That SuckedinfopracticalAugust 24 2008, 18:28:43 UTC
I disagree completely with you and the last poster. That sucked. Why?
I'd say that optimists think they know the future will be good, pessimists think they know the future will be bad and realists think the future is unknowable. Thus I don't subscribe to the aphoristic notion that pessimism or depression are the conditions of viewing things realistically, since it's not realistic to believe you can predict the long term at all.
To start from the notion that we cannot predict anything about the long term future at all -- now THAT'S delusional. If we had no predictive ability whatsoever, we wouldn't plan for the long term at all. It would be irrational. But survival of the fittest had, quite demonstrably, populated this planet with people who have the ability to plan for the long haul, and do so readily, if not instinctively.
If we're going to critique mindsets of depressed people...I'm going to suggest we start with something other than a claim without a warrant that itself seems (IMHO) based in delusion. Otherwise, calling the idea of negative future assessment a "delusion" only serves to justify suicidal actions. To do so is to not attempt understanding at all, but rather to distance oneself further from the suicidal person, therefore isolating that person more completely.
If you really actually don't want people to kill themselves, then this essay is at best counterproductive. It's flowery prose that makes absolutely no attempt to empathize with the perspective of the person who simply doesn't see, on average, a future worth the cost of continuing.
Some things in life will suck with certainty or near certainty. For everyone. Life involves a lot of pain. People heap it on each other pretty regularly. Frankly, I'm shocked more people don't kill themselves. It would be a better world where people felt more free to do so. Perhaps then we would trust those decisions to be more rational. And we wouldn't worry about whether we had the right conversation or not -- if anything strikes me as irrational, it's worrying that I had the wrong conversation, so long as I was being genuine.
***
In the end, perhaps I should call this brilliant. Perhaps the author, and the audience of the author, secretly do want some people to kill themselves, but don't want to say so out loud. If you want people to kill themselves, this is what you do -- tell them in an eloquent way that gets praised by many people that [in addition to their feeling that the present sucks deeply] that they are delusional. Yeah, that'll win em back.
Re: That SuckedcolinmarshallAugust 24 2008, 18:42:37 UTC
Ssh! You've uncovered my Final Solution for world population reduction. Clearly, I need to add more flowers to my prose to distract those who would ruin my scheme.
You've got a pretty cool-lookin' journal, by the way, from what I can see of it - added.
Re: That SuckedinfopracticalAugust 24 2008, 19:06:02 UTC
Ssh! You've uncovered my Final Solution for world population reduction.
I don't find that notion nearly so entertaining as you do. I wasn't being flip. Every time I see people build up the notion that negative future assessment is delusional -- without taking at least some effort to step into the shoes of that person -- it's very hard for me not to see it as an attack on people who aren't like them, whether conscious (usually not) or unconscious (usually so).
I don't play games with my opinions about an issue like hopeless pain.
Re: That SuckedcolinmarshallAugust 24 2008, 19:15:46 UTC
Well, the idea is to ultimately get the world's population down to one - me - so that I can drive stolen cars through forests and eat canned food and stuff. But I'm starting to think that's unrealistic.
At any rate, my assessment comes from an effort to step into the shoes of friends I've had who've suffered under these conditions, not to distance myself from them. If I'm saying that negative future assessment is delusional, I'd only mean "has a low probability of tracking to reality". And I'm not saying the person is stupid or anything; just that their particular belief about the road ahead may be way implausibly convicted and specific in its negativity. I find myself holding the same sort of beliefs, albeit on a much smaller scale, all the time, and have to work to remind myself that my detailed predictions of gloom and doom are, most of the time, unempirical nonsense.
Re: That SuckedinfopracticalAugust 24 2008, 19:37:05 UTC
If I'm saying that negative future assessment is delusional, I'd only mean "has a low probability of tracking to reality".
Okay, so let's start with a reason for this belief (which you state declaratively as a fact, as if you don't want to leave much room for discussion -- this strikes me as distancing yourself from anyone who might have a contrary take on the world).
And I'm not saying the person is stupid or anything; just that their particular belief about the road ahead may be way implausibly convicted and specific in its negativity.
Now you're diverging greatly from your last statement. here you leave open the possibility...maybe they're implausibly convicted...maybe they're not. If you acknowledge the "maybe they're not" part, doesn't that destroy the idea that these thoughts are any more likely to be delusional than...any other thoughts? Now you're leaving yourself with the need to actually evaluate that person's prospects in life. Maybe they're good, maybe they aren't...but you can't dismiss negative assessment as delusional without...doing the assessment. Even then, you've got to consider that you don't know all the facts, or that your own judgment might be no better than theirs.
I find myself holding the same sort of beliefs, albeit on a much smaller scale, all the time, and have to work to remind myself that my detailed predictions of gloom and doom are, most of the time, unempirical nonsense.
I hold the same sort of beliefs as well. But so far as I can tell, it's not unempirical nonsense. There is joy in the world, but there is also a lot of very real pain, and lots of forces that must be met with tremendous energy in order to live a happy life -- unless we decide ourselves to give in and pass that pain on to others. I could detail a few of these forces if you're unconvinced, but I would rather you search your own thoughts. Not that I want you to be miserable...I just can't stand the thought of living in proverbial Matrix.
Re: That SuckedcolinmarshallAugust 24 2008, 20:59:04 UTC
I'm not convinced that there's a contradiction between "having beliefs that have a low probability of tracking to reality" - as distinct, after all, from having a zero probability of tracking to reality - and having beliefs that "may be way implausibly convicted and specific in their negativity." To my mind, "maybe" and "low probability" don't contradict one another; would you argue that they do?
I do agree with you on these points:
A depressed person's gloomy predictions may be borne out by reality (though when I've heard depressed friends make these predictions, they generally sound implausibly apocalyptic, no matter what their life is already like)
Examination of depressed individuals will shed additional light (though not, I think all the light required to make an absolute prediction) on how specifically realistic or unrealistic these predictions of theirs are
There is real joy in the world (that the depressed and the non-depressed alike can and do experience)
There is real pain in the world (that the depressed and the non-depressed alike can and do experience)
But my basic point, I think, can be distilled like this: "Depressed people appear convinced that their future will be too painful to bear, a prediction which entails overestimation of their own (or any individual's) predictive abilities." (And, to be clear, I don't think humans can't make guesses, with better-than-chance accuracy, about their future - it seems clear to me that they can't literally predict the long term.) I would argue that this holds whether or not one specific depressed individual's predictions hold true. If I'm happy, I approach the world as a place full of surprising possibilities; if I'm depressed (not, of course, clinically), then I approach the world as a place of few, predictable possibilities. Serious depression seems to me to be an all-encompassing version of the latter.
I'm not sure how much we actually disagree here - I mean, other than that bit about "flowery prose". Flowery? Flowery?
It's About the AxiominfopracticalAugust 25 2008, 03:00:22 UTC
I think my response to radtea below is the best I can do right now for explaining my problem with the essay. I don't call the prose flowery in the sense of describing something that's pretty. You use words well, so the flower is...all those words (the whole essay really) wrapping around...one single axiom that I don't buy and that you don't give me a reason to buy -- that it is delusional to think we can predict the long term future in any sense that would allow us to make an assessment about our own prospects in life. Without that axiom, the entire essay crumbles, or even...becomes offensive.
I'm sure you didn't mean your essay to be offensive, but it does offend me for somebody to tell me that I'm delusional for thinking I can form a meaningful guesstimate in regards to my long-term prospects in life. Beyond that, the feeling that other people view me as delusional...just makes me feel more isolated. Reading it made me feel very depressed, like I could see a few possible points of hope fade into oblivion, replaced by people who can't empathize under circumstances of honest, negative self assessment.
Re: It's About the AxiomcolinmarshallAugust 25 2008, 04:29:32 UTC
Fair enough. I think we've gotten to the kernel of the disagreement. First, to quote from your response below:
the author quite clearly stated that we "cannot predict anything about the long term future"
I might not have been clear enough about this in the original post - hell, I probably wasn't - but that's not what I meant, and not quite what I said, either. Literally, what you have in quotes isn't what I wrote; I never said we "cannot predict anything." What I did say was "it's not realistic to believe you can predict the long term at all." By "predict", I do mean predict, as in, to know the future flawlessly. I don't think that precludes educated guesses, and those can be right, but in general they're still pretty damn fallible.
I wrote the post from the perspective that it is possible to make correct statements about one's own long-term future, but that their correctness plummets with each additional unit of specificity. Surely that's not particularly controversial? On top of that, I reckoned that someone depressed is convinced of the truth of their own negative assessment of the future more strongly than human predictive ability warrants.
Obviously I don't know your particular guesstimates of your own long-term prospects, but by no means would I label them delusional out of hand; it depends upon how specific said guesstimates are - and if you really mean "guesstimate" rather than "prediction", that doesn't sound delusional to me - and what the pertinent evidence looks like.
Framed in these terms, my argument would be this: someone more depressed than you probably is more convinced of the details of their own negative vision of their future than you are of yours. Agree? Disagree?
I should add that I make what seem to me to be honest negative self-assessments pretty frequently, and at the time I'm always stubbornly convinced of them - it's just that, as time passes, I tend to find them proven false. But your mileage may vary.
Re: It's About the AxiominfopracticalAugust 25 2008, 04:45:18 UTC
I'll take you at your clarification of your point about the sentence that defines the axiom ("it's not realistic to believe you can predict the long term at all."). Sorry if I misquoted -- I was trying to paraphrase to get to the point of what I was trying to explain.
I wrote the post from the perspective that it is possible to make correct statements about one's own long-term future, but that their correctness plummets with each additional unit of specificity. Surely that's not particularly controversial?
Okay, so it's only delusional to believe that you know the future to great certainty. Okay, that's fine and I can agree, though the point seems suddenly without impact -- I don't think optimists or depressive pessimists believe that the can predict the future to that kind of certainty.
I wrote the post from the perspective that it is possible to make correct statements about one's own long-term future, but that their correctness plummets with each additional unit of specificity. Surely that's not particularly controversial? On top of that, I reckoned that someone depressed is convinced of the truth of their own negative assessment of the future more strongly than human predictive ability warrants.
Okay, then I see our point of disagreement shifting. You think depressed people are convinced of some kind of truth of predictions beyond what ordinary people believe.
So...why do you believe this? Perhaps some are more convinced of their predictive capabilities and some aren't. It feels like you're getting into the realm of some kind of specific mental illness that probably does describe some subset of depressive suicidal people, but that I doubt describes them all.
Re: It's About the AxiomcolinmarshallAugust 26 2008, 17:54:09 UTC
And sure, maybe the point is without impact - that's what Livejournal posts are for, after all. I suppose impact varies from reader to reader.
It seems to me that it would be difficult to be depressed without being overconfident in one's own predictive capabilities. If you can't be reasonably certain that your future will suck, I'd imagine it would be tough to stay depressed. However, this doesn't cover those who, even taking into account the fallibility of human predictions, actually can be certain of future suckage: those about to be taken to the guillotine, for example. But I don't know if their condition counts as "depression", per se.
Re: It's About the AxiominfopracticalAugust 25 2008, 05:32:35 UTC
After reading your essay again (post clarification), I think I better understand your point-of-view. I agree entirely with the idea that the mindset of "that might suck" ruins opportunities to experience "that might be an adventure and not suck". I guess I just see you as pigeonholing depressive thoughts to certainty of the "that might suck" mindset, when I think there is a much wider range of explanation for depression -- some of which might not involve conscious decision making at all.
I think most of my negative reaction to such pigeonholing was me being repulsed by something that appeared to be...blaming the victim. I think the victim is responsible in some cases, but not in others (though mostly a mixture to be sure).
Re: It's About the AxiomcolinmarshallAugust 26 2008, 17:58:00 UTC
The issue here may also be that we're operating on different definitions of the term "depression". As in my example above, the dude who's down because his head is about to be chopped off would not, to my mind, count as depressed, because, well, he's just having the expected reaction to facing the guillotine. It's those who don't have that near-guarantee of suffering but think and act as if they do that I'm calling depressed.
Which may well be circular - the depressed overestimate the probability of suffering in their future, and the people who overestimate the probability of suffering in their future are depressed - but I'm going to have to spend a bit more mental bandwidth on that before I know for sure.
Re: It's About the AxiominfopracticalAugust 26 2008, 18:09:19 UTC
It's those who don't have that near-guarantee of suffering but think and act as if they do that I'm calling depressed.
Who's to judge what is and isn't a near-guarantee? Without some kind of standard, why do you suppose depressed poor make poor judgments in this regard.
It seems to be that what you're actually doing is...redefining depression with the one criterion that such people are the people who poorly judge their future as, on average, miserable. At that point, it still strikes me as a strange way of saying that it's all their fault that they're depressed, rather than empathizing and trying to explore the possibility (at all) that maybe they have reason to be depressed (or even that depression is an autonomous biochemical response to certain sets of stimuli -- I think that's the prevailing theory).
Re: It's About the AxiomcolinmarshallAugust 26 2008, 18:29:23 UTC
Oh, I don't mean to give the impression that I deny depression's biochemical roots; in fact, I'm probably even more solidly in the camp than most people. I actually wouldn't be surprised by a 100% biological (rather than, say, habitual) explanation for depression, though that seems orthogonal to whether or not depressed people overestimate their predictive abilities. (Note that I'm making no claims about the cause of depression, nor have I done so.)
Re: It's About the AxiominfopracticalAugust 26 2008, 18:43:59 UTC
So, your view of depression is that (generally -- I don't mean to overgeneralize your point) is that it is a biological response that causes people to overestimate their predictive ability of the future, causing them to focus on negative thoughts to a degree that is too strong? And optimists suffer (not the right word of course) from a similar biological condition? So this is like depression and mania perhaps?
I can buy that this is true for a large portion of depressed people, and perhaps a majority or even strong majority. But I think what frustrates me is that you're leaving out the possibility that a lot of people are emotionally down because of an onslaught of negative triggers, and that perhaps they have good reason to believe in a pattern that isn't going to let up.
I think you should at least explore the possibility that some people have good reason to think that life sucks and will continue to suck. The guillotine is a great start -- it's overly extreme of course, but we can certainly step back from that extreme and see that there is some point -- some equilibrium where we can judge life as...gonna suck (the extremal principle is an awesome cognitive tool). And that the feeling that suckitude of life results is pretty much the same emotional despair as that which results from biochemical misfires.
But now the essay comes off as a "this is just the problem" essay, as if to say "just pump a little more air into the tires to solve problem X." If the problem is a biochemical response, then what good does it do to describe the mental loop of negativity -- other than to cause people who have that loop to feel hopeless? There's no "here's the recipe for not thinking in this loop," so if I buy your interpretation...then I'm left without understanding your point in writing the essay.
Re: It's About the AxiomcolinmarshallAugust 28 2008, 18:04:17 UTC
Well, I personally lean toward biochemical explanations for depression, but that wasn't really a part of my original post, which was meant to hold whether or not depression of 100% biochemical, 0% biochemical, or anywhere in between. It's orthogonal to that.
Since I believe that life can suck, it certainly wouldn't make any sense for me to believe that nobody can ever correctly envision future suckage, though I do believe that it is typically very difficult to do so accurately. (The same holds for accurately envisioning future goodness.) But I would say that knowing suckage is in your immediate future and reacting to it - and the immediate future is really the only range one can begin to get certainty in - doesn't quite count as "depression", because it's a response to something rather than a chronic condition. (Not-quite-matching definitions of depression may be at work here.)
But, yes, the post was only ever intended as an observation, and not even a rigorous one at that. A wag might observe that that's why it's in a Livejournal rather than a psychological journal. The "point", to the extent that there was one, was just to describe a way I'd been thinking about the differences between optimism/pessimism/realism lately, and how a description of depression as an extreme version of pessimism as that system describes it seems to fit a particular individual I know. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'd say that optimists think they know the future will be good, pessimists think they know the future will be bad and realists think the future is unknowable. Thus I don't subscribe to the aphoristic notion that pessimism or depression are the conditions of viewing things realistically, since it's not realistic to believe you can predict the long term at all.
To start from the notion that we cannot predict anything about the long term future at all -- now THAT'S delusional. If we had no predictive ability whatsoever, we wouldn't plan for the long term at all. It would be irrational. But survival of the fittest had, quite demonstrably, populated this planet with people who have the ability to plan for the long haul, and do so readily, if not instinctively.
If we're going to critique mindsets of depressed people...I'm going to suggest we start with something other than a claim without a warrant that itself seems (IMHO) based in delusion. Otherwise, calling the idea of negative future assessment a "delusion" only serves to justify suicidal actions. To do so is to not attempt understanding at all, but rather to distance oneself further from the suicidal person, therefore isolating that person more completely.
If you really actually don't want people to kill themselves, then this essay is at best counterproductive. It's flowery prose that makes absolutely no attempt to empathize with the perspective of the person who simply doesn't see, on average, a future worth the cost of continuing.
Some things in life will suck with certainty or near certainty. For everyone. Life involves a lot of pain. People heap it on each other pretty regularly. Frankly, I'm shocked more people don't kill themselves. It would be a better world where people felt more free to do so. Perhaps then we would trust those decisions to be more rational. And we wouldn't worry about whether we had the right conversation or not -- if anything strikes me as irrational, it's worrying that I had the wrong conversation, so long as I was being genuine.
***
In the end, perhaps I should call this brilliant. Perhaps the author, and the audience of the author, secretly do want some people to kill themselves, but don't want to say so out loud. If you want people to kill themselves, this is what you do -- tell them in an eloquent way that gets praised by many people that [in addition to their feeling that the present sucks deeply] that they are delusional. Yeah, that'll win em back.
Reply
You've got a pretty cool-lookin' journal, by the way, from what I can see of it - added.
Reply
I don't find that notion nearly so entertaining as you do. I wasn't being flip. Every time I see people build up the notion that negative future assessment is delusional -- without taking at least some effort to step into the shoes of that person -- it's very hard for me not to see it as an attack on people who aren't like them, whether conscious (usually not) or unconscious (usually so).
I don't play games with my opinions about an issue like hopeless pain.
Reply
At any rate, my assessment comes from an effort to step into the shoes of friends I've had who've suffered under these conditions, not to distance myself from them. If I'm saying that negative future assessment is delusional, I'd only mean "has a low probability of tracking to reality". And I'm not saying the person is stupid or anything; just that their particular belief about the road ahead may be way implausibly convicted and specific in its negativity. I find myself holding the same sort of beliefs, albeit on a much smaller scale, all the time, and have to work to remind myself that my detailed predictions of gloom and doom are, most of the time, unempirical nonsense.
Reply
Okay, so let's start with a reason for this belief (which you state declaratively as a fact, as if you don't want to leave much room for discussion -- this strikes me as distancing yourself from anyone who might have a contrary take on the world).
And I'm not saying the person is stupid or anything; just that their particular belief about the road ahead may be way implausibly convicted and specific in its negativity.
Now you're diverging greatly from your last statement. here you leave open the possibility...maybe they're implausibly convicted...maybe they're not. If you acknowledge the "maybe they're not" part, doesn't that destroy the idea that these thoughts are any more likely to be delusional than...any other thoughts? Now you're leaving yourself with the need to actually evaluate that person's prospects in life. Maybe they're good, maybe they aren't...but you can't dismiss negative assessment as delusional without...doing the assessment. Even then, you've got to consider that you don't know all the facts, or that your own judgment might be no better than theirs.
I find myself holding the same sort of beliefs, albeit on a much smaller scale, all the time, and have to work to remind myself that my detailed predictions of gloom and doom are, most of the time, unempirical nonsense.
I hold the same sort of beliefs as well. But so far as I can tell, it's not unempirical nonsense. There is joy in the world, but there is also a lot of very real pain, and lots of forces that must be met with tremendous energy in order to live a happy life -- unless we decide ourselves to give in and pass that pain on to others. I could detail a few of these forces if you're unconvinced, but I would rather you search your own thoughts. Not that I want you to be miserable...I just can't stand the thought of living in proverbial Matrix.
Reply
I do agree with you on these points:
- A depressed person's gloomy predictions may be borne out by reality (though when I've heard depressed friends make these predictions, they generally sound implausibly apocalyptic, no matter what their life is already like)
- Examination of depressed individuals will shed additional light (though not, I think all the light required to make an absolute prediction) on how specifically realistic or unrealistic these predictions of theirs are
- There is real joy in the world (that the depressed and the non-depressed alike can and do experience)
- There is real pain in the world (that the depressed and the non-depressed alike can and do experience)
But my basic point, I think, can be distilled like this: "Depressed people appear convinced that their future will be too painful to bear, a prediction which entails overestimation of their own (or any individual's) predictive abilities." (And, to be clear, I don't think humans can't make guesses, with better-than-chance accuracy, about their future - it seems clear to me that they can't literally predict the long term.) I would argue that this holds whether or not one specific depressed individual's predictions hold true. If I'm happy, I approach the world as a place full of surprising possibilities; if I'm depressed (not, of course, clinically), then I approach the world as a place of few, predictable possibilities. Serious depression seems to me to be an all-encompassing version of the latter.I'm not sure how much we actually disagree here - I mean, other than that bit about "flowery prose". Flowery? Flowery?
Reply
I'm sure you didn't mean your essay to be offensive, but it does offend me for somebody to tell me that I'm delusional for thinking I can form a meaningful guesstimate in regards to my long-term prospects in life. Beyond that, the feeling that other people view me as delusional...just makes me feel more isolated. Reading it made me feel very depressed, like I could see a few possible points of hope fade into oblivion, replaced by people who can't empathize under circumstances of honest, negative self assessment.
Reply
the author quite clearly stated that we "cannot predict anything about the long term future"
I might not have been clear enough about this in the original post - hell, I probably wasn't - but that's not what I meant, and not quite what I said, either. Literally, what you have in quotes isn't what I wrote; I never said we "cannot predict anything." What I did say was "it's not realistic to believe you can predict the long term at all." By "predict", I do mean predict, as in, to know the future flawlessly. I don't think that precludes educated guesses, and those can be right, but in general they're still pretty damn fallible.
I wrote the post from the perspective that it is possible to make correct statements about one's own long-term future, but that their correctness plummets with each additional unit of specificity. Surely that's not particularly controversial? On top of that, I reckoned that someone depressed is convinced of the truth of their own negative assessment of the future more strongly than human predictive ability warrants.
Obviously I don't know your particular guesstimates of your own long-term prospects, but by no means would I label them delusional out of hand; it depends upon how specific said guesstimates are - and if you really mean "guesstimate" rather than "prediction", that doesn't sound delusional to me - and what the pertinent evidence looks like.
Framed in these terms, my argument would be this: someone more depressed than you probably is more convinced of the details of their own negative vision of their future than you are of yours. Agree? Disagree?
I should add that I make what seem to me to be honest negative self-assessments pretty frequently, and at the time I'm always stubbornly convinced of them - it's just that, as time passes, I tend to find them proven false. But your mileage may vary.
Reply
I wrote the post from the perspective that it is possible to make correct statements about one's own long-term future, but that their correctness plummets with each additional unit of specificity. Surely that's not particularly controversial?
Okay, so it's only delusional to believe that you know the future to great certainty. Okay, that's fine and I can agree, though the point seems suddenly without impact -- I don't think optimists or depressive pessimists believe that the can predict the future to that kind of certainty.
I wrote the post from the perspective that it is possible to make correct statements about one's own long-term future, but that their correctness plummets with each additional unit of specificity. Surely that's not particularly controversial? On top of that, I reckoned that someone depressed is convinced of the truth of their own negative assessment of the future more strongly than human predictive ability warrants.
Okay, then I see our point of disagreement shifting. You think depressed people are convinced of some kind of truth of predictions beyond what ordinary people believe.
So...why do you believe this? Perhaps some are more convinced of their predictive capabilities and some aren't. It feels like you're getting into the realm of some kind of specific mental illness that probably does describe some subset of depressive suicidal people, but that I doubt describes them all.
Reply
It seems to me that it would be difficult to be depressed without being overconfident in one's own predictive capabilities. If you can't be reasonably certain that your future will suck, I'd imagine it would be tough to stay depressed. However, this doesn't cover those who, even taking into account the fallibility of human predictions, actually can be certain of future suckage: those about to be taken to the guillotine, for example. But I don't know if their condition counts as "depression", per se.
Reply
I think most of my negative reaction to such pigeonholing was me being repulsed by something that appeared to be...blaming the victim. I think the victim is responsible in some cases, but not in others (though mostly a mixture to be sure).
Reply
Which may well be circular - the depressed overestimate the probability of suffering in their future, and the people who overestimate the probability of suffering in their future are depressed - but I'm going to have to spend a bit more mental bandwidth on that before I know for sure.
Reply
Who's to judge what is and isn't a near-guarantee? Without some kind of standard, why do you suppose depressed poor make poor judgments in this regard.
It seems to be that what you're actually doing is...redefining depression with the one criterion that such people are the people who poorly judge their future as, on average, miserable. At that point, it still strikes me as a strange way of saying that it's all their fault that they're depressed, rather than empathizing and trying to explore the possibility (at all) that maybe they have reason to be depressed (or even that depression is an autonomous biochemical response to certain sets of stimuli -- I think that's the prevailing theory).
Reply
Reply
I can buy that this is true for a large portion of depressed people, and perhaps a majority or even strong majority. But I think what frustrates me is that you're leaving out the possibility that a lot of people are emotionally down because of an onslaught of negative triggers, and that perhaps they have good reason to believe in a pattern that isn't going to let up.
I think you should at least explore the possibility that some people have good reason to think that life sucks and will continue to suck. The guillotine is a great start -- it's overly extreme of course, but we can certainly step back from that extreme and see that there is some point -- some equilibrium where we can judge life as...gonna suck (the extremal principle is an awesome cognitive tool). And that the feeling that suckitude of life results is pretty much the same emotional despair as that which results from biochemical misfires.
But now the essay comes off as a "this is just the problem" essay, as if to say "just pump a little more air into the tires to solve problem X." If the problem is a biochemical response, then what good does it do to describe the mental loop of negativity -- other than to cause people who have that loop to feel hopeless? There's no "here's the recipe for not thinking in this loop," so if I buy your interpretation...then I'm left without understanding your point in writing the essay.
Reply
Since I believe that life can suck, it certainly wouldn't make any sense for me to believe that nobody can ever correctly envision future suckage, though I do believe that it is typically very difficult to do so accurately. (The same holds for accurately envisioning future goodness.) But I would say that knowing suckage is in your immediate future and reacting to it - and the immediate future is really the only range one can begin to get certainty in - doesn't quite count as "depression", because it's a response to something rather than a chronic condition. (Not-quite-matching definitions of depression may be at work here.)
But, yes, the post was only ever intended as an observation, and not even a rigorous one at that. A wag might observe that that's why it's in a Livejournal rather than a psychological journal. The "point", to the extent that there was one, was just to describe a way I'd been thinking about the differences between optimism/pessimism/realism lately, and how a description of depression as an extreme version of pessimism as that system describes it seems to fit a particular individual I know. Nothing more, nothing less.
Reply
Leave a comment