People can die from giving up the fight
medicalxpress.com
medicalxpress.com
Cichlids tend to be highly territorial and socially competitive. They're constantly vying for some rock or hole to "own". Usually it is recommended to overstock a cichlid tank slightly in order to disperse aggression. With three fish it's easy for the most aggressive alpha to pick on and injure the weakest link. With twelve fish the most aggressive alpha will have that many more others to compete with/take out his aggression on. Sometimes, however, the weakest link still emerges. When this happens multiple fish might pick on the weakling and chase him/her around, disallowing them from entering any kind of territory among the rocks (they like rocks). They drive this weaker fish to stay toward the top reaches of the tank. Eventually the fish just starts hanging out there naturally because it knows it'll get bullied if it comes down. Then, after some time of giving up on fighting for its own territory and competing with the other fish, the weakling just...gives up. Even if the other fish have left them alone by then, and the fish isn't physically injured or lacking food or anything, the fish doesn't even try to reenter "society" anymore and just...dies.
I got my cichlids a couple of years ago and have since decided that while I will continue to care for these fish as best I can as I took on that responsibility, I'm not going to be getting any more fish for ethical reasons.
I find your ethics intriguing (in a positive way, to be clear).
Personally I feel better about keeping dogs in captivity than fish. Dogs are domesticated and want to be around us. Not only that but they can be around us fully, as opposed to sitting in a box for their entire life. They love and care for us in their own way, are very in tune with our emotions (and we with theirs), and have evolved to live alongside us (if one chooses the appropriate kind of dog for them). Where I live the laws on keeping dogs are more strict than some countries, and dogs enjoy a lot of access with their owners. They can't be left alone for more than a few hours at a time, so if a person is to keep a dog they either take it (almost) everywhere with them or sign up for dog daycare where the dog gets to spend the work day playing with other dogs and humans. I think dogs are in tune with us enough to be legitimately happy, and life alongside humans has become the "natural habitat" for many types of dogs (again assuming one chooses the appropriate dog).
This sounds amazing! Where is this if I may ask? My experience in Australia is that there are a lot of dogs and dog owners, but overall it is not very dog friendly at all. For example you can't take pets on trains and it is uncommon to take them to work.
https://www.vic.gov.au/rentfair/pets-are-welcome.html
I've also noticed more workplaces allowing pets to be brought in occasionally, and a significant number of cafes and shops allowing pets in and even supplying water bowls and an area for them to tie up and rest while you shop/eat.
This study explicitly says this is different from clinical depression. From the examples they chose in the article, I hypothesise the difference is between acute/imposed and chronic/natural psychological states.
There are a few ways to try to try and fix such a situation, including quarantine. One example is rearranging the rockscape in the tank to force the rest of the fish to re-establish the territories amongst themselves and take focus off of the weakling for long enough for him to maybe take a spot back.
> The term ‘give-up-itis’ describes people who respond to traumatic stress by developing extreme apathy, give up hope, relinquish the will to live and die, despite no obvious organic cause. This paper discusses the nature of give-up-itis, with progressive demotivation and executive dysfunction that have clinical analogues suggesting frontal-subcortical circuit dysfunction particularly within the dorsolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate circuits. It is hypothesised that progressive give-up-itis is consequent upon dopamine disequilibrium in these circuits, and a general theory for the cause and progression of give-up-itis is presented in which it is proposed that give-up-itis is the clinical expression of mental defeat; in particular, it is a pathology of a normal, passive coping response.
"It is hypothesized" is the closest it gets to evidence. This level of research seems to be that journal's specialty:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Hypotheses#Peer_review...
This article is a press release that drastically overstates the already weak claims of the paper itself.
"There are ideas that may seem implausible but which are very important if true. This is the only place you can get them published."
I'm torn, because on the one hand I wish everything from MH came with a giant "UNPROVEN AND DOES NOT FIT YOUR SCHEMA OF AN ACADEMIC PAPER" disclaimer, and that that would pass through when adapted to other media (like, say, this press release). On the other hand I basically share concerns about the peer review process and the stranglehold it can have on research.
These bonds root deep in us.
- tako tsubo syndrom, emotional shock => hormone cascade => myocard deformation to the point of uselesness
- arteries constrictions, nearly all your arteries (even micro capillaries) have tiny valve-rings, since fear can induce vasoconstriction to ensure high blood supply, I think high anxiety can force your system in that state for prolonged amount of time which will lead to blood flow disruption (tiny clots, mild hypoxia) and derail organs on the way.
I definitely think there's a correlation between your mental and physical health, but it's definitely not a simple one.
It's pretty simple, actually. The body cannot live (thrive) without the mind.
To actually know this you'd need a group of random patients to "give up the fight" and compare them to a control group. And you'd need the caregivers to not know which group is which.
A coach tells the team: "you lost because you gave up" -- to which they respond, "we gave up because we lost."
The coach is trying to tell the team that giving up before the outcome is actually certain is what caused the loss, and the team is incorrect to claim that they had lost before they actually had.
But you can do experiments like psychological interventions (counseling, inspirational/depressing media content) and see if some tend to cause statistically significant biological changes.
There are some obvious cases like if you hurt yourself and don't care enough to clean up or seek care, you risk infection or permanent injury.
Because otherwise, there's a million statistical biases that can creep into that outcome.
"So, do you want to enter into a 50/50 lottery, where we will either try to treat you, or let you die in peace? You don't get a choice of which, by the way."
Even if I was a cancer patient with an extremely poor outlook, I would probably have some pretty strong preference in the question of whether I wanted chemo, or end-of-life care.
You /could/ try to control that by try to separate the groups into "type of cancer" and "stage", so that you're comparing like-to-like when looking at mortality. But even then there are problems ("stages" are subjective, and there's evidence that they're slowly shifting so that old stage three would now be considered stage four), different Drs may be more aggressive at directing people to chemo, etc.
I think there's also basic issues of what we're comparing, e.g. are you undergoing chemo in an attempt to live a bit longer, or as an attempt to not die. Because at the "you're going to die within 3-6 weeks" you're going to get radically different survival rates for chemo than "you're going to die in 3-6 years". Which makes me wonder how you would deal with "EoL" chemo that does cause the cancer to die back?
I'm having trouble wording it, but what I'm curious about is what happens when you have a patient that
1. Is dying, and given 3 months to live. Can choose between chemo and hospice 2. Chemo successfully pushes the cancer back 3. Cancer comes back 5 years later 4. Patient chooses hospice 5. Patient "dies in hospice" 3 months later.
Which group should the patient be placed in?
This is why I'm glad nothing I do impacts peoples health/safety/etc
The other responses are better, but I think the stories of the prisoners should be enough to believe it. They watched people around them go through the progression with no apparent illness or other causes of decline. They didn't mention but I don't think they were just talking about old people where life may have just run its course. "This sucks, I'm done" seems to fit better than anything.
You don't always need (or can afford to have) a full control group and 100% separation causation from correlation.
Sometimes you can just draw the obvious conclusions from the events you see and only rationally eliminate other causes.
Most people seem to write off psychosomatic illnesses as they don't fit into their models of how the world should work, but their existence and ways to resolve them are well documented and doctors frequently find psychological or neurological ways to resolve or alleviate them (e.g. prescribing antidepressants to chronic pain sufferers).
The book also goes into how cancer can, in some circumstances, be hugely affected by the mental outlook of the patient, but for some reason this continues to be controversial in a way that 'dying of a broken heart' is not.
It's .. somehow criminal to me.
If you want annoying go for "Idiopathic". For example I have idiopathic optic nerve hypoplasia. The last three words mean my optic nerve is narrow than it should be - I have a gap in one quadrant of my peripheral vision - the "idiopathic" bit means they don't know why.
Oooh, sort of like "not otherwise specified" meaning "dunno what's going on".
http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/research-some-cancer-diagno...
The article has not a very good vibe to it, tbh.
It is a very persuasive argument about how one can deal with even the most 'hopeless' situation.
It is also a brilliant description of the psychological effects of camp life.
The way he described the odd dislocated feeling they got when the allies set them free was particularly memorable for me.
The book focused on things which I found to be subtly more disturbing, like the ability of an overweight Nazi guard to curse a death camp prisoner for being "swine, who doesn't know how to work!" while the prisoner is literally working themselves to death in front of the guard to just stands around being fat and worthless. Does the guard not see the irony? How is it possible that he does not? Do I myself hold any absurd views like that Nazi guard?
Ultimately the book showed me that there are decent and indecent people in any group, and made me want to be a decent person. I wouldn't say the book is depressing.
Viktor has a very objective tone of voice. He never paints himself as a saint, a martyr or a superman. This creates a certain feeling of detachment that shields from the full emotional impact of what he actually went through.
Overall, however, the book is about survival and the strength of human spirit. Especially since Mr. Frankl personally went through hell, retained his sanity and will to live, and wrote the book.
It's a book that gave me hope and strength in dark times.
Also his book are secretly 2 books for which this part is the first part. The second part is about Logotherapy, something he developed after WWII based on the insights he gained from people in concentration camps.
It is totally demoralizing to feel that there is no possibility of success.
Vivid thoughts of violent revenge are the only sparks of life I feel anymore.
Be careful indulging thoughts of revenge. They will subside with time, but then decades later you find yourself in a dark place again and all those re-enforced feelings will bubble up again.
Thoughts of revenge are detrimental to success. You aren't guaranteed to be successful no matter how hard you try, but you certainly can't be successful if you ruminate on revenge.
Please if you own a gun, then find a friend with a safe and give it to them. Liquidate all your cryptocurrency so you don't hire a hitman. Don't let this brief period destroy your entire future.
There are people whose children were murdered in front of them by a Nazi soldier and never got "violent revenge" and went on to live fulfilling honorable lives. Is your injustice anywhere near as bad ? Please find the strength to find a way to get through this without resorting to violence.
I can't imagine that any parent who saw their child murdered wouldn't at least entertain the thought of revenge. But I also see a profound power imbalance in your story. The powerful can act with impunity. Give the parent the power of reprisal and things start to look different. The child might have lived.
Perhaps there would be a bit less corruption and dishonesty in this world if there was a bit more fear of real consequences for ones actions.
Of course many people with depression don't just die of being depressed. That's not what this article is describing.
Depression isn't severe trauma. Severe trauma can cause depression, and what's explained here, is that it can cause death by psychosomatic cause.
Well, what one consciously expresses is not always a match for their inner state.
Second, it's another thing to say "oh god, take me now" than to consider yourself as nearing death. One is a kind of negative wish, while the other is how you view yourself objectively to be going to.
Besides, biological processes are not physical laws. They are statistical phenomena, and people can differ. It's what happens in the aggregate and for most that's examined. In that sense, a counter-example is not enough to take down the phenomenon.
In any case, glad it worked out for you.
You have to be pretty damn anal to think using a colloquial term suddenly discredits all the other information in that article.
There is some validity to his point though. Every time I read the word "give-up-itis" I reflexively feel negative feelings towards the article. It feels as if they are trying to be funny but not in a good way.
If they had to come up with a "medical" term for "give-up-itis", I might guess it'd be "apathetic psychogenic decay", or else some Latinized phrase. https://translate.google.com/#auto/la/disease%20of%20giving%... yields "De morbo dare sursum", who knows.
I also suspect this research is early enough that it doesn't make sense to choose an official term and commit to it yet. I am in favor of people not polluting the namespace of terms with things that, upon closer examination, should have been named something else.
Choosing to continue the tradition of naming things in a way such that only a relatively small chunk of society would immediately understand their meaning is something that I've never understood.
Jargon has its place. In regards to medical jargon, it serves as both a signal knowledge of medicine and pointing to a specific idea. Using plain language may or may not refer to the specific idea at hand and it definitely signals a lack of knowledge.
It's the same reason people who use computers say "cursor" instead of "pointy thing".
The precision is certainly a reasonable argument, yet that may be begging the question. The reason these words are more precise than alternatives is because these words are the ones chosen to associate with whatever 'thing' we might be referencing. Blue berry is hardly precise in terms of the words used, yet you know exactly what I am referencing with those words. Had we adopted such a tradition there we might find ourselves calling them vaccinium cyanococcus in a parallel dimension, and certainly there they would likely find the notion of blueberry to be an insufficiently precise alternative.
A lot of the words with these roots are international, or nearly so:
Polish: brontozaur; Spanish: brontosaurio, Slovak: brontosaurus; French: brontosaure; German: Brontosaurus.
These kinds of words actually make English easier to learn for people coming from numerous other languages.
Sure, let's be the laughing stock and replace that with "thunder lizard" and "underheating".
Still I can't see how someone in the medical profession would stick the -itis suffix on something that isn't any sort of inflammation, even out of jest.
Even, say, "give-up-osis" would be an improvement; an "osis" is just a condition (neurosis, psychosis, ...).
"itis" is used in the vernacular for making up words for obsessive preoccupations or imaginary illnesses and such; that formation style is not fitting in a serious medical setting at all.
She never talked about the cruelties she and her family had to endure from the Nazis. And in the end, she didn’t seem to even remember. It was simply too much for her to ever cope.
Just an n=1, but personally I am convinced that you can die from giving up (or a broken heart, on another matter).
I would have just assumed this to be depression or a part of it. However, the article is claiming this symptom is something different?
I have found my new metal band name, and feel freshly inspired to write some new tunes.
Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Give-up-Itis!
> Medical Hypotheses is a forum for ideas in medicine and related biomedical sciences. It will publish interesting and important theoretical papers that foster the diversity and debate upon which the scientific process thrives. [. . .] Medical Hypotheses was therefore launched, and still exists today, to give novel, radical new ideas and speculations in medicine open-minded consideration, opening the field to radical hypotheses which would be rejected by most conventional journals. Papers in Medical Hypotheses take a standard scientific form in terms of style, structure and referencing. The journal therefore constitutes a bridge between cutting-edge theory and the mainstream of medical and scientific communication, which ideas must eventually enter if they are to be critiqued and tested against observations.
Not saying it's completely without merit, but this should not be interpreted as a scientific study of any type.
That means that the story title is not accurate, as it declares the thing exists, when the entire point of the paper is that it may exist.
To be fair that is on par with a lot of science journalism (though I do realize this article was published by the journal itself). But I take the point and on a closer read I understand the original comment a bit better, the journal isn't actually purporting to put forth scientific studies, just hypotheses.