Honestly, it sounds like you're backpedaling. I don't mean that to be super critical. There's nothing wrong with changing your position in response to feedback, but pretending that's what you originally meant seems a little fishy. But I may be misinterpreting what you're saying.
To your clarified point, I'm not sure that's really accurate. I've known a LOT of depressed people and had my own struggles. I've never met a depressed person who logically thought there was nothing they could do to improve the situation. It's well established that regular exercise, sufficient sleep, establishing routines, talk therapy, antidepressants, etc. can help with depression. Again, I've never met anyone who suffered from depression and denied those treatments can help. Anecdotal but true.
The problem is that depression is not logical. If you've never experienced it, you really can't understand it. And it's doubly frustrating, because it can manifest itself differently for different people.
I read an analogy recently that I thought was pretty decent. Imagine you are sleepy all the time, just dead tired, exhausted, and you feel like you can never really get fully awake. Now imagine you're talking to somebody who never really gets tired; they're just naturally full of energy. Imagine trying to explain to them what being exhausted feels like. It's not a logical thing. It's not that you think it's a smart decision to stay in bed all day. You're just drained of all energy.
And when you describe what you're feeling, their response is to give you a bunch of solutions you've already tried. Have you tried drinking coffee? Black out curtains? Maybe your mattress is bad? You know when I'm feeling sluggish, I like to get up and do some exercise, that always perks me up!
At that point, you probably want to punch them in the face. They have no idea what they're talking about. If you had enough energy to get up and make coffee – or exercise for christ's sake – you wouldn't be in the situation you are.
Aaaaaaaaanyway, I'm not disagreeing that personal accountability is important. You can't help the depressed person (or alcoholic or anybody suffering from a disease), if they don't make an effort get help. The problem with depression is that making an effort – any effort to do anything – is often the very thing that person is unable to do.
So, people need to be careful discussing "taking responsibility" for depression, especially if they've never had first- or second-hand experience. Despite their best intentions, they're likely to come off looking like ignorant assholes. From your follow up comments, I think it's clear you're not an asshole. :) But I'm also not terribly surprised by danharaj's visceral response to your original sentiment.
First of all, I do have first- and second-hand experience of this, so I'm not talking entirely out of my ass.
Also, there are actually a lot of people who deny any psychological involvement with depression, and you'll see this a lot on forums (including HN). I'm not going to go into more detail, as it will likely just start another flame war, suffice to say it is definitely an issue.
I'm well aware of the difficulty in doing anything about depression, and it wasn't backpeddling. I was just making the point that it is possible to improve depression through making changes. I wasn't saying that it's people's own fault, or they just need to pull themselves together, or anything like that, which seems to be what people somehow implied from my comments.
> Also, there are actually a lot of people who deny any psychological involvement with depression, and you'll see this a lot on forums (including HN).
To be fair, a lot of psychotherapy advocates claim the same thing about physiological causes. This is kind of funny because the first step in a mood disorder diagnosis is supposed to be the elimination of physiological explanations, but in practice that process is often... let's be kind to the GPs/PCPs and say "optimized for time".
Basically, anyone who claims to have the one true solution to depression is either lying or believes a little too much in their own hype. Some are people who got lucky and had their first treatment work wonders (not a typical experience) and now think that everyone with depression needs to try their specific treatment, but a lot are people with a financial, reputational, or ideological stake in people's beliefs about treatment.
On one hand, depression treatment is certainly a case of "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" [1]. On the other hand, it's also a case of "it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose; that is not a weakness, that is life" [2].
[1]: popularly attributed to Wayne Gretzky
[2]: Jean-Luc Picard; Star Trek: The Next Generation 02x21 Peak Performance
That's bizarre. We must travel in very different circles.
I've never seen anybody claim there's nothing that can be done for depression. I've seen people say they've tried all of the standard stuff and nothing helped. That's different though. I'm not doubting you, just expressing surprise. It's also possible that our different experiences are due to us interpreting things differently.
Anyway, I don't frequent those types of forums these days, though I have in a previous life. You're probably much more knowledgeable about what's common in them than I am, at this point.
To your clarified point, I'm not sure that's really accurate. I've known a LOT of depressed people and had my own struggles. I've never met a depressed person who logically thought there was nothing they could do to improve the situation. It's well established that regular exercise, sufficient sleep, establishing routines, talk therapy, antidepressants, etc. can help with depression. Again, I've never met anyone who suffered from depression and denied those treatments can help. Anecdotal but true.
The problem is that depression is not logical. If you've never experienced it, you really can't understand it. And it's doubly frustrating, because it can manifest itself differently for different people.
I read an analogy recently that I thought was pretty decent. Imagine you are sleepy all the time, just dead tired, exhausted, and you feel like you can never really get fully awake. Now imagine you're talking to somebody who never really gets tired; they're just naturally full of energy. Imagine trying to explain to them what being exhausted feels like. It's not a logical thing. It's not that you think it's a smart decision to stay in bed all day. You're just drained of all energy.
And when you describe what you're feeling, their response is to give you a bunch of solutions you've already tried. Have you tried drinking coffee? Black out curtains? Maybe your mattress is bad? You know when I'm feeling sluggish, I like to get up and do some exercise, that always perks me up!
At that point, you probably want to punch them in the face. They have no idea what they're talking about. If you had enough energy to get up and make coffee – or exercise for christ's sake – you wouldn't be in the situation you are.
Aaaaaaaaanyway, I'm not disagreeing that personal accountability is important. You can't help the depressed person (or alcoholic or anybody suffering from a disease), if they don't make an effort get help. The problem with depression is that making an effort – any effort to do anything – is often the very thing that person is unable to do.
So, people need to be careful discussing "taking responsibility" for depression, especially if they've never had first- or second-hand experience. Despite their best intentions, they're likely to come off looking like ignorant assholes. From your follow up comments, I think it's clear you're not an asshole. :) But I'm also not terribly surprised by danharaj's visceral response to your original sentiment.