Nope, well established observation. Sort of like the joke about marijuana smokers being harmless because if they do too much, they can’t get up to cause anyone problems. Depression saps so much energy that at its nadir, you’d kill yourself but it’s just too much effort to contemplate.

It’s when the depression begins to lift, and energy returns, that a sufferer becomes a very serious risk. If you know a depressive, remember this because it could save their life.

Report comment

Not always a coincidence. One of the major leaders in Eve actually worked for the US State Department. He was killed in Benghazi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Smith_%28diplomat%29

Reading that story made me think that the Department of State should refuse to accept candidates until AFTER they had played a MMORPG of some type and risen to a leadership position. Now that would be a country one screwed with at one’s mortal peril.

Report comment

You’re falling into the cryptosocialist trap of Rousseau’s noble savage. Primitive society is a substantial step back, and it’s somewhat terrifying that there are mental health professionals ignorant enough to think otherwise.

The same could be said of a dockworker a hundred years ago, or a subsistence farmer a hundred-fifty years ago. Both would have struggled simply to survive. Why you think your patient would have been better off then is simply incomprehensible. Whatever disadvantages he has today, working part-time at the crappiest of crappiest jobs (or just living off welfare) is substantially safer, more rewarding and more lucrative than the work he would have found a century ago. He, like all of us, is blessed to be living in the time that he is (admittedly, his blessings are less substantial than most other people’s.)

Finally, society does not owe individual humans anything. That’s because society does not exist independent of human beings. When you’re saying society owes something, that’s a superficial deception; what you really mean is that individual humans, with their own problems and concerns, owe something, and that you are going to take it by violence. Regardless of what you may think society owes, and regardless of your generosity with other people’s money, I believe individuals are in the right in pre-empting your violence with violence of their own.

Report comment

But the realization of that is actually a very good argument against feeling as though you’re a burden. If there even are people who are a net positive in that sense, their proportion of the population is minuscule, so being a net positive contributor can’t possibly be the thing that justifies your continued existence.

Report comment

For one, you’re making an argument based on a different definition of “society”? The depressed person says “society” (if they even do use the word) as a short way of saying “all of the people around me who provide me support and suffer for my presence and to whom I pay little or nothing in return.” Talking about how our overall cultural and technological development has changed so certain people who would have been fine In The Hunter-Gatherer Days are now badly off has zero relevance to this at all.

Argue for guaranteed minimum income all you want, but it’s got nothing to do with depression and it’s kind of insulting to think it does. Being a burden is not just about money, and having more money does not solve it. It’s about the people around you having to take time and effort and experience emotional distress due to their association with you. That can’t be bought off. You’ll still bring them down by being near them, they’ll still worry about your well being or if you got into trouble, they will pass up opportunities in order to try to reach out to you in a doomed effort to fill the bottomless pit of your mood state. You will be miserable and hate being alive, and the people you care about will be worse off than if you were not around. How does a check solve this any more than the standard meaningless therapeutic platitudes of “it will get better, just you see!”

Hell, When can we say “X of the points at which you claimed things would get better have passed and things have not gotten better, I am allowed to notice that your claim has no relevance to what happens”?

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

Pretty much ever since I heard of the
Rationalist Taboo, I have been of the opinion that it should more-or-less automatically apply to the word ‘morality’ (and therefore related terms like ‘ethics’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the value-judgement sense rather than the purely factual sense etc.

I agree completely. In fact, it seems to me as if the only factual difference of opinion is between people who believe in naive moral realism and people who don’t. The latter argue a lot among themselves, but they have only definitional disagreements and non-compatible utility functions; they agree with all the actual facts.

Report comment

My parent denies that the problem is primarily inside their head, and does the whole “everyone else is wrong”, or, in extreme situations, “everyone else is intentionally malicious”. As far as the parent is concerned, any suggestion that they have a disorder is an insult and an attempt to undermine them.

I try to innocently work emotion management strategies into casual conversations, without explicitly talking about any disorders. To that end, I’ve read up on basic strategies DBT strategies. But the extent to which anything helps is limited when the person with the disorder doesn’t buy into the concept that their brain is lying to them.

How does one contact Ozy?

Report comment