Depression’s Upside | Hacker News Reader

Depression’s Upside

nytimes.com

74 pointstokenadult23 comments

There's productive depression and unproductive depression. Some people aren't compelled into productive depression.

Productive depression is a dignified depression¸ where the person realizes that the object of the angst is a little elusive. They know what the problem isn't, and it is never the most obvious thing. They do their best to manage it and figure out what the real problem is.

Unproductive depression is simply where you stop thinking about the problem too soon. Either blaming a facade of the depression, the most obvious and apparent source of the depression, or by giving up hope that the facade is solvable. Essentially, these people give up and stagnate.

There is nothing more pathetic than seeing someone profusely blame the wrong thing for their depression. There's little chance of these people escaping into productive work, because they've given up. They can't even start by realizing that what they think is depressing them, might not actually be what is depressing them. That's step point five!

Depression does not make genius.

Where do I think productive depression originates? Well, I partly think it's a conscious choice where the intelligent person chooses not to ignore a problem, and there are a lot of problems to be depressed about. Stuff that does not need to exist. This really is only my opinion, but we shouldn't have to deal with depression. We shouldn't need to "cope" with stupid, arcane ideas. But we'll just have to manage for now.

> Productive depression is a dignified depression¸ where the person realizes that the object of the angst is a little elusive

I think their theory is that this state (realizing what is the object and why it is elusive) is the healthy outcome of a depression, and it can either happen naturally or with the help of therapy. Using their metaphor, what you call "unproductive depression" is like a person hallucinating or dying with a 40º+ fever.

As the article says, malfunctioning isn't a privilege of the body, minds can do it too.

So the word "pathetic" is uncalled for. William Styron wrote a fantastic book about what it is like to be depressed: "Darkness Visible". Well worth a read.

From my comment:

There is nothing more pathetic than seeing someone profusely blame the wrong thing for their depression.

I'm wasn't specifically talking about people who casually blame the wrong thing. Maybe I need a stronger word than profusely....

On Darwin's side of the spectrum you have, well, Darwin. On other end of the spectrum you have people coming up with intricate ideas about how minorities are destroying everyone's lives.

Even though there is a lot of mental work in carefully choosing their illusory axioms to make the rest of their ideas naturally fall into place, I am very reluctant to call that work productive and I do think that it's pathetic.

Of course, the very same mistake was made with this person, who profusely blames the wrong thing, as the person who casually blames the wrong thing: they stopped trying to find the real problem too soon. There are only two words that come to mind: undignified and arrogant.

Arrogant that they're questioning the wrong thing and not questioning whether the output of their thought process is precise, and therefore they're not questioning the thought process itself.

Perhaps it is questioning that compels people into great, productive work. Depressed or not! Darwin held himself to high standards while he simultaneously, and perpetually, questioned his thoughts and the results of his thoughts. He did this to a point where his thoughts were very precise and congruent with the real world.

I do not think it was the depression that compelled him into productivity, but his dignity. Compelled into a productive depression! He couldn’t just shrug off his depression since that would mean ignoring certain issues. Again, this really is only my own speculation, but I don't think depression needs to exist in the amount that it does today. I don't think we're born depressed and very rarely chemically imbalanced.

Since so many minds are malfunctioning, these are not problems of the individual but signify a much larger problem: a problem of a malfunctioning thinking on a global scale. It is how people mis-attribute this malfunction that I find pathetic.

This "malfunctioning of thinking" expresses itself a lot in life. It accumulates and wears down on people to a point of depression or lethargy.

I should also point out that I don’t mean “pathetic” in the sense of “hate.” When it comes down to it, the problem is too complicated to just blame an individual and I can't expect everyone to have this natural dignity that Darwin possessed, or the will to teach it to themselves. I feel more compassionate at the individual's level than ticked off.

The reason I’m ranting a little bit is because I take issue with glorifying the wrong thing (not you, but implied in the article). In this case: depression. I hope this makes my thoughts on this clearer.

Also, checking out that book.

I'd blame vitamin D deficiency for the bulk of depression cases in the modern world. Indoors culture, heavy clothing, an aversion to organ meats - which the biology tells us are the most nutrient-rich parts. It adds up to a massive nutrition gap, one only slightly offset by the tiny amounts added to dairy.

I recently started taking vitamin D and I feel great. I'm more energetic, sleep better, and, yes, feel happier. So that's one data point in favor of your thesis.

I'll add a second one where I also experienced all of those positive symptoms. Plus, I had trouble for years staying awake in the the mid-afternoon. During grad school it got so bad I had to put a futon in my office. A few days of Vitamin D supplements later, the problem completely went away.

I've continued to take D as I've had my levels tested six times in the last year and they're still low. But the positive symptoms remain.

I'm going to be _really_ grateful to you guys if this ends up being true for me. Going out to get some now :)

I should add that to really know how much you should be taking, you should have your blood levels tested, as different people absorb it differently. Here's a post on William Davis' Heart Scan Blog (oriented toward heart health, which includes Vitamin D supplementation):

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/getting-vitamin-d-...

He suggests about 6000 units/day as average.

The implicit assumption of this article is that tendency to depression is a heritable genetic trait which is preserved in the population by selection pressure. It goes on to seek an explanation for the prevalence of depression in terms of greater reproductive fitness. The risk is that by not examining this assumption, it may be laboring under a misapprehension. Depression might be a learned behavior: more "software" than "hardware." The near-total failure to validate anti-depressants as an effective treatment for depression[1] suggests that we don't have a clue as to its actual etiology.

[1] E.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...

  "Given these results, there seems to be little reason to 
  prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most 
  severely depressed patients, unless alternative treatments 
  have failed to provide a benefit. This study raises
  serious issues that need to be addressed surrounding drug
  licensing and how drug trial data is reported."

Update after reading the whole thing: I like the practical developments this research has led to in Thomson's own practice. E.g. (page 6)

  “What you’re trying to do is speed along the rumination 
  process,” Thomson says. “Once you show people the dilemma
  they need to solve, they almost always start feeling 
  better.”

But he seems to have really been reaching with his scientific conclusions.

I think the increase in depression may be a result of changes in the human environment over time. Depression may be an evolutionary acceptable downside to some other useful trait, which is simply more common now.

This is pure BS, but an example might be: People respond to rewards with mild addictive behavior, which a useful adaption. However, in our day to day lives there are few short term rewards which messes with the reward pathways in our brain leading to depression. So the an effective treatment might be playing games with a specific type of reward structure.

PS: Depression is a vary generic problem, so there might be hundreds of different failures that all result in the same symptoms.

How prevalent are anti-depressants?

I get the impression that a large percentage of the american youth are on Prozac or others, and/or even medication for ADD. And also that the normal response for depression is medication.

In the Netherlands this is quite the reverse. Anti-depressants (AFAIK) are only used as a last resort, or as a kick-start for the healing process when it is a very deep depression. Kids in highschool taking drugs against psychological disorders is almost unheard of, except in clear cases of ADD.

I suspect that reports of this are highly exaggerated by the people that think that every problem is solvable through 'putting your nose to the grindstone' and that everything else is just 'weakness.'

I disagree. The idea that our society hyper-medicalizes and therefore overmedicates human problems is, to my mind, very sensible. It by no means follows that all emotional problems are "just weakness" and that the solution is to pull oneself up by the bootstraps. Indeed, given that the latter is the ultimate in crude ideas of how to approach the psyche, it actually goes hand-in-hand with the hypermedical approach: if that's the only alternative, it's no wonder that people resort to drugs.

This seems rather untrue. "In Nederland worden steeds vaker antidepressiva voorgeschreven. In 2007 kregen 937.000 mensen in totaal 6,7 miljoen recepten tegen depressie voorgeschreven. Het aantal mensen dat antidepressiva gebruikt is sinds 1999 elk jaar met 6 procent gegroeid." (Wikipedia) 937.000 people out of 16 million (5.8%) isn't quite the "11% of women and 5% of men in the non-institutionalized population" Wikipedia has for the US, but it's certainly not "quite the reverse", either.

Blogging as therapy?

He cites as evidence a recent study that found “expressive writing” — asking depressed subjects to write essays about their feelings — led to significantly shorter depressive episodes.

Perhaps, though I suspect many a depressed person might be prefer to write in private. And I would think the goal of the writing would be focused on the problem, not an ongoing commentary on the state of Ruby, democracy in America, or Julie & Julia recipes. An excellent article.

Maybe they have no one to talk to.

I think this is part of my problem - I don't have a close friend that I can talk to about stresses at home, etc..

On a similar note, I found this book http://www.amazon.com/Solitude-Return-Self-Anthony-Storr/dp/... to be quite interesting. It discusses about solitude, its necessity and other related issues like depression in detail.

One page:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.ht...

http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2009-10-29-223937_the_powe...

I don't have time right now to look for the source, but it's reasonably well knows that depression improves critical thinking directly. (maybe this? http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a785... )

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