Hacker News Reader

Comment by brookside | Hacker News Reader

But a depressed person often is a negative person, and moods can spread. Think about working for a boss who is miserable and passes that feeling down onto people who work for her. If that boss goes to to a psychiatrist/therapist because she is having trouble getting along with the people in her life, that psychiatrist/therapist will likely say she depressed, never diagnose her as being a "negative person" which is also a true assessment, and how people working with her would describe her.

I'm happy to be open about mental health issues. I have had enough negative experiences with, and read broadly enough about the theory behind psychotherapy to have come to my own conclusion that it makes about as sense as most dogmatic religions (very little).

View on HN

>But a depressed person often is a negative person, and moods can spread.

That's pretty stereotypical. The happiest people on the outside can hide some pretty dark clouds on the inside; especially in a work environment where outward appearances are important. In fact, I would suggest that the majority that are depressed don't show any outwards signs to working colleagues.

I'm in the Robin Williams category of depressives. I know how desperate and tiring it is fighting off those causeless bouts, and so I try to make life as enriching as I can for people around me.

It's my way of compensating for every relentless, hammering, baseless urge to die that I've survived alone over the years. It took a long time for me to get that people don't typically understand that it's more like hiding that you have cancer than not being able to cheer up. You can hide the symptoms of both, you don't ask for either of them, and they might both kill you, but somehow you're responsible when you get depression but not cancer.

We can be responsible for our depressions though. The CBT paradigm is that thoughts cause emotions, and if we change our thoughts (which we can have control over) our mood will shift. So there is some self-determination, I don't think the typical comparison with cancer is a good one. (Obviously you can give yourself cancer with behaviors like smoking, but once you have cancer you have little internal control to make it go away. Not so with depression.)

Absolutely, but I can almost guarantee you the person who presents as anxious/tortured wreck is not secretly beaming with contentment inside.

As is well known among people who study anxiety, commonly anxiety leads to stress, stress leads to depression, the depression may cause problems, e.g., in career, that leads to more stress and, thus, more depression and eventually clinical depression which is dangerous as in fatal from suicide. Then, for the depression it has been common to give some pills that, bummer, increase the chances of suicide.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com