A very sweeping statement generalising a very broad set of people.
Have you ever helped a close loved one during their battle with depression? If you have some experience with this you'll know that a lot of your sweeping generalisation is easily falsifiable.
People might take your more seriously if you acknowledged that your personal experience is not necessarily universally applicable to the very large group of people who suffer depression.
>no matter what it says there are many people who love you
I hear this platitude all the time and I don't think that it's constructive. Disconnectedness and depression go hand in hand, in my experience. You may be blessed to have many people who love you, but a decent portion of the human population objectively doesn't, and can recognize it. So saying such a thing to a depressed person seems to run a high risk of rubbing their loneliness in their face.
Most people who make generalizations about most people make mostly bad generalizations. {yes, the irony}. I agree that widespread depression is a social problem, but those anecdotes about "reason" amount to little. Mental disorders are overdiagnosed in USA, but "their lives suck"? Not that I dispute this entirely, but it's still quite a preposterous assumption.
If one can readily identify a reason for depression then they already fall into a different group of people than those who get depressed for no apparent reason. And this is the depression that induces one to think one's life sucks ,when it seemed fine the day, or hour, ago.
It seems intuitive that people with depression are more likely to feel bad in response to X, for all X.
Nonsense. Depressed people are not just sad about everything, and depression affects selfish and unselfish people alike. Trying to derive general laws from shallow stereotypes is likely to compound misconceptions. Doing so to engage in pedantic critiques of a headline while ignoring the rest of the article is just a waste of time for everyone.
> 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?
I see your "People X..., People Y..." language, and I just want to note that over-generalization can be a path towards depression[1].
I don't mean this directed at you specifically, but it's fairly common for people to take their bad experiences in a handful of places and extrapolate that to all places everywhere, and end up feeling depressed/nihilistic, as you mention. I find myself doing it too, from time to time.
So, maybe this is more directed at other readers who might see your comment and take it as validation of their "everyone sucks" suspicions — grain of salt, and all that.
But I agree that what you describe is genuinely demoralizing and a crap way to be treated (: I hope you get to experience a good work life, if you haven't already.
[1] There's a good amount of research on this topic (search for "depression, over-generalization"), in addition to my personal experiences.
I clearly stated that "most people I know are careful to not throw around the word "depression". The rest of what I wrote syncs this perspective. Not sure what you read.
> Rather, it's a byproduct of a seriously messed up world/society/personal relations landscape, that depressed individuals are more sensitive to or have felt more deeply.
You can proclaim whatever you want, that don't make it true.
I think this is a little too one-sided. Yes, there is a group of people who have depression due to factors outside of their control, and we should all be cognizant of that. But that doesn't mean that literally every person who's depressed falls into that group. There's another group of people who are depressed due to factors at least somewhat within their control.
> A lot of people are vested in NOT understanding depression, it clashes with their fundamental atomic level beliefs of how the world operates.
Definitely. I once had a discussion on HN with a guy who insisted on seeing depression as an expression of individuality and any attempts of treatment as Brave New Word-ish, evil oppressive society enforcing conformism via happy pills.
> To receive a diagnosis of depression, these symptoms must cause the individual clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
I'd say most of the lower class has this issue.
> But it is certainly not something that includes "almost everyone".
How do you know this?
edit: maybe almost everyone is too much, I mean about 97% of the population.
The reason why the word depression is too general is because depression is a normal conceptial state that everyone will endure at least once in life. Real, debilitating, actual depression, is life-long and persist regardless of any one event. It's not just a function of the mind or an emotional relationship related to life, but an absence that can only be described as emotionally detached, sociopathic, and even as an obligation of guilt and doubt simply for existing in a time you can't accept.
Have you ever helped a close loved one during their battle with depression? If you have some experience with this you'll know that a lot of your sweeping generalisation is easily falsifiable.
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