I was in my 40s when I realized that the thing that gave me severe depression for over 25 years was capitalism. Even as a teenager I could not comprehend why anyone would go to school so they could get a job so they could hopefully pay the bank the rest of their lives so they can mow grass.
My brain to me: Sounds like you need a drink buddy.
Me: I dunno, liver, what’s your take?
Liver: Fuck it man, take that drink.
This is both my biggest love of, and gripe with, Slavs.
“Why smile? Everything is shit? Look around!”
But also, the world is amazing AF if you look around. There’s joy and love in anything and everything of you choose to look for joy and love.
But also, everything is fucked, so let’s drink rakja until we don’t feel feelings.
But also, flowers and sunsets.
you can have depression from outside causes. some of it will be internal. I have major depressive and general anxiety. I don’t think current events created it but they did push it to where it is not manageable by me with things like walks and breathing excersises.
Lemmite try not to talk like a 13 tumblr user when their parents won’t buy them a £2000 streaming PC challenge.
Bitch I’m 37
Why not both - my brain
So, there’s a dark joke about why ECT (Electro Convulsive Therapy) is (mostly temporarily) effective in treatment of depression.
First, you should know, ECT has a strong side effect of amnesia, mostly temporary amnesia.
So, you get ECT, you forget why (you think) your life sucks and your outlook on everything improves, depressive symptoms fade - until your memory comes back.
People in all walks of life get serious depression, including high rates of suicide.
You’re not wrong, it can be both. Which sucks.
Ignorance is bliss, and that’s why I refrain from explaining myself to other people 😅
lemmy will have you thinking everything sucks though. this is one of the most intense doomer spaces i’ve ever seen…
Lemmy is filled with terminally online shut-ins that barely interact with the real world, yet talk like they’ve travelled the world and are an expert in anything.
Not even close to as bad as Reddit. Have you opened that recently…? I can’t scroll more than 4 or 5 posts before I have to nope out of there because I can feel the ragebait radiating from my phone.
Ragebait is everywhere, if you choose to take it.
You also have the choice to look past / through it and see non-rage inducing aspects of life both closely related to and entirely different from the ragebait.
That’s not to say that the ragebait is false, just that how you engage with it - or not - is more important to improving outcomes in your life and the lives of those you impact than directly addressing the particular spin the baiters put on their hooks.
I have the opposite reaction. I feel like reddit is easier to curate for good things.
I still look at communities like DIY, personalfinance, Timberborn, etc over there. Some of these are topics where Lemmy doesn’t have much coverage.
*Well, this prompted me to search, and I found a couple of equivalents here. Lower traffic, though.
One feature that Reddit has that Lemmy still hasn’t managed to replicate is that it’s feed will weight your subscribed subs higher but still include non-subscribed posts. On Lemmy, I can only choose between local/subscribed/all, where local/all ignores the comms I’ve subscribed to (they still show up but in their default sort location), and subscribed only shows the comms I’ve subscribed to.
I miss that hybrid sorting… it meant that I could sub to stuff that makes me happy, and still get posts from other places mixed in.
not really! people are mostly talking about their day to day experience whether it’s their work or just general life.
I find it a lot better then reddit, and exponentially better that Facebook or Twitter (refuse to call it stupid ass X).
I mean you still get a lot of the echo chamber opinions and such, but I think that’s more of a reflection of the current state of society and not Lemmy.
Facebook or the status update bar from facebook. When Twitter launched i was like no fucking way anyone uses this.
Pretty sure it’s both in my case. I don’t want to do it anymore.
“It all started the day I was born and then things went rapidly downhill from there.”
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
My wife would tell me I’m depressed, and I’d agree about that.
However, she thought I should get meds, and I thought I should only get medicated for depression if the depression was chemical.
If you’re depressed because life sucks, then you should be motivated to fix what sucks. Unfortunately, that’s not how depression works.
Luckily, life started to suck slightly less.
One aspect that I think most don’t talk about enough is functional disorders.
Like way back in the day, depression was seen as a sign of weakness and a character flaw. Then we swung real hard to the opposite end and said that depression is completely outside of your control and is just a physical chemical imbalance. And while it certainly can be influenced by inherent brain chemistry, this is still not a particularly holistic understanding of it.
Many disorders, both physical and mental, can instead be thought of as functional disorders that act more like feedback loops. Think about something like tendonitis, it causes swelling, which causes more rubbing, which causes more tendonitis… Depression amongst many other mental health issues, can function similarly. It saps your motivation which can prevent you from doing stuff or taking action, which makes you more depressed.
Anti-depressants can help you break this loop, but it’s also entirely possible for anti-depressants to just ‘even you out’ enough that you feel no reason to break the loop or make any changes, and then you just end up stuck in the same loop, and just kind of end up numb to everything as a best case scenario.
The research on the long term effectiveness of anti-depressants for relatively mild - mid cases of depression is also still up for debate. A recent Australian public health report was pointing out that most studies measuring the effectiveness sof long term anti-depressant use measure the negative effects from stopping them, but many of these effects are just withdrawal, and once you control for that, they don’t look more effective than therapy, but come with a slew of negative side effects.
In my case, having my manager quit did more for my depression than any pill could do.
Shit life syndrome! In my case it got much better around the time I left school, and my parents divorced and left me at that point.
There’s a few studies that link low self esteem and depression with accurate understanding of the world and oneself. Lookup depressive realism. It’s actually mildly depressing!
Incidentally, using high self esteem may also lead to looking down on others, defensiveness, inability to critically analyze oneself, among other things. That’s just kinda how it goes when you think highly of yourself…
Sounds like a very mild case of “billionaire syndrome”
I am sorry, but this is nonsense. Even if the world sucks, the logical, smart response would not be dispair and depression, because that fixes nothing.
Also things like looking down on other or defensiveness are symptoms of low self esteem, not a high one. If you really are confident in yourself, you don’t need to feel better than others, because you feel good about yourself.
You can understand the world and still try to enjoy your life. The world always sucked and people found ways to cope with it. But that is a skill, that doesn’t always come naturally, but you should always strife towards that.
I am sorry, you are going through this, but don’t try to rationalize it. It is nearly rational, nor is it an inevitable outcome of high intelligence (this is not a judgement of you personally by the way).
Even if the world sucks, the logical, smart response would not be despair and depression, because that fixes nothing.
How logically do most people act, in your estimation? How logically would they act, if an unbearable depression descended upon them through looking at the shape of the world today? How many active genocides are taking place? How quickly will climate change destroy our way of life, and is there anything you, as an individual, can do to stop it? What about food and water insecurity being faced by millions of people? Millions of Americans, even? Lack of healthcare, the widening income gap between the 1% and everyone else? What can you logically do to address these global, ever worsening issues?
Perhaps the fact that you can’t do anything about these very real issues can also be a source of depression? Especially when you’re struggling just to keep your head above the metaphorical water?
One of the last vestiges of hope is a belief in karma. That the evil people perpetuating these evil things will one day face justice. But that’s not true, is it? kissinger never faced consequences. Somehow I doubt trump or netenyahoo will either.
I imagine your answer is probably something along the lines of “focus on your immediate needs and community.” Which boils down to, ignore these problems, because there’s nothing you can do. Kinda like telling an employee aboard a star ship to tidy their working area as the main computer counts down the self-destruction sequence.
I, for one, cannot imagine that Sisyphus is happy.
Ok here’s a counterpoint, sure the world sucks in that all the things you mentioned are happening, but also - compared to the conditions we were genetically programmed to endure, modern life is amazing. For the vast majority of people, our base biological needs are met effortlessly. The majority of human existence has historically been a struggle for calories. Like, thats it. That’s 99% of your life: either hunting, foraging, farming, or directly supporting the people in your family who do. Also, the strong dominating the weak wasn’t even questioned it was just a fact of life.
Transport one of those people from the hunter-gatherer/bronze age/iron age/midevial era and they would be ecstatic in the modern day. Try to tell them about Netanyahu or Trump and they would probably say “wow they sound like an asshole but not as bad as the guys I had to deal with”.
There are no objectively good or bad human conditions. Things can always be better or worse. People’s emotions and perception of human conditions, therefore, are all about whether they perceive things are getting better or worse. The good part about that is it gives you agency. All most people have to do to be happy is improve their quality of life, or adjust how they perceive the world in order to give themselves a more positive outlook.
Tldr get tf off of Lemmy and the rest of social media
I partially agree. Depression has nothing to do with logic and Depression is kind a Symptom of messed up brain or hormones i think. People dont decide to be depressed.
And i would like to throw in the theory that high and low selfesteem does not really exist, but rather stabile and fragile ego. People with high or low self esteem tend to struggle with critic and be defensive or tend to feel bad about themselves. But that is gross generalisation and fragile/stable ego makes a lot more sense to me
There are a few conflicting frameworks, plus what I describe is normative behavior rather than people with diagnosable conditions (depression in abnormal psychology tends to be more a dysfunction of the brain). I teach social psychology to undergraduates, so I’m familiar with the other frameworks at a fairly broad level-- the one the person you responded to is a bit of an older perspective, but the direction you’re taking I’ve heard discussed.
Still, it’s difficult to get into the details in a Lemmy comment on a shower thoughts thread.
None the less, I mostly don’t like the fragile/secure ego approach because it’s harder to measure something like that, meaning there’s less evidence that’s what’s going on.
I will say more generally though, our brains seek out acceptance and avoid rejection, much like we do physical pain (fMRI confirms it’s the same part of the brain). That includes good things, like behaving cooperatively, and bad things, like confirmation bias. Self-esteem, similarly, cuts both ways-- it makes us feel better without needing external sources of esteem, but it also rejects external threats to that self esteem.
I simply worry that excess of anything leads to bad outcomes, like certain politicians we’re dealing with now. But now we’re getting more into my opinion and less about the research.
If you’re curious, the textbook I use is open source. https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/
It’s not perfect, though. I find it covers the topic well enough not to need to force my students to buy a text.
Yeah, shit does suck and having financial security is better therapy than therapy.
Success is the best antidepressant. Weight loss does wonders.
Don’t know about that. We hear about celebrities that had depression.
Yeah, but that’s a different mechanism of addiction to feeling good due to a surge of emotions.
But if that was true Elon would be the happiest person on earth.
No, you’re picturing a linear curve on a graph (i.e. a straight line). Most systems in life do not behave linearly though. An S shape is probably more accurate, with happiness levelling off past a certain point.
Offer valid only up to $150k, turns out. After that, it starts going downhill.
*different cities may experience slightly higher or lower values, terms and conditions apply
After that, it starts going downhill.
No study suggests this. It keeps going up - you’re just hitting diminishing returns.
There’s a trillionaire that is desperate to get into pedophile parties, and between him and the common person, there’s a lot of millionaires and billionaires in those pedophile parties, so there’s clearly a downward trending curve.
Yeah but that’s because he’s a shit excuse for a human, and is fundamentally broken. Whereas a normie would self-actualize with the resources to do so.
Feel like that used to be true, now you need that and stability.
Maybe his happiness is so far up the scale it folded back in on itself and circled back to depression. Like getting a burn from dry ice.
unsigned integer overflow in real life :o
Having financial security eases with financial worries to an extent but doesn’t entirely solve even that issue nor does it even begin to deal with the unrelated issues. One can be financially secure and absolutely miserable.
I often think about how if I was financially secure for the future it would not change the state of my country or the world. I would be happier day to day to some degree but it would not change whats going on.
well I am financially insecure and miserable :(
Oh have I got great news for you! Both are actually true!
Score!
