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Comment by 0des | Hacker News Reader

> person is depressed

I did not get this feeling. Sometimes a bit of isolation and retrospection is enough to realize what your real priorities are. Things can be deprioritized without acknowledging a superior priority, and that's okay. As we go through life, we change, people change, our surroundings change, and sometimes all of the external things change for the worst around the same time and that's just how life goes.

Noting these deficiencies doesn't outright indicate someone is depressed and could indicate progress. Most people with any amount of deep introspection explore these possibilities, and I think that's healthy rather than living in fear of having to process uncomfortable truths. Sometimes we dig deep enough to find those truths werent as true as we thought they were, and that's progress.

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Everything in his original post discussing his withdrawal, his inability to engage in society, screams clinical depression.

Or at least, it quacks an awful lot like a duck with depression.

I don't think it screams clinical depression. I live in a rural area and empathize how someone could get to feeling this way. It can be tough to have so few people to talk to face-to-face on a peer level about the things that you're passionate about most, not because they don't want to talk about it, but because they mentally can't grok the subject matter to offer any consolation. You become your own best friend, your own therapist, your own support network. It's easy to socially discard people when you are precluded from forming those connections, they're just acquaintances, like the domino crew at the barber shop. I'm not saying it's right, but it doesn't also mean they're depressed or doesn't 'scream it' as you put it.

I feel like that's not the case

Just skimming to two parts in the second to last paragraph, these two sentences, "I am often desperately looking inward to find the strength to go on", and "Accepting a constant stream of low quality things for most of my life, including interactions with other people, only contributed to the way my life has gone and the way I feel now" were really striking to the author's day-to-day. It sounds like he' struggling to doing what he needs to do and they're content with the way this is. We should want more for ourselves and for our relationships to have meaning.

It's also possible to have a problem, and then that problem makes you depressed on top. But the depression is a symptom and focusing on it can come off as "everything is fine, there's just something wrong with your brain."

There are some difficult life transitions (real-world problems that are never going to go away) that can cause long-term feelings of grief that overlap clinically with depression. Maybe you need to take the time to process those feelings. Or maybe you don't have that luxury, you have bills to pay, so you're going to medicate those feelings away.

(Or maybe everything is fine, and there's just something wrong with your brain. But that's not for Internet randos to decide.)

There are more mental illnesses / patterns etc. beyond clinical depression, but it's just the most prominent in people's minds. Here's an example: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/schizoid-pers... (note: I am not even speculating this is at all a diagnosis, merely pointing out that the symptoms you list are not exclusive to clinical depression). Of course, you can also have any combination.

I wish people would stop pathologizing a proper response to a fcked up situation.

Sceptics would say the DSM is excellent at doing that, so it's perhaps not a surprise when people jump to pathologies.

As someone without any diagnostic training, I would also think that someone that is in a depression (A) could write a blogpost like that (B). That is, I can imagine that A ==> B is true. However, even if that were actually so in the real world, that does not mean its converse (B ==> A) is true as well.

So even in the optimistic case where, lack of diagnostic training notwithstanding, A ==> B, even then observing B does not necessarily imply A.

Which probably is part of the reason you shouldn't diagnose people over the Internet based on their posts, but via a diagnostic process actively involving them.

> As someone without any diagnostic training, I would also think that someone that is in a depression (A) could write a blogpost like that (B). That is, I can imagine that A ==> B is true.

What you have stated in words is rather more like, in the modal+temporal logic sense, "it is possible that A and then B" (temporal 'then'), not "if A, then B" (logical 'then'), which is how I read A ==> B--unless you meant, as I think you didn't, everyone experiencing A will do B.

You have a point, though I would see it as an exists operator (\exists_A A\implies B) than a modal operator. But that might be because it's been a while since I used modal logic :)

You are making the assumption that something is wrong with him. What if there is something wrong with society and he is just early to see it and be affected?

This is what capitalism odes, it always puts the burden on the individual. No, there is nothing every wrong with how we structure our society, never.

I am sure you could name some groups you would not find it pleasing to engage with...

Wait what? Like half of the ish we talk about on HN is what’s wrong with society, and we often look for the structural reasons behind society’s ills.. Including direct shots at capitalism.. And this is just one of a zillion online communities for folks of different stripes..

For sure I can imagine someone getting to a place where they feel gaslit by dysfunctional society, many must be in this boat all the time, the world is a challenging place. Should we not offer them a friendly hand, if they’re open to it?

Yes it is more than depression alone. Although depression may be one component. It is also disenchantment and disconnect. Even a mild existential crisis maybe. And advice from people online is rarely helpful. He could try personal therapy or perhaps simply just live with it. We're all built in different ways, and we don't have to always react the same way to the world. In fact we can't... it is a pity that the world , like a complex program, is optimised for the happy path, and if you deviate, it starts to complain.

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