Influential descriptions of depression are often misleading

> While differences here may seem purely semantic, the team argues that the understanding of depression conveyed on many sites is often "based on circular logic," which could leave those aiming to understand their low mood worse off. They reference recent research that found that emotional regulation is more successful when people were aware of the causes of their suffering – if educational material bills depression as causative, however, some of those with the condition may not look further to identify potentially-addressable causative factors.

This makes sense to me. I’d like to see more discussion and research in this area. As someone who has experienced massive depression at different times in my life, I’m reasonably well equipped to manage it. But putting myself in the shoes of someone going through it for the first time, I want people to have the best tools to address it.

> the team argues that the understanding of depression conveyed on many sites is often "based on circular logic," which could leave those aiming to understand their low mood worse off. They reference recent research that found that emotional regulation is more successful when people were aware of the causes of their suffering – if educational material bills depression as causative, however, some of those with the condition may not look further to identify potentially-addressable causative factors.

I have been under the impression that the deal with ‘clinical depression’ is that there is no reasonable cause - you feel depressed because of your brain chemistry, not because of your circumstances. You would feel depressed regardless of whether your life was good or bad, because it’s not a response to your life, it’s an aberrant behavior by the part of your brain that makes you feel feelings.

And to that end, to the contrary of what’s written in the article, trying to find a reason for your depression is a trap - one of your brain’s favorite things to do is to feel an emotion and then find a cause to pin it on. But if the cause is really just weird brain stuff - you risk false accusations or false positives when searching for the source of your depression. I must feel depressed because of my relationship. I must feel depressed because of climate change. I must feel depressed because my kid is away at college, because my car needs work, because I haven’t had sex for a while, etc.

All of those things may very well be problems in your life worth addressing - but are they actually the cause of your feelings of depression? Or is that just your brain doing stuff you don’t want it to do?

This is endemic to language, sadly. Descriptive can read the same as explanatory. Or justification. Or causative, as is most applicable to this story.

You can see this easily with how hard it is to describe crime as high in some places without sounding like you are explaining that crime is high because of the area.

And, no doubt, often this is purposely blurred by people that are bad actors and do have bad intentions. It doesn't help the underlying difficulties to push them as hard as they have been pushed recently.

There is an even more fundamental problem. Psychiatrists do not apply uniform diagnostic criteria.

This is painfully obvious in genetic studies of depression. The work of Jonathan Flint has highlighted this serious problem.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32231276/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25062429/

We had a thread on this a few days ago but this goes hand in hand with people not knowing what introversion really is. Pop culture and media have significantly distorted things for the purposes of whimsical storytelling and product sales.

As someone who struggles with depression, it's frustrating to see so much misleading information online. When trusted sources oversimplify the condition, it can make it harder to understand what's really going on with my mental health and leave me feeling even more confused and isolated.

I used to have debilitating depression. SSRIs and similar drugs never worked. Eventually I was diagnosed with bipolar 2 and given lamotrigine, and it solved my depression completely.

> ...some of those with the condition may not look further to identify potentially-addressable causative factors.

I believe in the hypothesis that depression is [more often] a symptom rather than some sort of organic disease. I would also lump anxiety into the same category for what it is worth.

Before people get up in arms, I want to clarify that I am talking about the majority of cases of depression, but not all. I am not disputing the idea that in some cases depression could be caused by something more intrinsic, but I am inclined to think those cases are rarer than many claim.

A common motif amongst quite a handful of depressed people is that there is some internal belief that they have no reason to be depressed because everything in their life is going well, and they have no reason to be depressed. However, when one peels back that onion -- layer by layer -- I find that, often times, those people might actually have a legitimate and underestimated factor which might be a major contributing factor.

My completely pseudoscientific hypothesis is that anxiety and depression are signals. Much like pain, when the signals are firing, then body is trying to alert one that something has gone awry.

"Determining the cause for negative motions"

Sounds simple, but it aint. That requires careful study over along period of time and getting to know the subject well, plus the history, and an understanding of the environment.

What a person who is depressed is focusing on, can be unrelated to the deeper reason.

If there ever is "a" truly deeper reason. More likely it is a set of / mesh of things that have built up.

Lastly nobody can describe depression. Those who have lived and are living with severe clinical depression know what it feels like, (like myself), the rest, the doctors and scientists are guessing.