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Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?

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Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?

#161

Post by rnestler »

mathieuh wrote: post #159

I was a heroin addict for five years and I got clean around this time two years ago. This is always a difficult time of year for me: my father died around this time when I was 12-years-old; I live in the northern latitudes so it's dark all the time; and since it's around the time I got clean I start getting bad cravings again. I want to buy a smart trainer for my bike but they're all sold out at the moment. I'm too s…

> I've been going for short walks but I really need that kind of exercise that leaves you struggling to think afterwards.

I have started to go running during the lock down in March where I live. I recommend you get a good pair of running shoes if you want to start. Also I used a sports tracker on my phone to track progress, which helped me stay motivated.

For me usually after the first 15 minutes of running, my brain stops thinking and is just focusing on the running and my immediate surroundings.

Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?

#162

Post by throwaway4good »

Various forms of lockdowns + extensive work from home + november => a wave of depression at the scale of two unsurpressed hacker news threads!

Question is what can we do? Without resorting to therapists and pills ...

Maybe the first thing is to have a bit humour and perspective about it - reminding ourselves that this too shall pass.

Here is a German lock yourselves at home government propaganda piece for your entertainment:

https://twitter.com/antoni_UK/status/1327701477008285696

Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?

#164

Post by chris_wot »

danielvaughn wrote: post #22

I don't felt the need to see a doctor about what I'm experiencing, so I'm not sure if what I have qualifies as depression. But over the past several months, it feels like my entire personality and being is a rug that has been pulled out from underneath me. I'm no longer the driven and interested person that I used to be. I struggle to sit down and work - my brain feels scattered and no matter how much I sleep and res…

That sounds like depression to me. I get this fairly regularly. It’s why I haven’t edited Wikipedia for at least a month, even though I really want to. I just can’t seem to get the drive to get the next article out.

One thing I can say, at least for me, is that exercise has helped.

Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?

#165

Post by kzrdude »

throwaway4good wrote: post #162

Various forms of lockdowns + extensive work from home + november => a wave of depression at the scale of two unsurpressed hacker news threads! Question is what can we do? Without resorting to therapists and pills ... Maybe the first thing is to have a bit humour and perspective about it - reminding ourselves that this too shall pass. Here is a German lock yourselves at home government propaganda piece for your entert…

I'm trying to sleep better (not going so well), sleep deprivation is a simple but important thing that can trigger a vicious cycle for me.

Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?

#168

Post by m3Lith »

danielvaughn wrote: post #22

I don't felt the need to see a doctor about what I'm experiencing, so I'm not sure if what I have qualifies as depression. But over the past several months, it feels like my entire personality and being is a rug that has been pulled out from underneath me. I'm no longer the driven and interested person that I used to be. I struggle to sit down and work - my brain feels scattered and no matter how much I sleep and res…

I startedd to feel something like that too, basically a few weeks from the quarantine. The thing is, I actually thought I would like being closed up, because I'm pretty introverted and don't mind staying at home after work. However, the last couple of years I've started going out more, meeting new people, and trying various activities, which really opened up my view and felt good. But I didn't imagine that cutting these things off would affect me that much. Now I don't even want to work, don't want to play games either, can hardly force myself to watch a movie too. That subtle "background sadness" is a pretty accurate description.

Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?

#169

Post by glangdale »

danieltillett wrote: post #151
glangdale wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am put in mind of this quote: "All of us have sufficient fortitude to bear the misfortunes of others". Francois de La Rochefoucauld I see you're On Fire further down in the thread, helpfully whatabouting malaria or something to explain away our current crisis. I don't think most people wake up and immediately start praising their lucky stars that they aren't living during the Black Death or in some war-torn country i…

It is amazing you manage to read this all into my post. Of course life is hard for many people in the world, but things are getting better every year for the average person. This seems to not include the average HN poster who seems to be caught in a depressed funk.

It's almost as if people's emotional states come from things other than making entirely rational big picture judgements about the state of the "average person" on the whole planet.

I'm curious if you have, at some point in your life, met another human being? All evidence would point to "yes", and yet here you are, all over this thread, debunking other peoples' subjective mental states with your superior facts and logic. As people do.

It is tempting to picture you striding confidently through a mental health ward, heels clicking authoritatively. As you approach each patient, you lean down and gently impart a optimistic fact from Nature or The Economist ("did you know that rates of cholera have declined by 60% in 2018 alone"). In your wake, sparks of life return to the previously dead seeming eyes of troubled teenagers and despairing middle-aged men.

Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?

#170

Post by skytreader »

"Several days"

I got close to clinical depression before so I know what it feels like. Today, what I feel is something I attribute to Autumn's reduced daylight (darned harsher in Northern Germany, where even the sun seems to need government clearance to even just appear nowadays, and the government is most of the time too busy with other things to grant it so), plus the disruptions of being in "quarantine" (yeah unfortunately I haven't really settled to my personal "new normal" yet).

On the bright side, I've actually managed to achieve several of the goals I set myself to back when we thought WFH would just be, 2-4 months. I overplan, there's usually a ton of things I want to do and achieve, no way it would've fit in that initial 2-4 months. Now, I'm actually pretty satisfied with myself if I think about it.

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