The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Which means nothing if I don't actually get there. This is why I hate the whole idea of "grading on effort." You either got the right answer or you didn't. You either accomplish a goal, or you don't. How much effort you put in is completely and totally irrelevant!
It doesn't matter if you fail to achieve a goal after thirty minutes, or thirty years. It doesn't matter if you spend your whole life in pursuit of the goal. The only thing that matters is that you failed! In fact, the latter is arguably worse, because you wasted time and effort on something that didn't work.
Results are the only thing that matters. If you try really hard to do something, but never succeed? Then you might as well have never tried at all.
I'm not grasping your metaphor here.
That's exactly why I suggested goals that are trivially attainable, but ironically I suspect you dismissed them because they're too easy and thus not worth the effort. I'll explain my reason why:
If you never achieve your goal despite your efforts it means you were pursuing an unachievable goal, which is a failure and a tragedy and waste, and that's naturally very depressing.
I've read numerous books and articles on depression, and the best explanation I've found wasn't that it was a chemical imbalance, or a lack of daylight or physical exertion. It's that depression is a natural reaction to the repeated failure to achieve a goal. The feedback of failure is what alters the chemicals, and generates the low mood that influences a person to withdraw, whereupon they end up getting less daylight, less exertion, less socialising, etc etc. This is actually rational. Your biological substrate is compelling you to stop wasting its energy on something you/it demonstrably can't achieve.
You can force that away by tinkering with antidepressants and forcing yourself out there, and maybe that kickstarts the process, but it's skipping the most important step which is letting go of, or at least setting aside the goal that you repeatedly failed to achieve and recalibrating your ambition towards something more attainable. Then you have a new reason to get up and get going, because then you can get a successful outcome, and when you get the outcome you get the sweet conscious satisfaction plus the accompanying unconscious mood boosting chemicals. Or maybe you fail again, and the cycle resets, and you try something different until you find something that does deliver success.
TLDR Go somewhere else, get somewhere else, and discover whatever the meaning is of getting there instead of the meaninglessness of not getting where you're not getting.
In the literature, this is called the "behavioral theory of depression" and it's supported by studies that suggest the behavioral components of psychotherapy -- like looking at maladaptive behaviors, setting goals, seeing how things that are satisfying in the short term actually distract from things that are more important in the long term -- are equally as effective as therapy with cognitive components. I tend to agree with this view, although daylight, physical exertion, and sometimes, yes, even thoughts can play a role. The "chemical imbalance" theory is obviously silly, but I would note that each person has a different tendency towards depressed states that has significant genetic factors, so obviously something biochemical has an influence.
I conceptualize depression as a "stuck" state, like a program trapped in a loop. Like you said, lots of things can "unstick" someone from that state: behavioral changes, deliberate changes in thought, removing yourself from an environmental condition that's causing stress, but also tweaking neurotransmitters or even just a shift in mindset from "I'm stuck" to "I'm going to be unstuck" can be enough to somehow break the cycle. To me, this explains why antidepressants work miracles for some people while doing little if anything for others; I think of antidepressants as "shake up the neurotransmitters" pills, and like a vending machine, sometimes a little percussive maintanence makes things work again -- and sometimes not. In particular, the blunting caused by antidepressants appears to help anxious people, and reducing someone's anxiety slightly might be enough to unstick them from the stuck state and get them moving again.
All of our treatments for depression are just varied ways of trying to shake things up enough that a patient will happen to become unstuck and fall into a positive feedback loop. IMO, that's why all forms of psychotherapy work about the same -- just for different people -- because we know the stuck state can exist but there's no agreement on what's actually going on psychologically or biochemically. Like you argue, it may be that depression is adaptive, but that modern lifestyles make it more likely to occur than is adaptive. It wouldn't be the first time!
It's depressing that psychology has so many entrenched schools all trying to fit the evidence into existing universal theories. It really does seem like everyone has a useful piece of the map (except for the guys who built an entire theory of the human mind out of the color print bars and some of the copyright logo).
Are there interdisciplinary efforts out there to reconcile this stuff, or do they not get supported?
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