The article says acupuncture has no side effects. That is not true.
Tips for the depressed
101–110 of 224 posts
Re: Tips for the depressed
#102There's some good stuff here, but it completely skips gratitude. Focusing on what you're grateful for is one of the more powerful and best proven methods to combat depression. I've been through clinical depression and consider it the key to my recovery.
what if you find it difficult to have gratitude? you want to be grateful for what you have, but you're not, and can't explain why.
if you don't care about anything, meaning you have no gratitude, how do you jumpstart this process?
Re: Tips for the depressed
#103I largely agree with all the advice here. I dropped out of college due to depression, then I torched my tech career with a manic episode that led me straight from a FAANG SWE job to an involuntary psych ward patient for a month, which was followed by a half year brutal depression. I’ve done a lot of research and I think psychiatry is pseudoscience and antidepressants are largely placebo. I’m really on the mindfulness…
> I’ve done a lot of research and I think psychiatry is pseudoscience and antidepressants are largely placebo.
Even if they didn't work for you, making claims like this on a public forum is very irresponsible for you, and can be very dangerous for those who really need the help.
Please refrain from making such statements unless you're a medical professional.
Re: Tips for the depressed
#104One of the biggest force multipliers in overcoming depression is accepting that you can modulate your condition by taking small, deliberate actions. It's also one of the most difficult and delicate ideas to communicate to a depressed person. Depression notoriously clouds peoples' judgment and makes simple tasks seem impossible. Depression also encourages a lot of binary thinking, where people tend to give up because…
Please be careful not to generalize when proposing solutions, because their is not the depression(1): Depressions can be caused by very different things, can cause somewhat different symptoms and certainly can be solved using very different approaches. I met a lot of of depressed people, most them got out of them with different approaches (meds, therapy, changes in their environment).
I myself tried the approach mentioned, during therapy, without any success: Achieving something just didn't produce any positive effect for me. Then I got treated (as last resort) with ECT, my condition improved temporarily, and suddenly, within the same therapy, I started to feel an effect and was able to stabilize.
In short: Propsing "Do , it most likely will help you" is not a good idea, as it is quite depressing for the depressed (at least for me it was). Maybe it's better to say sth like "Try , maybe it helps, if not, there is also or . There is a lot that can be tried, maybe something might help you. "
(1) A doctor explained it to me like that: "depression" is more like a term to group together conditions that partially share symptoms, and that is it basically used for handling the insurance stuff etc. For treatment (at least for severe depressions), the term is too rough to be useful. E.g. a lot of severely depressed people also show symptoms of psychosis as side effect.
EDIT: Formatting and reformulated a bit (I think I was too harsh)
Re: Tips for the depressed
#105One of the biggest force multipliers in overcoming depression is accepting that you can modulate your condition by taking small, deliberate actions. It's also one of the most difficult and delicate ideas to communicate to a depressed person. Depression notoriously clouds peoples' judgment and makes simple tasks seem impossible. Depression also encourages a lot of binary thinking, where people tend to give up because…
I've struggled with this quite a bit in my own life. I find the "No Zero" mentality to work well for me. Treat every weekday as a "No Zero" day. What does that mean? It means if my goal is to go to the gym, even if I literally walk into the gym, do a pushup, and leave, that counts. It's more than Zero. Consistent non-zero days eventually help break me out of my depression. And when I miss a day... well forgive myself…
crazy how the first step is often the most important one
Re: Tips for the depressed
#106How do you report things on HN?
This may be the wildest inaccurate information I have ever seen pass here.
I have suffered depression, and nearly all of the points mentioned in the article except for some trivialities are completely of the mark.
Re: Tips for the depressed
#107I largely agree with all the advice here. I dropped out of college due to depression, then I torched my tech career with a manic episode that led me straight from a FAANG SWE job to an involuntary psych ward patient for a month, which was followed by a half year brutal depression. I’ve done a lot of research and I think psychiatry is pseudoscience and antidepressants are largely placebo. I’m really on the mindfulness…
Psychiatry is a lot of flailing around and trying different things, probably because we don't have a very good understanding of the exact nature of everyone's condition. Everything seems to help 10-20%. That group does not overlap, and effect sizes vary substantially between individuals.
I have had the experience of deep depression and starting a new medication that pulled me out of it, making me active and functional again. It may have been coincidence, but I doubt it. I then was able to get off that medication and enjoy my life again.
Re: Tips for the depressed
#108One of the biggest force multipliers in overcoming depression is accepting that you can modulate your condition by taking small, deliberate actions. It's also one of the most difficult and delicate ideas to communicate to a depressed person. Depression notoriously clouds peoples' judgment and makes simple tasks seem impossible. Depression also encourages a lot of binary thinking, where people tend to give up because…
For me, doing those small things did seem impossible and even when I managed to achieve it, I didn't feel the reward. There didn't seem any point in making the bed if I felt the same whether the bed was made or not. Eventually I reached a mental place where I could turn that around: If it doesn't make a difference in how I feel, why not make the bed? I had to more or less take it on faith that eventually the rewards…
Speaking of treating yourself as well as you might treat a friend... I found this paper on self-compassion to be very helpful when dealing with self-criticism, guilt and shame:
Self-Compassion: An Alternative Conceptualization of a Healthy Attitude Toward Oneself
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b357/87b9b21486d00458e85f8b....
Re: Tips for the depressed
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've struggled with this quite a bit in my own life. I find the "No Zero" mentality to work well for me. Treat every weekday as a "No Zero" day. What does that mean? It means if my goal is to go to the gym, even if I literally walk into the gym, do a pushup, and leave, that counts. It's more than Zero. Consistent non-zero days eventually help break me out of my depression. And when I miss a day... well forgive myself…
crazy how the first step is often the most important one
And every step is the first since the last one.
Re: Tips for the depressed
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
He never said. Nietzsche wrote very aphoristically, and it's often up to the reader to make sense of it. For me, this saying resonates because I've found that when I think of suicide I feel better because it makes me think that after my death I won't have any more of the troubles that plague me in life. It'll be a relief. In a way, it's hope. It also, I think, for a time gives me the feeling of control over my life.…
But can a reader who's truly depressed think as rationally as Nietzsche and make sense of it? Because of the views around suicide and how it can be seen as an "out" for issues that are actually only temporary, associating suicide with hope in any sense could be counterproductive. You have to make these people understand. Sometimes they never intend to understand, and only take the parts that validate their preexistin…
One could also view seriously depressed people as extremely lucid. (If it's not brain damage induced of course)