I gotta agree with you. And also, game companies seem to have figured it out now, too.
I bought Call of Duty 3 for my Wii 'cause I was so excited to try the FPS interface with a Wii. Kind of disappointing. Then I just recently got a copy of Medal of Honor: Heroes 2, and it's almost night and day.
The controls are pretty similar, but MoH:H2 makes much, much, better use of the wii's capabilities.
Bruce Schneier has written frequently on this topic, the problem is, the person in a position to do something about it (the bank) has no financial loss from fraud.
If you made the banks, who have the capacity for change, liable, you'd see change.
Spoken like somebody who's culture is not in any threat of disappearing.
How 'bout somebody tells you you have to move to mainland china, and nobody where you live will speak english, and they'll have radically different ideas on economics, ethics, and social norms?
I wouldn't call these stereotypes at all. Or if they are, well stereotypes don't come from nowhere. Where I work, in my black rockports, black jeans, and black t-shirt I'm the best dressed guy in the company. My co-workers tend towards button-up shirts that were bought at least a decade ago, there are 2 of 10 people in my office who wear shorts with sandals. Everybody but me has their cell phone (not a PDA or blackberry) clipped to their belt. My boss favors black sneakers, white socks, and black pants, and his pants are usually those cheap-o ones with the elasticized waist.
My boss' boss tends to wear reasonably nice pants and good shoes, but he wears a black fanny pack as a final accessory.
"Using the Linux example (need to find another one), it has a lot of neat, weird, esoteric features bundled into it, that Windows lacks, but Windows has what people are willing to pay for, not whatever the Windows devs want to put into it."
Yeah, 'cause the majority of the population, when they buy a computer, sits down and decides what OS they want first, putting together a pros and cons list, including price.
At what point exactly does the average consumer 'buy' windows? It doesn't count unless they're aware that they 'bought' it.
C'mon, the market for OSs (or is it OSes?) is just about the worst example of consumer choice, 'cause basically nobody 'chooses' their OS. People choose a PC or a mac, and geeks might choose linux, but let's not pretend that people like my mom or my girlfriend's parents 'choose' to buy windows.
"OSS shouldn't be about reverse engineering good ideas and making them freely available. OSS is supposed to be about innovation and new ideas. Sadly, for most OSS apps that I see, it does appear to be a way to skim the main parts off of products that cost money and redistribute them for free. GIMP and OpenOffice are perfect examples. Does the world really need another app to do the jobs that their proprietary "cousins" do? No! Some folks just think those programs should be free! I can't tell you a single thing, other than freeness, that those apps have provided the world.
Well, another way of looking at it is, software is a tool, a means to an end. So if I can get that tool for free, instead of paying X amount for word or photoshop, (and GIMP or OO is 'good enough') then that's a "negative cost" to me, isn't it?
So, maybe you could think of paying for things like PS or Office as kind of a 'dead weight' on the whole economy?
"It's not supposed to be about screwing "The Man"."
Yeah, well, one man's "screwing 'The Man'" is another man's attempt to break the stranglehold of a quasi-monopoly.
50 years ago, chronic obesity wasn't the problem it is now. Neither was depression.
One of the things that has happened in between is that almost nobody gets enough exercise in the course of their average day. What I mean by that is, since we all drive everywhere etc., the only people who get proper exercise are those who take special pains to do so.
I've never had depression, I'm about as far away from being 'at risk' of it as you can get, but I've known a half-dozen of people who've suffered from utterly _crippling_ depression. The type where you someone won't even get out of bed for days.
None of them got what I would describe as (or what a doctor would call) appropriate amounts of exercise.
Now, of course, this is a chicken-egg scenario. I don't imagine when you're in the midst of a depressive episode that you feel like hitting the gym or joining a karate club, right?
Now, I know my sample of say, at most 10, ain't exactly scientific, but does anybody know of someone who has depression and hits the gym 3 times a week?
As a final note, one of the things you can say conclusively about the epidemic of depression is that it tends to increase with industrialization. Now, sure, lots of other things happen as industrialization goes up other than driving more and walking less, but I wonder if anybody's looked into it?
Did you ever see the Simpsons episode where they diagnosed Bart with ADD?
The scene where the two doctors are advocating a medication called "focusin", that they describe as being "the best possible treatment, except for (roll of the eyes, and dismissive shrug) *snort* regular _exercise_."
Little bit more complicated. I heard it covered on CBC radio's "Quirks and Quarks". (at least I think we're thinking of the same thing here...)
Most research centers have a list of people who will be participants in a drug trial for a couple hundred bucks. So most of the time that a drug goes through trials, the test subjects are familiar with what side effects are common to many medications. Take dry mouth for example.
So let's say I'm in a drug trial of drug X for condition Y. If I take the pill, and 20 minutes later I have the dry mouth side effect, then I'm pretty sure I'm in the test group, not the placebo group. So I get an "extra special placebo effect".
So what some researchers are worried about is that we're 'selecting' for drugs that have harsher side-effects. No easy way to design trials around this.
All good advice, but I think (or at least my 2nd-hand experience from having a couple of girlfriends and some close friends with serious, crippling, to the level of "crying and won't get out of bed for 2 or 3 days" depression) those work well for preventing, not so much cure.
In the same sense that eating right and walking daily will keep you from getting overweight, but if you're 150lbs overweight, you ain't gonna lose that by 30 minutes of light exercise daily and eating more salad, those sort of 'mood management best practices' won't pull somebody out of depression.
Scary statistic: If you've had a full-blown depressive episode 2 or more times in the past, then a hypothetical researcher could call you up at a random day in the future, and there's a 50% chance that you'll be in the middle of a full-blown depressive episode. Oh yeah, and depressive episodes last for months.
Depression utterly _defies_ treatment attempts. It's one of those things like heart disease or lung cancer where it's much, much, easier to try and prevent than cure.
A psych prof I had a number of years back pointed out that the incidence rate for depression in women was ~2X the incidence of depression for men.
And she also pointed out that the rate of alcoholism in men was roughly 2X that of women.
She had her own conjecture (mood disorders wasn't her primary area of study) that men are more 'action-oriented'. She felt that the way that men handle setbacks was less likely to induce depression than the way women do.
What do men do when they lose their job? Get angry, get drunk, maybe start even start a fight! Also, men tend to (please excuse generalization here, take it for what it's worth) attribute negative events to external factors, whereas women in the same situation tend to look inwards. Now looking towards yourself might be more accurate when you lose your job or get dumped or something, but my prof's point was that it also tends to be the sort of 'habit of thought' more associated with depression.
Funny, there's also a psych concept called the 'sadder but wiser' hypothesis.
If you take someone, and ask them to interpret ambiguous information (show somebody a picture, ask them what's going on between the two people in the photo, etc), people who have had depression in the past tend to be better at interpreting ambiguous information. Not only that, but when a depressive is in the midst of a depressive episode, they get even better at it.
I heard from a friend of mine (phd philosophy student) about how one of his colleagues had 'hung out his shingle' offering 'philosophical counseling'.
The idea that, if you're not happy, it might have something to do with the way that you see the world, your assumptions about what you want, what makes life meaningful, etc.
Now, I think that sort of thing can help a lot of people, probably. But expecting that to cure somebody from a major depressive episode is like expecting to find a cream or a salve to re-grow a limb, unfortunately.
After living with two different women who had depression, I have times when I feel like the only treatment is quarantine.
"Conversely, suggesting the depression is NEVER self-inflicted is on par with suggesting that rape "victims" never falsely accuse anyone just for attention."
That's a very good point.
Although I would suspect that most people who are more in the 'author of their own misfortune' camp who are diagnosed with depression are mis-diagnosed.
Which is of course part of the problem. They talk about Tony Soprano being depressed on the show, but he does not by any means meet the diagnostic criteria.
As someone else mentioned, there's an issue of 'mood management' that you need to do if you suffer from depression, sorta 'preventative maintenance' on your psyche. Exercise regularly, eat properly, get enough sleep, etc. The same way a diabetic needs to watch what they eat.
But just 'cause you aggravate your condition by your bad habits of course doesn't necessarily mean you _caused_ your depression.
Absolutely right. I think the more nuanced position you describe is very much correct. If you struggle with depression, you need to do 'mood management' in the same sense that a diabetic needs to watch what they eat.
And, like the diabetic, the person who does "preventative maintenance" will have better outcomes.
But that's a far cry from what some other people are suggesting, that it's somehow a 'choice' to be happy or depressed, as if it's as simple as choosing coke vs pepsi or something.
That's a bunch of crap. You decide what your reaction is to events, you can control how events effect your mental state. Everyone has the choice between wallowing in their own crapulence and deciding to do something about it.
Respectfully, unless you've been conducting top-secret research about the brain that you haven't shared with the rest of the world, you can't possibly know that.
The sopranos is a great example, actually, of somebody who isn't actually depressed, but has been mis-diagnosed as such. A major depressive episode doesn't look like anything depicted on 'the sopranos'. If you think Tony Soprano is depressed, then you haven't read the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria.
Having lived with two different women at times with serious clinical depression I can tell you it looks nothing like Tony Soprano. Unless I missed the episode where Tony spend 3 or 4 days crying and unable/unwilling to get out of bed except to go to the bathroom. Depression is utterly crippling, when someone's in a depressive episode, and it defies any attempt at treatment.
I agree completely that drug companies want to make everybody take a pill every time they feel a little bit blue 'cause they lost their job, but if you think you can 'think your way out of depression' then you have never seen a real life example.
If you'd ever seen anybody in the midst of a depressive episode, then you wouldn't say they chose that, any more than you'd say somebody with cancer chose to get sick.
As others have pointed out.. if you are talking about a chemical imbalance, then no amount of "positive thinking" is going to change that... However there are situational depressions.. ie a person who's brain chemistry is such that if the situation were different (say.. girlfriend didn't dump him) then they would not be depressed... these people can be helped by choosing their own mood.
I agree absolutely. But I'd suggest that in that example, they were probably mis-diagnosed. One of the criteria for clinical depression is that there hasn't been any major upsets like getting dumped or a parent dying or losing your job or something.
I think it was in 'reason' magazine, there was an article about the over-diagnosis of depression that was titled something like "Is Tony Soprano Depressed?".
I think a lot of the confusion is that people who are not _truly_ depressed are being treated as if they were (i.e., whip out the prescription pad!), even if they're not formally given the diagnosis of depression.
There was a time however, when I was an extremely unhappy person..(this is different from clinical depression).. and finally one day I read that happiness was a choice.. that you choose to be happy..
There was a study done back when they'd put electrodes in your brain, where you apply the electrodes to this part, the person smells something funny, put the electrodes somewhere else, they feel cold, etc, where they discovered that they could stimulate a part of the brain and make people laugh. Some psychologists did a study where they'd stimulate that 'laugh center' and then they'd ask the subject, "why did you laugh just now?".
Almost nobody said "Y'know, I really don't know, I just laughed, I guess", almost all subjects would say something like "well, they way that doctor's wearing his lab coat, he's so funny!"
The point is, if you have a brain state change, one tends to attribute a _cause_ to it, and if one isn't there, then people will use their imagination to fill in the blanks.
So maybe you really did just 'choose to be happy', but maybe you had a change in your brain state due to an unknown/hidden factor, and you attributed a cause to it.
If it was that easy to just figure out that "happiness is a choice", then everybody would do it.
The reason I bring up the 'blame the victim' rape example is that they're both part of the same psychological phenomena, the 'Fair World Bias'.
Most people aren't comfortable with the idea that bad things happen to people through no fault of their own. If bad things can happen to you through no fault of your own, then I have to consider that terrible things might happen to me!
It's like people believing in a meritocracy. People who believe they owe all their success and material wealth to their own strength of character and nothing else, as if, had they been switched at birth and raised in the 3rd world or an inner-city slum, instead of a middle-class family in an industrialized country, that they'd still be programmers or stockbrokers or something.
The fact that these pills DO NOTHING seem to re-enforce my point, wouldn't you think?
Are you suggesting that the fact that SSRIs do nothing supports the assertion that people can just 'think themselves out of depression'? 'Cause I don't think you can draw that conclusion at all. The only conclusion I think you can draw from the fact that SSRIs are no better than placebo is that we don't understand the brain nearly as well as we thought.
The real fix is to find the thing making you depressed and fix that.
I thought one of the diagnostic criteria for depression was that there wasn't something external to be 'fixed', i.e. loss of job, death in the family, etc?
I'd like to think that there's treatment options, but having had two long-term relationships with women who suffered from moderate-to-serious depression (I know, I know, I certainly had 'a type' when I was younger...), I'm not optimistic about treatment.
I read somewhere that statistically, if someone has had 2 or more clinical depressive episodes in their life, then you can contact them, at a random point in the future, and there is a 50% chance that they will be suffering from another major depressive episode. Given that that sort of thing tends to last 6-8 months, that's some pretty sinister statistics.
Saying that hobbies cured your depression is to fall into the same trap that gets people believing in faith healers.
Most diseases are self-limiting, they either get better, or the patient dies. As time passes things get better. But you have no control group here, and have no real evidence to say that you have cured your depression via getting some hobbies.
Many/.ers are true believers in fair world and meritocracy.
So the idea that bad things happen to people for no reason at all, through no fault of their own, makes people who believe that they're 100% responsible for the state of their life profoundly uncomfortable. So you get this 'blame the victim' mentality.
Comfortable, well educated, middle class white guys don't like being told that they didn't get where they are solely on their own strength of character.
I submit that anybody who says you can 'decide' to not be depressed has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.
Suggesting that depression is self-inflicted by people who would just rather be sad is on par with suggesting that a rape victim was asking for it.
Anybody who's ever seen anyone suffering from genuine depression (as opposed to feeling down after you lost your job or something) knows that nobody would wish that on themselves any more than they'd wish cancer on themselves.
What are you retarded?
Depression isn't 'feeling a little blue', it's when somebody doesn't want to get out of bed for 3 or 4 days, even when nothing's gone wrong in your life (death in the family, loss of job, etc).
Have you ever been close to somebody with depression? After living with two different women who suffered from depression (I know, I certainly had 'a type' for a while...) I've started to think that the only treatment is quarantine.
I don't know what causes depression, or how to treat it, but I do know it's not something you can 'think your way out of', like some sort of Tony Robbins infomercial.
Slashdot Mirror
I gotta agree with you. And also, game companies seem to have figured it out now, too.
I bought Call of Duty 3 for my Wii 'cause I was so excited to try the FPS interface with a Wii. Kind of disappointing. Then I just recently got a copy of Medal of Honor: Heroes 2, and it's almost night and day.
The controls are pretty similar, but MoH:H2 makes much, much, better use of the wii's capabilities.
Bruce Schneier has written frequently on this topic, the problem is, the person in a position to do something about it (the bank) has no financial loss from fraud.
If you made the banks, who have the capacity for change, liable, you'd see change.
Spoken like somebody who's culture is not in any threat of disappearing.
How 'bout somebody tells you you have to move to mainland china, and nobody where you live will speak english, and they'll have radically different ideas on economics, ethics, and social norms?
Still feel like it's no big deal?
He seems to think that the 'value' of a product is based on how much labor went into it, rather than it's utility or what other people think of it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this basically a marxist definition of value?
I wouldn't call these stereotypes at all. Or if they are, well stereotypes don't come from nowhere. Where I work, in my black rockports, black jeans, and black t-shirt I'm the best dressed guy in the company. My co-workers tend towards button-up shirts that were bought at least a decade ago, there are 2 of 10 people in my office who wear shorts with sandals. Everybody but me has their cell phone (not a PDA or blackberry) clipped to their belt. My boss favors black sneakers, white socks, and black pants, and his pants are usually those cheap-o ones with the elasticized waist.
My boss' boss tends to wear reasonably nice pants and good shoes, but he wears a black fanny pack as a final accessory.
Yeah, 'cause the majority of the population, when they buy a computer, sits down and decides what OS they want first, putting together a pros and cons list, including price.
At what point exactly does the average consumer 'buy' windows? It doesn't count unless they're aware that they 'bought' it.
C'mon, the market for OSs (or is it OSes?) is just about the worst example of consumer choice, 'cause basically nobody 'chooses' their OS. People choose a PC or a mac, and geeks might choose linux, but let's not pretend that people like my mom or my girlfriend's parents 'choose' to buy windows.
Well, another way of looking at it is, software is a tool, a means to an end. So if I can get that tool for free, instead of paying X amount for word or photoshop, (and GIMP or OO is 'good enough') then that's a "negative cost" to me, isn't it?
So, maybe you could think of paying for things like PS or Office as kind of a 'dead weight' on the whole economy?
Yeah, well, one man's "screwing 'The Man'" is another man's attempt to break the stranglehold of a quasi-monopoly.
You say tomato, I say tomato...
No, that generates income or money which is not at all the same thing as creating wealth.
50 years ago, chronic obesity wasn't the problem it is now. Neither was depression.
One of the things that has happened in between is that almost nobody gets enough exercise in the course of their average day. What I mean by that is, since we all drive everywhere etc., the only people who get proper exercise are those who take special pains to do so.
I've never had depression, I'm about as far away from being 'at risk' of it as you can get, but I've known a half-dozen of people who've suffered from utterly _crippling_ depression. The type where you someone won't even get out of bed for days.
None of them got what I would describe as (or what a doctor would call) appropriate amounts of exercise.
Now, of course, this is a chicken-egg scenario. I don't imagine when you're in the midst of a depressive episode that you feel like hitting the gym or joining a karate club, right?
Now, I know my sample of say, at most 10, ain't exactly scientific, but does anybody know of someone who has depression and hits the gym 3 times a week?
As a final note, one of the things you can say conclusively about the epidemic of depression is that it tends to increase with industrialization. Now, sure, lots of other things happen as industrialization goes up other than driving more and walking less, but I wonder if anybody's looked into it?
Did you ever see the Simpsons episode where they diagnosed Bart with ADD?
The scene where the two doctors are advocating a medication called "focusin", that they describe as being "the best possible treatment, except for (roll of the eyes, and dismissive shrug) *snort* regular _exercise_."
If I had mod points, I'd throw them your way.
That guy's blog rocks. Very well written, nice, clean way of stating things.
Little bit more complicated. I heard it covered on CBC radio's "Quirks and Quarks". (at least I think we're thinking of the same thing here...)
Most research centers have a list of people who will be participants in a drug trial for a couple hundred bucks. So most of the time that a drug goes through trials, the test subjects are familiar with what side effects are common to many medications. Take dry mouth for example.
So let's say I'm in a drug trial of drug X for condition Y. If I take the pill, and 20 minutes later I have the dry mouth side effect, then I'm pretty sure I'm in the test group, not the placebo group. So I get an "extra special placebo effect".
So what some researchers are worried about is that we're 'selecting' for drugs that have harsher side-effects. No easy way to design trials around this.
All good advice, but I think (or at least my 2nd-hand experience from having a couple of girlfriends and some close friends with serious, crippling, to the level of "crying and won't get out of bed for 2 or 3 days" depression) those work well for preventing, not so much cure.
In the same sense that eating right and walking daily will keep you from getting overweight, but if you're 150lbs overweight, you ain't gonna lose that by 30 minutes of light exercise daily and eating more salad, those sort of 'mood management best practices' won't pull somebody out of depression.
Scary statistic: If you've had a full-blown depressive episode 2 or more times in the past, then a hypothetical researcher could call you up at a random day in the future, and there's a 50% chance that you'll be in the middle of a full-blown depressive episode. Oh yeah, and depressive episodes last for months.
Depression utterly _defies_ treatment attempts. It's one of those things like heart disease or lung cancer where it's much, much, easier to try and prevent than cure.
A psych prof I had a number of years back pointed out that the incidence rate for depression in women was ~2X the incidence of depression for men.
And she also pointed out that the rate of alcoholism in men was roughly 2X that of women.
She had her own conjecture (mood disorders wasn't her primary area of study) that men are more 'action-oriented'. She felt that the way that men handle setbacks was less likely to induce depression than the way women do.
What do men do when they lose their job? Get angry, get drunk, maybe start even start a fight! Also, men tend to (please excuse generalization here, take it for what it's worth) attribute negative events to external factors, whereas women in the same situation tend to look inwards. Now looking towards yourself might be more accurate when you lose your job or get dumped or something, but my prof's point was that it also tends to be the sort of 'habit of thought' more associated with depression.
Funny, there's also a psych concept called the 'sadder but wiser' hypothesis.
If you take someone, and ask them to interpret ambiguous information (show somebody a picture, ask them what's going on between the two people in the photo, etc), people who have had depression in the past tend to be better at interpreting ambiguous information. Not only that, but when a depressive is in the midst of a depressive episode, they get even better at it.
I heard from a friend of mine (phd philosophy student) about how one of his colleagues had 'hung out his shingle' offering 'philosophical counseling'.
The idea that, if you're not happy, it might have something to do with the way that you see the world, your assumptions about what you want, what makes life meaningful, etc.
Now, I think that sort of thing can help a lot of people, probably. But expecting that to cure somebody from a major depressive episode is like expecting to find a cream or a salve to re-grow a limb, unfortunately.
After living with two different women who had depression, I have times when I feel like the only treatment is quarantine.
"Conversely, suggesting the depression is NEVER self-inflicted is on par with suggesting that rape "victims" never falsely accuse anyone just for attention."
That's a very good point.
Although I would suspect that most people who are more in the 'author of their own misfortune' camp who are diagnosed with depression are mis-diagnosed.
Which is of course part of the problem. They talk about Tony Soprano being depressed on the show, but he does not by any means meet the diagnostic criteria.
As someone else mentioned, there's an issue of 'mood management' that you need to do if you suffer from depression, sorta 'preventative maintenance' on your psyche. Exercise regularly, eat properly, get enough sleep, etc. The same way a diabetic needs to watch what they eat.
But just 'cause you aggravate your condition by your bad habits of course doesn't necessarily mean you _caused_ your depression.
Absolutely right. I think the more nuanced position you describe is very much correct. If you struggle with depression, you need to do 'mood management' in the same sense that a diabetic needs to watch what they eat.
And, like the diabetic, the person who does "preventative maintenance" will have better outcomes.
But that's a far cry from what some other people are suggesting, that it's somehow a 'choice' to be happy or depressed, as if it's as simple as choosing coke vs pepsi or something.
Respectfully, unless you've been conducting top-secret research about the brain that you haven't shared with the rest of the world, you can't possibly know that.
The sopranos is a great example, actually, of somebody who isn't actually depressed, but has been mis-diagnosed as such. A major depressive episode doesn't look like anything depicted on 'the sopranos'. If you think Tony Soprano is depressed, then you haven't read the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria.
Having lived with two different women at times with serious clinical depression I can tell you it looks nothing like Tony Soprano. Unless I missed the episode where Tony spend 3 or 4 days crying and unable/unwilling to get out of bed except to go to the bathroom. Depression is utterly crippling, when someone's in a depressive episode, and it defies any attempt at treatment.
I agree completely that drug companies want to make everybody take a pill every time they feel a little bit blue 'cause they lost their job, but if you think you can 'think your way out of depression' then you have never seen a real life example.
If you'd ever seen anybody in the midst of a depressive episode, then you wouldn't say they chose that, any more than you'd say somebody with cancer chose to get sick.
I agree absolutely. But I'd suggest that in that example, they were probably mis-diagnosed. One of the criteria for clinical depression is that there hasn't been any major upsets like getting dumped or a parent dying or losing your job or something.
I think it was in 'reason' magazine, there was an article about the over-diagnosis of depression that was titled something like "Is Tony Soprano Depressed?".
I think a lot of the confusion is that people who are not _truly_ depressed are being treated as if they were (i.e., whip out the prescription pad!), even if they're not formally given the diagnosis of depression.
There was a study done back when they'd put electrodes in your brain, where you apply the electrodes to this part, the person smells something funny, put the electrodes somewhere else, they feel cold, etc, where they discovered that they could stimulate a part of the brain and make people laugh. Some psychologists did a study where they'd stimulate that 'laugh center' and then they'd ask the subject, "why did you laugh just now?".
Almost nobody said "Y'know, I really don't know, I just laughed, I guess", almost all subjects would say something like "well, they way that doctor's wearing his lab coat, he's so funny!"
The point is, if you have a brain state change, one tends to attribute a _cause_ to it, and if one isn't there, then people will use their imagination to fill in the blanks.
So maybe you really did just 'choose to be happy', but maybe you had a change in your brain state due to an unknown/hidden factor, and you attributed a cause to it.
If it was that easy to just figure out that "happiness is a choice", then everybody would do it.
Most people aren't comfortable with the idea that bad things happen to people through no fault of their own. If bad things can happen to you through no fault of your own, then I have to consider that terrible things might happen to me!
It's like people believing in a meritocracy. People who believe they owe all their success and material wealth to their own strength of character and nothing else, as if, had they been switched at birth and raised in the 3rd world or an inner-city slum, instead of a middle-class family in an industrialized country, that they'd still be programmers or stockbrokers or something.
Are you suggesting that the fact that SSRIs do nothing supports the assertion that people can just 'think themselves out of depression'? 'Cause I don't think you can draw that conclusion at all. The only conclusion I think you can draw from the fact that SSRIs are no better than placebo is that we don't understand the brain nearly as well as we thought.
I thought one of the diagnostic criteria for depression was that there wasn't something external to be 'fixed', i.e. loss of job, death in the family, etc?
I'd like to think that there's treatment options, but having had two long-term relationships with women who suffered from moderate-to-serious depression (I know, I know, I certainly had 'a type' when I was younger...), I'm not optimistic about treatment.
I read somewhere that statistically, if someone has had 2 or more clinical depressive episodes in their life, then you can contact them, at a random point in the future, and there is a 50% chance that they will be suffering from another major depressive episode. Given that that sort of thing tends to last 6-8 months, that's some pretty sinister statistics.
Saying that hobbies cured your depression is to fall into the same trap that gets people believing in faith healers. Most diseases are self-limiting, they either get better, or the patient dies. As time passes things get better. But you have no control group here, and have no real evidence to say that you have cured your depression via getting some hobbies.
It's the fair world bias.
/.ers are true believers in fair world and meritocracy.
Many
So the idea that bad things happen to people for no reason at all, through no fault of their own, makes people who believe that they're 100% responsible for the state of their life profoundly uncomfortable. So you get this 'blame the victim' mentality.
Comfortable, well educated, middle class white guys don't like being told that they didn't get where they are solely on their own strength of character.
I submit that anybody who says you can 'decide' to not be depressed has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.
Suggesting that depression is self-inflicted by people who would just rather be sad is on par with suggesting that a rape victim was asking for it. Anybody who's ever seen anyone suffering from genuine depression (as opposed to feeling down after you lost your job or something) knows that nobody would wish that on themselves any more than they'd wish cancer on themselves.
What are you retarded? Depression isn't 'feeling a little blue', it's when somebody doesn't want to get out of bed for 3 or 4 days, even when nothing's gone wrong in your life (death in the family, loss of job, etc). Have you ever been close to somebody with depression? After living with two different women who suffered from depression (I know, I certainly had 'a type' for a while...) I've started to think that the only treatment is quarantine. I don't know what causes depression, or how to treat it, but I do know it's not something you can 'think your way out of', like some sort of Tony Robbins infomercial.