If you view a world at a certain angle there is always something to worry about: 1. World in not perfect, it doesn't confirm to how we want it to be (and could not even in theory given that different people want it to be different) 2. The future cannot be predicted with 100% accuracy so even if all is perfect today you can worry that it will turn bad in the future.
When looking at the same reality one persons sees the situation as OK and another as a an endless and hopeless disaster it is hard to tell who is right. A depressed person would tell that most people around him are wrong and are optimistic only because they don't understand how bad all is.
That's incredibly reductive. I'm sure some people's depression can boil down to a matter of perspective, but it's naive to extrapolate that to everyone with depression.
I'm incredibly optimistic and am content with my position in life. My default state is being mindful of the present and I don't think about things too far into the future. I very rarely ever feel stressed out over things in life.
However, none of that changes the fact that I feel completely empty and find no joy in things. Interests are nearly non-existent, emotions dialed to 1, and the only thing I'm motivated to do is lay in bed staring at the ceiling... unless I'm on sertraline.
Admittedly that's just anecdotal, but I worked in a clinical neuroscience lab researching treatments for severe treatment-resistant depression (read: people who tried so many options including CBT that they even tried electroshock therapy). The only thing that helped those subjects was a regimen of personalized neuroimaging-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation for 10 minutes every hour for 10 hours every day for a week. Even then, it wasn't permanent. Some saw improvement for months, others only weeks.
For some people, it's not just a matter of "perspective".
I'm not telling it's a matter of perspective, my point is that I see no objective metrics to tell apart if the situation is bad so it's one expected to be depressed and when the situation is good (so only medication / therapy would help). And it makes discussions around this topic harder.
If its not just a matter of perspective and only medication can help, etc, then why do we call depression a "psychological" or "mental health" concern? Why isn't it just considered a neurological disease?
Depression is increasingly starting to be seen as a neurobiological disorder as we learn more.
In my own opinion, we need to stop viewing "mental health" as a separate class of conditions from general/physical health. A mental illness is a health/medical condition just like any other and shifting our views and diagnostic criteria in that direction would do a lot to remove the stigma associated with mental illness.
Someone with depression has a chronic illness, not a temporary "it's just in your head" condition.
It's not as liberating as you might think. A joyless existence is either suffering or nothingness. A life without meaning, either internal or external, is one where nothing is meaningful with no motivation thus one of crippling catatonia til death.
All I can say is just that it doesn't feel good and if you can't feel good about anything, your calculus of your life inevitably leads to the conclusion that existence isn't worth it.
There is only one cure/hack for Nihilism or similar...
Go somewhere where you need to work physically you az off to afford daily food. You will be so exhausted eventually that:
1 you will not have any energy left for thoughts.
2 If you have any energy left, you will give it to angriness which will lead to other circumstances which are none related to find the meaning of life.
I think a lot of people are conflating depression with "bad thoughts". That's just one possible symptom, usually as a result of a combination of both anxiety and depression.
I didn't have anxiety, just depression. I rarely thought. I existed on autopilot. I was physically exhausted on a daily basis as a division 1 athlete in college. Often went days without eating either because I simply forgot to eat or forgot to make time for it between classes and training. Didn't change anything.
I think something people are forgetting is that motivation is either driving you toward something you want or driving you away from things you specifically don't want. A complete lack of motivation means I wasn't motivated to do anything to get something, but also I wasn't motivated to anything to avoid something either. I wasn't motivated to eat to avoid hunger pangs. I wasn't motivated to quit my sport to avoid routine physical exhaustion. Instead, my empty autopilot existence just freely acted on the expectations of those around me as a proxy for motivation.
Yeah, most folk get the causation backwards. They think having meaning in life will pull you out of depression. It's the other way around. You have to get pulled out of depression to be able to find meaning in your life.
Realizing that some "chemical reactions" can change your destiny then further learning that when you want something, all the universe is bound to conspires in helping you to achieve it.
> "the etiology of depression is incredibly complex, the narrative that it is caused by a simple “chemical imbalance” persists in lay settings. We sought to understand where people are exposed to this explanation"
> "Onset of depression more complex than a brain chemical imbalance. It's often said that depression results from a chemical imbalance, but that figure of speech doesn't capture how complex the disease is. Research suggests that depression doesn't spring from simply having too much or too little of certain brain chemicals."
(These are not thoroughly checked articles, they're the first few search results; however claims that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance ought to be able to show where that idea originated, how the imbalance is measured in patients, where that hypothesis is supported by evidence, why antidepressents don't fix depression in half of patients, and several more suspicious things).
(I've written paragraphs and paragraphs thinking through some of my views in this thread. You wrote three words naming a thing which doesn't seem to exist. If you want more engagement, engage more. What words am I twisting? Where did you say it was anything more detailed than that? What behaviour that people "can't control alone" are you talking about?)
I did not and I am telling you I do not believe that it is that simple. You do not need to waste time arguing against your incorrect interpretation of my comment. If you need me to say I could have phrased it better, sure, I could have phrased it better. But I am now telling you exactly what I mean and think so we don’t need to do this song and dance.
For emphasis: I do not think it is simply/exclusively “chemical imbalance.”
But why do you think it is at all "chemical imbalance" when that doesn't seem to be an actual thing? What evidence convinced you? What measurements were taken on a human brain to diagnose the imbalance?
We can nitpick terminology all day but at the end of the day for you to assert that this is purely about perspective is patently absurd and I’m not going to let you distract from that fact. There are medical realities that impact people. There are external factors. There’s more to depression then recalibrating “how bad things actually are.”
This is the "people with anxiety should just stop being worried" attitude that failed to help for centuries. Whether or not you believe SSRI's are clinically effective, denying the existence of mental health disorders is not helping.
No, anxiety and depression aren't simply a matter of perspective.
Isn't people in the past had less control? There were dying from infections and not only had no vaccines and drugs they didn't understand how infections are spread. They also suffered from various natural disasters not having a protection a modern civilization gives us.
I don't know enough about how people lived in the past but I would tend to agree with you that they might have had less control than us on many things. But what I meant was that it depends on how much control you *think* you have rather than the control you actually have.
So I think a lot of it is about perception, in 100 years time people might wonder why we weren't all depressed because we had a life expectancy of "just" 80/90 years, but for us it's just normal and expected
> You might be depressed because you life objectively sucks
The problem with this that to a bad situation different people react differently - some trying to do what they can to improve the situation or at least don't make it worse and some give up and let situation to slip and become worse and worse (becoming a self fulfilling prophesy). It's not a choose one makes I think (it's likely a biological predisposition) but the difference is still exists.
People prone to depression genuinely believe the main (only) reason for a depression that the life sucks and as a result they avoid medical help and don't do anything which could help them.
In many places water is pumped from deep underground aquifers but leaks go to surface ground waters and could quickly end-up in the Ocean so aquifers are still depleted.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
Access to Apple ecosystem - iCloud e. t. c. If one uses iPhone it's quite convenient to have access to the same cloud services from a laptop. FindMy is a big one for me - if I lost or misplaced my phone I can use FindMy on Macbook to locate it. While it's technically possible to use FindMy via web you'll need the phone as 2FA which is not an option when I'm trying to find it.
An exporter could in theory reduce prices specifically for the US market to avoid sell volume decline (which happens when consumers face higher prices because of tariffs). But in most cases they cannot because profit margins are no high enough to begin with.
> Foreign exporters absorb only about 4% of the tariff burden—the remaining 96% is passed through to US buyers.
Unfortunately (for sellers) tariff decrease trade volume so even if only 4% absorbed by a seller they have much bigger losses from sell volume decline.
Economy is not a zero sum game - almost everyone looses from tariffs - consumers no longer can afford the same some things they did buy in the past because tariffs increased prices. Sellers cannot decrease prices because in many cases it will make their business unprofitable but they still loose on the volume.
China is also getting coal from Russia at rock bottom prices. Coal is no longer cost efficient source but for a big country like China shifting away will take time.
> Sea transport isn't going to get any faster - probably ever.
It seems to me that modern freight ships are optimized for capacity/cost ratio and not for speed - hull shape is very close to a box with a short bow/stern attached. I'm not an expert but it looks like if you make the hull longer and a bow/stern narrow you can go faster. Military ships are optimized for speed and their hull shape is not a box.
When looking at the same reality one persons sees the situation as OK and another as a an endless and hopeless disaster it is hard to tell who is right. A depressed person would tell that most people around him are wrong and are optimistic only because they don't understand how bad all is.
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