I've heard plenty of people involved in mental health care themselves lament the fact that they're often just trying to happy-talk people who genuinely have harrowing lives. I don't think the notion is absurd.

The idea that a terrible life can cause depression is not the limb he's going out on. It's the idea that somehow depression is caused by being way more exploited than our ancestors in the 1700's who were working on someone else's farms and factories as children is the limb he's going out on.

OK, well, that's an easy rhetorical maneuver but one that can be met with equally facile ripostes, such as "how do you determine that people weren't just as if not more depressed in the 18th Century when the concept was less familiar?" or "perhaps having the gulf between themselves and the wealthy rubbed in their faces every day is what causes the distress, since there can be little sense of exploitation if one is surrounded only by those in similar straits."

Didn't people in the olden days also see the castles and mansions of the rich on a daily basis?

Daily I very much doubt because it’s not like most people were commuting to work. Would you sometimes see them, sure, but people also had a belief system that would have done more to justify the social order, and it would probably be limited to provincial elites for most.

Weren't a lot of towns built basically surrounding a castle?

I guess people in towns would see wealthy people often, but people in remote farms and villages wouldn't.

I'm not sure exactly what wealth is being rubbed in my face today. News about rich people? I would assume there would also be news and gossip about rich people back then too.

Fair criticism as usual and maybe I should have been more specific, but I didn't say anything about the 1700s or prior specifically. If we talk about trends in the lifespan of people alive today (which represents a huge number of people) the picture is much different.

My grandma (alive today) grew up with no indoor plumbing in the United States. They had to use an outhouse.

> In 1940 nearly half of houses lacked hot piped water, a bathtub or shower, or a flush toilet. Over a third of houses didn't have a flush toilet.

https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2004/data/papers/SS0...

Is it exploitation that's the problem?

Or social isolation? People are very isolated these days. People can have good jobs, have lots of shallow acquittances but no true friends.

You don't need to go back to the 1700s to find comparatively low levels of depression. The 1980s will do.

All sorts of non-absurd-seeming notions turn out to be wrong, which is why people train for many years to conduct medical research.

How would you "medically disprove" the notion that some people are unhappy because the circumstances of their lives are bad rather than biological defects?

Unhappy is dramatically, completely different to depression. I've been both and they don't even feel that similar.

If we change the word "unhappy" to "despairing" does it make sense?

I don't know - it's your argument.

If it helps, unhappiness/despair seem like different degrees of the same feeling. Depression is a different feeling.

The closest analogy I can think of is that "amused" and "satisfied" are both positive feelings, but they are different and you can't treat the cause the same even if some of the symptoms are similar.

“Exogenous depression” is supposed to be experienced by about a fifth of people at one point or another. What if many persistent cases of depression were actually exogenous? That might be more interesting than parsing the difference between despair, hopelessness, anhedonia, and depression.

No

Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.

Sadness or distress vs not feeling anything and not having motivation?

Yes, this is roughly in the right area.

I wonder how a week of low dose amphetamine usage, like adderall, might help disrupt no-motivation mood loops. A friend of mine (cycling through many antidepressants) seems like he would respond well to this. As in, he would feel better and be able to “shift gears.” Not to get more work done, but say, enjoy going to an art museum. And feel what it is like to be enthusiastic again.

Nobody needs to disprove the notion that some people are happy for reasons having nothing to do with clinical depression.

OK. And the notion that psychiatry has been used to simply stamp anyone agitating for political change as insane is also attested (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protest_Psychosis for instance). So what's your objection to this line of inquiry?

I don't know what you're trying to argue here, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the claim at the root of the thread, and I apologize but I'm not interested in the tangent.