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Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

psychologytoday.com

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Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#131

Post by podgaj »

Pelic4n wrote: post #119
podgaj wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Thanks for your insights and sorry for having supposed you had a less severe case, but all of that happened to you and you think it's not a disorder or a disease ?

Disease: A particular distinctive process in the body with a specific cause and characteristic symptoms.

Disorder: Irregularity, disturbance, or interruption of normal functions.

Syndrome: A number of symptoms occurring together and characterizing a specific disease.

I do not care which it is. I just focused on my symptoms and what made them worse and what made them better. To me is is a difference, that is the best way I can put it.

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#132

Post by User23 »

podgaj wrote: post #83
Solstinox wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. One sees the depression as something to be fixed, the other sees the underlying problem causing the depression as something to be fixed.

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…

Amphetamines have shown some promising results in actually curing depression. There is a vicious cycle of depression where the anhedonia and lack of motivation cause the sufferer to allow the underlying causes to get even worse leading to deeper depression. Amphetamines can help break that cycle and ideally even start a virtuous cycle where their use can be tapered and eventually discontinued. It's vitally important though that the drug treatment is combined with behavioral modification so that the artificial stimulation of reward circuits can be operant conditioned on behavior patterns that mitigate the underlying cause of depression. Anyhow I might be off on the jargon since college psychology was a long time ago, but the basic concept strikes me as highly plausible and consistent with what we know about the human mind. And anecdotally I have friends who benefited from amphetamines for depression.

However used improperly it can end in amphetamine addiction or even psychosis. It's not surprising most mainstream psychiatrists don't like to use them for depression, but it is a powerful tool in the box.

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#133

Post by podgaj »

bluntfang wrote: post #107
JimTheMan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>For instance I bet a great swathe of the unemployed would not be depressed if they had a job. 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.

I agree, and this is why I say the majority of mood disorders are environmental, even ones as bad as mine.

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#134

Post by nverno »

bluntfang wrote: post #107
JimTheMan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>For instance I bet a great swathe of the unemployed would not be depressed if they had a job. 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.

That is an unconvincing rephrasing though. The benefits of hard (rewarding?) work to mental health seem obvious [to me subjectively ofc]

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#135

Post by HeckFeck »

Honestly, this squares with personal experience. I've had long periods of anxiety, which I'd describe as perceiving outside things as greater threats than they are, excessive worry and overthinking and withdrawal from outside world. I've also endured depression, that is overmuch despair and lack of willpower to complete even simple tasks.

It plagued me for years, badly affecting much of my personal life. I had some therapy (for 3 months), and interestingly a doctor actually voiced the same view put forward in this article. I never took medication.

Latterly, after gaining more life experience and connecting some dots, I realised much of this was fed by my environment when I was growing up. I realised this comparing outcomes with others who had stabler, supportive homes. Bad circumstances leading to social ostracisation, which meant I never developed social skills well, which meant I always dreaded social contact. This fed an endless anxiety cycle.

After ten painful years, wrangling and working through it, I've eventually managed to make better friendships. As a result, my anxiety has dropped and my overall social ability improved. Nowadays, social contact has been reduced and I've been forced to stay in my childhood home thanks to "lockdown". Curiously, I've once again had more of the depression-like symptoms.

I wonder how much of these afflictions are brought on by poor family environments, and even when they are stronger the parents providing little personal input into children's lives. Lack of community generally and increased personal isolation. I'd put it forward that medicalisation isn't the answer to all of life's woes, or the problems we face individually or collectively.

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#136

Post by iamthepieman »

frereubu wrote: post #7
framecowbird wrote: post #4

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…

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 struggle with mild depression, especially in the long winter months in the Northeast U.S. Anecdata, I know, but I'm much better at estimating times (arrival times, how long it will take to pack for a trip, when we will actually leave to get to an appointment) than my wife who is eternally optimistic.

This comes in handy on estimating project times as well though only for me internally as most people don't want to hear realistic project times.

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#137

Post by golergka »

hexxiiiz wrote: post #122
slfnflctd wrote: post #52

At first I viewed the depression I started fighting in my teens as a scourge, a defect, something broken to be fixed. I have since come to see it as an important signal. When I am managing my life and mental states well, it often fades into the background. When it starts to flare up, like with some kind of physical pain, that's telling me I need to pay attention and change things up a bit. Furthermore - and perhaps m…

This may make sense for you in particular, but it a lot of people the signal provided by depression is distinct in its persistent alarm about something that isn't really in the present. Listening to the signal and stopping to take stock of it and make changes is often what makes depression so paralyzing, since it is characteristic of it that this doesnt help. Depression for most people is that "stop, stop, rest" happ…

> about something that isn't really in the present

Or is it? Therapy, especially gestalt or existential, often makes people realise that something really is off with their outlook on life, relationships with other people or other things like this — something that they had paid no attention to and perceived as "normal", that really wasn't. And in the end, what started as their fight against depression ended up as work to fix the core reason for which that depression was only a symptom.

I know this to be the case with myself and some close friends of mine. I'm not a health professional, and this is anecdotal evidence, but from talking to other people and therapists, I hear about this quite often.

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#138

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

montagg wrote: post #92
podgaj wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had it a large chunk of my life. It went, eventually. It can go but that's because it's not in my nature/mind/brain/chemistry/whatever. In this I'm very fortunate, but please don't completely rule out defeating it, though the odds are poor.

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#139

Post by podgaj »

elliekelly wrote: post #127
podgaj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You see, depression is fundamentally and immune disorder. We react negatively to something in the environment, like a bad job or marriage. This is an atrociously overly simplistic statement. There are plenty of people who suffer from depression despite having everything going for them. A person can have not a single thing in the world to complain about and still have depression.

What about all the other things that might affect their immune system? Have they ruled them all out? Latent viral or bacterial infection? Allergies? Diet? Look at diet and Omega 6 consumption, that alone will screw with the immune system and throw the catecholamines off kilter.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950146/

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