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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.
Because sometimes people look around them, see that they are in the top 1% of luckiest human beings to ever live, and realize that they are still sad.
Sometimes people will be depressed because of their genes and because of physiological factors such as brain chemicals. You may think having an income, health, wife/husband is enough for happiness, but what you're really saying is "In that situation I would be happy." This may very well be true because you've got normal brain functions and always will. However, is it too much of a stretch of the imagination to perceive that some people's brains operate in a different manner to yours, and that difference can cause depression?
You're right, you'll never understand what it's like. So the choices are you respect that it exists, or you can condescend those who have it because you personally have not gone through it.
One of these choices makes you an ass.
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It's possible other individuals in a similar situation might be prone to making much more dramatic changes in their life that is overwhelmingly self-destructive. Becoming an alcoholic or a compulsive gambler could be a few of the negative outcomes. It's hard to map down an entire individual, so it's probably more of a blanket statement.
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I can relate to this because I have plane fright.(is that the correct term in english?)
Intellectually I know that the possibility of something bad happening is very very very small, but as a person with plane fright I will always think that the bad thing will happen to me. I'm going to Korea tomorrow, 14 hour trip, hopefully it will be worth it!
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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.
almost every depressed person has probably several people like you, telling them its not so bad etc. Its counter productive and indeed only shows a lack of understanding
just consider yourself lucky
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Thing that I noticed in this was:
On July 02 2012 04:08 Liquid`NonY wrote:
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.
Well, whats he saying exactly then? And more to the point, are you really sure that your interpretation of what he is saying is correct? Maybe all this just came from either your misinterpretation of what he said, or from his failure to express what he was really trying to say?
Either way, ask him why he says what he says. If he really wants to say that you're incompetent, ask him why.
-If he doesnt mean calling you incompetent at all, all is fine.
-If he means it and has a good reason for calling you incompetent, and you agree with it, all is fine.
-If he means it and has a good reason for calling you incompetent, but you dont agree, its still good. Even if you might not agree with the reason, it will make you understand why he did it if it was backed up by some solid logic. You should be able to come to an agreement to disagree and move on. And he should hopefully not press the "incompetence"-issue.
-If he means it but doesnt have a good reason for it at best you get an apology from him and you can move on to more important issues rather than having this plague you.
-If he means it but doesnt have a good reason for it and doesnt want to admit him doing anything wrong, its up to you to make a judgement whether you wanna continue to talk to him about this (where by continuing you accept his faults) or if you wanna call it quits and not see him again.
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Part of overcoming depression is the realisation that your thought processes are NOT rational.
Half the struggle of the process for professionals is getting people to realize that and to realize they are not subservient to their thoughts. No, you are not incompetent, but your rationality is severely impaired. Making long winded semi-philosophical speeches about it won't change that.
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On July 02 2012 15:41 Kitai wrote:Show nested quote +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.
Very much so. There´s a huge difference between "I´m so depressed today" and a clinical depression. The former is feeling bad and applying a wrong term for that feeling, the latter is an illness. Implying an actually depressed person should be content with what they have is like saying someone with a fever is just lazy and should get up to make walk. These uninformed opinions just make it harder for the person afflicted and it´s sad that so little has changed in mainstream perception compared to the progress made in psychology and neurology.
Concerning the OP
I don´t have a degree in shit or any professional experience, so probably not what you´re looking for, but I think:
The idea of right choices is a fallacy that one has to rid oneself of. There is no objective good or bad, only the subjective feeling of benefit or harm. Decisions for optimizing one´s happiness are considered the right one´s and there´s really not much to it. It just gets complicated if there is some kind of ideal - like becoming rich, having a family, getting laid a million times - which people try to adhere to because they feel obliged to, or just are unaware of what they want, or feel the need to conform, etc. It all comes down to feeling good or not feeling good. If a guy is rich, has a family, and a good sexlife, he can still be reasonably unhappy. He´s not supposed to, but he can be with or without a depression.
If someone feels better selling his shit and living in the wilderness rather than in his penthouse, it´s the right decision. It is right, if he knows beforehand what he´s getting into and can anticipate how it´s going to make him feel. Of course, that´s kinda vague, and maybe he wants to get back afterwards and can´t and there´s remorse and all kinds of not feeling good, but that can happen to you with any choice. Doing what you want per se is right for you, if your want now is the same later and you can decide reasonably when you can assess its stability, i.e. your future want.
A depression on the otherhand deprives you - at least - temporarily of the ability to feel good and also "clouds" your mind with fears you otherwise don´t have (like e.g. what others think of you and your choices). That decision-making is different "under influence" (be it a depression, or being high, or starved, or afraid) is a self-evident fact, isn´t it? So, no your not as rational as you´d otherwise might be. But you´re completely right that many people are not even rational without a severe mental influence like a depression. But that is comparing, and comparing for the sake of being normal/above-average/okay/whatever is not being rational, it´s being dependent on how other people view oneself.
So a depression definitely afflicts you ability to reason, like a fever does, or being hung-over does, or even having your period does, because it changes some workings within the brain, thereby changing your perception, thereby making it very hard, if not impossible to anticipate the outcome of a decision that is usually based on making you feel good, since you are not your normal, sober, healthy, painless self at that time.
So the real question is: How does a person decide what´s good for himself, when they cannot know what is good for themselves.
I agree with you though that taking away decision-making from someone (if possible) would be kind of pointless, at least if dealing with a person who´s not happy with certain outcomes, but with making their own decisions, no matter how they turn out.
My 2cents: Making your own decisions is best you can get, if you desire so. But if that´s what you really want, you gotta make sure you are actually able to be yourself. Being depressed is not being yourself, it´s being sick, being your depressed self. Getting back to normal, back to wanting, back to the ability to be happy is top priority and all decisions made should point in that direction, because otherwise, what good is to come of it? When you´re at the point of knowing what you want, and getting satisfaction in achieving it, right and wrong become superfluous and all talks of further "optimization" strike me as a popular misconception, because at the end it´s the edict of worms for everybody.
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I don't agree with the notion that people with "depression" cannot reason or that they are inherently less reasonable/rational. At some point you need an objective measure. Whether or not someone is "depressed" changes as your measure changes. I can pick measures that make non-"depressed" people seem idiotic. It's all a matter of perspective.
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But if you don't share my perspective, you are depressed and need treatment! Don't take drugs... except the ones we sell you.
How many million drug addicts have been created now? Drug addicts are A-OK so long as they keep going to work and paying their taxes 
On July 02 2012 19:52 Evangelist wrote:
Part of overcoming depression is the realisation that your thought processes are NOT rational.
Shame that irrational thought process isn't limited to people with "depression" XD
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On July 02 2012 10:41 Zaragon wrote: Show nested quote +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. .
Helplessness, trouble thinking, catastrophising and feelings of worthlessness are all symptoms of diminished reasoning capacity. A feeling of worthlessness is basically a massive red flag to an inability to get perspective. Note, I am not saying that said capacity is diminished in all areas of thinking, but in terms of interpersonal skills and self awareness, a depressive persons ability to reason is extremely diminished and this will effect their life in a number of ways, especially when it comes to personal progression in life.
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On July 02 2012 20:27 Mstring wrote:I don't agree with the notion that people with "depression" cannot reason or that they are inherently less reasonable/rational. At some point you need an objective measure. Whether or not someone is "depressed" changes as your measure changes. I can pick measures that make non-"depressed" people seem idiotic. It's all a matter of perspective. -- But if you don't share my perspective, you are depressed and need treatment! Don't take drugs... except the ones we sell you. How many million drug addicts have been created now? Drug addicts are A-OK so long as they keep going to work and paying their taxes Show nested quote +On July 02 2012 19:52 Evangelist wrote:
Part of overcoming depression is the realisation that your thought processes are NOT rational.
Shame that irrational thought process isn't limited to people with "depression" XD
Absolutely right. The thing is, when most non-depressive people get a thought flashing through their head like "I'm really shit at this" they will usually dismiss it in a matter of seconds. It might linger for a bit, they might get a bit down, but it won't hugely effect them. They'll usually distract themselves in some other way or keep going.
Take for example my personal experience in social anxiety disorder. The thought "everyone's looking at you, this is horrible" is so utterly overpowering as to be crippling. A personal with social anxiety will focus on the one thing they got wrong and will hammer themselves with it, continually, for hours, days, weeks, even months! Now depression is not something that can be gotten rid of with simple positive thinking. However it is part of the process and part of that is admitting that your thoughts are under your control and if they are irrational, then your reasoning in certain aspects of your life cannot be trusted.
I would like to know psychology's best attempts at measuring a person's ability to reason. When someone tells me my ability is compromised, I'd like to know who is going to make the decision instead of me. And then we can take some tests and see who is really better qualified, a compromised me or a regular them. I'd like to know how much effort they'll put into their decision. There's no way it'll match mine. I'd like to know their arguments why my subjective experience is not valuable enough evidence to weigh in on the decision. I can't imagine a definitive one.
I'm gonna cut this one in half because I think you need a bit of perspective, NoNy. Yes, it will match yours. In fact, the average non-depressive person will greatly exceed your ability to reason in terms of interpersonal relationships and in personal decision making. They will make better decisions which make them happier which will be better reasoned. There are many extremely great thinkers who suffered from severe depression and made cataclysms of their personal lives. This does not mean their ability to reason within abstract concepts is diminished - it just means their ability to reason in regard to specific situations is impaired.
Let's take another non-depressive example. Thorzain plays the Spoon Terran style because he doesn't ever feel safe. He will likely watch replays where his opponent sits back with a tenth of his army, patiently building up a deathball. Yet he continues to do this - okay yes, probably down to success, but his reasoning is not rational. His reasoning is based on fear of getting wiped out on the map and instantly losing. I have the same fear, 3 leagues down. The difference being, both of us have been confronted with evidence and while we know rationally that an opponent is sitting back, we're still scared of moving out because of what might happen.
When someone states you have lost the ability to reason, it is usually applied to one specific situation or a number of them. You can be the most rational, level headed person in the world (for example, I start a PhD in physics in 2 months so I obviously know how to reason) but still have significant flaws and drawbacks in certain situations. Your ability to reason related to your personal circumstances is substantially impaired, and you need to accept that.
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Interesting read. The question of who is going to make a decision instead of you is interesting. Because in theory everyone would be uncapable of making that major decision. The best case would be someone who had no emotions and nothing at stake in the decision. I would have to say an outsider.
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On July 02 2012 04:45 Milkis wrote:What I'm about to say may not apply to depression, but it's something that I realized over the last few months over being emotional and decision making. Show nested quote +I would like to know psychology's best attempts at measuring a person's ability to reason. When someone tells me my ability is compromised, I'd like to know who is going to make the decision instead of me. And then we can take some tests and see who is really better qualified, a compromised me or a regular them. I'd like to know how much effort they'll put into their decision. There's no way it'll match mine. I'd like to know their arguments why my subjective experience is not valuable enough evidence to weigh in on the decision. I can't imagine a definitive one. Not going to talk about "psychology", but for me, I think the biggest way to judge this is hindsight. Generally whenever I got emotional, I got advice from other people, but I ended up doing my own thing anyway. You look back, and you see the decision you made versus the decision you could have made... nearly every time the decision I made while emotional ended up being quite the destructive, stupid one. Being too involved in the situation, or "caring too much", etc etc... all usually ended up blinding me, and nowadays I really just try and have some trust in close friends whenever I get into situations similar. Of course, you'll never have a perfect control for it (ie: you never know for certain if advice given to you by other people was actually better than yours), but I don't think it takes much reason to gauge between whichever ones work out and whichever ones do not. Being emotional is a fringe extreme case though I think, since it makes you completely myopic.
I think what you say works as a fine example of how a powerful emotional state can act as just any other number of variables on one's decision making, as NonY said. I do agree that hindsight and self-examination are big here.
Though the center point is how depression is overly criticized as being a variable to account for, and given an undue amount of weight compared to other factors. As NonY said, it is fucking irrational to take such an approach, and it is downright making a mockery of how truly complex and expansive the human mind and it's influences are.
Sometimes even in powerful emotional states as you mentioned, we are able to recognized we are in such a state. Preparation when not in such a state can lead to having a working decision-making ability that is untouched when in those states.
For instance, just because I may be depressed when required to make a decision does not that I am unaware of my depression and its effects.
I like to think of it as going to the grocery store while hungry. So many more food items seem appealing, oftentimes ones that are less healthy, less practical, or more expensive. However, having thought about the situation before hand and given it enough preparation, I can still make the correct decisions about what to purchase, completely aware that my urges are driven by my hunger and do not necessarily need to have any more influence than I allow them.
Of course, many effects can be much more serious, or much more sneaky in their impairing of your judgment, but the it seems we are poor judges of these effects, and often given some undue weight.
God I miss reading things like this. Great blog, NonY.
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I have no experience with depression or anything similar on the level discussed here, so feel free to just dismiss me if I come of as not knowing anything. But from my own experience from times when, looking back, I was dealing with impaired judgement...
I feel the most problematic is that it isn't so much your ability to reason that is impaired. That is, your ability to do raw processing such as math or logical analysis. What is impaired is your ability to receive inputs and judge their proper relevance and value. You will take incredibly important things and dismiss them as unimportant and irrelevant, and you will take tiny insignificant things and turn them into the centre of how you're looking at things.
This also makes it incredibly difficult to ask or receive advice. Because when another person has a different evaluation than you, how do you know this because they can see the situation more clearly, and not because they have completely misunderstood what is going on, or are working from a value system fundamentally different from yours?
I think I have to agree with Milkis's point, that is: the only person fit to judge your impaired self, is your non-impaired self. I have never had a situation where I got out of these mindsets because of my own reasoning or someone elses advice. What happened was that eventually reality hit me like a brick wall. Then much later I would look back with a clear head and realise how stupid and blind I had been.
Of course, that doesn't offer much help while someone is going trough it... I'd guess the best thing is to try and stay humble, and surround yourself with people you feel you can trust through thick and thin. But I think if we had clear answers to these kinds of problems, we'd all be living much happier lives. 
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Small fact relevant to you Nony:
Depressed people tend to have a more accurate sense of reality than others. Ironically, happy individuals or even happy relationships tend to have some bit of willful misperception.
I think the lack of reason sentiment could probably be traced to suicides and an effort to explain why people do something that seems incomprehensible to happier individuals. It may also be due to an inability to articulate why the the process of deciding to commit suicide can be affected by extreme emotion or some "non rational" element. (Personally, I think in some cases suicide might be the consequence of the same sort of emotion affecting non-depressed individuals)
edit: Of course being psych the first paper I google with 130 citations disagrees with this popular hypothesis.
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Rationality is not really what's at issue, it's the heuristics upon which that rationality is based - i.e. the perceived probability that certain decisions will have positive outcomes, etc. What's important to realize is that, because we are not yet at a point where we can derive all decisions from first principles, all human rationality is in fact predicated on inputs which are not themselves rational (which is not to say they are irrational - they are heuristic, so thinking about them in terms of "rational" or "irrational" is a category error). FWIW, I speak from some small amount of experience on this point.
I would like to know psychology's best attempts at measuring a person's ability to reason.
Psychology tends to put a bit too much emphasis on normativity, although I'm sure there is some rigorous work on this question of which I'm unaware.
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?
So, yeah, you're right, this move is illegitimate. The better point is that a depressed person's ability to perceive the world in a heuristically powerful fashion has been diminished.
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all the people explaining all the various ways a depressed person's reasoning skills can be impaired have completely missed the point of the blog. i dont think i saw anything in his blog claiming that a depressed person has no impairment on their reasoning abilities. what i got from the blog is that setting that issue aside, on what grounds can somebody claim to be in a better position to make decisions for a depressed person than the depressed person themselves? such claims are given without necessary evidence and seem to be expected to just be accepted as common sense as if the statement itself is so self evidently true that there shouldn't be any need to make a rational investigation into the reasoning behind it.
also, subjectivity
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On July 03 2012 02:47 thrawn2112 wrote:
also, subjectivity
What about it?
on what grounds can somebody claim to be in a better position to make decisions for a depressed person than the depressed person themselves?
The point of therapy is not to "make decisions" for people. The point is to enable them to make better decisions for themselves.
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On July 03 2012 02:50 sam!zdat wrote:What about it? Show nested quote +
on what grounds can somebody claim to be in a better position to make decisions for a depressed person than the depressed person themselves?
The point of therapy is not to "make decisions" for people. The point is to enable them to make better decisions for themselves.
seems like you didnt pay much attention to the blog 
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On July 03 2012 02:53 thrawn2112 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2012 02:50 sam!zdat wrote:On July 03 2012 02:47 thrawn2112 wrote:
also, subjectivity What about it?
on what grounds can somebody claim to be in a better position to make decisions for a depressed person than the depressed person themselves?
The point of therapy is not to "make decisions" for people. The point is to enable them to make better decisions for themselves. seems like you didnt pay much attention to the blog
The topic of the blog was the suggestion that people should postpone major decisions while being depressed, which is a good idea.
Would you care to elaborate what I missed?
edit: my point is that it's a straw man that psychology says depressed people can't "reason."
this, for example, is the entirely wrong way to think about it:
If one of the greatest thinkers is depressed and her ability to reason has been lowered to the level of an above average thinker
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EPT
