Depression

God life's depressing. Yet few things are more depressing than the view of depression, which is and ever will remain a matter for philosophical speculation, advanced by psychiatry. The notion that taking a pill would usher in an age of previously unimagined joy for the ever-burgeoning ranks of severely miserable people, has been shown to be a great error.

In the following posts I will endeavor to offer an alternative way of looking at human misery, liberated from its current conceptual moorings which frame depression as a problem of the brain (in accordance with the temper of the times), a conceptualization whose myriad shortcomings I will enumerate.

One problem with the current understanding of depression, if understanding it can be called, is that it is ultimately counter-productive for the recipients of the diagnosis, in that the drugs at best provide only a short term benefit, which quickly resolves into a feelings of emotional numbness, in which the seeming emptiness of existence becomes eloquent, alternating with feelings of intense dysphoria, and punctuated by the odd flash of mania (or whatever you want to call it), in which one's thoughts seem to run ahead of oneself, adding nausea to the list of negative emotional baggage with which long-term usage of the drug saddles you.

On top of this, the diagnosis has a stigma attached to it, and the biogenetic model encourages an attitude of fatalistic resignation on the part of the recipient and on the part of others, disempowering the patient, and encouraging others to see you as a lost case, something which explains the results of studies that have shown that the biogenetic model, and the assumptions that reside therein, leads to negative attitudes.

Another problem is that depression qua disease, is defined in a circular manner. A person is believed to be suffering from the disease of depression because they meet the relevant symptomatological criteria. Yet how do we know they are symptoms? Because the person feels depressed. The fact of your depression proves they are symptoms, and vice versa. A classic species of circular logic. This kind of logic constitutes the common essence of psychiatric diagnoses, where the prerequisite of evidence, upheld in bona fide medical fields, is neatly done away with. Nevertheless, believers in the mental health faith always find some loophole through which they can evade conceding the conceptual, logical, epistemological, and empirical shortcomings of their field of inquiry, don't they?

TBC>

Coming back to the issue of the harm of the diagnosis of depression, because of the stigma attached people have a tendency to retreat from the recipient, notwithstanding hypocritical societal attitudes to the contrary about the supposed abundance of compassion people feel for those so labelled (oh, so that must be why we treat the severely depressed as if they don't exist, or as if they were emotional contaminants, around whom some sort of cordon sanitaire must be drawn lest they infect the happy, beautiful people, Fortune's favourites, with their "disease").

Now it must be said that the isolation of people who are depressed cannot be explained solely by the repercussions of the diagnosis. There is also the sad fact that people are like the proverbial summer birds who fly away upon the approach of winter. Misery and adversity imbues those whom they visit with a force of repulsion, as surely as prosperity imbues those whom it visits with a force of attraction. This is something that, because it doesn't comport well with some of our sanctimonious pretensions, needs must be suppressed, but it is nevertheless true that few things alienate like misery and adversity, just that it is one of those many unpalatable truths whose recognition is rare for this reason.

Nevertheless there persists this idea that there is something compassionate about the psychiatric labeling of depressed people. Alas, people will believe in what they want to believe.

Obviously then, the label and the way we treat people so labelled plays a pivotal role in reinforcing the misery of those to whom such labels are ascribed, because it condemns the individual to life on the margins of social popularity and desirability. For such people, modern society is a barren emotional landscape, fertile only for the growth of feelings of despair, disappointment, and despondency. The lack of human contact and an anchorage within a network of social support which could restore them to faith and good spirits, as well as buffering the blows of outrageous fortune and conflict with others, ensures that extreme distress will be a permanent fixture in their lives.

Psychiatry begets the very problems it purports to remedy.

Another problem with the medical model of depression and the treatments thereof is that the latter beget the incapacity they purport to cure. Anti-depressants may provide some short-term benefits, but in the long-term they lead to deep and abiding feelings of extreme depression, largely as a result of the sedative effect and the incapacity whereof I speak.

Why does incapacity lead to and reinforce feelings of depression? Mencken once said, to paraphrase, that people work to escape the depressing agony of contemplating existence. When men can't work because of some physical or mental incapacity, depression is inevitable. Anti-depressant drugs sedate you to such an extent that for large swathes of time you can do little but just lie about staring into vacant space. In such a state of mind, the emptiness of existence is conjured into full relief. It can also, as Mencken understood, lead to morbid preoccupations as concerns the point of this Sisyphean slog we call life, leading to feelings of despair and depression.

This is why any prescription for the contemplative life should come with the proviso, "you may end up killing yourself!". The facts are, life is just too hideous and cruel for contemplation thereupon to lead to anything other than despair and disillusionment. As Ecclesiastes said, "knowledge increaseth sorrow". The accumulation of philosophical insight and the gradual build-up of feelings of disenchantment with and sorrow regarding the ways of this, our world, proceed pari passu and in parallel, due to this very relationship that Ecclesiastes understood.

Another reason why this incapacity can lead to depression is because we live in a society where there is a stigma attached to not working, so that people at a disadvantage in the labor market are inculcated upon by their society to loathe themselves, to feel inferior to others, worthless, useless etc..

I am in agreement with Cledwyn Bulbs' perspective

One distinction I would make :
I am using Duloxetine 60mg which is a re-uptake inhibitor of serotonin and norepinephrine.
This is prescribed by medical bureaucrats as an anti-depressant.
In their usual haste to stay abreast of matters medical,
doctors seem not to understand the context that made it useful for me.

Being in my 60s, the usual decline in neurotransmitter levels with aging
had adversely affected my mood, with melancholia taking an obnoxiously dominant role.

Duloxetine has offset that decline in mood and mental vigour
without inducing torpor or any druglike stupidity.
My mental status was quickly restored, and my mood returned to its native dynamic.

With that anti-aging measure done, the responsibility to enjoy my life
is fully restored to my own initiative.

Excellent thought provoking discussion!

Other than my typical not everything is a chemical imbalance speech I think you guys said it better than myself, by a long haul.


My opinion is that if you give a person anti-depressants without a chemical imbalance you eventually create one. The brain is plastic, so it will adjust. When the medication is removed you will get withdrawal, even if it is just worsened depression, you end up right back on the drug.

Cruxx wrote:I am in agreement with Cledwyn Bulbs' perspective

One distinction I would make :
I am using Duloxetine 60mg which is a re-uptake inhibitor of serotonin and norepinephrine.
This is prescribed by medical bureaucrats as an anti-depressant.
In their usual haste to stay abreast of matters medical,
doctors seem not to understand the context that made it useful for me.

Being in my 60s, the usual decline in neurotransmitter levels with aging
had adversely affected my mood, with melancholia taking an obnoxiously dominant role.

Duloxetine has offset that decline in mood and mental vigour
without inducing torpor or any druglike stupidity.
My mental status was quickly restored, and my mood returned to its native dynamic.

With that anti-aging measure done, the responsibility to enjoy my life
is fully restored to my own initiative.

Thanks for the reply. I'm glad that worked for you.

-- Sat Mar 21, 2015 7:52 pm --

Riccola wrote:Excellent thought provoking discussion!

Other than my typical not everything is a chemical imbalance speech I think you guys said it better than myself, by a long haul.


My opinion is that if you give a person anti-depressants without a chemical imbalance you eventually create one. The brain is plastic, so it will adjust. When the medication is removed you will get withdrawal, even if it is just worsened depression, you end up right back on the drug.

Thanks for the reply. My experience of these drugs is that in the long-term they are depressogenic.

As for why people are depressed, why shouldn't they be? I think happiness, as an abiding state of bliss, is just a mirage in the desert of human suffering, a friar's lantern that retreats upon approach, that draws us deeper and deeper into the infernal nether-regions of human misery. Insofar as it can be said that happiness is possible in this world, it is something we happen upon serendipitously in the pursuit of some other goal, which is why hedonism leads to dissatisfaction and ennui. John Mill and Immanuel Kant both believed this.

Another source of depression is the belief that other people are happy. One of the great myths of the age, propagated by the ever-burgeoning mental health- and self-help industry is that there is such a thing as happiness, that is, as an abiding state, outside of the cycle of pleasure and pain, and that withstands the blows of ill fortune. This is largely because psychiatry, as a business, exploits and largely generates this desire for sublunary beatitude because of the revenue it derives therefrom.

This is how big businesses work. They foster a climate of ceaseless craving and desiring for things we don't have, keeping us in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction and frustration so that we keep on consuming their products in the hope that by doing so we will finally reach the promised land. Yet we never do, because even when we can possess the object of our desire, the greater the possession thereof, the greater our desire becomes, hence why wealthy people are so greedy, why the powerful are so greedy for power, and why the famous are so covetous of more fame than that which they have.

Coming back to my point about psychiatry, psychiatry fills our heads with beatific visions of "mental health", creating expectations of a happiness which has no counterpart in the real world of human experience.

True, lots of people claim to be happy, but this is largely because of the stigma attached to depression, and an at least intuitive understanding of the misery, abandonment and loneliness that waits in store for anyone who dares to vent their misery. For this reason, people will even deceive themselves that they are happy when they are not.

TBC>

Hi Cledwyn,
you find elevated serotinin & norepinephrine depressogenic
because your perspective is depressogenic.

Mood follow perspective more faithfully than mood follows dumb biochemistry.

You deny the reality of happiness because it absolves you
of failure to conquer that elusive state of mind.
Bertrand Russell wrote a most-excellent book, called "The Conquest of Happiness".
Go argue with Bertie.
He sets a formidable standard of observation and insight.
A hero of the art and science of thinking.

When it comes to Misery, you are quite an Artiste, Cledwyn.
Strange to find such a bizarre dissonance.

Crystal-Clear perceptiveness VersuS bitter Disappointment - in one person . . .

Maybe it's some kind of Achievement, a fresh horizon for self-torment.
Cledwyn knows that outcome, better than I.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hi SSDD
from private message :

Did I misunderstand your meaning?

A good thing that making light of our cosmically-small significance has crossed your mind.

Making light of our situation is actually a technique with brilliant Possibilities.

The Toltec call it "Controlled Folly",
to distinguish it from the ordinary folly of humans
that attends the Peculiar {grin} absence of Omniscience.

The methodology of Controlled Folly is described in abstract detail in the book
"The Power of Silence", written by the nagual Carlos.

However, SSDD, it was Cledwyn Bulbs who authored the quote that you interpreted as
"making light of” a crapulous circumstance.

What if we all just looked at it all and laughed the manic laugh of the people condemned to suffer something, somewhere, sometime, and found solace with each other in doing so. A bit of gallows humour wouldn't go amiss, surely, when ultimately we're all in the shyte together.

It seems that you have understood Cledwyn's meaning in this quote.

sadly, Cledwyn is still an angry young man,
so his poetry is more Bitter than necessary.

Controlled Folly, on the other hand,
is refined by its Ability to incorporate a constructive {ie negEntropic} Strategy,
so that the outcome of the strategic attitude includes
a far more Generous Celebration of the possibilities of awareness.

By choosing an impeccable attitude to Life,
rather than a Reasonable attitude,
or a helplessly self-pitying focus,
we folly-eers dis-Entangle ourselves from the crippling baggage of noxious socialisation.

Takes a while, but controlled-folly certainly works as a cure for melancholy.
It works for me.
Prove it for YourSelf . . .

Evidence of their successfull escape from misery - by strategic controlled-folly . . .
is vividly portrayed in the humour of the nagual Carlos' teachers,
that band of Toltec seers, who disclosed their underground {heretical} heritage
for the purposefull controlled-folly of manifesting its worldwide publication
by a somewhat-hysterical anthropologist, who was [in 1959]
unReasonably determined to do herbal field-work in mysterious Mexico.

The great innovator Bernard Shaw exquisitely expresses the paradox of controlled-folly :

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world.
The unReasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unReasonable man.

. . . George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

Controlled-folly puts our self-importance in its rightful place,
and in so doing, demolishes the prison erected by the mudshadow influence.

Cruxx wrote:Hi Cledwyn,
you find elevated serotinin & norepinephrine depressogenic
because your perspective is depressogenic.

Mood follow perspective more faithfully than mood follows dumb biochemistry.

You deny the reality of happiness because it absolves you
of failure to conquer that elusive state of mind.
Bertrand Russell wrote a most-excellent book, called "The Conquest of Happiness".
Go argue with Bertie.
He sets a formidable standard of observation and insight.
A hero of the art and science of thinking.

When it comes to Misery, you are quite an Artiste, Cledwyn.
Strange to find such a bizarre dissonance.

Crystal-Clear perceptiveness VersuS bitter Disappointment - in one person . . .

Maybe it's some kind of Achievement, a fresh horizon for self-torment.
Cledwyn knows that outcome, better than I.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hi SSDD
from private message :

Did I misunderstand your meaning?

A good thing that making light of our cosmically-small significance has crossed your mind.

Making light of our situation is actually a technique with brilliant Possibilities.

The Toltec call it "Controlled Folly",
to distinguish it from the ordinary folly of humans
that attends the Peculiar {grin} absence of Omniscience.

The methodology of Controlled Folly is described in abstract detail in the book
"The Power of Silence", written by the nagual Carlos.

However, SSDD, it was Cledwyn Bulbs who authored the quote that you interpreted as
"making light of” a crapulous circumstance.

What if we all just looked at it all and laughed the manic laugh of the people condemned to suffer something, somewhere, sometime, and found solace with each other in doing so. A bit of gallows humour wouldn't go amiss, surely, when ultimately we're all in the shyte together.

It seems that you have understood Cledwyn's meaning in this quote.

sadly, Cledwyn is still an angry young man,
so his poetry is more Bitter than necessary.

Controlled Folly, on the other hand,
is refined by its Ability to incorporate a constructive {ie negEntropic} Strategy,
so that the outcome of the strategic attitude includes
a far more Generous Celebration of the possibilities of awareness.

By choosing an impeccable attitude to Life,
rather than a Reasonable attitude,
or a helplessly self-pitying focus,
we folly-eers dis-Entangle ourselves from the crippling baggage of noxious socialisation.

Takes a while, but controlled-folly certainly works as a cure for melancholy.
It works for me.
Prove it for YourSelf . . .

Evidence of their successfull escape from misery - by strategic controlled-folly . . .
is vividly portrayed in the humour of the nagual Carlos' teachers,
that band of Toltec seers, who disclosed their underground {heretical} heritage
for the purposefull controlled-folly of manifesting its worldwide publication
by a somewhat-hysterical anthropologist, who was [in 1959]
unReasonably determined to do herbal field-work in mysterious Mexico.

The great innovator Bernard Shaw exquisitely expresses the paradox of controlled-folly :

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world.
The unReasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unReasonable man.

. . . George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

Controlled-folly puts our self-importance in its rightful place,
and in so doing, demolishes the prison erected by the mudshadow influence.

Hi Cruxx. I hope you are right about happiness. I'll have to give that book by Bertrand Russell a read. I've got his book on power, which is very good. I wholeheartedly agree with your point about controlled folly. What you say about it putting our self-importance in place is spot on. Samuel Beckett understood the importance of this.

Depression is also often an epiphenomenon of contemplation upon the ways of this world, as I pointed out earlier in my discussion of the harms of psychiatric diagnosis. This is one of the reasons why it is advised by experts not to dwell on suffering and injustice, because contemplation thereupon summons forth a whole host of psychological demons, shaking the very foundations upon which our very being rests, leading either to terror, or despair and depression.

This leads to an intuitive lack of faith in existence, a kind of sickness unto death, to borrow from Kierkegaard. The rise of this intuitive lack of faith whereof I speak has coincided exactly with the rise of scepticism and doubt, itself coincident with the rise of science. Science, for all the good it has achieved, has helped to usher in a climate toxic to the "mental health" of almost all who breathe in its insalubrious air. Each day, we all have us have to struggle against the tide of nihilism that threatens to submerge us. This is why I have tried to believe in god, but just can't take that leap of faith that Kierkegaard prescribed as the remedy for the "sickness unto death".

Nevertheless, I disagree with the experts, who make up that tutelary complex to which man injudiciously delegates responsibility for almost his whole existence in modern society, leading to a cult of the expert in which it is considered lese majeste for any man to question the object of veneration who the devout votaries thereof esteem to be above criticism, and mercifully free from the limitations to which the human mind is heir. The world needs people to dwell on injustice and evil, otherwise its agents get a free pass.