Hacker news is good for intelligent discussion, but when the topic is on something that isn't empirically measure-able (IE: mental health in this scenario) conversation goes downhill pretty quickly. I'm quite concerned about how the majority are medicating so quickly, early and in a way that's mostly unchallenged.
I mean we barely understand the I/O of the brain, yet we're claiming some pretty heavy positive bias on chemical remediation. It's a pretty farked situation, being unable to talk about it in a neutral environment frustrates me to no end. The top comment on this thread though, perfectly sums up my perspective on depression:
"It's the realization that I was depressed for actual emotional reasons and not just because of some putative neurochemical imbalance, the idea of which in such huge numbers makes absolutely no evolutionary sense. A trait this common is not a disorder---it's a survival mechanism."
I want to understand depression, it's just such a hard issue to tackle scientifically. The scientific method takes the subject out of the equation, nuking any sort of bias. But that doesn't work when the issue that needs to be understood IS the subject.
I need data, subjective perspective from all walks of life is the best dataset I think I can use to shape my understanding. I want to talk about depression from a neutral, logical, mindful and philosophical perspective. Maybe then I might understand where, why and how medication would or should come into play.
But how to distinguish this from absolute nonsense? Intuition is probably the number one thing -- what smells like BS? It's not a perfect substitute for objective knowledge, but I think as engineers and scientists, we undervalue our subjective life experiences in shaping our view. Also, it helps to have a discerning eye for the macroscopic message the author is trying to deliver. Many times, we tend to attack the articulation or delivery of a thought, and miss the underlying message. In the context of the author of that article was saying, we can all agree that we have a poor understanding of pharmaceuticals (SSRI's in particular), and it helps to stay with the feeling of depression to know what your body is trying to convey to you, rather than flood the body with more input to make the "negative" emotion leave. I took that thought and discarded all the other specifics -- because I don't expect anyone to be 100% right, and hence I take the kernel in each viewpoint and leave the husk.