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If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

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Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#261

Post by socceroos »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #182
vinbreau wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife put her foot down eventually and told me she wasn't going to be able to live with me any more after too many verbal angry outbursts. I received an ADHD diagnosis as a child but was never treated. I lived with the extreme anger all my life and only recently sought treatment as an adult. Doing that was really hard after a lifetime of people telling me it was simply a matter of adjusting my attitude and that I b…

Yes. If you break your leg, that's an injury, and you see a doctor. If you get pneumonia, you're sick and you need antibiotics. But if your brain isn't working right that's a moral failure.

I dislike modern notions of abdicating responsibility for one's own actions by pointing to other problems.

I believe we're all personally responsible for our output. You can have the worst input in the history of mankind - and this should generate sympathy, understanding and a desire to help - but your output is still entirely your responsibility.

The are circumstances where someone can be considered incapable of reasonable output or the reasonable processing of input, but these circumstances are the exception to the rule.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#262

Post by dredmorbius »

ip26 wrote: post #185
ozzyman700 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Humans in general are pretty shitty, driven mostly by self-interest. Water takes the path of least resistance, Humans take the path of least expected effort expenditure to accomplish their desires Both are just doing as nature does, being themselves. Why be sad that every person will do the least amount of work to satisfy their desires, when it is an inevitability, but your sadness is not.

Water doesn't have the capacity for cruelty. The world is also a much nicer place to live for everyone when people behave in pro-social ways, whether or not that is our nature.

It may not have the volition for cruelty. It certainly has the capacity.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#263

Post by jki275 »

magduf wrote: post #105
jki275 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "US" are you talking about? There are 50 states, all of whom have very different attitudes and values, and within those are thousands of counties, cities, towns, and unincorporated areas where nothing you wrote applies.

Most of those small towns and unincorporated areas are useless for someone who makes a living in the tech industry. It doesn't matter how nice a place is; if you can't get good-paying work there, it's not a place you can reasonably live. Face the facts: the tech jobs are mostly all in a handful of metro areas, where everything I said is completely true. And it's a completely reasonable assumption that the vast majori…

I'm in the tech industry in one of those metro areas, and I grew up in the midwest.

Your comment has literally no basis in reality, and your follow-up defense to it has even less. There are good paying tech jobs all over "flyover country" that you discount -- the cost of living is also much lower. One can often work out a situation where their quality of life is better in those areas because of the low cost of living and lack of need to commute like we do in the "metro areas".

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#264

Post by jki275 »

coldtea wrote: post #120
jki275 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "US" are you talking about? There are 50 states, all of whom have very different attitudes and values, and within those are thousands of counties, cities, towns, and unincorporated areas where nothing you wrote applies.

Different when they consider one another, but not so different to an outsider that has seen places.

Many view "the US" as a homogenous place, culture, and group of people.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

And I've spent many years living overseas as well as having grown up in the midwest and now living in one of the largest metro areas in the US.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#265

Post by tabtab »

dTal wrote: post #259
tabtab wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Reply to "sjjshzvuiajhz" at this level because there's a message nesting limit on HN.) Let me get this straight: you are insisting I "just feel" different? Just somehow make my brain like certain people? I realize there are books about forcing oneself to have different emotions, but they often don't work. It's like asking a fan of classical music to just start liking hip-hip and vice-versa. "Just change your head".…

I can second everything sjjshzvuiajhz is saying. Approach people with humility and positivity and they will care surprisingly little if you're weird or socially awkward. People don't necessarily need conversational poetry - they just want to feel safe, at ease. These kinds of things aren't skills that it takes 100,000 hours to learn. They're "habits of mind". Adopting them is more like learning to get up on time or l…

Re: These kinds of things aren't skills that it takes 100,000 hours to learn. They're "habits of mind". Adopting them is more like learning to get up on time or learning to eat well, than learning to play an instrument

It may be easy for you, but I am not you. I always try to improve my people skills. I've known I had a problem there since childhood and have been trying to fix it since. To me it does feel like learning to play a trombone while riding backward on a unicycle while chewing gum and reciting the Gettysburg Address. My progress is slow and I don't know where the knob is to crank it up. It's as if my brain is missing a lobe that everyone else has.

A big problem is that the feedback is not immediate. If I got an electric shock every time I presented a Sheldon-esque attitude to the listener, I might be fixed by now. But that's not legal.

(There's something funny about "reply" links on HN. Hmmm...)

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#266

Post by agumonkey »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #208
agumonkey wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I learned on my own is that it's very easy to lose track of what 'normal' is. You slip slowly into different spectrum of emotions without really knowing why. When your mind is not at peace, stress/struggle will leak out in any shape be it anger, negativity, somatic onset (psoriasis, spasms) .. I believe strongly that we ought to aim for positivity and if we recognize something's not right, acknowledge it, a…

My layperson's understanding of depression is that it's your brain lying to you. My wife's perception of things that happened to her were often 180 degrees different from mine. She would take compliments I would give her, process them through the “depression” filter, and they would come out the other end as insults. You could actually watch it happen; there was a perceptible mental lag as the filters worked. To this…

honestly, I had this kind of reactions even when I was "happy" .. I'd say it's more paranoid trait than depression but this is probably all very linked together.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#267

Post by tabtab »

MarsAscendant wrote: post #164
agumonkey wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we're supposed to be intelligent. Early on in my life I felt something, I never get angry at nature, no matter harmful, but disappointment by other beings hurts deeply. Nature doesn't pretend to choose, it just is. That made me a lot more at ease with objects than people.

> Except we're supposed to be intelligent. I don't think we are. We sure as hell can be. Seeing bright minds at work is a special kind of inspiration, and its own mental turn-on for me. People aspiring to do well by their desires and talents – that's quite a picture. But it only happens when effort is put forth to surround ourselves – and others around us – with the kind of attitude we seek to promote. Imagine punish…

Being capable of intelligence and being intelligent are not necessarily the same thing. Humans are social animals first, and logical or rational animals second. Our decisions are influenced heavily by (perceived) social factors and self pride/ego such that office politics and pride often end up overriding objective logic. The Dilbert comic strip is close to a documentary in my observation; only slightly exaggerated.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#268

Post by tabtab »

barberousse wrote: post #234
tabtab wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to share my reasoning and logic with anybody who asks, and will refine it if it lacks clarity. I enjoy having my logic tuned by other minds; it makes me even MORE logical to be challenged, even if it hurts my pride in the short-term. Others are not so open and don't want their thinking process challenged. I don't know why, other than pride, ego, or office politics. If you know why, please tell me. Don't b…

This is a real thing and not just some dude who thinks he's really smart and everybody else isn't. I coached a public HS debate team in Chicago for eight years and the problem really does start there in school. Most teenagers are not only frightened of public speaking (I had a student vomit on the podium out of anxiety) they have almost zero experience with someone asking them to give an account of themselves, neithe…

I'm frightened of public speaking also, I'd note. But in a small meeting where I know my sh8t, I'm not afraid to justify my conclusions and opinions when questioned. Sometimes I'll admit I have a hard time explaining something immediately, but later follow up in an email with carefully worded details. We don't have to do all our thinking at live meetings. Wiki's etc. are good also for longer chains of reasoning.

Others don't seem able or motivated to do the same. If they have great logic, they hide it from the world.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#269

Post by nvrspyx »

socceroos wrote: post #261
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If you break your leg, that's an injury, and you see a doctor. If you get pneumonia, you're sick and you need antibiotics. But if your brain isn't working right that's a moral failure.

I dislike modern notions of abdicating responsibility for one's own actions by pointing to other problems. I believe we're all personally responsible for our output. You can have the worst input in the history of mankind - and this should generate sympathy, understanding and a desire to help - but your output is still entirely your responsibility. The are circumstances where someone can be considered incapable of rea…

That's much easier said than done. Depression messes with a lot of systems and it's hard for anyone to recognize in themselves. If it was so easy to control, people wouldn't need treatment. It's so serious precisely because it interferes with daily functioning and it can't easily be controlled. This seems very narrow-minded in regards to the ripple effect that depression has on so many emotional systems. You're asking people to juggle a hundred things. It's just not feasible.

Now, this totally depends on how you define "reasonable" output, but it sounds a lot like telling someone with depression to just stop feeling depressed.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#270

Post by davesque »

renholder wrote: post #191
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If you break your leg, that's an injury, and you see a doctor. If you get pneumonia, you're sick and you need antibiotics. But if your brain isn't working right that's a moral failure.

>But if your brain isn't working right that's a moral failure. See? That's that shit - right there - that makes mental health so stigmatised that people won't seek help.

That's exactly what OP was saying.
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