101–110 of 272 posts
Couldn't a person have a biological makeup that predisposes them to experience greater or lesser adversity? If mental disorders are adaptive responses, that doesn't seem to rule out that some people may be more prone to interpreting situations as adversarial.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajmg.b.3276...
Anxiety is a disorder of the nervous system that is a by-product of civilization. We are one of the only mammals that gets anxiety, if you get anxiety in the wild you won't be alive much longer. Depression and PTSD are not responses to adversity. If you face adversity and suffer depression or PTSD you were raised psychologically weak in a way that is dangerous to you. There are people who have survived civil wars, dr…
> There are people who have survived civil wars, drought and mass starvation all over the world that don't have these problems get out of your bubble. And similarly, there are people who have been traumatized by the same events. In fact, there are war heroes who have taken bullets for their comrades, saved platoons, jumped at the enemy, and have been stricken with PTSD - if you think these people are "weak", then you…
I'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…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_Childhood_Experiences_...
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Sorry but that attitude is extremely dangerous. Maybe you have a less severe case that's manageable without treatment but that's not the case for everyone. Mania states are actively brain damaging and can blow into full-on psychosis. There is no lifestyle change, diet or essential oil that's going to stop that from happening for folks with a severe bipolar disorder, which is absolutely a disease since it destroys you…
Less sever case!!! Ahahahahhah! Uhm, no, I assure you this is not the case. Hospitalized four times, suicide attempts, psychosis, hallucination, on permanent disability, my mother and brothers have it and attempted suicide, my nephew, suicide. At one pint I was on lithium, zyprexa, lamictal, and prozac all at the same time. They also thought I had MS at times because of all the neurological stuff that was happening.…
It's also dangerous because you're telling people they don't have a problem they need to address and that if they do address it, they just need to eat differently, neither of which are applicable broadly to people with bipolar disorder. Medications that didn't work for you might work for them and are worth pursuing.
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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 orthoped…
The reason your assumption doesn't ring true while leto_ii's assumption does is that we have a much, much better understanding of the knee than we do of the human mind, and much more objective tests for knee injuries than for depressive disorders. So your assumption that you would have been given surgery seems extremely unlikely, while the assumption that a person with depressive symptoms would be prescribed psychiat…
Here'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 think people just need to realise that depression is going to come from when the stressors in our environment overwhelm our ability to cope. It's not just something that arises from out of nowhere for most people. For instance I bet a great swathe of the unemployed would not be depressed if they had a job. Sounds like you were able to adapt and start doing things that would reduce your stressors. However I don't th…
I think this is worth a rephrase. Something like:
I bet a great swathe of people wouldn't be depressed if they didn't have to trade their time for food and housing tokens.
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How common is that extreme form of depression? Sounds like we need two different names for two very different diseases (or perhaps only one is actually a disease)
There are no diseases, only symptoms. We can name diseases forever but that gets us nowhere. They just have more depression, or are more depressed. By the way, why don't people get SSRI's when they are depressed with a flu? I mean that is caused my lower serotonin as well. So for some reason we accept that depression because we have a reason for it? https://www.inverse.com/article/40843-what-f-lu-do-es-t-o-yo... You…
One reason is SSRIs typically require a a few weeks to reach effective levels in your system; about how long it takes to recover from the flu.
> depression is fundamentally and immune disorder
You appear to be playing a free association game with words, not describing reality.
I'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…
Largely because articles like this generally focus on what I think of as “layman’s depression”, or “layman’s anxiety.” That is, a mild form of the condition that straddles the gray area between “personality” and “mild personality disorder,” that diminishes quality of life in a perceptible but not devastating way. Then you go work on a psych floor and meet people whose depression is so severe it induces catatonia; peo…
An adaptive response “taken too far”, on the other hand, is the very definition of wide swaths of disease - autoimmune, cancer, etc.
These two statements don't add up for me. If you do accept that various autoimmune disorders and cancers are essentially adaptive responses taken too far, then why can't depression similarly be considered the same? Or is your point that depression is simply an adaptive response, and it's not "taken too far" until people are at the catatonic state?
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Yeah, I agree. But the signal is still the disorder that needs to be fixed. Any psychiatrist will tell you that psychiatric medications only treat the symptoms of mood disorders and that they do not know the cause of most of them. It is hogwash that they think mood disorders are "only chemical imbalances in the brain". They know these disorders are polygenic and environmental. But for some people, a short dose of SSR…
Are you familiar with what it’s like to have depression? It’s not something you can really ever get rid of, even if you can mitigate it with medication and lifestyle changes. It’s there, though not dominant, even when things are going well and even when you’re in a positive mood. I struggle with similar feelings, and the idea that depression becomes something that is there but can be put to positive use absolutely tr…
Many people who haven't been stuck in that positive feedback loop have still been blue. Their capacity to feel happiness is muted just like ours, but they are successfully able to get out of that with a behavioral change. That's not always the case with a depressive disorder, and it can take a multi-faceted approach of medications, lifestyle change, sleep hygiene improvement, sometimes electroshock therapy for those people to get out of it.