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Comment by patatino | Hacker News Reader

My wife is a therapist and has so many clients who say they have a "small burnout" or something similar.

People fight to not have the label "depression" over them. It is really sad in my opinion. It's your health, it is time to put the pride away and don't care about terminology and do whatever you can to get better.

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It's wise to avoid getting any of these labels tagged onto you. There is a strong current of people that really believe that you are forever defined by a temporary state, something like people that really, really believe in the AA model of alcoholism think that people who once drank too much are forever and ever at least dry-drunks.

And I sure as hell wouldn't want to get onto any of these anti-depressants with all of their side effects and tapering problems if you ever want to get off them again.

Just because you have depression doesn't mean you have to go on anti-depressants. They are many other therapies available. As mentioned in another comment thread Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is very successful.

I dunno, I sort of accept that I am depressed, but I also definitely don't see it as a health issue. I've always been like this and for me, it's just part of my personality. It's not very severe, it does not preclude me from functioning in the society. Could I be happier on some drugs? Perhaps, but I don't like experimenting on my body. Btw I know a guy who's like me but a bit more severe, still functioning (no wive/kids, a bit of a shut-in, with a good remote job) and he's not taking meds either. I guess it's about accepting who you really are.

Except this goes in your permanent record and increases insurance fees from then on. At least that is how it works in Germany. The only way to avoid this is to pay in cash. It‘s probably also a good idea to not bring your phone, so that there is no location tracking of you.

With the exceptionally low amount of real detail in this post, I am left with the most salient question: How can it be on a permanent record at a company when all involved parties (except for you of course) are sworn to secrecy?

Given this critical center concern, your closing thought of location tracking (while relevant for a nation-state actor) pushes the whole thought process a bit over the line of sounding reasonable.

Pretty simple, if you visit a psychiatrist/psychotherapist you have to pay them somehow. One way of doing so is by using your medical insurance. So you hand over your medical insurance card, and now they know you’ve visited a psychotherapist. If at any later point in time you want to get work disability insurance or switch to private health insurance you have to disclose any preexisting medical conditions, since there is a record of you going to a therapist, they could otherwise retroactively find out that you got treated for depression and deny your claim if you have burn out.

> Except this goes in your permanent record and increases insurance fees from then on. At least that is how it works in Germany.

[citation needed]

Neither is true as far as I know. What do you refer to?

You will have to disclose the treatment if you apply for work disability insurance or switch to private health insurance later.

Yip, an similarly how many pilots with completely manageable temporal lobe epilepsy upgrade their diagnosis to trigeminal neuralgia.

Trigeminal neuralgia being impossible to refute and sharing the same medicine (tegretol).

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