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Depressed People Surf the Web Differently
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from Medical Daily:
"Researchers led by Sriram Chellappan from the Missouri University of Science and Technology, collected internet usage data from 216 college students enrolled at the university. The usage data was collected anonymously without interfering with the student’s normal internet usage for a month. The students were tested to see if they had symptoms of depression and analyzed internet usage based on the results. Depressed students tended to use the internet in much different ways than their non-depressed classmates. Depressed students used file-sharing programs, like torrents or online sharing sites, more than non-depressed students (PDF). Depressed students also chatted more and sent more emails out. Online video viewing and game playing were also more popular for depressed students."
File-sharing, chatting, email, video games, watching videos--all those are the domain of the depressed, apparently. So wtf do the non-depressed do online, just read the newspaper and post ads on Craigslist?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
"Depressed people skate on the other side of the ice."
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I read the title as "dressed" people. I thought, "well of course dressed people surf the Internet differently than naked people".
Duh! Slashdot makes everyone happy!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I hope that your point is that not all depressed people can be lumped into one category.
People who have experienced episodes of major depression might resent your assertion that they got that way because they were "lonely" or "bored" -- or even "sad."
Breakfast served all day!
coping mechanism. When your brain is telling you you're all alone, you do everything you can to feel some sort of human connection.
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
Except you're wrong. Depression is also caused by things like hormone imbalance (postpartum depression), prolonged grief, or serotonin deficiency, to name a few. In fact, loneliness and boredom are symptoms of depression, not the other way around (as you suggest). When depressed, people lose motivation, which to boredom, and have an overwhelming sense of worthlessness, which leads to loneliness.
When someone is deficient in serotonin, they find that it takes an incredible amount of stimuli to bring their serotonin levels up to normal. You know that feeling of satisfaction you get when you complete a project or task? Those who are serotonin deficient don't get that feeling, and instead feel overwhelmed by the very thought of starting the task. Because it takes so much stimuli to bring their serotonin levels up to normal, they seek out quick fixes, like eating sweets, watching TV, and playing video games simultaneously; or masturbating 5-10 times a day. That's just to feel normal.
So in short, STFU, because you have no idea what you're talking about.
You should think about changing your userid to "ReallyReallyReallySadBob".
Linux is cool though . . .
It's called escapism. I watched vidoes and played games so I wouldn't have to think of my miserable life. Of course doing those things didn't help fix my problems, so I always ended up feeling worse sometime afterwards. But I didn't have any motivation to get any real work done. I don't do online chats and don't have many (if any) friends to send emails to (not that I would have anything to say), but I prefer online communications compared with face to face. It's a lot easier to write a response than it is to stand next to someone and try to completely hide your depression. People don't like being around other depressed people; it's depressing.
Maintaining face is extermely difficult when you're really depressed. Happy people make you want to cry because you're never that happy and can't ever get there. You also haven't acoomplished anything (you sat around for 3-4 hours being too depressed to do anything), so when people ask you "what's up" you have no answer. There's only so many ways to sound busy.
coping mechanism. When your brain is telling you you're all alone, you do everything you can to feel some sort of human connection.
No. Goddamnit, no.
Look, you extroverted people have no understanding of us, more introverted guys. I understand most people really can't stand to be alone, and start wanting to climb the walls when forced to do that. Not everyone shares these feelings. We prefer interaction online because we want to attenuate the human connection. Being around people for too long drains me. Talking to someone online is manageable, because the person on the other side isn't taking up the entirety of my attention, and I'm free to do other things WHILE interacting. I get a message, and I get to ignore it for a minute while I'm reading an article, then getting around to respond it, then go back to reading the article.
One-on-one people interactions completely monopolize your time, and for that reason is very draining to introverts. You can't just tune out the person for a bit without being extremely rude. When I was in college, my roommate was another introvert. We sometimes, I shit you not, type to each other over instant messaging through our computers while IN THE SAME ROOM.
We sometimes, I shit you not, type to each other over instant messaging through our computers while IN THE SAME ROOM.
yeah ... here in the office, we call that "working" and we do it 10 hours a day.
Yeah but no one goes there, it's way too depressing.
You may want to take a look at the following ted talk by Sherry Turkle. http://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together.html
It discusses exactly your point, and left me feeling sorry for the smart phoney's among us. The jist of her argument is that we only want the good parts of relationships which weakens relationships in general.
Here is a transcript that i have copied from the web. Hopefully slashdot doesnt brutalize it too much:
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Just a moment ago, my daughter Rebecca texted me for good luck. Her text said, "Mom, you will rock." I love this. Getting that text was like getting a hug. And so there you have it. I embody the central paradox. I'm a woman who loves getting texts who's going to tell you that too many of them can be a problem.
Actually that reminder of my daughter brings me to the beginning of my story. 1996, when I gave my first TEDTalk, Rebecca was five years old and she was sitting right there in the front row. I had just written a book that celebrated our life on the internet and I was about to be on the cover of Wired magazine. In those heady days, we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual communities. We were exploring different aspects of ourselves. And then we unplugged. I was excited. And, as a psychologist, what excited me most was the idea that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about ourselves, about our identity, to live better lives in the real world.
Now fast-forward to 2012. I'm back here on the TED stage again. My daughter's 20. She's a college student. She sleeps with her cellphone, so do I. And I've just written a new book, but this time it's not one that will get me on the cover of Wired magazine. So what happened? I'm still excited by technology, but I believe, and I'm here to make the case, that we're letting it take us places that we don't want to go.
Over the past 15 years, I've studied technologies of mobile communication and I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their plugged in lives. And what I've found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don't only change what we do, they change who we are. Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they've quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things.
So just to take some quick examples: People text or do email during corporate board meetings. They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you're texting. (Laughter) People explain to me that it's hard, but that it can be done. Parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents' full attention. But then these same children deny each other their full attention. This is a recent shot of my daughter and her friends being together while not being together. And we even text at funerals. I study this. We remove ourselves from our grief or from our revery and we go into our phones.
Why does this matter? It matters to me because I think we're setting ourselves up for trouble -- trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection. We're getting used to a new way of being alone together. People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere -- connected to all the different places they want to be. People want to customize their lives. They want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that m
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Please see a psychiatrist.
They really, really do help. You will not be looked down upon, you will be given specific to you help rather than just the generic "How to feel better" crap you find in books and online. Also it will not be the "Here take this pill and go away" treatment that you get from general practitioners. It might be a little pricy (Especially if you don't have insurance), but worth every single penny! This is your direct quality of life and means to make a living we are talking about here.
At the very least they will advise you on how to get out of this self-feeding loop. Without proffessional help (Your family and friends are doing all they know to help you, but they just don't know how to do that) you will not be able to break out of this and things will just get steadily worse. Take it from someone that have been in this situation for several years before finally biting the bullet and seeking help.
Finally if it gets so bad that you seriously start planning out your suicide, you owe it to everyone that care or ever cared about you to seek proffessional help immediately! Taking your own life will send the people you know right into deep depression themselves: Do you really want them to go through what you are in now?