Why do people keep treating depression as a medical condition? You are depressed because your life sucks. Fix it or accept it. <eom>
One of the symptoms of depression is ahedonia, the inability to experience pleasure. It is a very strange experience.
One day I went outside and it was a beautiful sunny day, and I couldn't enjoy it. Not that I was so sad the sunny day didn't matter. It did nothing. It was like I was looking at it through a store window, but my world was overcast and gray.
One day I went to play at a pool with my newborn son. It was a beautiful day, he was laughing, kids were frolicking and playing. I felt nothing. Not the slightest reaction. As if they weren't there.
I have a beautiful life. No financial stress. My family is awesome. My job is awesome. I don't do anything reckless or self-destructive. I have lots of hopes for the near future. But many days, I didn't care if I lived or died, didn't care if I missed so much work I got fired, didn't care if I alienated my family, didn't care that I was cold even though there was a blanket within arm's reach.
Medication resulted in a nearly immediate improvement, and a slow return to normalcy. And it is definitely the medication. One day I missed my meds, and I went into a three day long tailspin during which I couldn't care enough about anything to make even small decisions like whether to have lunch or how to put my socks on.
Surely that's why several millionaires go up, go to excess, lose it all etc.
It tells the story of John Kirwin, a legendary Rugby player here in New Zealand. He was supposed to be living the dream as one of the best and toughest Rugby players in the world, yet depression still got the better of him.
From the outside it's easy to tell someone to "harden up" but that does no good when the person is going through a personal hell.
You are speaking in vague generalities, with authority, on matters about which you are apparently ignorant. Moreover, your propagating this misinformation is detrimental to attitudes about depression, both for those who might be afflicted and the public as a whole.
Depression is a serious problem which should be addressed through science, credible education, and consultation with professionals.
The comment you are defending is utterly asinine. Persistent depression is far more likely to be the result of cognitive-behavioral factors and/or physiological factors rooted in genetics than it is to be the result of bad life circumstances aside from some negative extremes.
Furthermore, you grant that people are "unable to take responsibility for their emotional life" and yet somehow also support the patent contradiction to that idea in suggesting that "fix it or accept it" is acceptable advice.
Your final line (in addition to conflating freedom from depression with "being happy") belies a kind of moralistic thinking about mental health. Would you say that broken legs are essential to social stability? Or ulcers?
Warm regards.
I'd say that it's pretty funny that so many people took it upon themselves to explain how their life is so perfect and that any possible explaination for their depression could not lie in that their life sucks.
The reality is that most people's lives suck (including mine and yours) and that most people spend their lives covering up how their lives suck by buying more crap, settling & self-medication. As you said, if it didn't suck, human civilization would not progress.
People make a simple problem into a much more complicated one. If your life sucks, then fix it or accept it. The caveat is that you have to either man up to fix it or swallow your pride to accept it.
Edit: on second thought, don't. It probably won't help me overcome any of my personal rationalizations or bring me any closer to my goals. But I have a recommendation. Read Nassim Taleb's Bed of Procrustes.
Case in point, Love in the Time of Cholera. You want to get the girl but you are a victim of socioeconomic scarcity. You become a life-long melancholic but are motivated to climb the social/professional ladder to get what it is that you couldn't get in the first place. All great literature, music, scientific discoveries were of products of unrequited love, jealousy, or the urge to overcome a self-inferiority complex.
Beyond a basic level, this fails to be true.
>which in term induces human productivity/creativity.
Show me that depression leads to greater productivity. I expect that you cannot.
>climb the social/professional ladder to get what it is that you couldn't get in the first place.
This has nothing to do with depression and little to do with happiness.
>All great literature, music, scientific discoveries were of products of unrequited love, jealousy, or the urge to overcome a self-inferiority complex.
This is trite, wildly hyperbolic, and almost certainly baseless.
"Stars" are more likely to be hypomanic. Or just people who like writing or composing music too much :) People like to blame success on mental disease or drugs because it helps them justify their laziness. Also, attempt to claim that Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Kobain wrote their music because they had a self-inferiority complex might be caused by the self-inferiority complex and envy :P
Thank you for this. This was one of the most important things I learned out of my (pretty) mild depression. Since then whenever I see people pretending to always be happy or at least striving to always be happy I sense that there's something wrong. That, and the thing that I began to understand what the Stoics were saying a little bit more (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism)