Yeah, because all depressed people go around thinking they’re special and asking for a free ride on… what exactly?
But it’s great to know we have your permission to seek treatment for mental health issues! :rolleyes:
Let’s accept the premise that “chemicals” aren’t the ultimate cause, but situations and unmet “needs” are.
It is a lot easier said than done to revamp one’s life. If you have to work 16-hour days to keep everyone in the family fed and sheltered and happy, and you can’t take off from work to get counseling and even if you could, you can only afford a few sessions anyway, then why NOT take a pill? Yes, pills have side effects and they don’t always work. But seeing as how we don’t have a system where you get a special variance on rent/mortage/bills when life turns shitty for you, then pills will always be the first choice.
I went through several years of depression. I did talk therapy for a couple of years in the absence of medication because I was certain I could fix it all on my own. But I only got worst through that period, so it would have been stupid for me to not try meds. And while they weren’t a perfect fix, they did stop my deterioration and gave me some space to develop some insight and do healthy, self-caring things. It’s really hard to do healthy things when you’re thinking about suicide all the time. Pain medication helps someone with a broken bone heal faster if only because it allows them to take care of themselves without the distraction of the pain. That’s what psych meds did for me. And I was lucky enough to be able to stick with therapy so that I could take a multi-prong approach to my issues.
Not everyone is this lucky.
I think people who make this kind of argument think there was some idyllic yesteryear when you were allowed to be depressed/anxious without it being medicalized and people would just magically get better all on their own. Ha! What a load of SHIT. In this “yesteryear”, parents could beat their children and wives in public and no one would say a damn thing. In this “yesteryear”, the crazy aunt or uncle was locked in the basement or sent to an institution and no one would speak about them ever again. People have self-medicated themselves with abandon for centuries. It is a luxury to be in the position to cure oneself by addressing unmet needs. Most people can only afford crutches and band-aides.
Forty years ago when I saw a therapist after my divorce, the official diagnosis was “transient situational depression.” Sure enough, as my “situation” changed I worked through it with cognitive-behavioral techniques and didn’t need drugs.
Years later a different set of concerns put me back in therapy. At that point I was prescribed a mild antidepressant and have responded very well to it.
So it isn’t like the professionals haven’t always recognized the difference between being depressed because something bad happened and being depressed even though nothing bad happened. Anyone who claims Big Psychology doesn’t know that, or doesn’t try different treatments, is just lying.
Disability benefits, for one. 
Boo hoo - I’m a fragile snowflake! Where’s my check?
This is offensive, and I think you know that or you would not have slapped a big grinning smiley on it.
Not even close. I agreed with you on the point that there are cases when the right thought is, “Life’s tough, deal with it and move on.”
Disability is not one of them.
Research data was routinely manipulated in peer-reviewed scientific papers. Reforms have since been put in place.
Sorry guys, just posting from my point of view where every day I have to deal with people who are putting more effort into obtaining various disability benefits than into holding down a job.
At no point have I suggested that mental illness is not real, or that SOME people are not incapacitated by it. However, in my daily experience, there are many many people who are whiners and fuck-ups, but would prefer to attribute their situation to factors beyond their control.
And mental health is no different from any area of medicine - mostly conscientious practitioners, but a good number of quacks and whores as well. JMHO
And that’s part of the problem (not accusing you personally, I don’t know you). It’s not your job personally, but as a society, we need to find out why these people are whiners and fuckups. It’s easy to label them that way, because I certainly was (there were reasons other than I mentioned above – immaturity among them, but I’ve grown and learned since then–not everyone does, even those my age and older).
The thing is, is if people don’t want to do a job, there’s usually a reason (or reasons). One is our culture goads us into thinking it’s all right to have that mentality. It’s as if laziness is rewarded. That’s cultural, and as such, we all are responsible.
But we also have a responsibility to try to understand mental illness, even if it doesn’t touch us directly. Just like we understand cancer, or broken bones, or paralysis.
Obviously, I can’t speak to the people that Dinsdale works with, but I do know people are more complex than we usually give them credit for. And if they’re behaving in some detrimental way, there’s usually a reason.
That isn’t to say they need to be comforted and hugged, while you say, “Awwwwwwww…it’s all right, shhhhh,” because ytou don’t. But you shouldn’t go too far the other way either, and just label someone who doesn’t want to do a job just because they’re lazy. Maybe, as in my case, management is the problem.
For one example, I was “promoted” at a company (it was a sales job, and I was given higher dollar accounts), and the paperwork was different than I’d been used to. I asked my boss for advice and instruction. He threw me out of his office, saying, “Figure it out for yourself. I don’t have time to train you!” Some will take the boss’s stance, but to me, that’s wrong.
Also, when you see (joke) signs in workplaces that say, “Beatings will continue until morale improves,” or “I don’t have the time or crayons to explain it to you,” what the hell kind of message is that sending to employees?
In the job I just mentioned, I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I wasn’t important, because I had Mom and Pop accounts, and not big box stores. Guess what? My customers thought I was important. When I was transitioned out, one of my customers said, “What’s wrong with those idiots?!” because he would then have to deal with customer service, either on the phone or through the website.
My upshot is people behave the way they do because of reasons. Those reasons may not be obvious, or even make sense to you, but to them they do. And if you want the best out of people, you should begin understanding them. As individual people.
Now, having said all that, not everything is for everybody. Not everyone is suited to work in a factory, or to pick up trash, or to be a mortician, or be an executive, or work in a restaurant. If people are fucking up in a particular job, they may not be right for that job. In that case, it’s management’s responsibility to determine that, and either train the employee properly, or get someone better suited. It’s also the employee’s responsibility to do the job to the best of their ability, or get out.
Working is a dance between the employer and employee.
Mod Note
All right, I see you’ve qualified your statement, but let’s try to be mindful that a number of people on this message board are directly impacted by mental illness, and this statement definitely qualifies as ‘‘being a jerk.’’ You’re welcome to share your opinions about this subject, even if they are unpopular, but let’s knock it down a notch.
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
My entirely nonprofessional opinion is that today’s society makes it a lot harder to be a whiner or a fuck up. Or unintelligent. Some people simply consistently draw short straws. Below average all around. There simply aren’t enough unskilled decently paying jobs to go around. You drop out of high school, get a drug conviction or 2 on your record, and you are fucked.
American society does a HORRIBLE job working with such people. There definitely should be increased education and training available. Hell, I’m a big fan of CCC-type workfare programs. And I’m a strong supporter of universal health care (with some measure of rationing.)
I am not willing to accept “mental illness” as a catchall term to cover (excuse) everyone who had poor role models, never learned of the need to mature and act responsibly, made various poor choices, or have undesirable personality traits.
On edit - notice received, Spice. I thought someone suggested that NO ONE alleges mental illness seeking a free ride, when my daily experience for 30+ years has been to the contrary.
To me, the differing viewpoints on this matter present a false choice. In my case, there’s a strong argument that I have a biologically based mental illness (recurrent major depressive disorder), but it’s complicated by the fact that I have PTSD and that trauma in my family is generational. Did I inherit depression from my mother? Or did she teach me how to be depressed the way she learned how to be depressed? Particularly in the case of children, early experiences permanently shape neurology. Children exposed to repeated trauma are left with permanently hyperactive amygdalae. The more times you are depressed, the more likely you are to be depressed in the future. It’s not just the behavior that is learned, it’s the brain’s response too. The brain learns depression and anxiety, and sometimes it learns it forever.
So what ‘‘causes’’ mental illness? There’s no way to answer this definitively. My general view of mental health disorders, particularly anxiety and depression, is that they are rooted in learned behaviors that protect from short-term harm but do more damage in the long run. Depression, whether ‘‘chemical’’ or induced by a sudden loss, leads to self-isolation, sitting around doing nothing, and heaps of negative cognition, all of which contribute to and perpetuate the depression. I find behavioral approaches most effective in combating it, as well as something called ‘‘opposite action’’ in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy circles. If I feel like a worthless piece of shit, I go do something worthwhile.
I read an excellent article about ‘‘self-care’’ once that asserted, against the grain, ‘‘Self-care is not always about spending the day in bed and drawing a bubble bath. More often it’s about cleaning the pile of shit off your kitchen counter, doing the dishes and applying for a job.’’ This really hit home for me, because so much of mental illness pathology is constructed around avoidance of distress. You can’t be happy if your entire life is built around trying to avoid pain. Most of what I get depressed about is not having accomplished something important to me that day. (This idea is reinforced by Acceptance of Commitment Therapy, which is partly about accepting chronic illness but also about recognizing our mental pain often comes from not prioritizing the things that we value.)
Now there is certainly a strain of ignorance and lack of understanding about mental illness. It’s not just about what you do. And you could do everything right, every day, and still feel like shit, because your brain decided that’s how it’s gonna feel. There is an element that is completely beyond your control. I know some people hate the physical illness comparison, but I think it can be like diabetes in that way. As a diabetic, there are things you can do to make your condition worse and things you can do to mitigate the damage, but it’s never going away. The best many can do is ‘‘manage it.’’ It’s the best I can do. I’ve had severe depression since I was 13, and the first time I felt anything close to relief was at 27, when my ACT therapist told me, “Oh, are you under the impression your depression can be cured? No, I’m sorry. This is not likely to ever go away.” I had been in search of a cure up to that point. And not having to chase a cure gave me a lot of freedom to think about what I wanted to make out of my life.
But when you’re facing the reality of chronic, lifelong mental illness, and you mention that you’re depressed, and someone blithely says, ‘‘Oh, you just need a bit of fresh air,’’ it’s rage-inducing. It’s tone-deaf, it’s minimizing, and so much so that we are less inclined to want to admit fresh air will probably help. Management of depression for me doesn’t look like pills and therapy. It looks like pills, therapy, good sleep hygiene, vitamins, light therapy, time spent outdoors, regular exercise, deliberate social interaction even when I don’t feel like it, etc. etc. And it’s exhausting. And most people don’t have to do all that just to make their lives bearable. But there is a lot to be said for a holistic approach.
But I do see, as Dinsdale has seen, a refusal, in some, to even try to manage their symptoms. They are the proverbial diabetic stuffing cake down their gullet (or whatever makes diabetes worse… I’m not educated) and then claiming they are helpless victims of their own biology. My husband of course also sees these people on a regular basis, and as a psychologist, he finds it very frustrating. It’s nice though because he always comes home and showers me with praise for being so proactive.
I think a common disconnect is that having a mental illness doesn’t mean you are free of responsibility for your choices. Some people seem to think it does. (cough mother cough.) The difficulty is in parsing out what portion is dodging responsibility and what portion is a real limitation, and I honestly couldn’t even answer that for myself. Sometimes I think I give it too much power, and other times I think I’m too hard on myself. With depression in particular, part of the illness is a blindness to elements within our control to change and a feeling of hopelessless that anything will ever change. It’s a hard thing to combat a brain that is always trying to talk you out of success. It’s kind of remarkable to get anything done at all when you do not give a shit whether you live or die. Anxiety actually makes way more sense to me, evolutionarily speaking, than depression. Anxiety is an exaggerated version of the natural fear response intended to avoid death. It’s hard to understand any biological being suffering with a malady that compels it toward death.
Very true, especially the last sentence. It’s all too common to get pigeonholed in society. For instance, I’ve been in sales/customer service, and I’m working on reinventing myself as an SOP writer (I’ve done a bit of that in various jobs, and one full-time), but companies say, “Customer service? Sales? Pshaw, you don’t know anything about what we do.” When it’s the reverse. I have skills that can translate to any number of jobs and industries, but they don’t realize that.
I’ve never had a drug conviction, and am not a HS dropout, but the point’s the same: you get typed as one sort of worker, and (in my experience, which covers decades) that’s all you got. Sure, people can reinvent themselves – it happens, but it sure ain’t easy.
Agreed again. Maybe not on the rationing, but certainly on the fact that American society does a horrible job with mental illness in particular. But as I mentioned before, the situation is slowly changing. In my lifetime, we’ve gone from the Cuckoo’s Nest type of treatment to actually discussing it openly, which is a great step forward. But it’s not enough. (It wasn’t until the mid 80s that it was discovered children could suffer from depression – before that, it was thought their brains weren’t developed enough. Think of that–just 30 years ago. In some contexts, that’s a long time, but in medicine, it’s yesterday.)
I don’t think you should. And I’m not saying mental illness covers all those actions and behaviors. What I am saying is that if someone acts badly because they didn’t have a good role model, or made poor choices, doesn’t mean they should necessarily be punished. Nor should they be rewarded, because it’s not a binary choice. Actions have consequences, but sometimes, just sometimes, it can be worth it to take a person aside and try to understand their point of view, and try to teach them. Maybe they’ll listen. Most people won’t, but that doesn’t mean no one will. (I was a manager, and had 2 separate underperforming employees. One didn’t give a shit, the other tried, but still failed. I had to fire them both, but I was able to give the one who at least tried more room, because the first had just given up entirely. There’s nothing you can do with someone like that, unless you’re a health professional, and even then you can’t force someone to be better.)
No comment from me, as this isn’t my business.
I’m sure there are people who allege mental illness seeking a free ride, but what I’m saying is that a lot of people with mental illness underestimate their abilities as a direct result of their mental illness. It is the nature of depression to assume failure. Learned helplessness is a real phenomenon. So it’s not necessarily that those people aren’t actually mentally ill, it’s that their mental illness is more treatable than they think, that they are in fact capable of more than they realize.
My mother filed for disability based on a back injury, and I don’t believe that she’s incapable of working. But I believe that she believes she’s incapable of working. The problem is not trying to hoodwink the system, it’s distorted perception caused by her mental illness.
There are also people in the world who lack even the most basic skills necessary for holding down a job. Case in point, I was recently screamed at by a woman in the parking lot because I tried to help her get directions to a place she ‘‘absolutely had to get to on time.’’ She left five minutes before the time she needed to be there, with no clue where she was going, and when I told her she probably wasn’t going to make it on time, she flipped her shit.
Is she a victim? Definitively yes. She was staying at a domestic violence shelter, which means she had been assessed as being at a high risk of death or serious harm if she continued to live at home. She was under extraordinary amounts of stress. She was homeless. She was probably mentally ill.
This woman, while physically able-bodied, is probably not capable of holding down a job, at least not with her current skillset (or absence thereof.) Is she responsible for her problems? Well, yes, she has to be or else society would collapse. But the necessary work she will have to do to learn a better way to be is staggering. Is it her fault she still has all that work to do? Probably not entirely. I don’t know her history. Things like ‘‘leave with enough time to make it to your appointments’’ are really taught in childhood. She clearly has a number of unmet needs.
The system is unequipped to help these people, but I’m not sure how to fix the problem. You can offer all the help in the world and it’s useless if someone chooses not to take it.
Menial jobs used to be available for people with low-level personality and emotional flaws.
But now you’re expected to pass a personality test. You’re expected to have good social skills and be able to work well with others. Had a long unemployment gap because of illness? Well, now you look like a loser.
I was able to come through my depression largely because I had a job that afforded me flexible hours and that didn’t require me to put on a happy face all the time. If I had been working behind someone’s register for minimum wage with no sick leave during that time period, I have no doubt that would have lost my mind.
Sometimes we think that because we made it through, then other people who are struggling must be lazy whiners. When really, a lot of “other people” don’t have the social supports that enable them to make it through. And people can also lack cognitive resources. It takes a certain amount of intelligence to formulate a plan and stick with it.
Have you ever known someone with an untreated medical condition like a thyroid problem (either hyper or hypo)? Their mental mood is definitely off. Get them the right treatment and the change in mood can be amazing.
Do such people have “unmet needs” (other than treatment)? Of course not.
And there are hundreds of conditions that affect mood. Including … messed up neurotransmitters that can be helped with the right meds!
Are all depressed/anxious people that way just because of neurotransmitters? Nope. But a whole lot are.
Trying to put all people with mental issues in one box is itself a sign of a person with a mental issue.
And I was happy that I had checked the name and not assumed that he was a he! :smack:
*Now I’m depressed * 
I’m confused. The replication issue is well understood, and has nothing to do with pruning data. The rest of the article is on someone who was trying to prove ESP, hardly the mainstream. I’ve listened to Honorton talk - I was not impressed.
But what has this to do with the contention that papers on depression and drugs to treat depression routinely purge data not supporting the hypothesis?
He is a good journalistic writer (IMHO), but a colossal tit (in everyone’s HO), and his career was basically finished a few years ago when he was found to be plagiarising material / mis-attributing quotes. He’s dropped out of view to write this book, but it’s not clear to me what his message is [admittedly just going on that Guardian piece]. I mean, it sounds like something from 1998 - Hold up lads, perhaps these pills don’t cure depression after all. That doesn’t seem especially insightful, as I thought it was well known that depression was tackled from a number of therapeutic angles, with pharmaceutical intervention just one of the tools.
Him being who he is, he’s already getting stretchered on twitter over the accuracy of his source material - e.g. his claim that 65-80% of people relapse on the pills in a year has apparently been pulled from his rectum.
Bottom line is that it’s a deep area and I doubt he’s equipped to make a serious contribution [although I am certain he could talk about it all day]. Add in his track record of self-promotion and unethical journalism and I doubt we’re looking at a book that will add anything new.
Do you tell that to people with diabetes? Cerebral palsy? Hey, your blood pressure’s out of wack? Suck it up you big baby, we’ve all got problems!
Why is it so weird to think that our brain chemistry can be messed up as well? The brain is just another organ, isn’t it? What makes it somehow immune?
I’m not saying people should just fall all over and whine, “oh woe is me!” but “snap out of it!” or “get over it!” is NOT going to work for people with depression, and is one of the most offensive and disgusting attitudes a person can have.
Depression is not merely “whining and fucking up”. A lot of the time it’s lack of caring – you don’t care period. You’re numb, no matter if things are going good or bad. It’s a hell of a lot more complex than you seem to think. Yeah, you definitely have people who want to use it as an excuse – but you have that with any illness. But there’s always been a stigma against mental illness, and we’re only now starting to attack that.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and trust me, I loathe people who go around saying, “you can’t pick on me, I’m SICK!”, but trust me, if I could just “snap out of it”, I would. I wish it were that easy.