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Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

psychologytoday.com

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Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#261

Post by leetcrew »

3pt14159 wrote: post #256
leetcrew wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, I struggle with things like a suicide pill given to air force pilots. it does raise an interesting, if morbid question. personally, I think it is fine for someone to kill themselves (or receive assistance in doing so) if they are facing a near certainty of terrible suffering for the rest of their life. the tricky part is the "certainty" bit. many people experience varying degrees of suffering at some point…

Yeah, that is a valid point that I've thought about as well. Though there is also the argument that pilots would be told less critical information if the people commanding them didn't expect them to commit suicide before capture.

FWIW, the US claims that they no longer give these pills to any military personnel. [0]

as for why the pilots in particular, my (fairly uneducated) guess is that pilots inherently have knowledge of more sensitive information than a typical infantry person. while the soldier probably only has knowledge of local troop movements that will be stale in a few days (most US infantry standard procedures and equipment details are public knowledge), the pilot may know classified information about the aircraft they are flying.

[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/02/19/suicide-pill...

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#262

Post by ColanR »

Pelic4n wrote: post #253
ColanR wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spreading such misinformation can lead to people not seeking treatment and getting hurt. Misinformation? Unless you have expert knowledge in that domain - and unless the alternatives podgaj describes have been exhaustively eliminated by a body of peer-reviewed research - you have absolutely no justification to label that as misinformation.

Calling bipolar disorder not a disorder and saying it can be self-treated with lifestyle & diet changes absolutely is misinformation. Ask any psychiatrist. I do not need a medical degree to say that, in the same way I do not need a medical degree to say that self-treating cancer or any serious illness with diet and lifestyle change is misinformation and dangerous. These statements taken as face value are incredibly d…

I'm sorry about your family. But extrapolating from their uninformed use of essential oils to say that the psychiatrist's recommendation is always right is just swinging from one extreme to another. As podgaj said elsewhere,

> I literally have the metabolic and genetic proof that I found out what was causing my mood disorder.

We aren't talking about essential oils, or anything close. podgaj also says pretty clearly that the psychiatrist's recommendations were doing him no good at all. Don't let your personal grief harm others -- in this case, by denying that there is any alternative to using the antipsychotic medication that a psychiatrist would recommend.

> Ask any psychiatrist.

Only if the evidence is totally conclusive, as I mentioned elsewhere. Otherwise, asking a psychiatrist will only get you 10-20 year old data from the textbooks they read in school, and whatever they've learned to try and keep up to date since then. That's great when you have a fairly normal problem with a straightforward solution and no strange factors in play.

People seem to think medicine is more or less solved, like physics or computer science (ha) -- it's not. We don't even know why people tend to get colds in the winter! Even for that, the best we have are competing theories.

Here's an example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22340278/. It's about schizophrenia, but as a psychiatric illness it's close enough to illustrate my point. There were even bipolar patients included in the group, though they didn't contribute to these conclusions. A 20 year longitudinal study of 139 psychotic patients; here's a key quote (SZ is shorthand for schizophrenia):

> At the 2-year assessment there were no significant differences in severity of psychosis between SZ on antipsychotic medications and SZ not on any medications. However, starting at the 4.5-year follow-ups and continuing over the next 15 years, the SZ who were not on antipsychotic medications were significantly less psychotic than those on antipsychotics (p> In addition (see Fig. 1), starting at the 4.5-year follow-up and continuing at each assessment over the next 15 years, a significantly larger percentage of SZ not on medications experienced a period of recovery (pDependence on experts can cause irreparable damage, too.

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#263

Post by zepto »

least wrote: post #229
zepto wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be someone who has a very deep trust in medicine and in particular psychiatry to produce good outcomes for people. I can respect that difference of opinion.

I don't have a particularly deep trust in either medicine or psychiatry. My personal experiences with dealing with humans in either has been largely negative. That said, I largely attribute that to the people i've interacted with and not with medicine in general.

It’s unclear why you’d be such an advocate for unquestioningly seeking treatment if you neither trust medicine in general, nor have had good experiences with it yourself.

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#264

Post by Ancapistani »

thebean11 wrote: post #247
Ancapistani wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it "Trauma" or "Drama"? The version I'm seeing on Amazon is "The Drama of the Gifted Child". ETA: I found this interesting, too - the author's own child wrote a book about his negative childhood experiences: https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/.premium-mother-dearest-1...

It's "Drama"

Thanks :)

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#265

Post by dorchadas »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #222
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope so, and that what we now call depression will be considered as silly a moniker as hysteria or "troubled humours" back when.

Exactly. When it comes to depression the chemical imbalance theory comes from Zoloft. It is a drug that accidentally had the side effect of reducing depression in some patients. Curious scientists wanted to figure out why, so they examined it. Turns out Zoloft boosts serotonin in the brain. This created the chemical imbalance theory, but since then study after study for decades has disproved this, yet for some sort o…

You might be interested in Johann Hari's Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions, who really looks into this and how depression is diagnosed and treated, as well as why it may actually be the 'adaptive response' suggested above.

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#266

Post by dredmorbius »

holidayacct wrote: post #255
dredmorbius wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Addressing only one of your dubious points, there is a considerable scientific literature on anxiety response in animals. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=anxiety%20response%20an...

There are anxiety-like responses in animals but nothing similar to what we consider anxiety in humans. The key take-away is that most of the anxiety behaviors are found in prey animals. Most predators have a social system that removes members from the genetic pool who get anxiety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Zebras_Don%27t_Get_Ulcers

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#267

Post by Valakas »

astrocat wrote: post #170
_ywdj wrote: post #158

Out of necessity (after existing conventional treatments offered little help) I've been conducting a 10+ year self-experiment related to this topic. Like others have described, when I started experiencing symptoms of conditions resembling anxiety, depression, ADHD, mild bipolar, paranoia and CFS/ME, I initially sought mainstream medical psychiatric treatment and undertook talk therapy and was prescribed anti-anxiety…

The Trauma of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller is probably a good read to throw in here if this is the direction you're looking to explore - especially if you can get an early edition that hasn't been watered down. Some of her perspectives into experiences as a child that are commonly accepted as "normal" but are often experienced by the child as trauma and grow into dysfunction as adults were interesting.

I attest to this. This book should be required reading in school. There's so much suffering in the world being done to children in the privacy of homes. That suffering goes without punishment and the victims grow up to be perpetrators or victims again (in abusive relationships). And most don't even know how that happened.

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#268

Post by sizzle »

_ywdj wrote: post #258
sizzle wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These sound like awesome techniques to have in your toolkit. Any idea if they've been studied in double blinded evidence based trials on patients for efficacy? We need more tools like this at our disposal for cracking the code on the last frontier that is mental health, in addition to the current shotgun approach of flooding our synapses with neurochemicals via SSRIs. Also wish I could try psychoactives like Psilocyb…

Of NET, some small trials by fringe researchers have been conducted [1] (or just planned [2]), but none has had much impact. This 2017 study [3] seemed to find promising results: Changes in cerebellar functional connectivity and autonomic regulation in cancer patients treated with the Neuro Emotional Technique for traumatic stress symptoms ... Results: The results demonstrated significant changes in the NET group, as…

Thank you for the thoughtful and thorough response

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#269

Post by fnord77 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #254
fnord77 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if it doesn't heal in some reasonable amount of time after the trauma and remains fractured indefinitely, then yes.

How do fractures heal without proper medical care? The "just walk it off" method fares poorly. Magaret Mead uses this for her exemplar of civilisation foe a reason.

for many fractures, yes.

fractured usually ribs heal by themselves.

I once had a broken, displaced rib. Nothing was done except to let it heal by itself

Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

#270

Post by proverbialbunny »

least wrote: post #249
proverbialbunny wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a problem with how we diagnosis illness today. We diagnose off of symptoms and symptoms only. The reason this is a problem is there can be multiple different things that cause identical or nearly identical symptoms. Today we think of those multiple things as one, but they're not one thing, they're different things. If they were the same, they would have the same cure. Parent knows he has a BH4 deficiency. In…

This doesn't deviate from what I said at all.

Not everything said has to be in conflict. I'm guessing you're from Reddit? Welcome. ^_^
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