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Comment by triyambakam | Hacker News Reader

I'm puzzled by those who disagree with this statement. How is it surprising that depressing circumstances would lead to depression?

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Major depressive disorder isn't the same thing as feeling sad about your job.

If being down about your job causes symptoms of depression that last more than 2 weeks, then it's the same thing. Psychiatrists diagnose based on symptoms. Worse, its usually what you say your symptoms are, with words and talking. They don't scan your brain. I've been seeing psychiatrists for almost 30 years. The good ones take plenty of interest in your situation, lifestyle, and other non-chemical non-medical factors. Psychiatrists don't distinguish between so-called 'situational' and 'clinical' depressions. Laypeople do that. If you get diagnosed by a clinician, that is the part that makes it clinical - it isn't a different kind of condition.

That is an incredibly dismissive and reductive argument to make. "Feeling sad about your job" isn't limited to burnt out software engineers with a safety net. It can also apply to, for example, someone stuck in a shitty, low paying job with few, if any, prospects for better employment. The lack of a path to a decent future can, in itself, be incredibly demoralizing, even if your present circumstances might be decent. After all, what's the point in continuing if I can see that it's all downhill from here?

That isn't major depressive disorder either. Even if those people think their life sucks, they're capable of, say, getting out of bed every day and don't regularly attempt suicide.

Russian serfs might've revolted when they got the chance, but they were more or less psychologically normal until then. Their society adapts to not kill them all. (Or they all become alcoholics or something.)

Bad jobs can cause suicide

Suicide is usually due to distress than clinical depression. This is why suicide hotlines work at all.

I would recommend reading some history books before saying these are depressing circumstances.

Just because some people have suffered through worse doesn't mean that you can use that to invalidate someone else's suffering.

But when, for the vast majority of history, the population faced a much poorer, more monotonous, and less free existence than what the modern worker faces then you jolly well can.

That still doesn't invalidate people's mental conditions today.

> the population faced a much poorer, more monotonous, and less free existence

That's an over simplification.

People could still have more free time than we do now[1], while their life could be more monotonous on some aspect, I believe an average office worker life today can be even more monotonous than what a serf life could be. You also have to consider labor alienation, which is a something that didn't exist so much before industrialization.

Most importantly, life commonly revolved around tight communities, while today most people live in individualist societies.

Individualism certainly has a larger impact on happiness than most modern convenience has.

- [1]: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

If there are people today who want to put their money where their mouth is and give up the conveniences of modernity to go back to communal subsistence farming under serf-like conditions (and there are places in the world that still live like that), more power to them. I haven't seen any takers.

I don't understand this need to make everything white or black, unless we want to pretend we live in a word as simple as a kids' novel. You can't just throw away milleniums of history and people because in the past 60 years we have become too lazy and addicted to modern convenience.

No, preindustrial ages weren't the hell they're made to be nor a golden age by any means. The same can be said of today. Stop playing defensive and think openly instead, there's lot we can improve by learning from the past.

It isn’t someone’s personal/unique suffering that I am invalidating. They are saying that we are having uniquely depressing times _in general_ which if you take a brief look at history is laughably invalid.

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