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Respectfully, you are wrong. The realities of human biology don't all fit into neat little boxes.

With no evidence presented you dismiss the entire body of scientific evidence which backs the rather basic idea that depression, like any other biological process can be caused by a wide variety of sources not just external factors.

Being very sad because of an internal reason and clinical depression are not the same thing though to an outsider they may appear the same. Much like being overweight because you eat too much and sit all day isn't the same as being overweight because your thyroid isn't functioning properly aren't the same thing. What you're doing here is the intellectual and moral equivalent of blaming people with an underactive thyroid for their weight gain because you can't tell the difference by looking at them.

You're right on one point depression is the symptom not the disease and there's huge room for misdiagnosis here. Likely our understanding will ultimately split clinical depression into many different diseases that cause it as we learn more but its simply foolish to dismiss the disease possibility out of hand.

Your description of depression makes it sound like, if only depressed people would stop taking medication, they would naturally find the "actual problem" (which you assume exists), solve it, and then no longer be depressed.

I don't know how much experience you've had with actual clinical depression, but as far as I've seen, those people are not "more rational", and leaving them to their own devices makes things worse, not better.

I've studied the matter in depth, ive tried to talk sense into someone ready to jump off a 4 story building onto concrete or drive into water with handcuffs on the wheel. I was unable to fix them. I left this guy to his own devices when nothing I did helped, I said your brain has some destructive feedback loops going on and you need to go and fix it. He's alive today. Im no expert but I sure have opinions!

I had a big long post written up about crippling depression, and how it really can stop a person from functioning in life.

Instead, I'll just post and call you a fucking idiot.

Stopping the entity from functioning is exactly what it is supposed to do. It's selected into the genome because that entity gets help without hi tech medications. I've been very depressed, and never took drugs, I picked myself up and fixed my damn problem. I don't like the quickness that doctors will screw with the machinary of the mind with drugs. Its like a caveman working to fix a harrier jet with his club.

At first I thought maybe I was a little hasty, in calling you a fucking idiot. Now I'm glad that you have reaffirmed my initial suspicions.

Please don't do this.

I'm interested in this topic, and might have spent some time reading the thread, but when I see stuff like this I just bail.

Your poor reading experience...

Some times people need tobe told harshly they're being an idiot.

I don't like the quickness that doctors will screw with the machinary of the mind with drugs.

The machinery of the mind is chemicals. Drugs are chemicals. When a chemical machine malfunctions, chemical treatments are not unreasonable.

At any rate, this comment is probably being downvoted for this line:

I picked myself up and fixed my damn problem.

Edit: also this: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Typical_mind_fallacy

Based on everything I've read from others who have talked about clinical depression, it sounds like there is no picking oneself up. The metaphorical train has gone so far off track that its conductor doesn't even remember what tracks look like.

  > I've been very depressed, and never took drugs, I
  > picked myself up and fixed my damn problem.

This is the equivalent of saying:

"I've been running Windows for 15 years, and never had a blue-screen-of-death, therefore anyone that has issues with a blue-screen-of-death is either lying or a fucking moron. My anecdote proves that Windows is 100% stable 100% of the time."

There is a lot more to the science of depression than simply being down for a bit. Thats part of the cycle of everyone's life, at some point. Everyone self medicates.

Depression is so often a side-effect of other, real, mental disorders. These aren't things you can 'pick yourself up from' and walk it off. Doctors 'screw with the mind' of consenting adults who agree that they have a problem and are trying exactly to 'pick themselves up.'

You should expand your notion of a drug and what treatment is, along with the machinery of the mind. Depression is caused by drugs in your own mind, which are so much more complicated and nuanced than the pharmaceuticals one would take to offset them.

I think there might be some truth to what you're saying. Depression is certainly a part of life, but I think the confusion here is about the type of depression. Most people get depressed from time to time, but others have physical and mental problems that lead to very severe depression, manic depression. These people can't just fix their problems and get better like normal people when we get depressed, because their depression doesn't stem from their problems. That's not to say that their problems can't compound the depression, my sister is bipolar and gets REALLY depressed sometimes, and certainly some of that is her situation, but a lot of it is also hereditary mental illness she got from my mother. No amount of "grow the fuck up" is going to fix that, trust me, we've tried.

Slight depression may have tended to keep our ancestors quietly enduring (not fixing) problems rather than getting into harm's way, but like anxiety attacks and cytokine storms, it can become a pointless, debilitating overreaction to a situation that doesn't warrant it.

"Depressed people are found to be more rational than the people who feel successful."

You know how I can tell you don't have depression?

Depressed people are found to be more rational than the people who feel successful

This sounds to me like you took something wildly out of context. For example, is a depressed person more rational than someone who just won a hand of Blackjack? Probably. Is a depressed person more rational than the same person when not depressed? As someone who is currently helping a friend through a very bad bout of depression, I can say with confidence that the answer is no.

Doctors don't even know why these drugs work.

I know a lot of programmers who don't know how a transistor works. Does this invalidate their work?