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Comment by hi-v-rocknroll | Hacker News Reader

The conflation of depression as a temporary or voluntary state or something that can be miracled away with lifestyle is ignorant and subtly victim blaming. There are many people with treatment-resistant depression who do not respond to any of these tactics, therapy, or almost any medication.

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I understand what you’re trying to say here and I agree we should be careful prescribing lifestyle changes for serious cases of depression (or any disease for that matter). However, there are a significant number of people out there who _don’t_ have treatment resistant depression and would benefit from lifestyle interventions. I think it’s a good thing for research to be done in that area, and being dismissive of something helpful for many because it doesn’t help those with serious cases isn’t a particularly healthy place to start a conversation from.

Well good for them, while you accuse me of what you're doing. There is no win-lose suggested, and you're inventing a conflict and blaming me for it. There is negligible research done on TRD and psychiatry is largely an evidence-free clinical practice that doesn't measure or examine the organ it's supposedly treating in any meaningful way. Most psychologists, psychiatrists, and often MDs merely dump bucket of molecules into people's bodies and hope for a net positive outcome by trial-and-error without understanding individual pathophysiology. Genetic tests like GeneSight have so far proved to be selling false hope.

I had depression and it was eventually cured through lifestyle changes (getting a job, learning a skill, and making new friends). What would you say about my case?

sampling size n=1

Rather the point is that depression is... more of a shared symptom really. We're mostly grasping at straws with our treatments, but we do know that some cases (and we assume, causes..) are amenable to lifestyle factors. Others are assuredly not.

It's unhelpful for either case to assume that the other side doesn't exist.

Any time you're out of homeostasis, you should expect depression to be following close behind.

Do you reply with this when anyone tells you their experience?

Just to clarify, is your argument that the data shows no link between depression and lifestyle factors, and that I'm an outlier, so my experience can be dismissed?

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