thoughts, feelings or behaviour were mechanistically caused. Finally, a thread where I can point out my own experiences. Around four years ago, it would be fair to call me slightly crazy. It was a harmless sort of crazy, but it was quite self-destructive. I used to wake up wishing to die, genuinely, and not knowing why. All of that changed after going on Proza…

> When you have a broken leg, everyone notices and can relate; when you have a broken mind, no one can see it, and so no one can feel sympathy, let alone empathy. This hits home and almost moved me to tears. I went through a trauma about 3 years ago, I was Kidnapped/abducted from a gas station at gun point and was forced to drive my attacker for nearly 30 minutes at gun point under threat of death before opening the…

I also got ptsd in a domestic setting. Please remember it gets better with time. I’m sure you already know this, but MDMA has been shown to be effective in treating ptsd. I was personally able to get rid of most of the symptoms with large doses of propranolol. Try both of those before killing yourself.

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#166

Post by realharo »

nathan_compton wrote: post #148
realharo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a metaphor. Because the way it works can be viewed as inputs (sensors, environment, external chemicals) + current state ---> outputs (behavior) + new state kinda like computers or robots, in a deterministic manner (except it is practically impossible to recreate the exact same inputs, or the exact same state). You don't have to take it too literally, people who read it generally understand what it means.

This is either very specific and thus not all that applicable to biological systems (that is, the current state is typically much much much more dominant a determinant of future time evolution in biological systems than in machines) or so general as to characterize literally any physical phenomenon whatsoever, and thus hardly useful to think about how biological systems work specifically. Indeed, one element emphasiz…

I see. Do you think a machine that physically alters its own silicon, or software that rewrites its code instead of storing data, would be closer to biological systems? Or is that part irrelevant?

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#167

Post by ixtli »

opportune wrote: post #86
ixtli wrote: post #37

Not to reduce a complex topic to an aphorism but: if the world is configured in a way thats antagonistic towards you, a negative response is understandable. A lot of this stuff fits neatly into a tradition of blaming people for their conditions that, by and large, they have little control over. Oh, another aphorism that's always stuck with me is "the difference between 'crazy' and 'eccentric' is a million dollars."

I feel this is particularly apt as depression has grown considerably over the past few decades. Could be the result of destigmatization, or could be the result of society worsening in some way. If you have a poor social life and feel like an underachiever (which describes increasingly more people, IME) it’s no surprise to me that you would experience depression

To start, I hope that if you're talking about yourself you are doing ok.

But yes I think its possible all of the things you're talking about put together. The long term effects of the extreme wealth gap are so broad they're difficult to even take a survey of. But at the same time, we're becoming more open about mental health issues and acknowledging them as legitimate problems so reporting in accepting, progressive communities is going to make it seem like there are more.

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#168

Post by kqr »

centimeter wrote: post #142
realharo wrote: post #5

>She told me she welcomed the diagnosis of a neurobiological disorder, which confirmed her problem was ‘real’ – brought on by a physiological force external to her volition – and that it showed she’s not ‘just a slacker’. That is such an arbitrary distinction. As if being "just a slacker" doesn't have a number of deeper reasons behind it as well. Brains are just machines at the end of the day, every behavior is a res…

Consequentialists often point out that whether things like laziness are moral failings or are physiological problems with no moral bearing, it still makes sense to treat them as a moral failing, because it’s usually more likely to result in incentives and social pressures that lead to the moral failing/physiological problem being fixed, mitigated, or worked around. There was an SSC article that had some good discussi…

You might be able to go through archive.is which contains a large part of SSC. I find the argument weird because we tend not to handle moral failings very constructively.

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#169

Post by UnFleshedOne »

pantaloony wrote: post #101
wincy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started having disturbing, invasive thoughts a few months before the pandemic hit. I’d be watching a movie with my family after dinner then boom, I’d feel insane. It wasn’t suicidal just things like “soon you will be DEAD!” kind of stuff. Turned out it was me reacting to some of the food we were eating at home. The GP I saw suggested Lexapro which I’ve taken before and it’s not for me. I told him the problem had a…

Hold up. Is the specter of existential angst, rising to outright horror if left unchecked, not just, like, a normal part of life that rises to conscious thought as soon as you’re not distracted, for the entire non-religious population?

Nah, we just ignore this stuff for the most part. People are really good at compartmentalizing things, and pretty much feel they are immortal. A lot of us suffer from stockholm syndrome and think death is somehow good -- just look at a common reaction to many transhumanist notions.

Those who do take it seriously but are not strong enough to bear, end up joining cults.

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#170

Post by EE84M3i »

_ywdj wrote: post #133
ifend wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I discovered deep subconscious emotional healing techniques Can you elaborate on this? Can you recommend any resources?

I usually get asked this and my standard reply is that I don't prefer not to get into discussions about specifics here, but I'm happy to share info via email, and I also host a Discord group where people interested can discus and share their own experiences with different techniques. So, please feel free to email me (address is in my profile). Edit: the reason I’m reticent about getting into details here is that I’ve…

To be blunt: why? Your reply reads to me like you're recruiting for a cult and/or selling something.
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