Poll: How often do you get depressed?
I find my career as a developer to be quite rewarding both financially and intellectually. However, a couple times a year I find myself in a deep funk wondering what the hell am I doing with my life. How often do you get depressed per year?
38 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 87.7 ms ] threadThat is far from obvious.
The medicalization of depression is itself questionable. There are eloquent dissents by informed critics. It's certainly the majority view right now, but is more a paradigm than a proven truth, and these things are notorious for being subject to fashion. It wouldn't be surprising if, in a decade or two, the pendulum swung the other way.
Interesting. I hadn't heard that before. How do you know this?
Have suicides really gone down with the advent of antidepressants? I remember lawsuits about increased rates of suicides among adolescents prescribed some of them. It would be interesting to know the overall rates.
I don't know how the participant to whom you are replying knows what his post reported, but concern about suicide is definitely one of the motivations for urging more treatment for depression. An organization for suicide prevention
http://www.save.org/
puts up billboards in my town to remind family members to have their depressed relatives treated for depression, saying that untreated depression is the main risk factor for suicide. That factual statement is correct, as I can verify from having read many books by psychologists or medical doctors about mood disorders. I got into this reading back in the 1990s as part of studying suicide risk in different cultures,
http://learninfreedom.org/suicide.html
and research on this issue continues to be replicated across many studies with different investigators in different places.
You ask about one category of medicines, the SSRI medicines commonly prescribed as antidepressants. They do have a genuine risk of INCREASING rather than decreasing suicidal behavior in some patients, now recognized in their prescriber labeling. The Goodwin and Jamison textbook
http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec...
details the research on this issue over many pages with lots of footnotes to primary research papers in peer-reviewed journals. My overall impression of the mechanism for increased suicide risk upon SSRI treatment for depression is that some depressed patients go from thinking that there is nothing they can do to thinking that the one thing they can do is to harm themselves. That's why I follow Goodwin and Jamison in thinking that for most depressed patients whose history of mood variation is poorly known, the best initial treatment is a mood-stabilizing medicine (such as lithium, carbamazepine, divalproex, or lamotrigine) rather than an SSRI medicine. But I am not a physician, and I urge persons who are concerned about their depressed moods to check with a physician who has clinical experience with depressed patients to be evaluated for what might or might not be at issue.
Yes. Untreated depression is a huge cause of mortality among young people. Young people in developed countries don't die of much else besides traffic accidents (and at least some deaths of young people that are reported as traffic accidents may be misreported suicides).
There is also the issue of subsequent degradation of a person's quality of life if depression is not treated when the person is young. Most twenty-somethings are resilient enough to get through quite a few episodes of depression and to stay employed and to stay in romantic relationships, but each depressive episode tends to cost a patient work productivity, intimacy with significant others, and other sources of personal reserves for the next episode. It is UNUSUAL for young people to have prolonged (days-long) episodes of depressed mood if they haven't had a parent die or something like that. That's an issue that should be looked into. Perhaps part of what is going on in this thread is that people are applying different criteria for using the term "depressed." Physicians have taken care in multiple research projects to develop diagnostic screening tools that standardize how much by way of depressive symptoms is enough to be of concern. If you have a concern, get the opinion of someone with clinical experience and see if you can go through life without repeated episodes of feeling worse (and doing worse) than you need to.
Is depression common?
Very common. Around one million Australian adults and 100,000 young people live with depression each year. On average, one in five people will experience depression in their lifetime - one in four females and one in six males.
That's out of a population of 21m.
I think one of the best strategies when depressed is to text someone and pair program. Also helps to keep the internet out of the house so you have to leave to get food eventually :)
The biggest thing though is remembering that it's biochemical, not "real", and that you'll snap out of it.
I'm in the middle of one as I type this, actually. Sometimes when depression hits it's in reaction to a mania: There's a big high followed by a crash. But frequently that depression comes in the form of apathy; I'd even say contentment. I have periods of huge excitement, followed by much chiller periods that I'd call a biochemical depression. But that's a depression that doesn't have the pointed emotional aspects that I associate with the word.
When that second kind of depression hits, almost always it has to do with something mental. When those really bleak periods hit, I can almost always find a cause that's tied in with something in my life: Core situations and circumstances that are subtly bringing down other parts of the way I feel. And I've found that if I react swiftly to deal with whatever it is that's causing it, I can end the feeling quickly and get back to a more balanced state of mind.
Getting a balanced, "happy" life isn't easy, because everybody has to deal not only with all their many wants and needs but with the wants and needs they think they should have that they're given from other people. Growing up, I feel many of those problems are problems with actual, logical solutions, but that the answers are convoluted and twisted many many times over. So I'll feel as if I've figured something out, and indeed I'll have gotten farther than I had previously, but a year later I'll realize there's another, much subtler issue related to the one I thought I'd figured out, and then I have to rethink everything.
The result, I find, is that over my life I've managed to stabilize myself quite well. I now face these feeling much less frequently than I once did, and for less of a duration. The cooler, more casual depressions are frequent for me, but those are more relaxing and less worrisome. So in one way you're right, and depressions do snap, but in another way the content of the depression is what matters, not just the depression itself.
and the next year?
My brother once told me: "There is a support group for people who hate their jobs. It is called Everybody, and we meet at bars starting at about 5:30."
Adjust by about six hours and it is equally true for Japanese salarymen.
spending an hour by myself once a week
Man, I'd go insane if I only got an hour's worth of solitude a week.
It usually lasts for a couple of days but could easily be alleviated by hanging out with friends. There are times though I tend to make it worse by spending time just by myself.
Here's a couple of resources I've found helpful wrt understanding and avoiding depression. Hopefully they'll be useful to someone.
Short: http://lesswrong.com/lw/sc/existential_angst_factory/
Longer: Martin Seligman's book on Learned Optimism http://www.amazon.com/Learned-Optimism-Change-Your-Mind/dp/1...
The key to beating depression is introspection. Recognize it for what it is: a couple chemicals in your brain that are out of whack. No small matter, and there's probably a cause. But your mental faculties are still there -- they just have a distraction breaking their concentration. Think of it just like a loud noise, and tune it out, then figure out where it's coming from and silence it.
My Brain gets tired from hacking. It wanders into the depressed area of my thoughts because of this.
I contemplate all of the mistakes, regrets and missed opportunities I've had. I can spend the rest of the day in a melancholy funk.
Sometimes I used wonder how can I go on as a person; but now-a-days I wonder how I can go on as a programmer, because I know (believe?) it is a pattern related to my profession.
I don't know what else I would do as a career, however.
My bird brain says boredom/depression goes in a sine wave (x-time, y-boredom/depression). And I have no explanation for it.
I try to meditate for 20-30 minutes every day practicing my breathing and letting thoughts flow in and out. During this time there's no fighting emotions; if I feel like punching someone, I allow myself to envision it, let the emotion consume me, and then be done with it. Thoughts and emotions seem to disappear on their own if given the room to "make an appearance."
"As you gain experience with this type of meditation, you will gain the understanding that your true essence - your essential spirit - is not the contents of your mind, but rather the observer of the contents." http://themindfulnessblog.com/mindfulness-meditation-a-path-...
It's worth exploring other ways of interacting with your emotions. Mindful meditation has been successful for me. If you're interested, the book "The Mindful Way through Depression" is a great starting point. http://www.amazon.com/Mindful-Way-through-Depression-Unhappi...