Mental illness, attention deficit disorder, and suffering

Not sure if this is true.

Evolutionary psychologists have explored the improved tunnel vision that accompanies depression as a means for finding one’s way out of harmful situations.

Society-wide it seems many people are living in harmful situations/ways and are able to medicate their way out of the tunnel vision before recognizing the sources of pain.

Mental and behavioral issues are tough because there are many shades of grey. If whatever you are experiencing is causing you pain and you cannot stop it, than it’s a problem.

I think modern society is tough because we tend to have fewer social connections and institutions. It’s easier to get stuck in bad situations or to be isolated than in the past, and I think that makes latent problems more problematic. The good news is that we have professionals who can help, but that bad news is we also have others (schools, etc) who help themselves.

There's a lot of modern discourse around "identity". My view is that the only healthy conception of your identity is the things you share with no one else. So ADD is not your identity, nor is your skin color, ethnicity, religion and so on. Rather, your identity is the result of experiences unique to your life and how those experiences shaped you.

Another big issue here is locus of control. I'm reminded of this quote: "I was dissatisfied with my own conduct, and laid the blame for my excesses on irresistible inner forces, as well as a combination of inscrutable external factors, invisibly staged to provoke and upset me."

It’s the classic “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” adage at work. The sad thing is that it does kill many, and for some, never leaves in order to make room for growth.

As for the tunnel vision, that’s an interesting one because it does let you focus in on a problem exceptionally well and that could be useful. The trouble I’ve found in myself is that I haven’t always had the tools or resources to do something with that attention.

You end up intently focused on a problem, and it just becomes a painful echo chamber instead of an opportunity to address something. I suspect this is largely due to a lack of understanding and teaching. Perhaps too, like you mentioned, we expect medication to function as a solution eventually, relieving ourselves of any duty to investigate internal solutions. Had I known how normal depression is though, how it can present, how it can be managed, I suspect my own experiences could have been a lot better. It’s impossible to be certain.

I definitely disagree about the ups and downs in any case. Struggle defines us and helps us grow. Getting better doesn’t have to be a fun or enjoyable experience.

> Not sure if this is true.

The remarkable film "Melancholia" (Lars von Trier, 2011) was inspired by the director's depression, and one particular upside: that when things get bad, like really bad, the depressive can function better than normal folks because the outside now matches their inside. Kirsten Dunst plays a young woman with utterly crippling depression, I've never seen anything like it in real life or on film, like unable to move or eat. But when the Earth is about to be destroyed, she's sanguine, unlike everyone else.

Not sure if this is true to life, but it makes some sort of sense.