Comment by carabiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carabiner | Hacker News Reader

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IOW: Are you ready for me to diagnose your totally normal reaction to our shitty society as mental illness so I can get you addicted to mind altering drugs for the rest of your life? https://imgur.com/Jb1mJyx

Or as the Unabomber said, "Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable."

I think you're right. The problem is, this is the only life most of us have lived, and so we cannot imagine it otherwise, like a fish who cannot conceive of a world above water, or even that water is the medium surrounding it. If our entire society is causing this, then what can we do? Wage slavery, oligarchy, attention theft by tech companies, disintegration of community from various causes. Life for so many people is crawling through glass Monday through Friday, then getting shitfaced on the weekend. Is that happiness? How do we escape?

It's very funny to describe SSRIs or SNRIs essentially as "happy pills". They are very unpleasant drugs to take, especially in the first month or so when starting to use them, and no one would be using them if they didn't feel there is a serious problem in their lives.

Not to mention, depression takes several forms, and not all of them are related to unhappiness. A common form is related to anxiety, with people experiencing a constant feeling that something awful is about to happen, sometimes getting terrible panic attacks. Given that many of these people live in objectively and subjectively extremely safe environments, much safer than at any other time in history, it's very hard to take seriously any environmental theory of this kind.

Edit: corrected one bad auto-correct typo ("problem", not "purulente") .

Would you rather be safe in prison for 100 years, or free in a world for 1 day where you could die?

I know for sure that I have much more anxiety when I'm in an unsafe environment than a safe one, regardless of how free I am in each. Lack of freedom does lots of bad things to your mind, but anxiety isn't one of them.

I prefer death.

Life isn't like that though. This question is kind of counter-productive.

>no one would be using them if they didn't feel there is a serious purulente in their lives.

You are playing into the argument, people often don't have a choice to avoid a depression inducing environment, they only have the choice of using drugs or not.

Environment is only one component of certain types of depression. It is primarily a biological phenomenon.

This site has an unbelievable amount of armchair-science that gets rattled off. You are right, because depression and anxiety are primarily biological phenomena.

People looking for an actual expert discuss these things should watch Robert Sapolsky's talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc

For example, in the talk, he points out one of the most telltale signs of depression is waking up early, which is completely backwards from the common perception that depression is someone staying in bed all day.

It's a strange mode of persuasion, making arguments about how we should frame psychological dysfunction that quote a man who pooped into a hole in the corner of a shack while in hiding after trying to down a passenger jet.

That is the definition of an ”ad hominem” argument.

I'm comfortable with "ad hominem" when the appeal in question is to the Unabomber.

You wish to vilify him. That's fine. It's extremely uncomfortable to find that this mathematician was right about something. I respect your feelings. But that doesn't alter the substance of his social critiques.

Sure it does. It's strange to argue that it wouldn't. Kaczynski is a madman, and perhaps the only person in the history of the United States whose quality of life was drastically improved by incarceration in a Supermax prison.

He lived out in the fresh air and sunlight.

So do rats.

I doubt he would agree with that, just like depression has many forms so does the concept of quality of life

Quoting the Unabomber was a strange choice considering the main idea isn't unique to him and stands on its own merit:

"Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs."

Examining the social factors that contribute to pathology isn't controversial nor does it downplay the role of drugs in reducing harm.

> Life for so many people is crawling through glass Monday through Friday, then getting shitfaced on the weekend. Is that happiness?

Ooof

Brave New World and 1984 were near-future fiction, but were more near future than fiction. Drugs are soma.

This reminds me a lot of Mark Fisher and Capitalist Realism. Obviously if the article is true then who is to say about low serotonin levels, but in any case "It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this is nothing about their causation if it is true, for instance, the depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, was still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; ... This pathologization these problems - treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individuals neurology and/or by their family background - any question of social systemic causation is ruled out." In essence a liberal worldview is not equipped to deal with mental illness.

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