Anxiety and Depression Are Symptoms, Not Diseases

Right on. Most people with actual depression are rarely able to visit a doctor, let alone survive the hoop jumping required to see a psychiatrist, yet alone get a referral for a psychologist, yet alone participate in a study. Frankly, I doubt there has ever been a study ever done on depression where the majority of participants actually had it. It is simply not realistic. You'd have more luck getting a paraplegic into the Olympics than a depressed person into anything more an appointment with a GP.

But every man and his dog has claimed they've had depression. It's like listening to a student who had to survive on ramen noodles for a few years, claim they know what starvation and poverty is like. Unbelievable.

Depression isn't the disease, it's a symptom.

Perhaps he should have clarified that the cause of the symptom might be situational, or it might be the result of another medical problem, e.g. brain malfunction/chemicals, genetics, nervous system disorder, cortisol issues, thyroid, hormone disorders etc., all shown to correlate with high levels of depression.

Most people who I've talked to who say it's a disease seem to believe so because they haven't identified the cause, and that brings them comfort.

But the meds, while necessary in some cases, should be avoided when possible, or weaned off quickly. They're bad news pushed by an industry that's making so much money from them, and the side effects are worse than what's being disclosed.

Indeed. Speaking as a sufferer of a serious depressive disorder, one well educated on the current medical science, I find these discussions incredibly frustrating.

Everyone brings out their anecdotes about how their aunt 'just got better through positive thinking, and you can too!' Or people just throw in whatever pop-psychology is currently in fashion. If we were having this conversation in the 1950s, all the smarty-pants would be talking about how depression is simply one of the many materialisations of conflicts between the concious and unconscious mind a la Freudian psychoanalytic theory.

Thankfully our methods of scientific inquiry (if you could categorise past efforts as such) have advanced significantly, and continue to do so. Our understanding of genomics suggests that mood disorders like unipolar and bipolar depression, and even psychotic disorders like schizophrenia, represent a spectrum of possibly thousands of different 'diseases', rather than the few 'categories' arbitrarily delineated in the DSM.

Advances in neuroscience and medical imaging allow us to directly observe how different symptoms are associated with inefficient information processing in different topographically localised brain regions. As we gather more data and the verisimilitude of our observations increases (as tends to occur with rigorous scientific study), we will be able to develop new treatments; be they psycho pharmacological (e.g. drugs) or physical (e.g. trans-cranial magnetic stimulation).

Yes, psychological therapy has its use, and has proven effective in certain situations. But it is just one tool in our ever-growing toolbox. To just blithely deem the rest of the tools to be useless and throw them out is to condemn people like me to a (short) life filled with suffering.

The simplest example would be welfare per month from (disability + unemployed) > unemployed only.

There was an interesting article few days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11358931

In the article, there was a quote: Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.

It seems to me, sometimes, being a member of society (having these societal needs met) can be quite tricky.