How to Deal with Depression - The Meta Layers

What did you use to actually cure it?

Meds.

Is this the kind of depression that was probably a result of a random imbalance of neurotransmitters, rather than anything actually going hugely wrong in your life?

That distinction is pretty artificial. If you must know the history, my childhood sucked big time in several different ways. When circumstances improved, the depression made my life get worse rather than better. Then I got on meds, so the depression went away and I could start picking up the pieces.

be newly and frighteningly negative

Sure, if you're in okay circumstances and it doesn't creep up on you and you can do something about it. If you don't actually remember the last time you were healthy, it just feels normal.

If there are hugely wrong things with your life but you're just too lazy and scatterbrained to fix them, it's a great idea to put them on the back burner and go fix your brain first.

Sometimes to get better, things have to get worse first.

Sure - the operative word was "just". The forms of it I could sustain didn't help over five years or so.

I am curious to know what "Actually curing the depression" required for you?

Meds.

Specifically, things got so horrible that I was forced to drop my plans of getting medical insurance in order beforehand, and to go to a doctor, who promptly handed me off to a psychiatrist, who put me in the loony bin for a few days and on meds. The meds turned out to make it worse, so I was put on a different med, which worked so quickly and miraculously that the psychiatrist feared I was going hypomanic.

It sounds like MixedNuts has a problem like mine-- a part of the self which is frequently poised to attack on just about any pretext. Here's a very extreme version.

I've gotten some relief from working on moving my sense of self from the attacking voice to the rest of me.

I'm not sure how much habitually looking at one's self from the outside (is this really possible? maybe it's a hypothesized outside) is a problem in itself, and how much it's only a problem if the outside view is a hanging judge.

The way I find myself most commonly experiencing meta-suffering is not when one big bad thing happens in my life, but when a lot of small frustrating things happen all within a few days. The stress becomes immense, and I think I must be anticipating more things going wrong and on some level it feels more like the universe is conspiring against me, for lack of a more scientific term.

I think this applies to everyone, but it sounds like that didn't stand out to you

I think the problem is that I didn't know what you meant by meta suffering at that time, so I was unable to evaluate the claim that the topic is valuable to most people. Therefore, I ignored everything up until the point where I understood what you meant by that.

Meta suffering is when you suffer because you are distressed that you are suffering. You are feeling depressed and hopeless, and there is a part of you that genuinely fears that it will never end.

^ This is the point at which I understood what you meant.

For example, someone who is unhappy because they are tired, might think about how they are unhappy because they are tired, and worry that they are going to do things that make them tired like this a lot in the future, and see it as a persistent state.

I don't see this happening around me so I think it is not a good example of why the meta suffering concept is applicable to a broad audience.

I'd say more often than not, people see their states as persistent, even when they logically can look at their lives over time and realize that the states are not persistent. So when someone is in an uncomfortable state, they often angst about it because of this bias.

I believe it, but it'd be nice to have some kind of term for this (like whatever the academic or psychology term is for this bias) or a study as opposed to a reference to a person who seems to believe the same thing (Seligman).

When I used to be depressed, I identified with my depressed state as "real," and all other states as passing and "not who I actually am." (guess I should have cited this in the article!)

I don't think it'll help people see it as relevant to them if you write about how it was relevant to you. Though, it might help them feel related to.

I think the best bet for presenting this as relevant to this audience is to dig up the study that showed that 50% of people experience depression (assuming it was a good cite. I have no memory of where I got that from).

Writing for these guys is difficult. Would you like having someone to trade feedback with? Then we can both find out about presentation problems before anybody votes us down. :)

I've been good, super super busy. You?

Alienated but less so than I was last time we talked. Thanks for the email address. I saved it for if I need to email you.

I've found it helps somewhat to remember that shame/self attack is collaborating with people who are against me by imagining their attacks or their contempt even when they aren't around. I don't have to do that. Even if there are practical reasons to avoid setting them off, this doesn't mean I need to imagine their emotions vividly.

Alternate hypothesis: The vividness of my emotions is not under my direct control, and it is least under my direct control while I am already experiencing vivid emotions.

Experiential evidence for alternative hypothesis: I have spent approximately 30 years training myself to 'gain control' of my emotional responses, especially fear, anger, and shame. Several times, when I have noticed that 'gaining control' was simply a 'bottling up' process that led to an exacerbating explosion later, I have torn down the regulating mechanisms and attempted to build new, better ones.

Model-based evidence for alternative hypothesis: In the human brain, the amygdala has much shorter and stronger neural pathways to the thalamus and cerebellum than the neocortex. In fact, many of the neocortex's pathways must pass through the limbic system to reach the somatic control areas.

Narrative analogy to describe alternate hypothesis: Gravity, like neurochemistry, is a force that we cannot escape. On earth, a bird may "hack" gravity to convert its gravitational potential into forward momentum rather than downward momentum by spreading its wings in the correct way, but only if it also possesses the correct wing structure. Birds with sufficiently damaged wings cannot fly. Likewise, humans with sufficiently damaged limbic systems or cingulate cortices cannot self-regulate; otherwise, bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder would simply be a matter of willpower, not medication.

Conjecture: When most people talk about "controlling their emotions", they are constructing a narrative to explain the fact that their emotions happened to subside long enough for them to experience something that feels from the inside like making a decision to calm down.

Look for ways that you're already on your side. You care enough to keep yourself alive. You're working on finding solutions.

Alternative hypothesis: I care enough about the people around me to not inconvenience them with a body and a lot of emotional fallout. I care about the people around me enough to not inconvenience them with rabidly non-functional behavior. I continue to look for a solution so long as I believe that I can contain the rabidly non-functional behavior enough that it does not outweigh the inconvenience of dealing with a body and a lot of emotional fallout.

Experiential evidence for alternative hypothesis: I continually seek out opportunities to push people away, explicitly and consciously so that fewer people will have to deal with my crazy, and explicitly and consciously so that fewer people will be harmed if I am unceremoniously removed from the tapestry of their lives. I will strategically wield rabidly non-functional behavior against people who I feel I am becoming to attached to, explicitly and consciously so that they will decide that they are no longer emotionally entwined with my well-being, and will feel justified and satisfied with their own decision to remove me from their lives.

Model evidence for alternative hypothesis: My personal narrative, when confronted with setbacks, consistently contains ideation that I am the only being who is ultimately responsible for my situation (self-oriented blame for negative events), that the past is the only viable source of information with which to predict the future (a preference for permanency over transience), and that most failure modes tend to be interrelated interactions between multiple systems (a belief in pervasive processes rather than isolated processes). This is called a 'pessimistic explanatory style' (or more pessimistically, 'depressive realism'), and tends to indicate depression and very poor self-esteem.

Narrative analogy to describe alternate hypothesis: Human behavior and motivation tends to follow something like a bell curve (or at least a curve with a clump in the middle and long tails on either side) across most axes. Just as there are sociopaths, who are genuinely incapable at a neurobiological level of valuing others, there are likely to be people who are genuinely incapable at a neurobiological level of valuing themselves. This can be due to organic disorder (either via brain damage or genetic abnormality), or this can be induced as a pervasive kind of "learned helplessness", if started early enough (the old "baby elephant tied to a tree" story).

Conjecture: Most people take their self-interest as a given; if they need help with self-interest due to depression or learned helplessness, they simply need to build on the basic survival drives that already exist. For some people, those survival drives have been so thoroughly corrupted that they are useless - or worse, dangerous to tap into. (Most situations where I have had people encourage me to think selfishly have ended in rather terrifying displays of sadistic cruelty on my part, because that's simply the only model of 'selfishness' that my brain can really wrap its head around.)

Side note: These are not attempts to refute you. These are acknowledgments of my own internal refutations, which I must overcome before I accept the potential wisdom of what you are saying, and which I myself do not possess the strength-of-will to disable so that I can give your hypotheses a fair shake.

Citations to studies done personally would be enough. As-is, I have no reason to believe this article at all.

I think it would be better if the article said, "I've done a bunch of work with depressed people and here's a technique that seems to work. Now I want to test it. Email me if you would like to volunteer for a study that will take about five minutes per day for two weeks."

I would sign up for that study.

(...) citations are very important to this community.

Citations can usually be dispensed with if you have better evidence presented in some other form. I think wording it as "this needs citations" is perhaps misleading - citations are only a good way to indicate to readers that there is clear evidence there, and lets them go look at said evidence.

While it's well understood that evidence of the form "This fellow rationalist believes X, thus I should update towards X because [insert the long bayesian reasoning]" is technically valid, it's also well understood (at least from what I've seen on LW) that humans are unable to adequately apply this by default, and so most of us deliberately reduce the effect of such updates in order to avoid such things spiraling out of control.

The charitable interpretation of "this needs citations" is: "This is interesting. Care to let us look at the numbers if you've found any?"

I've seen people describe LW as a frightening place, but the seeing the wall you ran up against in some of the early comments is the first time that complaint has made sense to me.

Well, first of all I'm nowhere near starvation (actually, I'm trying to get back down to my usual weight after a week of binge eating), and second, if my body is trying to tell me to eat more it's doing it wrong, as I don't actually feel hungry (unless I've been downright fasting for a while, or I'm already below my set point) -- I just blow some totally unrelated reasons to be sad out of proportion and dismiss reasons to be happy impostor syndrome-style, and it hadn't occurred to me that it might have to do with my diet until recently. (Damn you, Azatoth!) BTW, it also seems to me that caffeine kind-of prevents that, but I'd have to experiment more about that.