Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by 3pt14159 » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 6:24 PM UTC

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #188

GreenWatermelon wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really better than death? to me, death means salvation, I'll no longer have to deal with troubles.

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” -- E. Cioran The trouble with "death means salvation", and believe me I know that yearning, is that you don't get to experience this salvation. Suicide is literally not the answer, because you will never get to experience the relief on the other end. This is the essence of Cioran's quote here. It would have been better to not e…

Believe me, I know what it is to suffer. But even though I lean against suicide strongly since I've lived the whole "if you're going through hell keep going" thing, and the relief when the (years long) suffering is over is immense. However, I struggle with things like a suicide pill given to air force pilots.

Would it be better to be tortured for years? To have your family knowing that your fingernails got ripped out? That you lost your genitals to electrocution?

I'm not sure. Plenty of heroes committed suicide.

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

#212

Post by xhrpost » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

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…

Interesting counterpoint, but if you don't make changes then, aren't you just trying harder at the same thing every day, expecting different results? I guess I sympathize with OP as "try harder tomorrow" just hasn't seemed to work for me. What is it you're suggesting if stop and rest is actually the wrong thing to do?

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

#213

Post by proverbialbunny » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC

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…

This is horrible. If a therapist thinks depression is purely neurological then they will not try to cure the person and instead resort to talking to help comfort them.

This view needs to change.

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

#214

Post by podgaj » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

least wrote: post #185

podgaj wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only have the disorder when I have symptoms. You get it? Those symptoms are caused by my diet and environment. I am not "Bipolar" because everyone is bipolar, every one has these states, mine are just more extreme when faced with environmental challenges. If someone has a peanut allergy do they have a disease or a disorder? no, they have a different response when exposed to peanuts. I use the term Bipolar Disorder…

> If someone has a peanut allergy do they have a disease or a disorder? no, they have a different response when exposed to peanuts. They have an "allergy," which is just another medical term like disease or disorder to define something which is abnormal which negatively affects life. If everyone had an "allergy" to peanuts then we'd just call them poisonous. > As far as your idiotic comment about the medication I nee…

You say bipolar is atypical, but you are wrong. I can go months with no symptoms, just like people with headaches can go months without one. Then I have a trigger; stress, diet, pollution, etc.

and I have never said that my fix was for everyone. Not once ever. It is that thinking that kept me sick for so many years in the hands of the psychiatrists.

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

#215

Post by robotresearcher » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #143

b0rsuk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Evolution does not and cannot give a shit about you is why really. Elimination by evolution requires it to be both utterly nonviable and not tied to anything else. Look at sickle cell anemia - one copy protects against malaria via mild blood cell deformation. Two makes them concave. There are plenty of non-optimal things kept around because there isn't sufficient pressure to ensure it dies out.

> Elimination by evolution requires it to be both utterly nonviable and not tied to anything else.

Neither of those things are required. Any disadvantage to reproduction frequency of an allele can lead to its extinction. Even a 'good' allele can lose to a 'better' one.

(The scare quotes are to acknowledge that these terms are just frequency re-stated)

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

#216

Post by b0rsuk » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #143

b0rsuk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Evolution does not and cannot give a shit about you is why really. Elimination by evolution requires it to be both utterly nonviable and not tied to anything else. Look at sickle cell anemia - one copy protects against malaria via mild blood cell deformation. Two makes them concave. There are plenty of non-optimal things kept around because there isn't sufficient pressure to ensure it dies out.

Or sinuses!

An Annoying Quirk Of Our Evolution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSSmJLb468k

But what I meant is that according to the theory of evolution, individuals with disadvantageous traits reproduce less often. If they reproduce less often, they pass their genes less often. I think they say the trait is regressive.

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

#217

Post by maxlamb » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

podgaj wrote: post #47

leto_ii wrote: post #16

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…

This is like saying people with heart disease do not have a disease because they stopped eating poorly and the heart disease went away. You did have a metal disorder. You were just lucky to find the cause. The cause was job stress. I have a mental disorder that was harder to find the cause. But I did as well.

Heart disease means presence of plaque in arteries, it is physically verifiable, the plaque is physically stuck to the artery walls and is much harder to get rid of. If you are doing something that makes you unhappy because you really need the money and then as soon as you stop doing it you are happy again, I really don't see how you can define this period of unhappiness as a mental disease.

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

#218

Post by derefr » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

j4nt4b wrote: post #179

derefr wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some people, these diseases (depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, OCD, intermittent explosive disorder, etc.) are lifelong maladies present from birth; where even if the disease only “showed up” later on, it is known from the person’s genetics/neuroanatomy/etc. that it was inevitable for this person to get them, eventually, regardless of environment or lifestyle. Such cases are no more adaptive than…

I would hesitate before calling these conditions "lifelong maladies present from birth". It's much more accurate to call them predispositions that may or may not manifest. And even so, the degree of manifestation may depend on the degree of trauma, addiction, or other challenges the person happens to face in life. This variation is what makes me doubt any clean division into adaptive/maladaptive cases. Not everyone s…

> those who can manage their conditions may take offence at being called "malfunctioning" when they did in fact "adapt".

People don't malfunction; bodies do. People are (cybernetic) systems, composed of a mind and a body; but people's bodies specifically, when taken on their own—including their brains, when taken on their own as organs!—are just complex machines, that can have organic diseases. (In the case of the brain, we call these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_brain_syndrome s.)

If your computer spontaneously powers off whenever you open hit your keyboard's "A" key, that's a malfunction. Computers, as machines, aren't supposed to do that. If you avoid ever hitting the "A" key, you might have worked around the problem, but the problem itself is still present—the computer, considered as a standalone machine rather than a cybernetic operator-machine system, is still malfunctioning.

If you have an SNP in the gene DDC, causing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromatic_L-amino_acid_decarbox..., that is a malfunction (or manufacturing defect) in your brain-as-machine. You — the mind-body system — might learn to adapt to/work around this malfunction; but that doesn't mean the brain-as-machine isn't continuing to malfunction. A working system can be constructed from unreliable components.

> who is so diagnosed is a lost cause

Who said anything about being a lost cause? For something to be maladaptive, it simply has to reduce inclusive genetic fitness, such that people with the condition reproduce less than people without the condition. That says nothing about whether you can live your life with the condition.

Whatever part of the human brain thinks getting a vasectomy is a good idea, is extremely maladaptive! But that's not to say that we don't prefer things that way. :)

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

#219

Post by proverbialbunny » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

least wrote: post #105

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.…

Different treatments affect different people differently. This isn't particularly controversial, but the layman suggesting that they know better than scientists/doctors is kind of dangerous. There is of course room to be skeptical and ultimately you know what's going on better in your head than anyone else does, but that's not really actionable across an entire population of people suffering from something similar to…

There is a problem with how we diagnosis illness today. We diagnose off of symptoms and symptoms only. The reason this is a problem is there can be multiple different things that cause identical or nearly identical symptoms. Today we think of those multiple things as one, but they're not one thing, they're different things. If they were the same, they would have the same cure.

Parent knows he has a BH4 deficiency. Instead of calling that bi-polar, we could instead call it eg, 'bi-polar type 5' out of, say, 12, where 12 is the number of cures we've found for bipolar. Eventually, as time passes, we can map all if the cures, mapping all of the types. However, we can not do this if we think of an illness as a singular thing. This person has one specific type of bi-polar, and just because it only cures a subset of bi-polar patients does not mean it should be dismissed. It should be documented so we can have a list of cures.

Once there is a list of cures a doctor can walk through this list and eventually find the correct cure for the patient. Once everything is mapped it becomes possible to have a 100% cure rate. This is something no single pill can do.

This is why we should not force a one shoe fits all approach. It is toxic behavior to dismiss a solution just because it only works on a subset of patients. If I had bi-polar I'd be glad to know their story, so I could try it and see if it would work on myself. Dismissing psychological solutions is a toxic behavior we as a culture share. Let's do our part to make the world a better place and end this behavior.

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

#220

Post by least » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

zepto wrote: post #208

least wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The viewpoint is based in the reality we live in where we stigmatize abnormality. The correct response isn't to try and normalize abnormality, but to try and remove the stigma surrounding it. Suggesting that it is normal actually creates a stigma for those who are suffering from it from pursuing treatment because they're supposed to feel that way because it's "normal."

Who said anything about normalizing abnormality? If by abnormality, you mean traits that are far from the center of a population normal distribution, then I agree that this is essential information for a person to have about themselves. Nobody is encouraging people to think they aren’t different from the norm, when they in fact are. Abnormal, disordered, or diseased are very different things, and should not be confus…

> Who said anything about normalizing abnormality?

It's implicit in the original comment i responded to.

> If by abnormality, you mean traits that are far from the center of a population normal distribution, then I agree that this is essential information for a person to have about themselves. Nobody is encouraging people to think they aren’t different from the norm, when they in fact are.

People are encourage others to think they aren't different from the norm, this is prevalent throughout society at large, not just in cases of mental wellbeing.

> Abnormal, disordered, or diseased are very different things, and should not be confused.

Disorders and Diseases are both abnormalities.

> As for treatment - nobody should seek treatment because someone else has told them they are abnormal, or because they are not close to the center of the bell curve for a given trait. This is simply a bad reason.

This isn't true. Symptoms can manifest without an individual noticing it themself. Another trusted person telling you about these abnormalities to your behavior or physicality is a perfectly valid reason to seek treatment, even if it doesn't result in anything.

> People should seek treatment if it will help improve their quality of life, and they are willing to accept the trade-offs that come with it. Whether they are ‘normal’ or not is irrelevant.

Which was largely my point from the get go. The exception being cases where their lack of treatment being a danger to others.