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That is nonsense. You are depressed, of course your ability to reason is affected. That is what depression means. Of course it doesn't mean you can't add 2 + 2 anymore, or figure out the best way to save $2 at Walmart. It means, and again, all of this is incredibly obvious, that you cannot trust your own reasoning about yourself.
That’s simply not true. Obviously it depends on the type of depression, but you can have anhedonia, sadness, helplessness, trouble thinking, feelings of worthlessness; easily enough symptoms to be diagnosed with depression, and still have completely solid reasoning. Depression means that emotions (and the lack thereof) will try to interfere with your reasoning. Reasoning will be harder, but inability to reason around those emotions is not an inherent part in depression.
The keyword being “try”, depression tries to affect your reasoning, it will not always succeed, and might never succeed to a larger extent than any of the everyday things Nony mentioned.
If you’re depressed, it’s quite offensive when people assume that your reasoning is automatically worse than theirs, especially regarding yourself.
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Hey, Tyler.
Even though I'm not 100% sure that it's been validated FOR depression, as in "to be used to evaluate if your cognitive functions are ok IF you are depressed", there's a pretty simple test called the MMSE, or the Mini Mental State Examination, which evaluates cognitive functions, including reasoning (however hard that sounds). I've seen it being applied to patients who suffer from depression (such as myself) and as part of my practice (I'm an MD) I've also applied it to patients in certain ocasions.
It still baffles me, as a doctor, how we can assume to understand "reasoning" as a concept and to even begin we get to grasp the evaluation of it... It's such a complex thing, multi-variabled in its construction and operation, that -at least for me- it seems impossible to properly assess it, We can only try to understand the impact of it on the daily wellbeing and daily activities of those suffering with depression to only qualitatively state "this patient's reasoning is impaired".
Still, that's pretty subjective and as such, examinator bias is all over the assessment.
You've stated a pretty important thing... Because that subjectiveness is because the reasoning in the assessed patient is being compared to another point of reference, that must obviously be the examinator's... And nothing says their reasoning is "normal".
In fact, what could be stated as a "normal reasoning?"
A pretty damn interesting question. Don't know the answer for it myself.
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On July 02 2012 10:41 Zaragon wrote:
If you’re depressed, it’s quite offensive when people assume that your reasoning is automatically worse than theirs, especially regarding yourself.
My experience is that a lot of people always think their reasoning or judgement is better than yours. About themselves, you or basically anything they care to have an opinion about. They might feel more comfortable sharing this with a depressed person for whatever reason, but the feeling is often there anyway.
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I think there is a case to be made for advising depressed people, when those people are liable to make choices that have been already shown to have long term detrimental effects - i.e. choices that other depressed people have consistently made in the past that led to ultimately unwanted consequences. On the whole however I agree with you.
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Didn't they give you the spiel that your "brain chemicals are imbalanced, and depression is no different than diabetes?" Simply replenish your brain chemicals like a diabetic does insulin! Yes, professionals can often be quite patronizing and condescending, treating you like an idiot and a child.
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Really interesting read, thanks for sharing nony : )
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I liked it, I wish I could add more than appreciation but I don't have any meaningful thoughts beyond what has already been said.
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it seems like a worryingly large number of people live in a world of absolutes where they can justify making the arbitrary judgement calls you mentioned regarding a person's ability to make their own desicions. they have an opinion that goes one way or the other, and a lack of either scientific understanding or just plain thought experiments into the issue leave them in a place where something either is or isnt, with no room in between to admit that they dont actually have the answer
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On July 02 2012 09:57 UniversalSnip wrote:
I think you overstate the degree to which people have control taken away rather than giving it away willingly.
What choice do they have? To be depressed and "unable to reason"?
People desperate for answers will take anything given to them. If you liken it to religion, even an athiest calls for a priest on his death bed. People desperate for solutions confide in those offering them.
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I prefer to keep the information I present concise and helpful, but I am afraid that if I do not write enough, I will be passed over in favor of an allegedly greater mind presenting more information.
When is self-interest required? At what point does focusing on oneself become too selfish? When do the interests of others outweigh self-interest?
These are some important questions that a depressed person needs to answer. In matters of choosing between two+ sharply diverging paths that lead to two+ different desired "life achievement" outcomes, I believe action should be taken in one direction as soon as possible. It is better to decide quickly than to be indecisive and emotionally frozen as a result. Time is a valuable resource and mistakes can be learned from -- action is possible after a decision is made. Look at CJ_EffOrt, for example. His mind before his decision to retire is unknown, but his mind is unimportant here. He took action and found that he didn't want to retire, and then he took action to return to CJ.
Self-interest is important when a person is depressed. It is important to ignore self-deprecating thoughts and ideas in order to heal. When a person is depressed, he should be selfish with the intent of improving his life, but also be open to the positive ideas of others that are focused on improving his life.
I don't know whether psychology attempts to measure a person's ability to reason, nor do I know its best attempts if they do exist. I do have personal experience with depression, and I know how painful it is.
There will always be legitimate reasons to feel bad. Focus on the good things and all that. But I have found that in my own internal conflicts, the best choice seems to be the one that reduces stress and makes my life easier to enjoy, regardless of the reason(s) my curiosity/ego/friend gives me to take the other path. Stress can be a powerful motivator, but it is otherwise a relatively unimportant thing to focus on.
Is more time spent on one life path necessarily a good idea? At present, it seems to depend on whether you are satisfied with the personal value you feel relative to the time spent attempting to build that value in yourself. But you must also take into account the opportunity cost. Could you enjoy your life in some alternative future with the knowledge of a goal left not achieved? Is there a goal you have at the present that you are not working towards, but would like to, and are you capable of enjoying your life at present with the knowledge of that goal left not achieved?
Music helps. Trying to make others lives better helps. Getting some sun helps. I hold onto a one-song personal anthem and try not to compare myself to others. Those two things help a lot.
I wish you as speedy a recovery as a full recovery allows you, and also that you take independent action that leads you to greater enjoyment of your life, whatever that action may be.
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On July 02 2012 04:08 Liquid`NonY wrote:
It is troublesome that a person can make the suggestion that a depressed person's ability to reason has diminished and that that can take away the depressed person's self-authority. Where are the measurements? Where are the arguments, supported by facts and evidence, about the level of ability and amount of effort that a decision requires? How can a line of thinking so thinly logical and so fucking irrational be used to take away someone else's logic and rationality?
As if a depressed person's self-esteem issues aren't severe enough, the healthy people, the professionals trained to fix, fling accusations of incompetence that are complete fucking guesses. No they're not so insensitive and rude that they say "you are incompetent!" but that is the bottom line. I think it's a bullshit power grab made by a person who wants to go with a different decision and is too lazy or too god damned stupid to justify and defend it properly.
To me, those two paragraphs hit the hardest, as I was in that exact same situation. I had been seeing a coach/therapist for my AS for about a year, and had developed an immense amount of trust in her. She was the only person that I had ever met to truly understand who I was, and why I acted the way I did. The betrayal I felt when she made me "volunteer" for inpatient depression treatment (the other option was calling the police and telling them that I was a hazard to myself) made things way worse than they already were. I know that she cared and that she was afraid because she had never seen me sink so low before, but there's nothing that makes you feel quite as helpless and angry as when your own authority over yourself is taken away.
I felt that she was entirely unjustified to make that call for me, for the same points outlined in the blog. Even now that my depression is (mostly) over and I can look back at it more rationally, I still feel the same way. In the end, all it did was sour the trust in our relationship, and I lost one of the most important people in my life.
I wish I had the answers to the questions posed in the blog, as I am still searching for them for myself - great post.
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Thought of a reduction in ability to reason leads to the reduction in ability to reason. This thought process spirals downward thus creating the depression effect.
Depression is merely viewed as a state of negativity. The 'span of rationalization' is just shifted during this state. Similarly, if one person is overly excited/happy, his 'span of rationalization' shifts in the opposite direction. I guess you could also call this your ability to reason.
'Doctors' who claim to be able to fix a person's self-esteem issues as you have stated are not real doctors. One cannot heal one others' depression, all this doctor can do is open a door for you, but you need to walk through it to cure yourself.
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It's worth considering exactly how depression might impair judgment, and when its effect would be stronger or weaker. A lot of the problem comes from the well-documented basic human tendency to answer questions about the future based on how one feels in the present. If you go shopping for groceries while you're hungry, you buy a lot more than if you go shopping after a big meal. Every day we're faced with a lot of decisions, and we try to choose the one that we think will make us happiest, but our way of evaluating that happiness intuitively is by asking, "how happy would this make me now?"
In general, people are well-suited to making decisions for themselves because they know more than anyone else what makes them happy. If you're engaged to your long-time girlfriend, and you're trying to decide to go through with it, you are the best one to answer that question. You know how you feel about her, you know what kind of person you are, you know how well you do with commitment and making sacrifices for other people more than anyone else does. You may not know yourself perfectly, but you definitely know yourself better than anyone else does. So when you ask yourself, "how happy would it make me to be married to her right now?" and you picture married life, based on your knowledge of yourself and your preferences, you can make a reasonable decision about what will make you happy.
But depression throws off that analysis. Things that would normally make you happy don't always when you're depressed. You can still think and reason and control yourself just as well as any other time, but making judgments about what will make you happy is very hard because when you try to evaluate the costs, you evaluate them accurately, but when you try to evaluate the benefits, nothing seems like it would really make you happy anyway.
In this case doing something like "following your heart" may not be the best course of action. Your "heart" is probably just your brain's basic instincts for decision-making, the "peripheral route" to persuasion rather than the central one. And those instincts will be as guilty of this fallacy as any part of your mind. What you need is a dispassionate way of evaluating decisions that won't be so affected by your current mental state.
One way to do this would to just try to be aware of the bias and not listen to it. Instead of asking "how happy would this make me now?" you should try to ask "how happy would this usually make me?" Another way to do this is to find a close friend who knows you almost as well as you know yourself, and has a pretty good idea of what does and doesn't make you happy. Obviously they can't know as well as you can what decision would be best, but their judgment is unaffected by your current mental state, which gives their opinion some value beyond what you could reason out yourself.
Nony, you strike me as someone who is very good at forming distancing yourself from an issue and forming a dispassionate judgment. I would imagine people like that are less affected by this bias, although I must confess I haven't read any studies that indicate who is more or less affected by it. In fact I think studies show that people who are aware of the cognitive biases discovered by psychology are actually more prone to them, as though they think that by being aware of the bias they are immune to its effects. At any rate, there's my two cents. Take it for what it's worth.
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I completely agree with Nony. I too have depression that really affects my life. But I wouldn't say it makes me unable to make smart and reasonable decisions. If anything, it's my incredible reasoning skills that makes my depression worse. When I was at a point where I had a lot of suicidal thoughts, I was thinking 100% clearly. I thought out every possible situation of every person I knew and figured out why their life would be better if I weren't around. I used reason and logic to feed my depression.
During my times of depression I think clearer than ever before. It's not always the optimistic and positive thoughts I want myself to be thinking, but they are intelligent and rational thoughts. I think that being reasonable has been my downfall in the past.
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Mmm...psych.
Nice blog, NoNy.
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|As I proofread: Prepare yourself for my traditional disjointed writing. I was reading my posts previously, and every single one is structured like this. Meaning it isn't.
I heard it said once, that the majority of people over estimate themselves.
Answers to simple questions such as 'how good are you at math?' -- 'Yeah I'm not great, but I'm above average.'
These people who say this have scored lower than average on whatever tests that they said they were above average in.
The reason that they say this, is because they have no reference point with which to measure themselves.
Interestingly, you must be an expert at something, to be able to judge that other people are worse than you, and their varying degrees of badness. You must also be an expert to recognize when people are better than you, because you have this vast experience with which to measure things against.
When it comes to making a complex decision. I.E. moving residence for benefit XYZ at the expense of ABC. Physically, you are a young guy. There are people older than you with more experience in life who will be able to tell you, by their high er level of experience what will give the most joy and prosperity to you.
Your tool of measurement is only held, and given units, by those who created it. These people are also not emotionally the same as you.
However, there are major flaws in my view. The one that stands out to me, is who has more experience of you, than... you? You won't find a psychologist who has lived 20+ years of professional gaming, with stronger medical depression, with the a stronger athletic background, and the same upbringing.
In something like chess. You will find that guy who is better than you. You will find that guy who has such a profound understanding of your strategy which revolves around controlling the centre four squares that he surrenders it, plays around you and wins. Chess is very structured, there are few deviations, and only limited possibilities. There you can reliably measure yourself against one another based on experience.
But, life? There are so many variations to what you can experience through your life. Everything that happens in your life is in varying degrees. If your father dies, and your sister completely breaks down crying, but you are only numbed, you come out with different experiences and as a result, influences on your life. Then, how do you measure the degree of difference? How do you understand the difference between which of you is more sorrowful, if at all. You can't measure it. You can't even wrap your mind around the concept. Sure, everyone can agree that your experiences will shape who you are as a person, but how much. And then, genetics, what if someone is born with a stronger, hardened brain, and you are not? It is not possible, you can't possibly measure it.
There is no point arguing it in my mind. Trust yourself to know what is right.
Use your instinct.
Take your time.
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Hmm I don't know what's been said in the thread so far, but Psychology insofar as I know it (not much) has little claim over "measuring reasoning". It's quite the philosophical task to define "Reasoning" and then separate it out from "Behavior" "Mindset" "Chemical Reaction".
I'm sure there are plenty of Psychologists that would argue about that and would provide their own narrow definition. We all also know the conventional meaning though and I suppose this isn't the place for such a convoluted discussion.
With that as the preface, I suppose to say it most simply:
The legitimacy of your reasoning would depend on your propensity to avoid cognitive biases. When you become emotional, impatient, overly burdened, I'm sure the list goes on, but as a general trend you become more prone to bias.
Wikipedia on Cognitive Bias--
A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations, leading to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.[1][2][3] Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison with what is normatively expected; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable facts. A continually evolving list of cognitive biases has been identified over the last six decades of research on human judgment and decision-making in cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioral economics.
Of course it depends on what you meant by Reasoning and what sort of "Pattern of deviation" is applicable. But i'm talking well over my depth, so sorry if this is really bad :DD:D
EDIT: Link to a list for lols http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
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It's less a matter of affecting your reasoning skills, and more a matter of impairing your judgment, especially in regards to more personal decisions having to do with emotions and value judgments. Whenever you're in a really emotionally turbulent state, your judgment may not be all it could be, especially when making very personal decisions. Now, whether or not that means you should postpone major decisions or have others make them for you is gonna depend upon things like how affected you are, how urgent the decision is, how much the decision you're making has to do with your state, and so on.
I would agree that it's not as simple as "you're depressed, so we can't let you make decisions for yourself," and I can see how that would be quite harmful if applied in a blanket fashion, but it is always good to be aware at least of the possibility of impairment and to take that into account when making plans and decisions.
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I've never understood depression. I have like.... one bad day a year everything else in life is pretty much perfect and it's not like anything special has ever really happened.
You have all your limbs, your friends and family are alive, you have an income, you have your health and a wife/husband. How can people who have all these things actually be depressed? What more in life do you seriously want. It's something I'll probably never understand.
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On July 02 2012 15:26 Figgy wrote:
I've never understood depression. I have like.... one bad day a year everything else in life is pretty much perfect and it's not like anything special has ever really happened.
You have all your limbs, your friends and family are alive, you have an income, you have your health and a wife/husband. How can people who have all these things actually be depressed? What more in life do you seriously want. It's something I'll probably never understand.
To many people, depression is caused by a chemical imbalance within the brain, more-so than being sad about negative events, or having a bad life. You're acting like it's their fault for being greedy and wanting more or something, when it's actually not within their control to just be happy unless they get help and/or go on some form of medication.
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EPT
