Anxiety and Depression Are Symptoms, Not Diseases

Amen to this article. As one who myself once believed my depression &quot;came out of nowhere&quot; (but which, in retrospect, was an obvious symptom of my emotionally destructive family and school environment) and who tried for many years to smother those feelings with antidepressants, I feel strongly that this article presents a wiser path.<p>Evolutionarily speaking, it seems likely that depression&#x2F;anxiety are there for some purpose, and yet we treat them both like meaningless pain meant only to be banished using drugs. I believe both are signals that something in our environment is not working for us. They indicate emotional or physical needs unmet---needs for safety, autonomy, connection, etc.<p>Often the individual suffering is fundamentally unaware of their own circumstances. I didn&#x27;t realize how messed up my family relationships were growing up until much later. There are various reasons for this unawareness, but I believe the depression&#x2F;anxiety are there to force our conscious self and the people around us to acknowledge that something is wrong.<p>This isn&#x27;t just the old nonsense about depressed people needing to cheer up, and that it will pass in a day. This is a completely different paradigm that explains depression and anxiety as meaningful signals of underlying problems rather than as inexplicable suffering to be numbed through prescription medication. I believe it will prove the more robust and also the wiser way of looking at these experiences.

The comments here are depressing. People who are actually depressed are saying that the author is completely wrong about their depression, while others with no experience of depression are nitpicking at them with for what passes for logic on the internet.<p>The truth is, this PhD is not a psychiatrist, appears to have little clinical experience except whatever his &quot;practice&quot; has thrown his way, and, tellingly, refers to &quot;clients&quot; instead of &quot;patients&quot;.<p>Some depression is situational, for sure, but this is not a deep observation or original thinking. The author is perhaps qualified to treat situational, temporary depression but cannot speak to clinical depression or depression that arises from mood disorders. To the extent he is in denial that these forms exist he is mistreating his &quot;clients&quot;, and he shouldn&#x27;t have the support of a bunch of smarty-pants nerds when he does it.

&gt; Or if you are outside for a long time in the cold with no jacket, upon feeling very cold, you don’t say that you have &quot;a coldness disorder&quot;.<p>A better example for anxiety or depression would be standing inside in a warm room, and despite everyone else in the room being comfortable, you are unable to warm up at all. When you complain, you are told that &quot;everyone gets cold sometimes&quot;.<p>This article doesn&#x27;t seem to have any new information, it&#x27;s just repeating the old ideas that depression and anxiety are the same as temporary sadness and worry due to legitimate problems.

I have been suffering depression for long time and can tell you right now that this article is as wrong in describing how I feel as one could get it. Regardless of how my need are taken care of and how satisfied I should be with the status quo depression takes it all away from you without you understanding why and how. There are days that I feel like I am the luckiest man in the world, technically speaking, yet I feel the &#x27;saddest&#x27; and most depressed I have ever been. Don&#x27;t believe for a second what the author claims here - depression is a disease and it needs to be treated as one. Very dangerous post indeed.

While there&#x27;s truth to this, it&#x27;s a generalization. Twin studies show that there&#x27;s a moderate genetic factor in depression, and a strong one for manic depression<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;558030" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;558030</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;16390897" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;16390897</a>

I&#x27;m not a psychologist or have received any other professional training in this direction but really I think there are two types of depression.<p>- Clinical depression. The disease type that for many &quot;comes out of nowhere&quot; and paralyzes people to the point where they can&#x27;t leave bed any more. I&#x27;d venture to say it&#x27;s the minority of cases but the author may be wrong in putting them in the same group as the...<p>- Symptom depression. That&#x27;s what I think the author is talking about and what I think is the majority of cases. People who work a lot call it &quot;burn-out&quot;. Those affected can still function in daily live but quality of life is still pretty poor.<p>It&#x27;s probably a mistake to put the first kind in the same class as the second kind. However I think it is a far bigger mistake to treat the second kind like the first kind and that&#x27;s I think what the author was trying to say (and I would very much agree with it).

So I have depressive symptoms for quite some time. I&#x27;ve talked to my doctor like 2 years ago about it. He told me that the only way to get a therapy is to seek out a therapist on my own. This is fine, I can understand that. Just like an alcoholic must accept that he has problems and seeks out for help. I am not going to lie, it is a tough thing to do. But as an general scepticist I have the huge problem to find someone to trust. I find it absurd that I have to check the phone book or the internet to find some nice looking person that maybe can help with my mental health. Eventually, a therapy is something that both therapist and patient have to agree about. But I can&#x27;t really see myself to visit mutliple therapists just to find someone that can work with me.<p>So if someone lives in germany and can give me a hint to find someone, or anyone else in any way I&#x27;d appreciate it.

Depression is commonly defined as the inability to recover from negative emotional state. To then call that a symptom of emotional needs seems to miss the distinction.<p>If we compared this to injure and clotting, it would be weird to describe a clotting disorder as a symptom of injuries. Preventing more injuries is likely going to help and is a good step forward, but it do nothing to address the issue on why the recovery process is impaired.

There is major difference with being depressed and having clinical depression. I have been fighting the latter for the last few years and I can vouch for there being no cause.<p>Example: I was with my extended family members in mountains of coffee plantations enjoying a vacation. There was no internet connection and thus nothing to disturb me. We were all (over 20 of us) having a great time. We were playing a game of cricket, where during the game I had a depression attack and almost collapsed on the ground. There was nothing there to upset me at all.<p>This is just one example. I have faced many more in a similar manner.<p>There is one thing for sure. Community support helps you fight depression very well. I am a member of a Buddhist group and their encouragement and support has really help me fight it.

This! So many times I see that &quot;depression is not just something you can address with actionable things, talking about rainbows&quot;, etc. and some sort of implicit acknowledgment that psychotropic drugs are necessary and that depression is totally okay and just has to be understood and empathized with. (I wish I expressed this sentiment better, but I hope you know what I mean since the same sentiment keeps appearing.) And then that can lead to downward spirals, drug abuse, and even suicide.<p>Depression and anxiety are usually symptoms of needs not being met, or embracing a worldview in which one is not living up to things they believe are essential. Often the worldview makes a big difference, including and especially religion and philosophy -- as these affect what the person values the most. That and the interpersonal relationships with people and how they are affected by the person&#x27;s goals.<p>If you are close to someone who is depressed, ask them about:<p>Their worldview<p>What is important<p>Their values and goals<p>Why must they achieve those goals<p>How have they been achieving them<p>Their interpersonal relationships<p>What is wrong is often systemic - it is seen over and over in various people in various ways. The underlying worldview usually is the first factor, followed by interpersonal relationships that are colored by the worldview and goals. Often one&#x27;s early relationship with the parents sets unconcious goals (eg must get married to someone within the faith, must get good grades etc.) that cause people to expend a lot of effort pursuing while not fulfilling their physical and emotional needs. They end up depressed or anxious as a result.

There was an interesting article few days ago on HN: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11358931" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11358931</a><p>In the article, there was a quote: Many people with severe anxiety and&#x2F;or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and&#x2F;or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.<p>It seems to me, sometimes, being a member of society (having these societal needs met) can be quite tricky.

While trying better to understand someone else in my family, the expert advice I got was that anxiety is nearly always genetic, that is, nature and not nurture. And the expert claimed that it is known that psychotherapy, e.g., as suggested in the OP, doesn&#x27;t work for anxiety or some of its other symptoms, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social phobia, paranoia, hysteria, psychopathic-passive.<p>For more, there is<p>David V. Sheehan, M.D., <i>The Anxiety Disease.</i><p>where he argues that, even after <i>controlling</i> on various obvious candidate variables, anxiety disease is four times more common in human females than human males. He conjectures that the difference is so great that at some time the disease must have had some reproductive advantage.<p>Or, some people come from just horrible backgrounds and still do not suffer from anxiety disease, while other people come from apparently ideal backgrounds and do suffer.<p>Of course, a child gets from their parents both nature and nurture, so we have to suspect that can be difficult to separate the two.<p>Still, IMHO, on this quite serious subject, the OP is a bit too simplistic.

Dis-ease. Semantics. There can be morphological (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC2785515&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC2785515&#x2F;</a>) and biochemical indicators of depression and anxiety.<p>To make mice depressed they will do a forced swimming test (poor mice). So this is another way to induce depression: physical+psychological stress.<p>If there were good science with good funding it&#x27;s feasible to come up with a lab test for depression--and anxiety--that&#x27;s very, very accurate.<p>No, the article is incorrect. It does not have citations either. Explore pubmed for plenty of information. (Keep in mind the sad reality is that even good science is wrong lots of the time--I&#x27;m hedging, okay most of the time.)<p>The risks of not properly treating depression and anxiety is very, very high. So the article is very irresponsible in my opinion.

This is pure generalization and does not apply to those who are clinically depressed or suffer bipolar.

There&#x27;s a HUGE difference between depression&#x2F;anxiety the symptom, and major depressive disorder.<p>For those with an hour to kill, Robert Sapolsky has a wonderful, accessible lecture on the topic[1].<p>1.) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc</a>

This is a terrible article that completely treats depression as the fault of the individual. Pretty irresponsible frankly.

Maybe it&#x27;s the lack of emotional education from my childhood or i was born with it, but i&#x27;m diagnosed that i don&#x27;t feel for myself, and (worse) mirror all the feeling of others on me. Which explains why people tire me out so fast. And when i&#x27;m overwhelmed by people emotions in a room, i get iritated and aggressive (a lot).<p>Now I realise that anger is a self defense mechanism because when my system is overloaded with people&#x27;s emotions, it&#x27;s a desperate but sane manuever of my subconscious in order to cut off the situation completely.<p>Of course it&#x27;s just a temporary solution and it has many consequences but if you&#x27;re loading too much of others on you, your body has to issue an irrevokable state of mind.<p>I think it&#x27;s similar to other &quot;negative&quot; symptoms. So when i started to meditation (in order to create an interface to talk with the hidden drive in my subsconscious), i regarded them as little wicked monsters, but not anymore, now i regard them as the only company i have in my breakdown episode. Because when you&#x27;re depressed, you don&#x27;t believe in whatever your loved ones say anymore. there&#x27;s only you and the battle.

This is one reason that the famous Hyperbole and a Half entries describing depression were always so surprising to me. The first entry starts like this:<p>&gt; Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me. I just woke up one day feeling sad and helpless for absolutely no reason.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;10&#x2F;adventures-in-depression.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;10&#x2F;adventures-in-...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;depression-part-two.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;depression-par...</a><p>If this article is true, the Allie just hadn&#x27;t figured out what the underlying issue was yet. Or what she went through was something else entirely.

Agreed 100% here. I was chronically suicidal and depressed from 8th grade all the way through my first semester of college at Harvard. Someone jumped off a building halfway through that first semester, and ever after, I couldn&#x27;t stop thinking about killing myself. Knew I&#x27;d unequivocally off myself if I stuck around, so it finally provided the impetus for me to drop out, travel around the world, get a Thiel Fellowship, and now be surrounded by the most amazing group of friends, family, and coworkers, and to be working on something I truly find meaningful.<p>Haven&#x27;t been depressed or suicidal in the <i>slightest</i> since I came out here to SF and started living an autonomous life on my own trajectory half a decade ago. Was 100% circumstantial and situational for me, took zero drugs and professional therapy didn&#x27;t do anything. Changing my life circumstances did everything.

The author fails to differentiate quite a few things here.<p>Long-term depression is a way of thinking and feeling that some people fall into easier than others and that is also cultivated over time.<p>If you had a rough childhood and coped with it by getting sad and finally dissociating from your emotions in an early age, and you proceed to do that for a long time, then you are likely to get what&#x27;s called a major depression.<p>I don&#x27;t know if I would call that a symptom or a disorder and I frankly think that most of the time it doesn&#x27;t matter for the treatment.

This follow up article by the same author (linked at the bottom) seems important to understand his position in my opinion - it answers many of the points raised here in various comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;theory-knowledge&#x2F;201603&#x2F;clarifying-the-nature-anxiety-and-depression" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;theory-knowledge&#x2F;201603...</a>

Perhaps, but it is clearly more complicated than that. PTSD appears to be related to changes in the amygdala that make anxiety reactions more bursty and intense than they would otherwise be. What exactly triggers the reaction is not the problem as much as what happens next within the brain and thus the mind.

Lol I&#x27;m depressed because I can&#x27;t find a job. I can&#x27;t find a job because I don&#x27;t have a job. Which is sort of depressing. Which doesn&#x27;t make looking for jobs fun. Depression makes you not want to do things that aren&#x27;t fun. So I keep looking for jobs with the hope it can bring me out of my depression. But when I ask for people for job help they are a jerk to me. When I mention I am a little sad they say I need to act happy to get a job. They get upset that I&#x27;m not happy. But.... that&#x27;s what I was upset about!

Has anybody here had any success with applying Alexander Technique for treating depression and&#x2F;or anxiety? I&#x27;m asking this because I suspect that many technology workers are using wrong posture while sitting behind the computer (and most start this bad practice at a young age, including myself). I have recently started forcing myself into a better posture and I must say that I&#x27;m feeling much better. Of course, perhaps this is just a coincidence, so I&#x27;m wondering about any other experiences.

The article seems to essentially be advocating psychodynamic psychotherapy, which isn&#x27;t new but seems to be out of favor compared to thoughts-cause-emotions models common in CBT.

My startup, Krewe (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gokrewe.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gokrewe.com</a>), aims to help people make a new group of close, meaningful friends in their neighborhood and become connected with their local community. I really hope it&#x27;ll go a long way towards alleviating depression for many people.

Google cache view <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;theory-knowledge&#x2F;201603&#x2F;anxiety-and-depression-are-symptoms-not-diseases" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:https:&#x2F;...</a>

If you break your arm and then go into the emergency room, you don’t say, “I have pain-in-my-arm disorder”.<p>Haha! How true.

Some people think depression is also linked to inflammation.<p>e.g. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;nri&#x2F;journal&#x2F;v16&#x2F;n1&#x2F;full&#x2F;nri.2015.5.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;nri&#x2F;journal&#x2F;v16&#x2F;n1&#x2F;full&#x2F;nri.2015.5.htm...</a>

The issue with the metaphor is that it&#x27;s very subtle. We understand matter and mechanics. A broken bone is obvious. When you feel depressed you don&#x27;t really know what&#x27;s broken.

Many mental illnesses, over the past decade, have been proven to be diseases. They can be tested for. Currently there are a whole hosts of new tests and treatments going through the phases.<p>Gregg and his ideas run parallel to a line of thought associated with The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a group hell bent on denouncing mental illness as a disease. CCHR are&#x2F;were a nonprofit organization established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.<p>I can&#x27;t believe people are still pushing these ideas, but this thread is rife with them. Please would ya&#x27;ll make an effort to update yourselves to the state of the art.

I have said this a few years ago on this very site. Should I publish an article instead?)<p>So is Asperger&#x27;s by the way. Mild forms of autism, it seems, is an adaptation of a brain to cope with overwhelming cognitive overload of certain types, usually related to other people and unfamiliar places, which could be compared to too loud noise or an attacks of height-sickness.<p>And there is no single cause, of course. The symptoms are results of some genetic predisposition (slight differences in brain structure, perhaps, or higher levels of some neurotransmitters) and environmental and social factors, which conditioned the resulting habits and behavioral patterns.<p>One of the simplest and less wrong theories about mild forms of autism is that of so-called mind blindness. The children who have difficulty with maintaining eye contact and are looking to a mouth area instead of eyes area, could not learn to properly read accompanying emotions form faces of other people, so they constantly confused about interpreting the intentions and behavior of others and easily fooled by fake &quot;Pan Am&quot; smiles, so they learn to avoid confusing society and develop what we call introvert or nerdy mentality, with typical social awkwardness and eventually lack of interest in all these clowns, which clowns label sociopaths.)

This is a fantastic article.<p>&gt; Depression is a way the emotional system signals that things are not working and that one is not getting one’s relational needs met. If you are low on relational value in the key domains of family, friends, lovers, group and self, feeling depressed in this context is EXACTLY like feeling pain from a broken arm, feeling cold being outside in the cold, and feeling hungry after going 24 hours without food.<p>Exactly, it&#x27;s a signal, not a disease. A signal a lot more people I know are having as they grow into their desk jobs with bleak outlooks for advancement and fulfillment. Anecdotally, when I talk to depressed men I know, lack of romantic prospects is by far the biggest factor. We&#x27;ve never had more single men: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cnsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;article&#x2F;barbara-hollingsworth&#x2F;bachelor-nation-70-men-aged-20-34-are-not-married" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cnsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;article&#x2F;barbara-hollingsworth&#x2F;bachel...</a> I&#x27;m sure women are much happier either with these circumstances. Somehow modern society has us further apart in this regard.<p>I&#x27;ve written before about being prescribed SSRIs after a 45 minute meeting with a college psychiatrist. Absolute rubish. The real solution was to cut out a failing romantic relationship, stop living with this person, and start cultivating new, healthier relationships. I&#x27;ve never been depressed since, but I got a great experience dealing with SSRI withdrawal symptoms in a foreign country.<p>If anyone reading this is depressed, I strongly recommend thinking about it as a <i>signal</i> that something is off in your life. For most people (though certainly not all), the meds will only help you cope with whatever the underlying problems are. Get some exercise: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3674785&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3674785&#x2F;</a> and also start being more social. Practical tip for hitting two birds with one stone: join a running club.

Depression is not a symptom. It is the inability of neurons to recover from stress -- ever. I know, I know, it&#x27;s a novel thought -- to actually pay attention to the state of the art in depression research, but, what&#x27;evs. Gregg&#x27;s a psychologist, so he doesn&#x27;t have to care about that neuroscience sciencey weirdness.

Understanding <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_cognitive_biases" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_cognitive_biases</a> will alleviate your anxiety&#x2F;depression

Nooooo Shiiiiiitttt!!!!!

What does this have to do with software or tech? are developers all depressed or something? Is this site just turning into another reddit? Someone please help me to understand why hacker news should be a safe place for depressed people to talk about their feelings, there has to be a better venue for that.