This is the most accurate description of my depression and why it is seemingly impervious to therapy. It's not debilitating to the point of not being able to function in daily life, but is instead a constant, low-grade friction resulting in less drive and confidence and more inaction. Basically, life has taught me that my self-esteem was misguided, and I'm unsure of how to meaningfully act without it, so I just sort of fade away.
Re:We Are All Confident Idiots (2014)
by heavenlyblue on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @01:01PM
(#21138570)
Well, if you know that every time you've built a mental model and it didn't work, isn't that logical to assume that _any_ mental model you can imagine isn't perfect and thus you can't empirically assume it will work all the time?
I hear your opinion of "logic" as "I have a passion for being right, and it makes me unhappy when I am not". Is that logical?
Re:We Are All Confident Idiots (2014)
by dropit_sphere on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @12:34PM
(#21138308)
baller comment, just wanted to say
Oh I strongly disagree with this assessment. I am not a psychologist, but have suffered from depression on and off my whole life, and I assert that depression is indeed a philosophical problem.
Depression, I think, is the experience of one's mind realizing that its model of reality (philosophy) is too flawed or incomplete to see a concrete path towards meaningful change in one's life, and attempting to build a better model.
This is evidenced by:
1) depressive realism. the mind is being careful to make more accurate assessments.
2) a preference towards inaction. The mind does not trust its model of reality, and is reluctant to take actions with unpredictable results.
3) similar behavior in children undergoing cognitive schema shifts.
Further, I assert that part of the reason society is unable to effect meaningful treatment (for lack of a better word) of many cases of depression is that society's baseline philosophy (empiricism) is part of the model known by the subject to be flawed, and so it has no pre-existing better model to guide the individual towards (though I contend such models do exist if actively sought).
Depression, in my experience, is overcome in only 2 ways:
1) The mind gives up and returns to its previous, known flawed, philosophy and simply rejects the information that highlighted the flaws. This is an unstable state prone to relapse for obvious reasons. In the worst cases, the subject seeks to actively destroy the source of such information. This, I suspect, is essentially the cause of religious or ideological violence.
2) The mind constructs a better model that allows it to once again place confidence in its prediction of the outcomes of its actions. This is more stable, but the new model may still have significant flaws that will ultimate result in a new round of depression.
Needless to say for anyone who has actually been through severe depression, the experience is intensely unpleasant. If a mind is unable to resolve the dissonance between its current model and reality, it may take desperate action to relieve this suffering.
Anyways, I guess what I'm saying is that if my hypothesis is accurate then you can indeed become depressed from trying to apply logic to your life and discovering that logic (empirical logic anyway) alone is not sufficient.