two weeks?.. you mean 8 months?..
Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
51–60 of 227 posts
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#52Yep
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#53I wouldn’t say I feel depressed, but there’s an overarching feeling of claustrophobic suffocation that the confluence of current events is causing. It’s a feeling of foreboding. Some subconscious part of my brain is predicting a future that none of us wants to see. So depression? No. Fear? Definitely.
That's anxiety.
Anxiety is expecting a negative future / negative outcome.
An anxiety disorder is incorrectly assuming a negative future, often frequently and often.
If you're not regularly concerned about the future, then it's okay, it will go away. Though, maybe a therapist can help teach you ways to relax in the meantime? It's going to be two months before anything scary can happen, so that's a long time to be anxious. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's actually medically anxious. One doesn't need panic attacks, or even really dysfunction to have anxiety. A constant feeling of aimless dread is classic anxiety. It also doesn't have to be aimless: when I'm anxious, I realize I mostly post-facto create stories about why I'm feeling anxious. Sometimes there's a bona fide trigger, but other times I'm just inflating problems to justify my feelings. Medication, medi…
Also: drink less coffee.
I drink decaf. ^_^
There is decaf out there as good as the best non-decaf coffee (I drink espresso, yum!) and it's a pretty short amount of time before the brain normalizes to decaf and it will wake you up without the negative side effects.
But yah, caffeine while anxious can be not a good time.
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#55I draw my strength from the yellow sun. Over the last two weeks my home has tilted ever farther from it. I feel the familiar ebbing of the light. I’ve gotten better at mitigating it over the years. Vitamin D supplementation, light box therapy every morning, and near daily exercise is key. Getting the routine dialed in before mid-November is crucial.
One suggestion: lobby your representatives to put a stop to this insane time-changing business, which is basically engineered to engender the symptoms people are reporting in this thread.
The time change has no effect on total daylight hours. Nothing is stopping anyone from continuing to get up at the same real time if they want to have the same amount of daylight.
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#56For this poll to be accurate, I think a list of agreed exact symptoms needs to be included. E.g. I have no idea what depressive symptoms are.
That's part of the problem. No one else has an idea what depression is ether, even professionals.
For example here are two things drastically different and the medical industry considers both to be depression:
1) Being overly pessimistic and skeptical to the point of believing nothing is worth trying and nothing can be done. "Nothing I try will ever help me. My depression will last forever." This can come in the form of rationalizing why nothing will work when they have a problem, so they get suck. (An example of learned helplessness.)
2) Catching a chronic cold that may or may not cause irritable bowel syndrome that has the side effect of inflammation in the stomach which then in turn minimizes or outright removes the ability to feel positive emotions. Some may experience other side effects beyond inflammation, like long term cold symptoms where they want to lay in bed all day, not socialize, or do much. They feel sloth-like in an identical way to one feels when they have a cold, minus the sinus pressure and coughing.
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#57Counter anecdata: This year has been an insufferable slog, but in the last month or so, I've felt better than I have at any other time this year. It started a week or two before I quit Twitter, which I think rules out quitting social mass media as a factor? It's been a long, hard year, and for once I'm doing better in it, even if the outside world seems to be going to hell. It seems the inverse of what should be goin…
I don't think it rules out the quitting Twitter as a factor as such? A few weeks of response lag as conditioning/expectations gradually recognize the new normal seems likely enough to me.
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#58Now there are two depression threads on the front page. We usually don't allow that (I mean same-topic frontpage threads, not depression threads). Normally the easy answer would be to downweight the follow-up [1], but this post is nicely reminding the community that HN polls are a thing. So I don't know what to do!
I'm tempted to put up a poll asking whether to keep the poll or the original thread, but I have to go offline for 90 minutes and I don't want HN to blow any fuses.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRang...
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#59I cut out all alcohol and caffeine for the month of November. It has done wonders for my mental health. So no, I haven't. But I can definitely say I was in the months prior.
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#60The front page is giving me an inconsistent idea of whether this has somehow supplanted the other strawpoll thread, so I'll just point to my comments there (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25098076) and note that the second one involves me trying to ramp into accepting little code commissions as part of trying to stabilize (nudge me at profile email if you want to, low-effort one-liners accepted).