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by munificent 1290 days ago
Like many mental illnesses, depression interferes with your perceptions. It's not that that love "wasn't enough", it's that a person deep in depression can't even accurately see or feel that love.
2 comments

Yeah and it is especially hard for high achievers to ask for help or even consider that they should ask for help. I think its completely foreign to them.
Citation needed

Sorry, not trying to be a jerk, but unless there is actual comparative evidence, I don't think one can just assert that high achievers struggle in getting help any more than others.

It should be common knowledge by now, as the problem has been documented for decades and discussed here many times.[1][2][3][4]

As far as an actual citation: "Studies from Kjølseth et al. (2009), and our own findings (Szücs et al., 2020), suggest that older adults who die by suicide or have late-onset (mostly high-medical lethality) suicide attempts are often high-functioning throughout most of their life, and characterized as controlling, rigid, high-achievers, also high on orderliness (a conscientiousness subcomponent)."[5]

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/01/us/higher-suicide-risk-fo... [2]https://www.deseret.com/1988/9/13/18777827/30-percent-of-tee... [3]https://www.depts.ttu.edu/research/scholarly-messenger/2016/... [4]https://everymindatwork.com/high-achievers-and-mental-health... [5]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7655527/

This fits what I've seen unfortunately. Thanks for posting all those links.
Depression might not even really be about love. Seems like aggression plays a big role in it too.
yeah the old analysis thing about

aggression turned outwards --> anger

aggression turned inwards --> depression

i wish some of these super smart people weren't so afraid of the harmless 'woo' that costs next to nothing, like read some old 70s book on primal scream into a pillow or try a radical keto meat diet or weird mental re-framings from people who are total quacks

The internet is full of 60 plus years of this stuff since the 60s, books and lectures and diy reprogramming you can find for free.

random 'outdated' books where 80 percent is fluff i've stumbled on one page of a random client story that just cut through time and space to reach me at that moment. I can't even remember the book title but I still remember the page layout, reading a paragraph at 2am and started bawling after feeling numb all year.

I've pieced together little bits of insight this way and each feel like growth and knowing some secret unconscious part of myself better. You never know what will crack the ice and get thru to you.

like who cares about evidence when that has gotten you nowhere in matters of the mind?

Hell, you can build a life going from placebo insight to insight if that's what it takes to keep on, why would that even be different than the lives on 'normal' people chasing hollow consumer goods?

it's still a life of trying things out to better know yourself and your world, which is plenty meaningful

I’ve found people like Dr Paul Jenkins on YouTube hello with “reframing” significantly.
No.
Lol? this is a widely understood perspective.
I think maybe 5% of the time it isn't about love but the other 95% it is. A lot of people really are missing love.

The Netflix Series 13 Reasons Why seems pretty unrealistic except maybe it represents some unusual cases. In that series there are clearly people who cared about her but she was missing the caring of certain people (and I don't fault people for feeling bad because one particular person or a few doesn't like them). A lot of people don't have much loving attention at all though.

There is literally nothing aggressive about depression.
Then why are people suffering depression packed full of stress response hormones?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc

Are you familiar with the expression "fight or flight"? They feel a need to flee, but there is nowhere to go.