markroseman

First decide if you just want it to look nice, or if you want it to work nice. For the first there are already lots of suggestions here.

For the second, do you have some users or potential users (right needs, skills, etc.) nearby? Get them to use your software and watch them. Or use screen sharing to do it remotely, along with an audio link. Get them to talk through what they're doing. Watch to see the trouble spots, ways they approach using parts of the software that maybe don't match how you expect people to try to use it. Does the way your user interface is organized help or get in the way? Do the cool widgets you used make sense to people other than you?

Start this early, with the crappiest thing you can get up and running visually. Don't wait until you've invested huge amounts of effort in making things look just so. This may lead you to deeper changes but ones that might make the system a whole lot better.

Or, you could wait until you've put in so much effort and baked in so many decisions about how the system should work that you're not about to make any structural changes. Just put some lipstick on the pig.

While most people intuitively would agree with the headline, the study itself doesn't add a whole lot. Single study with 100-ish undergrads, evaluated only via the standard 'trails' test. Not a bad beginning, but a broader audience, a wider set of neuropsychiatric measurements and quantifying the duration of effects would be good to see.

You got shitty psychiatric care. The real tragedy is that is so common.

In this or anything else, exercise isn't suggested as a cure.

Almost without exception, the people she sees are looking for ways to help move themselves forward. By the time they get here, they realize (and it's part of the education that goes with the practice) that mental illness is extremely complex, not every treatment helps everyone, and there's no single magic bullet. And yes, serious metabolic workups are a big part of the practice.

So while I appreciate your perspective, I take issue with the claim that (in this context) it is suggesting laziness as a cause for their illness, or sadism on my part.

I'd consider the value to be motivational ammunition for an intervention that generally has few downsides and multiple possible benefits for the person affected. Your point about stigma does counterbalance that somewhat.

In other words, would I put the overview on the coffee table in my wife's office (she's a psychiatrist) for her patients to see? Yes.

That would be the "fuck if I can help you" non-response. Around here it happens a lot because it takes so long to get into a psychiatrist that unless you admit to suicidal ideation, intent and a plan, you're not going to get help fast. A lot of family docs have their hands tied.

Good point. The value in this one is the large size of the data set, but mental illness is hardly a uniform phenomenon, so if you fit the "mental illness" category it doesn't say much about how many people in their data set really overlap with you. And it can make a difference. High intensity exercise still can help many people with depression, but is often counterproductive for anxiety, where low-moderate intensity can be helpful.

Agreed for most people with mild-moderate mental illness. It's an intervention that can reduce intensity for quite a number of people, though not everyone. (I wish more people would also get checked early on for easily fixed metabolic stuff like low iron, wonky thyroid etc.)

My completely anecdotal example... it kept me from starting crazy meds for at least an extra year or two (by the time I was up to 1-2 hours, 7d/week, it was time to bite the bullet.. though at lower doses than I likely would have otherwise needed.

In practice, it probably just adds a bit more motivation or reinforcement to the existing body of knowledge. There is a lot of conflicting info out there about how much is needed, what kind, etc., so the fact that this is saying a broad range of activities and so on were shown helpful is a plus. Helps take the "should I run or bike or weight lift or... screw it, I'm sitting on the couch" out of it.

Few academics stake their careers on papers saying that X does fuck all (unless everyone already things X is amazingly effective)

Check out tkdocs.com

Check out http://tkdocs.com to get started _properly_ with tkinter.

The blocking thing you can do in two ways. First, put your blocking stuff in another thread and do it there, and when it's done call back into the main thread to tear down the alert.

The other way, to play nice with the event loop, is to do something like:

   makemydialog()
   Tk.update_idletasks()  # process events so that the dialog shows up
   do_my_stuff
   teardown

If within do_my_stuff you can periodically call update() to process events, it'll give the appearance of being more responsive.

After you get a bit more experience with doing some GUI stuff, and if you want to have a more long-running GUI, it will become more natural to think of initiating everything in response to event handlers, as opposed to the batch model of running your program linearly from top to bottom.

I think this is a nice start. I'd like to see you take it further.

The problem I have with your list is that it treats depression as a black box, and the solution is to throw random things at it until something sticks. There are things that can be done to better identify underlying causes. For example, your list should touch on deficiencies in iron and B12. Your symptoms can also be a clue as to which neurotransmitters are involved.

Solutions need to tie back to causes. Vitamin D supplements are useful if you have a substantial Vitamin D deficiency. All the serotonin supplements in the world aren't going to help if your issue isn't a shortage of serotonin or its precursors. Understanding how different solutions relate to causes (and therefore relate to each other) gives you a smarter way to approach solutions.

Full disclosure.. my psychiatrist wife and I are working on a book to help people approach mental health care in a more systematic way, trying to take the magic black box out of it. A big part is also on how you can best work with the resources you have available (we're in Canada, so different but comparable range of limitations as in the UK).

And doing your GUI with Tkinter, which has an API that fits incredibly well with Python is a problem because...?

Some people do get what they'd describe as emotional numbing. Think of it as a decreased range of emotion. Sertraline has a relatively higher incidence of this than other SxRI's

Ha! You know what they say, if we just add one more level of abstraction, all of our problems will be solved! Nobody will even have to know what's going on inside. Famous last words.

This. It's like watching master craftsmen work on some parts for the sheer joy and challenge. (Pity the parts that don't have the craftsmen working on them mind you)

This (or anything else) isn't going to bring back a resurgence in Tcl use. A simple web app framework like this is something many languages have, and I think in this case it's best seen not so much about the web framework being the centrepiece. Instead, for the existing (and generally aging) body of people who have a good sized chunk of their work in Tcl, this becomes another utility to build an interface to that other code.

As an aside, Tcl was influential as a source of inspiration in the early days, ranging from event-driven programming, to web servers big (AOLserver) and small (Brent Welch and Stephen Uhler's <200 line server/HTML parser) back when "normal" was forked CGI scripts.

Yes, when I did something like that nearly 20 years ago it was quite odd! But turned out to be terribly useful for us at the time. (Google 'proxytk' if you're curious)

Being on more than one antidepressant is not unusual, and can even sometimes be optimal. Even ones acting on the same neurotransmitter often target different receptors and hence different symptoms. More often it's because doctors are better at adding drugs rather than taking away ones prescribed by other doctors "just in case."

Serotonin syndrome can be an issue with all kinds of things (most people aren't warned about being on a SSRI and having cough syrup for example), but is not very common in practice, and because it coincides with a change/increase in medication, often sorted out quickly, even if it's characterized as a "side effect" or "tolerability" problem and not actually recognized for what it is.

We're not ignoring their environment. But unfortunately, most of the time drugs are quicker and easier for the prescribers, and therefore cheaper and more available for the patient, than extended psychotherapy, etc.

If the underlying problem is a psychosocial stressor, the meds won't fix that, though they might help you control the symptoms long enough that they give you the opportunity/resilience to address the stressor. And sometimes, while maybe not ideal, just controlling the symptoms is enough even for the long term.

Statistically, rating scales typically used in these studies have been validated as showing effect, and clinical interviews can pick up a lot of things. That said, it's normally hard for you to be able to look back eight weeks and subjectively compare how you feel then and now. Usually it's not the person being treated, but those around them (family etc.), who notice the improvements first.

Glad that worked for you. Having seen many psychotropics poorly chosen/prescribed, your experience is certainly not uncommon, though far from universal.

Best thing would be understanding that different solutions are right for different people, and we get in trouble by generalizing (whether it's about meds, therapy, nutrition, exercise, etc.). One illness, many root causes, many different presentations, and the appropriate solution depends on a multitude of variables.

Close enough to accurate. The better ones can apply useful heuristics (symptom matching, family response, etc.) as well as more sophisticated management of dose, side effects, etc. to converge on the solution much faster, but at this point, there's definitely still trial and error involved.

The anti-psychiatry folks are extreme enough that they deny mental illness altogether, though many other "psychiatric survivor" communities do not deny, and often celebrate "lived experience", but are critical of psychiatric treatments.

Yes the science has a long way to go, but you're ridiculously generalizing. Some people stay on antidepressants long term, but most don't. Many psychotropics are used only short term. I think your test/cure paradigm is a bit of a "red herring"... maybe it would be nice if it were the case, but symptom (and impact) based diagnosis plus subjective improvement to symptoms, functioning and quality of life still counts to people actually suffering, as well as their families.

Three months in some places. Here in Victoria, unless you're in crisis, it's actually almost impossible for most people to get in to see a psychiatrist, and if you can, the waiting list is well over a year.

Depression and other mental illnesses are defined by a set of symptoms. Suggesting one particular cause is being disingenuous. Having said that, the whole notion of "too much" or "too little" of something like serotonin is a gross oversimplification, at best useful as a metaphor to explain things to people at a very high level.

If you want to take it a step further, think about what's causing communication via neurotransmitters to be slowed or sped up (not enough available? not being released? not being picked up by receptor?), the fact that there are multiple receptors for each neurotransmitter which drugs may or may not manipulate, the fact that there are multiple neurotransmitters (which end up affecting different areas of the brain and hence different symptoms, though some symptoms are influenced by multiple neurotransmitters), and that putting all these things together to result in the right balance of communication (not quantity of chemicals) in the brain, it would be a surprise if there weren't multiple different approaches for the "same" problem.

Amitriptyline is a tricyclic; it's MAOI's that require a special (low-tyramine) diet.

Never? Dude, Tk back in the day! Compared with all the raw X11 predecessors, it was a revelation for Unix GUI's.