Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Maximum Spin]

This is not just inaccurate but dangerously so. Depression is an actual chemical disorder (albeit one that, like most brain problems, is hard to provide an etiology for with certainty); it's not something you can philosophize yourself into or out of, but a physiological problem with the brain.

This is a category error. Everything that happens in the brain is an actual chemical disorder, because the brain is an actual chemical object. Love is an actual chemical disorder. (Or order, for the optimist.) Your political views, and the opposition's, are actual chemical disorders. Philosophising yourself into or out of something is also an actual chemical process in the brain that can have real effects on brain chemistry; so is learning, or even just looking at things. Studies continue to show that philosophising yourself out of depression works about as often as medication does, and that the major source of variation seems to be that different approaches work for different people. Telling people they can't philosophise themselves out of depression without even letting them try first just worsens the problem.

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[Trekkin]

And to be perfectly clear: what annoys me so much about the public discourse it's that it's only relevant to relatives, they never talk about the needs of the affected. Unless you dig really deep and actually listen to talks and lectures of actual experts. This mainstream radio had a whole week and it wasted it on symptom description and a list of things the affected DON'T want to hear.

Oh, I'm with you there, although part of that is just that radio interviews are a poor medium for conveying the intricacies of psychology.
Note that I never said that psychotherapy is useless; far from it. I'm specifically advocating for antidepressants in concert with therapy, which an analysis of available studies would suggest work better in concert than either alone, and better than placebo or nothing. Sure the dosages and specific therapies are time-consuming to work out, in part because we don't have an objective gauge of their effectiveness the way we do for something like blood pressure, but regardless, "I am not responding to emotional stimuli as I think I should be" is a problem we have at least a good idea of how to solve, whether it's by pharmaceutically affecting brain chemistry (which isn't just flooding the brain with neurotransmitters) or psychotherapy.

Yes, every brain is different. Some will respond to antidepressants; some will not. Therapy must of course be carefully tuned to the individual patient. My point is simply that your chances are better with a trained therapist than with a depressed person, which is all you've got for therapy when you try to treat yourself, so we should be careful to emphasize that depression is more treatable than it often seems to a depressed person.

EDIT: Incidentally, it's also entirely possible that the best therapy for a given person is self-guided, but again, there are better-qualified people to make that determination than someone who is by definition dissatisfied with their current reactions to things.

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[inteuniso]

Eat more produce, find a hobby that involves dedicating multiple days to the activity, meditate and relax.

The world's in a bad place right now. Probably looks like the worst it's been in a long time. Probably going to get a little darker too.

Night's always darkest before dawn. Keep your chin up, just a few more years. Just have to keep the faith; hold onto the hope in the future.