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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Can we not armchair-diagnose people with mental illness, when we don't have anything more than a few blog posts to go on, and don't know much about them at all? And probably aren't qualified to make such a diagnosis anyway, even if we could sit in a room with them and talk to them for an hour about what's going on?

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Maybe it’s just me but when I see a layperson say “this person is depressed” I don’t assume they’re armchair diagnosing clinical depression. Depressed mood is not great but it’s also not inherently disordered, it’s a normal part of the human experience and doesn’t mean someone has a mental health diagnosis.

Agree. It’s not the arm chair diagnosis that bothers me, it the “they just need too…” solutions that come after.

I completely agree that "what you need to do" sort of comments are less than helpful. Perhaps the GP was edited, but "He'd probably do well" reads as "I would suggest" which is actually meant well to me. The former presupposes what one needs and is unnecessarily authoritative (and I cannot help but assume an air of condescension from using the statement), while the second is simply the suggestion written as kindly as possible (again to me).

I'm glad they wrote it, because it has not been suggested to me that I need to "be challenged if [I] tr[y] using [my] intellect to deflect from sitting with or reflecting upon said emotions". I very much identify with this statement owing to a life of using intellect as a coping mechanism for emotions that I have been told I'm not supposed to feel. I also have work to do.

Edit: typos

To what limit are laymen required to ignore manifest reality?

If someone writes that he is sneezing, has a sore throat, runny nose etc., are we allowed to infer that he has a cold?

We are not, because he could also have had contact with particularly hot sauce, or an allergy, or an influenza infection, or covid, or early stages of worse things. There is a reason why we train medical doctors for years before they start diagnosing people.

> There is a reason why we train medical doctors for years before they start diagnosing people.

That reason is partly so that they can be recognized as doctors. Making an observational deduction has nothing to do with medicine nor imitating a doctor, per se.

Yet, people can and will use heuristics as GP does to make such inferences all the time. I don’t think we can help it. Whether that’s a problem depends on what one does with such an inference.

In the case of a suspected cold, it’s perfectly reasonable to keep one’s distance to try to avoid catching it, whether the supposition is correct or not.

Suspected depression? Harder to say, but at minimum I hope that appraisal engenders understanding and compassion. I think gently suggesting someone seek professional help is reasonable. I also think we have a tendency to overly pathologize perfectly normal mental states, however, and especially if (as the OP states) a person appraises themselves to be OK, then suggestion should not become insistence.

> There is a reason why we train medical doctors for years before they start diagnosing people.

This is not support for your previous sentence. A large portion of doctors' training consists of making sure they will treat someone with a runny nose for a cold before they'll even consider other explanations.

And when someone drops a brick, and it falls to the floor, unless you're a physicist, you shouldn't infer it fell because of gravity. It could be that the video was taken in a room in space, and it feel because the space-ship is accelerating, or due to centrifugal forces from artificial gravity, or the brick has metal components, and there's a magnet under it.

To say that you need a clinician to diagnose depression, is like saying you need an MRI machine to detect pain.

I'm not saying the person we're talking about is depressed (or that he's not), I'm just commenting on what you said.

Nah I think we need more armchairing. In fact there should be a whole HN department around it, with salaried positions. :D

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