Or is it? Therapy, especially gestalt or existential, often makes people realise that something really is off with their outlook on life, relationships with other people or other things like this — something that they had paid no attention to and perceived as "normal", that really wasn't. And in the end, what started as their fight against depression ended up as work to fix the core reason for which that depression was only a symptom.
I know this to be the case with myself and some close friends of mine. I'm not a health professional, and this is anecdotal evidence, but from talking to other people and therapists, I hear about this quite often.
And for illnesses with a stressor: sometimes a person is not empowered to resolve it.
You shouldn't have too much faith in your own biology, it is far from perfect.
The last part is in my experience the thing people are missing that creates a lot of arguments, especially around medication. I have gone through lots of trauma growing up, and I only recently learned of the role of the interplay between the physical and the mental. I had always eschewed medication - and I still think it to be /mostly/ a first-aid treatment. There's nothing to say that someone has a long-term physiological imbalance, or one that we don't know how to treat. Therefore its valid if someone needs to be on a medication for the long term. The saying goes amongst people I know - "If you can't make your own neurochemicals, store bought is fine.".
For me, medication allowed the relative calm in order to directly tackle and address childhood trauma and patterns of thinking that ultimately result in acute depression and anxiety. Unawareness of those triggers or ways to deal with them leads that acute depression/anxiety to become chronic over time, where no trigger is necessary.
CBT (cognative behavioral therapy) is a very good way to identify patterns of thoughts or thinking that doesn't make sense, or create a reaction that is far outside of the range that a person would expect. You end up having this moments of unclear thoughts when digging into past events, or things that upset you, or thoughts about yourself. I have learned to relish those - that means I'm learning something or making a connection that I didn't have before.
Finally, approaching entirely from the psychological side does not always give results. Having gone through lots and lots of cognative behavioral therapy, I'm fully aware when I'm being irrational or have a stronger than expected emotional reaction to things. I even apologize while I'm doing it! But it wasn't until I dug into a different type of therapy, EMDR, that started to approach from the physical side of things. I started to learn to notice things that were making my hands ball up in anger, even though I didn't notice them before. I learned that I dissociate sometimes and don't form memories of when I'm upset, which severely hampers my ability to address the things. All of this to say, its complex. It all has underlying rational reasons behind it, and seeking out information and building your own mental model of, well, your mental model, is a very helpful way to go about it, though it takes a long time.
So try medication, try therapy, try different types of therapy. Its extremely difficult. Its sort of like performing surgery on yourself. But there is always another path and more things to learn about yourself.
Such cases are no more adaptive than Cystic Fibrosis is adaptive. They’re malfunctions.
People don't malfunction; bodies do. People are (cybernetic) systems, composed of a mind and a body; but people's bodies specifically, when taken on their own—including their brains, when taken on their own as organs!—are just complex machines, that can have organic diseases. (In the case of the brain, we call these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_brain_syndrome s.)
If your computer spontaneously powers off whenever you open hit your keyboard's "A" key, that's a malfunction. Computers, as machines, aren't supposed to do that. If you avoid ever hitting the "A" key, you might have worked around the problem, but the problem itself is still present—the computer, considered as a standalone machine rather than a cybernetic operator-machine system, is still malfunctioning.
If you have an SNP in the gene DDC, causing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromatic_L-amino_acid_decarbox..., that is a malfunction (or manufacturing defect) in your brain-as-machine. You — the mind-body system — might learn to adapt to/work around this malfunction; but that doesn't mean the brain-as-machine isn't continuing to malfunction. A working system can be constructed from unreliable components.
> who is so diagnosed is a lost cause
Who said anything about being a lost cause? For something to be maladaptive, it simply has to reduce inclusive genetic fitness, such that people with the condition reproduce less than people without the condition. That says nothing about whether you can live your life with the condition.
Whatever part of the human brain thinks getting a vasectomy is a good idea, is extremely maladaptive! But that's not to say that we don't prefer things that way. :)
Also “quiet” by Susan Cain is even more excellent and insightful about introverts.
-- E. Cioran
The trouble with "death means salvation", and believe me I know that yearning, is that you don't get to experience this salvation. Suicide is literally not the answer, because you will never get to experience the relief on the other end. This is the essence of Cioran's quote here. It would have been better to not exist, but it's too late for that now and ceasing to exist will not, in fact, afford you any sense of relief. The only relief you feel is in the fantasizing about death itself.
Eventually you will die and after that point it won't matter how long or how painfully you've lived. From the perspective of death life doesn't matter at all, but you won't be alive to experience that perspective.
Would it be better to be tortured for years? To have your family knowing that your fingernails got ripped out? That you lost your genitals to electrocution?
I'm not sure. Plenty of heroes committed suicide.
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 in their lives, but it is uncommon for it to persist throughout their entire lives.
if you are interested in a way to sidestep this specific question, I would point out that the pills are not only for the benefit of the pilots. the measure is also to protect others who might be harmed by information divulged under interrogation.
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...
Again it's not a universal solution but very often when you change context, you find yourself having it easier. You're not even trying to be happy, it just grows around.
"At first I viewed the depression I started fighting in my teens as a scourge, a defect, something broken to be fixed."
"I have since come to see it as an important signal. When I am managing my life and mental states well, it often fades into the background. When it starts to flare up, like with some kind of physical pain, that's telling me I need to pay attention and change things up a bit."
Any psychiatrist will tell you that psychiatric medications only treat the symptoms of mood disorders and that they do not know the cause of most of them. It is hogwash that they think mood disorders are "only chemical imbalances in the brain". They know these disorders are polygenic and environmental. But for some people, a short dose of SSRI's or antipsychotics can keep them alive long enough to find out what it is that is giving them so much pain, i mean singnals.
I struggle with similar feelings, and the idea that depression becomes something that is there but can be put to positive use absolutely tracks with my own experience.
If one cannot get rid of depression then one cannot get rid of heart disease or cancer.
Many people who haven't been stuck in that positive feedback loop have still been blue. Their capacity to feel happiness is muted just like ours, but they are successfully able to get out of that with a behavioral change. That's not always the case with a depressive disorder, and it can take a multi-faceted approach of medications, lifestyle change, sleep hygiene improvement, sometimes electroshock therapy for those people to get out of it.
Pretty sure there are many distinct conditions that we now call "depression".
Your description is very true for some of them, and not at all for others.
Some people might get a single episode, then get through it one way or another, and never have another one.
Others might have a lifelong tendency or vulnerability to it, and in that sense it might always be there in the background. I'm fairly certain I was more or less depressed (although not diagnosed) in my teenage years and early 20's. In my later 20's things were brighter, although I probably had a tendency for some amount of depression, especially during the darker winter months of the year (I live in the north). However, there were definitely times when I wouldn't have considered myself depressed. I'm not sure I'd even say it was "there" at those times, in the sense of being actively present in any way, even in a non-dominant way.
Later on, I got another deeper episode of depression that I'm still battling.
Yet other people might have it always there in some way, as you say.
However used improperly it can end in amphetamine addiction or even psychosis. It's not surprising most mainstream psychiatrists don't like to use them for depression, but it is a powerful tool in the box.
With that said, I also wonder how many of those people had undiagnosed ADHD/if such studies involved screening for ADHD.
Unmanaged ADHD leading to consistent failures in life and other difficulties -> depression/depressive symptoms from the consequences, lack of achievement, etc over the long term, is a pretty common story.
And obviously, the responsiveness of those with ADHD to stimulants is pretty well-known.
Someone I know managed to do that, despite being on intramuscular antipsychotics. Unfortunately no middle ground, the meds keep him anhedonic and abulic, but without them it's mania. I would be careful with stimulants.
Who are you quoting here? What psychiatrists think this? AFAIK, this hasn't been the meta for a long time.
Because fundamentally, I think, it is necessary to try to get people to comply with medication that seems to help sometimes, while avoiding the reality that the way it works is not known.
It may not be the modern psychiatric view, but it’s also true that psychiatrists are just doctors, and many of them are very slow to change from what they were taught in medical school.
But he just changed the name of the thing he wants to get rid of from "pain" to "signal". The signal is still a disorder. The signal is the thing that bothers us.
(I don't entirely agree with them, but that's my best summary of their argument).
I have since come to see it as an important signal. When I am managing my life and mental states well, it often fades into the background. When it starts to flare up, like with some kind of physical pain, that's telling me I need to pay attention and change things up a bit.
Furthermore - and perhaps most importantly - it is a preferred failure mode to freaking out or engaging in suicidal ideation. When I'm overwhelmed by that gloom, I remind myself that I could have a stroke, aneurysm or heart attack at any moment, and I think about what the consequences would be if I did. As long as I'm in a safe situation, I can simply take my first opportunity to Just. Stop. Taking time to shut down, and to cease forcing yourself to engage with a world that would go on without you if you suddenly died, is a good idea now & then.
Yeah, at times I feel some twinges of guilt for doing this. It seems selfish on the surface. But when you compare it to the alternatives, well-- it's better than being dead, isn't it? I feel like my ability to manage my life (and depression) has improved considerably with this insight. If you need to stop, stop. Rest. Let whatever is pushing you to the brink simmer in a corner for a while, provided it is physically safe to do so. You will be better equipped to deal with it when you've had a chance to breathe, and to remind yourself that a temporary shutdown is indeed better than being dead.