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Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
21–30 of 272 posts
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#22Here's a personal anecdote of the moment when I realized that perhaps mental disorders are not disorders at all: A few years ago I had a job that made me deeply unhappy. The unhappiness came about gradually, but in my last year there it was overwhelming. In my last year on the job I spent a good chunk of my working hours holding back feelings of deep frustration and anger over how things were progressing and over how…
Sorry man, the therapist can't prescribe. You are free to read "The body keeps the score" to understand why everything you wrote is wrong/false. To the downvoters: Things in life are in different levels. Your knee may hurt a little, you may tear 1 ACL in your knee, you tear all ligaments in your knee, your knee got chopped off, etc etc. Going to the doctor, doesn't 100% mean your knee will go into surgery. Sometimes,…
Telling somebody else they are wrong about their own personal experience deserves a downvote, which I don't have enough points to give you.
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#23I'm most surprised to learn that this _isn't_ the current prevailing view in the medical profession. I am not a doctor, but it's always seemed more natural to me to view depression and anxiety as adaptive behaviours - albeit perhaps ones that can end up being triggered too far. I read an article once (wish I could find it) that one advantage of mild depression was as sort a "call for help and support" from other embe…
There is a movement within psychiatry that wants to take a view similar to yours, although it is very much in a minority. I would point to figures such as the British psychiatrists Sami Timimi [1] and Joanna Moncrieff [2], associated with the groups "Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry" [3] and "Critical Psychiatry Network" [4].
The emphasise the ideas that psychotropic medications are overprescribed (they are not totally opposed to their use in all cases, but do think that the evidence for their benefit is often overstated, and the evidence of harmful side effects is often unfairly minimised), that the DSM-5 and ICD-10/11 diagnostic manuals have very weak science behind them and encourage blaming the patient's brain for the patient's problems (in a very general way – advocates of the biological model can rarely point to anything specifically wrong with a given individual patient's brain, just the faith that some biological explanation is waiting to one day be discovered) even while ignoring the factors in the patient's social situation which may be a better explanation (but maybe a less socially convenient one – blaming the brain rather than the society eases society's conscience).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_Timimi
[2] https://joannamoncrieff.com
[3] http://cepuk.org
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20200225204400/http://criticalps...
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#24PTSD is quite obviously a response to adversity, that is already implied by the name! What am I missing here? Why is this news?
The point is whether it's adaptive, i.e. whether it has evolved because it is beneficial (such as our pain aversion), rather than arising as an unfortunate bug in the system (such as cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder which seems pretty clearly not to be adaptive).
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#25Besides raving on and on about ADHD, the article offers little actionable stuff, dubious reasoning and outright falsehoods at places (like the fact that antidepressants are no better than placebo).
I wouldn't say that that is a false statement, there's been a bunch of research in the area, mostly started by this paper: https://www3.nd.edu/~ghaeffel/Kirsch2002%20Prevention%20&%20...
Note that the above is an analysis of the data used to approve the medications from the FDA, so likely to be optimistic.
The headline finding is that compared to an active placebo (i.e. one with similar side effects), the benefits of SSRIs are very small.
However, if you have a diagnosis of MDD, there is more evidence for an effect (although it's still pretty small).
It's a difficult subject to study correctly, because of the strong commercial pressures (like most drug studies, to be fair), but depression does seem relatively placebo responsive, which would suggest either a connection to inflammation or the body's opioid system.
This does not mean that people should stop taking anti-depressants, I'm not a medical doctor etc, but there is some research to support the assertion around SSRIs and placebo in the article.
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#26I'm most surprised to learn that this _isn't_ the current prevailing view in the medical profession. I am not a doctor, but it's always seemed more natural to me to view depression and anxiety as adaptive behaviours - albeit perhaps ones that can end up being triggered too far. I read an article once (wish I could find it) that one advantage of mild depression was as sort a "call for help and support" from other embe…
There's a general bucketing in the modern world of all unhappiness being depression that should be treated, which I don't think really fits what's going on. There are absolutely cases where anxiety and depression are a medical issue which warrant treatment with medication, but there are also completely legitimate reasons for those conditions. If your lifestyle is one of never leaving the house, zero social contact, w…
Naming these two medical conditions "Depression" and "Anxiety" is pretty unfortunate. They are completely different from"feeling depressed" and "feeling anxious". Having depression or anxiety in the medical sense will not cause you to do anything about any problem, because they are debilitating. They reflect long-term changes to your brain chemistry that may or may not respond to medication - transiently feeling anxious or depressed is not that.
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#27This strikes me as a pretty clumsy article.
> What if mental disorders like anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder aren’t mental disorders at all?
Of course they're disorders. That's why they deserve treatment. This bears no connection to the question of whether they're adaptive. Our capacity for physical pain is adaptive, but doctors still treat pain.
> With a thorough review of the evidence, they show good reasons to think of depression or PTSD as responses to adversity rather than chemical imbalances.
Besides clueless commentators on the Internet, who is suggesting depression is simply a matter of 'chemical imbalance'? If that were the case, it wouldn't be brought on by loneliness, and it wouldn't be treated with CBT and talking therapy.
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing that I learned during my psychology degrees that always stuck with me was that mildly depressed people are measurably better at judging probabilities of things happening. (Unfortunately I can't remember off the top of my head the structure of the study, or how much better they were). I wonder if that might fit into this, in that if you're mildly depressed presumably bad things are happening to you, so perha…
I remember reading an article like that. Also, it's a bit of a meme that if depression was 100% harmful then it would already be eliminated by evolution. I mean why shouldn't people prone to depression die off? Don't make a mistake, I'm still working on improving my life and uncovering the root causes. It is a silent thief of life.
> I mean why shouldn't people prone to depression die off?
"Having a child will make me happy". And hell, maybe it will - it's the perfect ruse by our genes - keep us depressed until we reproduce.
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry man, the therapist can't prescribe. You are free to read "The body keeps the score" to understand why everything you wrote is wrong/false. To the downvoters: Things in life are in different levels. Your knee may hurt a little, you may tear 1 ACL in your knee, you tear all ligaments in your knee, your knee got chopped off, etc etc. Going to the doctor, doesn't 100% mean your knee will go into surgery. Sometimes,…
Telling somebody else they are wrong about their own personal experience deserves a downvote, which I don't have enough points to give you.
Here's a personal anecdote when I realized that perhaps "knee medical issues" are not "medical issues" at all:
I was once running and my knee started hurting. I kept running and it kept hurting. I then saw that the reason my knee kept hurting was because I was using the wrong shoe, or was running not at the right form. After I changed these, the knee didn't hurt no more.
Had I gone to a physiotherapist or an orthopedist, they would've put me into surgery for ACL/MLC reconstruction and 6+ months of therapy so my knee worked again.
I would still be running after the surgery, not understanding why my knee would hurt. I wouldn't have made as much progress in understanding what I actually wanted from my knee.
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#30Here's a personal anecdote of the moment when I realized that perhaps mental disorders are not disorders at all: A few years ago I had a job that made me deeply unhappy. The unhappiness came about gradually, but in my last year there it was overwhelming. In my last year on the job I spent a good chunk of my working hours holding back feelings of deep frustration and anger over how things were progressing and over how…
I had a similar situation, although I had already been diagnosed with anxiety and depression multiple times. Medication never had a positive impact other than temporary fixes for anxiety so I reject any daily antidepressents.
Last year I was in a similar work situation but did decide to go to therapy as a kind of check to see if my feelings seemed warranted or if it was maybe something else.Ultimately decided to leave that job. It took 8 months for me to figure out what I wanted to do and actually start working again.
Extremely happy I made those decisions as I've doubled my salary, left an industry that was wrecked by COVID and got into one that has had accelerated growth for the same reason. I think it's good to trust your instincts, even though we both made different decisions they seem to have been the right ones for our particular situations.