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Comment by 15feetOfclay | Hacker News Reader

This comment section is absolutely full of people ready and willing to insist that people with depression simply need to cheer up and get over it. And all I can say is: I hope someone shows them a similar level of compassion when they are at their lowest.

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Most of the problems I would say are related to the modern isolated Nuclear family.

See that programmer sat next to you that is not a nice person? Well some kid had no choice but to have him as a parent.

Throw in a society that doesn’t value teachers and pays them below many other jobs and the kid spends all his day and evenings with no one to guide and nurture him or her.

Certainly we are all an alchemical output of our nurturing environments and our intrinsic characteristics, and I don't dispute that we could likely dramatically lower the incidence of severe mental illness by improving our culture's capacity for care and solidarity. It's tough out there, for children and adults.

Truly, the cause of all this suffering is not enough antinatalism. You've cracked the code.

Actually what they're saying is that most people did not have a lot of nurturing adults in their lives growing up, from which they've learned that the adult thing to do is to isolate themselves and avoid nurturing other people. Which they're presenting as a bad thing. The reason they bring up the "nuclear family" is an appeal to prehistory, in which we probably would have been raised by a much larger social group than mom and dad, to include other relatives and friends, and that this would give us more opportunities to be included and nurtured by a wide variety of people.

You don't need to go back to prehistory, you can just go back a few hundred years before the urbanization brought forth by the industrial revolution. We had millennia of written record by then.

There is no modern isolated Nuclear family. There's mostly broken homes now, and that is the root cause of most of the problems.

Are you one of those religious Bible loons who believes couples need to stay together even if it’s a disaster relationship.

As you are wrong if you are. Children suffer more in bad parent relationships

Sadness is a symptom. Mind/Body is saying something is wrong and it needs to be changed. Medication just dulls the pain. It is not a solution. The real solution is changing the way of life so that it becomes more fulfilling.

Happiness is not a easy thing to achieve. You need to fix the body, eat right, exercise, control/watch your thoughts, let go of things beyond control, enjoy what is in front of you instead of chasing some imaginary future.

I'll take "toxic beliefs about the nobility of suffering" for 500, Alex!

It's an awful thing to suffer and full sympathy to anyone who does. What unfortunately has happened as well is that the drug companies have successfully convinced the public, providers and sections of the media that any criticism of their products is criticism of people who suffer.

There are very serious concerns about the safety and effectiveness of these drugs, but the companies consistently attempt to misdirect that, seeking to portray the criticisms as "stigmatizing" sufferers or "fear mongering", neither of which is true.

I am as critical of Big Pharma as anyone else, but you can't seriously imply that our society places a certain amount of social stigma on people who take medication for mental illness. Some US insurance companies make it more difficult to get medication for mental illness because they often argue against the need for the medication.

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