[wizzwizz4]

There're a lot of people in the comments here who don't seem to know what depression is.

Depression isn't just “I'm sad all the time”. Functionally, depression is a reduction in the set of actions that one can take. For some, it can be bad enough that “fill out this form, make this phone call, write the reference number on the form then post it” is too much. No, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do that. That's why it's called a mental illness. Sure, they could “just try harder” except oops, that's not on the list either. (See http://www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.html for a good analogy.)

Many depressed people come up with psychological tricks to move necessary tasks from the “unavailable actions” category to the “available actions” category. Possibly the best one I've heard is the “shower heist”: it's not “taking a shower”, it's grand theft of the clean.

If you think depression is “just laziness”, why would someone go to all the effort of reframing basic actions in this way? So please, none of that.

[mahathu]

"Depression" is more the term our medical community has today to describe low mood, lack of energy, loss of interest et al.

It's important to understand that there exists no weird illness that is causing these symptoms. Instead, the symptoms can have all sorts of roots, but depression is just what we call them.

[anoncake]

It's similar to how before modern medicine, everything was a fever.

[carapace]

I suffered from bad depression in my youth. Couldn't get a haircut or buy new shoes, things like that. I think the worst moment came when I was so depressed I just stood there in my room. I couldn't even lie down. No way to explain that to a normal person.

One day my mom said, "I know you're not faking this because no one would deliberately be this miserable."

It was more comforting than you might imagine.

- - - -

(I debated adding this because I don't want to get drawn into an argument about my own personal history, but FWIW I was cured completely in a single session of hypnotherapy that lasted less than ten minutes. The therapist was Dr. Richard Bandler, co-inventor of Neurolinguistic Programming. (Yes, the NLP that is decried as "pseudoscience".))

[wizzwizz4]

Unless you're dealing with con artists, the “pseudo” in “psuedoscience” is usually the explanation. I don't doubt Freud was able to help a lot of people, but I do doubt his explanations of what it was exactly that helped, and why.

[carapace]

> the “pseudo” in “psuedoscience” is usually the explanation

Explanation of what?

I would say that NLP is non-scientific or pre-scientific, yet you can find practitioners and promoters who claim it is scientific, so to that extent NLP is pseudoscience. The trouble is that detractors use the label "pseudoscience" to cast shade on the whole thing, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The techniques developed under the rubric of NLP are rigorous and repeatable. E.g. the phobia cure or the "Visual Kinesthetic Squash" are like algorithms, in the sense that they are concrete patterns that work to create specific changes. They have been tested and refined and the essential elements boiled down to render specific steps without extraneous elements. A person can learn a pattern like the phobia cure and apply it to cure phobias. So there is a kind of rigor and repeatability that distinguishes NLP from the vast majority of schools of psychology.

> I do doubt his explanations of what it was exactly that helped, and why.

One of the most interesting (IMO) aspects of NLP is that Bandler and Grinder were very careful not to speculate as to how or why these patterns work, they refused to develop theories. The patterns were developed operationally without trying to find explanations or stories for what was going on in the brain that made them work. So no one knows why the "VK Squash" works. No one knows why the phobia cure works. But they do work. And sometimes they don't, so you try something else. It's not scientific, it's operational: do what works.

[shkkmo]

The issues is that we are missing the "why" of how most antidepressants work... so do they also qualify as pseudoscience?

In my mind, psuedoscience isn't just missing the "why/how it works" but also the "who/when it helps" and as a result don't have clear statistical backing.

[wizzwizz4]

We know the why is “because the antidepressants were taken”. But antidepressants only work sometimes – different antidepressants work for different people! We don't know the true, fundamental reason, but at least we've pinned it down a bit.

I call something pseudoscience when the “why” is “pinned down” as something wholly unrelated, and the people involved haven't noticed; if they were doing science instead of just theorising, they would've noticed.

(We agree, but we're using different words.)

[shkkmo]

> We know the why is “because the antidepressants were taken”.

We don't know that. The best we know is that people who take antidepressants on average experience more improvement than a placebo. We actually don't know who got better from taking antidepressants due to the placebo effect.

> I call something pseudoscience when the “why” is “pinned down” as something wholly unrelated, and the people involved haven't noticed;

This is a good point and I would agree that pseudosciences are generally bad at uncovering bad explanations. I will point out that the "chemical imbalance" theory is still widely believed even though it has been pretty thoroughly debunked.

I think the dichotomy science/pseudoscience if often applied to whole fields when there is often a mix of both within any given field. The prevelence can certainly be highly variable from field to field but it isn't as black and white as we like to suggest.

[smoldesu]

I think the larger sentiment (and you're welcome to correct me if I'm wrong) is that dealing with depressed people is tiring. I have a few friends who deal with chronic depression, and getting their input on things or checking up on them is always a production. I still greatly appreciate their position in my life, but my sanity (and patience) is finite. More often than not, I'm equally (if not more) helpless, which makes it extremely difficult to disengage or move the discussion forwards.

I welcome an honest dialogue around mental health, but a dialogue requires two people to be dynamic. If the two become mutually incompatible, then there's effectively no way for me to contribute.

[gverrilla]

I agree except for:

>No, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do that. That's why it's called a mental illness.

That's not the reason it's called a mental illness. It's called an illness because it's a source of suffering. Also, of course there's a reason - otherwise it wouldn't happen.

[abnry]

> There're a lot of people in the comments here who don't seem to know what depression is.

There is a lot of people who don't seem to know what depression is because no one really knows what is depression.

It is complex, it is multi-faceted, it can be subtle, it can be overt. It varies from person to person. It varies in causes.

[mdoms]

> There're a lot of people in the comments here who don't seem to know what depression is.

> Depression isn't just “I'm sad all the time”.

I always see these comments in threads about depression but I almost never see people actually making the comments in question. Can you point to an example in this thread?

[wizzwizz4]

They were mostly dead'd, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27543212 is the example that prompted me to write this.