Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Depression is a funny thing to write about. If someone is depressed reading about someone else's depression is preaching to the choir, but if they aren't or have never experienced it, it's hard to understand what's going on. But for both groups it's kind of crushing because it reminds you that some people just might not ever be happy and it's not really their fault and that's hard in a culture which says "be happy" or "just do X and you'll be happy".

I saw the article mentions Noonday Demon. I've never read it but a book that cites it and I personally found a depression classic is Lincoln's Melancholy. It is remarkable both how miserable he was and how far he drove himself because of or in spite of it. I don't think you can know Lincoln, the Civil War, or his impact on the US without understanding his depression.

Unfortunately it also makes a lot of modern politicians look very superficial and fake in comparison.

https://www.amazon.com/Lincolns-Melancholy-Depression-Challe...

I think David Foster Wallace's description of depression is one of the best I've read.

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

In my opinion it doesn't have a lot to do with happiness or unhappiness. Unhappiness is an emotion that at least fills the void. I'm unhappy now and I'm happy about that because I have a plan to get happy. Clinical depression is about the void, the nothingness, can't find a reason to live and don't want to live because this emptiness and emotionless existence is dreadful.

I find that stoicism helps with that feeling. Forces you to at least be somewhat functional.

Learning about stoicism definitely changed my outlook and attitude towards a lot of things, overall a much calmer and happier person even months into practicing the techniques

Do you think it has to do with being detached socially from other people, even family members?

For me it had more to do with being detached from myself.

No.

My experience with depression is that it does what it can to feed itself. Whatever triggers it (for me I am certain it is brain chemistry) doesn't really matter.

Depressed people detach socially from their support network because that feeds the depression, and any plausible explanation feels as true as any law of physics. All you have to do is pick one: "These people don't care about me/They can never understand/They are better off without me as I will just hurt them."

One way I describe depression is that it's a detachment from reality. Whatever reality you are actually in, depression bends and warps it to such a degree that mentally healthy people could not understand even when described to them.

I can vouch for this. I had a small group of close friends, who all seemed to tolerate the fact that it doesn't naturally occur to me to pick up the phone, invite them over etc. But after 2 years of serious depression, they've all drifted away from me. I don't blame them: I imagine it just becomes untenable to keep trying with someone who doesn't answer their phone, or never replies to your messages...

Not in my case. I have family and friends close by. I'm convinced it's something wrong with the chemical levels and receptors and in the brain, something that pharmaceuticals can help with. It doesn't have to be standard pharma: I'm reading encouraging reports about Kratom, LSD microdoses, Ketamine, and Psilocybin (Mushrooms.) I take Abilify which works wonders for me to keep the Black Dog away. Now that they off-patent (or something, I don't really understand it) it's cheaper. My initial look at it was going to cost around $900 a month so I could not continue even though it worked, so I suffered for another 2 years before I crashed. Now it's cheaper and working fine.

That can play a part.

I think it works the other way around, it causes detachment. Which doesn't help, sure, it may become a new source of despair. But getting rid of that one source won't change a thing, there are plenty of others.

I am fortunate in that I don't really suffer anymore; as I was "getting better" one thing I came to embrace was how little sense it made. For awhile I kept a journal, and if I read the entries from the bad times aloud, I'd be constantly apologizing for them and admitting that the feelings didn't make any sense. I intellectually understood the meanings of the words, but the emotions behind them felt foreign. I mean, I remembered feeling that way, but I couldn't understand why. As things improved, I was able to get to a place where I could just resign myself to being hopeless for no real reason, but with the understanding that, in my case, it would fade on its own.

That wasn't the "fix", but just an interesting step along the way.

Depression probably isn't a single illness, and most forms probably don't have a single cause but are a complex mix of "bio psycho social" stuff that reinforce each other.

The void-home is a coping mechanism individuals use to mute their internal disappointment of unfulfilled aspirations embedded in world-view & the vanishing of environmental low-hanging fruit & the consternation brewing according to the matter which makes up their body.

If you are confident in having learned that humanity means kindness, virtue, ubuntu, you may begin to experience symptoms of satisfaction, comfort, optimism, interesting challenges, self-realization and a steady flow of rewards.

The opposite absorbable world lesson the cruelest kind of learned helplessness. Look what fear has done to my body [0]. You might see humanity as fundamentally anti-human, kindness as ironic, nihilism as the stablest philosophy, even if you understand that, logically, the conclusion of nihilism is bound to invalidate the conclusion of nihilism itself.

Folks often invoke "curiosity killed the cat" as a way to communicate "unenriched and empowerment-lacking people are prone to self-annihilation while in their search for harmony". What they don't do is follow the thinking to its conclusion: "But the cat was simply trying to gain root access beyond a seemingly impenetrable social inertia. The cat knew that the subjectivity of contribution to the outcomes of local events was far more rewarding than the dissonance of a depressive hedonism trap.

It's always unexpected - if you could expect you would always appropriately manage your negative expectations, you would call such periods of discontent "vacations."

Like a situation where you're trapped in an action-selection fixed-point of free-energy-dissipation-minimization.

Like a phantom limb, you realize that the psychic model/hierarchical system of values/your world-view ultrafilter/your "rosebud" you placed faith into, you begin to realize that the abstraction might not really have captured every partial ordering/relation/utopia you could have benefited from knowing sooner.

Yup. Telling someone with depression to just "be happy" is like telling a paraplegic to just get up and walk.

I agree. Yet scientific and/or moral discussions of depression and other mental disorders are becoming increasingly taboo.

"Just run it off."

Yeah. "No pain, no gain" also comes to mind.

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