Yes it is unreasonable, because depression is not an “attitude”.
A few of my family members struggle with depression and also with anxiety. I love them dearly, but spending too much time with them can ruin my mood. It is exhausting to try to be upbeat around someone who is depressed; in my experience, they win, and I am dragged into sadness as well. Similarly, it is stressful to be around someone who suffers from anxiety.
It is widely accepted that mental illnesses like depression and anxiety are positive feedback loops. I don’t know why the same traits that make them so would not be able to impact others.
Just spend the morning on Reddit (or even HN!) and notice how your entire outlook changes.
There really needs to be a close proximity to the source; this means that online content isn’t really going to spread it. You need to be physically located in the environment near the people with depression and anxiety.
Also, you have to be easily socially suggestible and open to the input of others, on the level of mirroring and the chameleon effect.
Example: I worked for a boss with depression and anxiety. It never rubbed off on me, but his wife was highly suggestible and she seemed to mirror his foibles and idiosyncrasies.
I don’t know if I would go as far as the conclusions of the Rat Park experiment, but there is something to be said for a healthy, safe, and nurturing environment.
For approximately 10% of the population, who are considered highly suggestible. For comparison, Fox News had 1.21 percent of the US population as a primetime audience in 2020. One can imagine how that number increases with shared environments of family, friends, peers, and work (in other words, networks).
My mother is a great example. She won’t take tech advice from anyone in our family, but if one of her close friends shares that same information with her, it somehow becomes history—signed, sealed, and delivered. She’s influenced by her peers in a highly suggestible way.
Don’t know what the Twitter numbers are. In the 1960s, Huxley speculated that suggestibility was as high as 20%, and argued that if you controlled 20% of the population, you controlled the whole of society. More recently, that number has come down to 15%. My point remains the same as before.
Of course, I am not implying that people with depression are stupid.
If that were not possible, then how could therapy have an effect?
> If that were not possible, then how could therapy have an effect?
Because therapy is more than discussion.
If I go in a company and others are receptive to my anxiety, then it means anxiety is rampant in that company.
In my country burn out and alikes are increasing very rapidly (like 3x in 10 years). So I believe that the articles says that when your are tired, you're more likely to catch the flu. It's not the flu that is strong, it's the other's that more fragile.
And as someone who got through the burnout big time, I can assure you that this article will be misread. HR depts I have seen have a long way to go before they understand that burn out damages should be put on shoulders on the employee as well as the employer.
I think a much better analogy than surgery would be a software bootcamp. In the same sense that a classroom-oriented bootcamp is just discussion, therapy is just discussion.
There’s no replication crisis for the greater umbrella question of whether or not therapy is effective. Therapy in combination with medication is provably more effective than either alone (or nothing).
No contradiction - The problem isn't education obviously - its that some professions and disciplines are far more likely to produce pretentious ivory towers than others, that I have a problem with. Typically and ironically imo it is stronger in the soft sciences than the hard.
This isn't to say that surgery or surgeons are evil and to be avoided. Not at all. It just adds nuance to the picture: the degree of training your healthcare professional receives is only one aspect of their job, albeit an important one.
Do I care what kind of personality my surgeon has? No. I care about his aptitude at his job.
> Alcohol and drug abuse are a significant issue among physicians in general and surgeons in particular. A recent 7000-member survey of the American College of Surgeons demonstrated a prevalence for alcohol abuse among male surgeons at 13.8% and for female surgeons at 25.4%. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstrac...
This dictionary and factoid HN comment war thread makes me want to waste karma.
Generally, though, I feel HN is a good place to cathartically vent some heat. The limits/guidelines are set such that you can be aggressive without breaking them. You can add value in an aggressive tone. It’s like a city where the drivers are aggressive. Being kind, the first comment guideline, requires respect as opposed to syrupy fake facades. MMA fighters often respect each other, for example. This attitude is acknowledging the toxicity of anonymous internet culture and making the best of it. It’s an unhealthy place, but there’s value to be made/found. Are there any anonymous internet forums good for your mental health? I think not.
Jjconn’s take that therapy is useless makes me mad, and they’re willing to yell about it. I have something to gain here by learning their perspective.
Venting is okay, but weak rhetoric devices like one-sentence x doesn't work because vast blanket uninformed or intentionally reductionist statement should not get a free pass in the name of conversation. All it does is derail threads and put people who knows better in the position of managing egos while explaining what's wrong and doing it in a way that doesn't accuse the other party of just trolling or something. Or more likely they move on when they've had enough and the cycle repeats with other players.
> Are there any anonymous internet forums good for your mental health? I think not.
Yeah, agreed. But it's so addictive :D !
"Avoid female surgeons" seems to be the thrust of your point here.
You're not a machine in need of a mechanic. You're a person, and people respond better when they're involved in shared decision-making regarding their healthcare.
Besides, "aptitude" is necessary but not sufficient for a surgeon. For a particularly creepy example of abuse, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7424662/
Further reading: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7424662/
Plenty of pretentiousness among the software crowd as well apparently.
If that were the case population level rates would be relatively stable over time and not vary dramatically by country but that is wildly not the case. Clearly lifestyle choices are a primary factor here but that is so taboo these days to even mention.
>If that were the case population level rates would be relatively stable over time and not vary dramatically by country but that is wildly not the case.
That would be true if and only if the measurements were accurate and did not change by time or location.
The measurement strategies have been changing dramatically in the past decades, and countries are almost universally in disagreement over the (significant) details. Wide variance in time and location are definitely expected, drawing a conclusion based on that is very much standing on shaky ground.
This isn’t necessarily true. There’s a wide variety of reasons for which diagnoses of mental illnesses would vary greatly. Equating Psychology to hard sciences is naive. It is the softest of sciences, but labeling it as non-science would be ridiculous.
I personally think Psychiatrists in particular have one of the most difficult jobs as physicians. It’s made worse for patients by the fact that a poorly performing Psychiatrist has many scapegoats behind which to hide.
Unfortunately I spend a lot of time around mentally ill folk, myself included. A good dose/choice of medication and a good therapist-client-match work modern miracles on people, and it’s very easy to see when you’re around it. It’s very similar to a surgery with a low success rate.
It is about as scientific as chiropractics and acupuncture, full of anecdote and very little substance, you even provided some yourself. How can you possibly trust much of anything coming out of those disciplines when the majority of papers can't even be replicated?
I could replace therapy in that sentence with chiropractics or acupuncture and it would express an equally meaningless platitude.
> Suggesting that the recent decades of funding and research in the general psychology domain haven’t yielded good results is humorously ignorant.
And yet if we look at populations (as we do to benchmark real medicine) in much of the western world deaths from despair are up, depression and anxiety are up, population happiness is trending down. What a testament to those decades of research.
> From this perspective, you “having a problem” with it makes you look like a sociopath
This is a clear violation of HN rules, I suggest you take a look at them. What I have a problem with is people being duped into spending tons of money by charlatans. People in need spend money on tons of things they are convinced help them (supplements, psychics, acupuncture etc), that isn't evidence of their utility.
Sorry. Also, it’s not directed at you but rather someone who would deny another what they knew to be good medicine. It would be valid, in that case, would it not? (Still against the rules, I guess. I wouldn’t mind being banned for accurately labeling a sociopath; that would be a decent signal to spend my time elsewhere.)
You actually believe therapy to be a complete farce, which I hadn’t comprehended before this point.
Read some systematic literature review abstracts. Parse some statistics. Ask a physician you trust to explain it to you.
Research doesn’t suggest that therapy improves the lives of everyone but rather that it’s effective treatment for disease. You could similarly find papers that say the same thing about acupuncture or chiropractors: when I say “research” here, I’m referring to many orders of magnitudes more psychology papers. Tens of thousands would pass your replication crisis criticism criteria.
Storytelling is just discussion but that doesn’t mean stories don’t exist, or that all stories are the same, that everyone is an equally good story teller, etc.
I am specifically referring to therapy as distinct of psychiatry (which uses meds)
More broadly though, the conversation you can have with a therapist has a lot more going on than a regular discussion. Without getting into the details of every school I think it's fair to say that these conversations are guided in subtle and not subtle ways to lead the patient to introspection and self-reflection much more than a drink between buddies at a bar would (which is usually what people on HN tend argue when criticizing talk therapies). Therapists have to assess where the patient stands and feel how far the patient can be pushed to change their outlook on a situation or accept it.
Put in another way: a debate is also more than a discussion, same applies to therapy.
To your point at the end: the dictionary on iOS defines discussion as “a conversation or debate about a certain topic”
I can certainly agree that therapy is a guided discussion :)
The communication modality of therapy is voice. Why do you have to ask that here?
Because I like to ask questions to improve my understanding of the world when I notice someone seems to know something I don’t. Almost like we’re discussing things on a discussion forum.
I was frustrated by the naivety of your question in that it implies many folks have no idea what therapy is (and often take a negative attitude, which you’re not doing) and I took it out on you. Sorry.
If you are, to some degree, predisposed to depression, you are more likely to aggravate or trigger it by living in an hostile environment than if you are living your dream life.
It's like being predisposed to cardiovascular diseases : even if you are predisposed, you are more likely to not have any issue if you never encounter stress, eat healthy and have an active life.
Saying depression can be contagious by no means implies that depression is an attitude and not a disease.
Also , I like to think it isn't the attitude that is spreading but that depressed people help set an environment that cultivates depression whether by stress, lack of communication, bad communication,etc... depression wouldn't exactly be the first disease to be caused or affected by the environment a person spends their time in.
I’m not a big believer in CBT, but I know for sure antidepressants, as they are used nowadays, is one massive scam.
For the record, I do support antidepressants usage to get out of very dark place initially. But they do not cure it.
We as a society need to put safety nets in place to make sure people don’t fall into those very dark places. Depression is not a virus or bacteria. It’s a socially spreading disease. But we need attitudes instead of masks to stop it. Attitudes held by both patients and surrounding people.
"Not only is there contrary evidence showing problems with reasoning are widespread as well as potentially associated with mental health rather than mental disorder. But the evidence in favour of CBT’s take on mental illness is tainted because the tests used in these studies do not even track problems with reasoning. CBT provides a compelling story about mental illness – mental illness is associated with “faulty” reasoning, and in resolving this, negative behaviour and emotions are addressed. Unfortunately, research doesn’t quite back up this story."
Call me conspiracy theorist if you want, but I smell anti-depressant makers money. Fuck overuse of anti-depressants and not paying enough attention to things that do work.