Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

There are many mentally ill people who "power through", though. Some call it high-functioning depression.

There are different severities - a small depressive episode, a multi-year dysthymia or mixed (manic + depressive) episode.

I've been managing OK without meds, but maybe simply depression wasn't as severe as that of other folk. It's still a mental illness.

However, the effectiveness of Mindfulness based stress reduction and acceptance & commitment therapy show that those who can distance themselves from their thoughts have developed "mental resilience"

>sometimes, especially with children, there is no root cause in life to the depression beyond "genetics".

I find this hard to believe. People in the past weren't depressed nearly as much, so whatever is causing it has to be environmental.

Yeah, the person making the claim never responded. But I was more responding to your comments, specifically:

"Just searching 'chemical imbalance debunked' yields a wide array of sources. So why ask?", and "One of the first search results for me was a paper published in Nature. Other top results were from respected institutions like the NIH and Harvard University. Hardly grifters or crazies."

Those both trivialize the process of finding sources and interpreting them. I picked my top result which was from nih.gov and gave an example of why it's hard for a lay-person to interpret journal entries because it uses field specific terms that come across as wrong or conspiratorial. Heck the paper itself references other papers on other journals that appear legitimate that argue for the chemical imbalance theory, eg an article from JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) from 1993. Just because the source has NIH in it or is in a journal does not guarantee correctness or reliability because time passes and new science is done. The link in question was of a paper from 2006, which we are now further from than the 2006 paper was from the 1993 paper.

I am not claiming to be a scientific luminary and even agree that the chemical imbalance theory that was espoused for years was probably incorrect for many issues. I was just arguing against thinking it's easy to investigate and source claims. It's much easier for the person who is making the claim to provide their sources, and preferably they have a large body of evidence behind them and are recent or even better a source that has done that leg work of reviewing it and distilling it down.

I've scanned your full list of comments and can find plenty that have an ideological flavor to them, and others that are in the flamewar style, but are not so clearly related to politics/ideology. I'm not interested in getting into an argument about which of your comments are ideological or not. That's not the issue. What is the issue is the hostile and inflammatory style of commenting towards other community members and HN as a whole.

It's notable in this instance:

- You posted a series of comments about controversial topics, having established a history of participating on HN with this persona of being a brave combatant for, I don't know, some worldview or philosophy that you seem to be fighting for;

- When a handful of your comments receive even a solitary downvote, you call in "the cops" (dang) to come to your aid, with a claim of "brigading";

- When we investigated and found that, no, there's no "brigading", some of those comments are not even net-downvoted anymore, and that any downvotes you're getting are to be expected given your combative style of commenting, you've responded with these incoherent attacks on moderation/moderators.

Whether we all agree that many of your flamewar-style comments really are, in fact, political/ideological, is not the point and seems to be a way for you to deflect from being held to account for your conduct.

What I'm saying to you is that people who care about making HN better have all kinds of ways of showing it, and it begins with making an effort to observe the guidelines, and it also involves engaging respectfully with other community members and the moderation system. We are always, always working to make HN better and our moderation approaches better, and we always welcome and engage with feedback, as dang has been doing with you in another subthread today. But we've both been doing this job long enough to sense when someone isn't really wanting to help make HN better at all.

The guy I replied to seemed to, after I mentioned lobotomies as an example of physical treatments for "feeling sad" that are now seen as barbaric.