I went through a pretty intense major depressive episode (6 months not getting out of bed) plus chronic dissociation and depression. End to end from the onset of the episode to reaching a point where I feel I'm "fully actualized" took 6 years. During that process I went from being one of the angriest and most unpleasant people to being very happy with many close relationships, and a clear sense of purpose.
My mental health crisis was absolutely a wake up call. It lead me to make significant structural changes to my approach to phenomenology, aesthetics, morality, and epistemology. I totally restructured my moment to moment experience of existence.
Thanks I appreciate your concern, been dealing with it for a long time and have explored various treatment options. I would say yes it's nearly constant suffering. Just an exhaustion with life, 30 more years of this doesn't appeal to me. It's mostly around not having the level of dating/sexual privilege that most women experience in the dating market and just being out of energy to keep searching for a mate every year.
I also spend many days watching negative and suicidal thoughts running through my brain. I didn't actually read this article yet, I came in because the "Shamanic" and "Mental Illness" in the title and I thought it might have to do with ayahuasca, san pedro, or some other plant medicines.
In the last 2 years I have sat in a total of 5 joint ayahuasca and san pedro ceremonies (2 ceremonies over 3 days) and can say that each one has shifted in some significant way how I see myself, the world, other people and the interconnected relationships between them.
The internet has a lot of crazy information out there, but this Vice piece is the most measured I've seen:
I was diagnosed with Bipolar and have suicidal thoughts often.
You killing yourself would fuck up the lives of the people who love you and make them sad. In that sense, your life doesn't really belong to you; they're the ones who will suffer if you die.
Please don't do it. I know it's hard. And having a mental condition is tiring. You're a rock in the sand slowly being worn down by the waves. They never stop. And all of your fellow rocks are just past the high tide mark.
Your life absolutely belongs to you. It's true that other people suffer with you, but ultimately the decision is 100% your own.
It's possible to be supportive and try to keep someone alive as long as possible without making them feel like they're slaved to someone else's desires. I think everyone deserves to feel autonomous.
One of us might be misunderstanding the GP here. In my case, I'm also overlaying my own personal experience on what has been said, so grain of salt and all that.
I want to kill myself. I've wanted to end my wretched life for a long time now. But I know that if I did this it would destroy my family. I love my mother, father and sister and I don't want to do this horrible thing to them. So, in my mind, my only option is to limp onward.
It is 100% my decision. I've decided to make the less selfish choice.
I wanted to write something here because a friend of mine went through recurring thoughts of self-harm and (though they are doing much better now) it was difficult to see. I apologise if I'm repeating some things you've already been told but:
First of all, please, if you believe you are actually going to harm yourself then talk to someoneright away. Call a relative / friend / counseling hotline [online search should find a number in your country / area].
If you can't get through, or you think you might still harm yourself, then go straight to your hospital's ER or call an ambulance.
Bottom line: if you're in that situation, you need to make contact with someone!
Aside from the "urgent situation" stuff above, I echo the suggestions of other commenters that explaining your symptoms to a medical professional (appointment with family doctor, or similar) is an important step. They will likely be able to advise you better than any of us.
Finally, on mental illness in general: I've experienced episodes of major depression and of serious anxiety problems (as, in fact, have many of my friends and family). Medication, for me, worked wonders and helped me rebuild my strength - but the real turning point was when I talked it over with my doctor. That helped me begin exploring what I could do to get better, which led to all the improvements I've felt since.
I know it's difficult and I know I'm not in a position to understand your particular situation. I'm not suggesting these problems are always easy to fix - but from what I've seen, I really do believe improvements are possible for all of us.
The key thing is to realise that YOU control your thoughts. We're creatures of habits. YOU choose what to think whether you realise it or not.
Something within you associates the feeling of "depression" with reward.
Actively review your history, your relationships, patterns of behaviour. Look at your own thought processes critically, document them, decide how you want to think instead, and force yourself to think in the new way.
You control not just what you think but how you feel. You can feel how you want to feel. That's the key. Once you decide or are told you're "depressed" you "accept" that you have an "illness" and internalise it. Stop doing that shit. Ignore those bastards. Change how you think.
This is basically CBT. You have to actively control your thought processes to change them to something you want. Once you've done that for a while it becomes the new default.
Don't allow yourself to think things that don't help you. When you start fantasising about death, don't let yourself think about it. Force yourself to make plans for the next few days or something instead. When you think "I don't have the energy/motivation to make plans because I'm 'depressed'", tell yourself, "I'm not allowed to think that, instead I'm going to MAKE THE FUCKING PLANS".
Fuck all that bullshit about "chemical imbalances". You know what that means? It means your brain is wired wrong. Those chemicals? The sames ones everyone else has. Wanna know what the imbalance is? YOU LEARNED TO BEHAVE IN THE WRONG WAY, SO YOUR WIRING IS ALL FUCKED UP. Those neurotransmitters are going exactly where they've learnt to go.
YOU have to retrain your brain. Fuck everything people have told you about being "mentally ill". Recognise your brain as a learning machine and TEACH THAT MOTHER FUCKER HOW TO BEHAVE.
Life sucks? You either learn how to change it or learn how to change what you think about it.
You think those poor mother fuckers in third world countries with just enough food to eat who save up for years to buy a BICYCLE are depressed? FUCK NO THAT MOTHER FUCKER GOT HIS BICYCLE. He's 40 years old, barely feeding his family, but he's got a smile so wide he lights up every mother fucking heart in his village.
You know WHY? Because he doesn't think about why things are shit. He thinks about why things are SHIT HOT. MOTHER FUCKING BIKE HAS A BELL CHECK THAT SHIT OUT.
YOU define your reality. YOU define how you perceive the world. With a great deal of influence from those around you.
Surrounded by mother fuckers who are "depressed"? Get the fuck away from them. Find happy people. Catch their disease instead.
Control your thoughts, control your environment, discipline your brain to only allow you to think things that help you. Fuck everything else.
That's how you cure depression. You control what you think by understanding why you think what you think right now and throwing away the bad shit and keeping the good shit.
Do yourself a favour. Next time you think "I should be dead". Think "lol brain you're not allowed to think that shit anymore", SMILE and write down some shit you're grateful for. Call your friends/family and chat about some good shit that went down in the past. Think about the people who have done good shit for you over the years, and how happy it makes you that those mother fuckers exist.
Think of the mother fucker who you're most grateful for. Why do you like them so much? How did they make you feel? GOOD. Now go make other people feel like that. Be happy. Make other people happy. Feed on their happiness.
"But I want to die". Shut the fuck up brain you're not allowed to think that. Hey brain, remember that fucking awesome ice cream we ate last week? Yeah that was some good shit. I should show someone that ice cream, they'll like that shit. Remember that kid we used to hang out with when we were kids? Wonder what he's doing with his life now. We laughed our fucking cocks off at such and such. What a good memory.
What's that brain, feels good? Yeah, yeah it does feel fucking good. That's why you're gonna think good shit from now on brain. BECAUSE IT FEELS GOOD.
Fuck. Think good stuff. Don't allow yourself to think bad stuff. Make it a habit. Eventually you stop thinking bad stuff.
Make plans. Make people happy. Feed on happiness. Think of good memories. No good memories? Go fucking make some. Then think about them.
Fuck depression. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Here have a hug. They're free. Pass it on. Have a smile too these fuckers are great. :-D
Note that all of this assumes (as clinical psychology approaches usually do) that you've already eliminated all plausible physiological causes, which most people with depressed mood haven't (even if they've seen a doctor about it). Depressed mood is a feature of numerous medical conditions that require their own treatments and don't respond to CBT beyond peripheral improvements like reducing shame about having the illness and improving treatment compliance.
>You control not just what you think but how you feel. You can feel how you want to feel. That's the key. Once you decide or are told you're "depressed" you "accept" that you have an "illness" and internalise it. Stop doing that shit. Ignore those bastards. Change how you think.
> This is basically CBT. You have to actively control your thought processes to change them to something you want. Once you've done that for a while it becomes the new default.
Of course, giving mental health advice on the internet can be dangerous. This is of course not a magic recipe (advertising it as such may lead to people thinking "if this doesn't work for me, I'm broken") but I believe for some people your advice might be very helpful.
What you describe is the state of mind I had going out of a long lasting (1y+) depressive phase: "Fuck depression. These thoughts are not me, they are a parasite in my brain trying to kill me and I will identify and fight them."
CBT has been shown to be effective in around 60% of patients, it's great that this method worked for you but this message is very rude to those who won't benefit from it.
Folks, please go see a therapist for CBT and just ignore the parent comment. I've read up on it and even been to one, and their advice is going to differ from the parent comment in most ways.
CBT isn't as simple as "you can control your thoughts". It's a carefully structured plan of therapy to give a person the skills and techniques they need to control thoughts.
By saying, and repeating "you can control you're thoughts" without giving any of the detail of CBT you're merely telling people with depression to just think themselves happy.
Also, people with OCD will find it harder to control their thoughts, and people with psychosis may find it impossible without medication.
> Are you saying that it's impossible to control your thoughts?
Given that thought generation is not a process that you (the person) actively control, that seems rather obvious. "Thoughts" would refer to all of them, and many thoughts are intrusive or otherwise do not originate from "you" (i.e., insights, creativity related thoughts, odd memories, associations, etc., etc.).
You can have thoughts about thoughts, and you have a greater control over those because you /are/ more or less actively generating those, but that's not true for most thoughts you have.
Even then, the control space is very limited (not truly deserving of the term control) and only available to people who practice a lot of introspection. CBT is a tool in making one's way there. It's not something that the average person can get up and do. "You can control your thoughts" is therefore not the most useful statement, we're not discussing what's possible in theory, we're trying to help a specific person.
I do not believe in freedom of the will. Schopenhauer's words: "Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills" accompany me in all situations throughout my life.
Only if you decide it is such. I've suffered major depression for many years, now, and the advice given is good and will help some people. It's much better than the usual trite "just think happier". It might not help those of us who are deep down the rabbit hole, but it at least, to me, seems not to hurt.
If you need a more hands-on approach, I can recommend an old (1980) but very, very good book: Feeling Good by David D. Burns. Best $6 you will ever spend IMHO if you have any kind of depression issue.
This book helped me a lot when I was severely depressed. I too had irrational thoughts of dying and running away, and the practical exercises in the book helped me to get my thoughts moving in a better direction so I could feel better. I remember going for a walk (exercise is supposed to help, right?) and trying to think of something I like. I drew a blank for like 10 minutes - that's how bad off I was. I finally decided I liked my car - hey don't judge, it was something. I know well that feeling of trying to make yourself feel better and being unable to. For normal ups and downs in life that approach works. Not for depression.
When I was most severely depressed, it felt like I had fallen into a pit of soft, soft dirt. The more I tried to claw my way out of it, the more I would only dig a deeper hole. By learning to change my thought patterns, it was like having the hole I was in shrink until I could just step out. It is hard for someone who hasn't been there to understand. Those who suffer try so hard, but it just doesn't work.
Today, I am fully recovered and have been for years. There is hope that people can be completely healed.
Start meditating, seriously, it saved my life and its better than ever before now.. without the attachment to the "I" which seems to think that it thinks these thoughts.. who are you? what are you in the wholeness of your experience? Ask yourself, intently, and listen to the silence. Feel the core of your arms, the subtile energy there. Keep your awareness on it.... and then look around while keeping your awareness there. Look at things, look at what you see in the whole field of view. There's space behind it and around it. You are the space experiencing itself thinking these thoughts. You are nothing without thought and yet you are not thought.. can you see what I mean?
I will give you some "break glass in case of emergency" advice that will (probably) help you immediately:
1) Take a shower.
2) Do a load of laundry.
3) Go for a long run.
4) Take a shower and put on clean clothes.
5) Start eating mostly green leafy vegetables and
6) Make an appointment with a doctor or psychiatrist (you are in urgent need of medical care).
Get and stay clean, start exercising and eating healthy, and go get some professional help. If you have any close friends or family, now would be a time to cash in those "Free Hug" vouchers with your support network. I also started reading the Stoics.
Very well put, thank you for sharing your experience. Often O feel that depression in an "healthy" reaction to something wrong: there are good reasons to be depressed.
If you're inclined to detail the structural changes you made or have already done so, it seems like something that could be incredibly useful if it finds its way into the right hands.
I dunno about revolving. The pay in the private sector is very good. Tons of folks who worked in the IDF end up at tech companies for two reasons:
(1) almost everyone goes through the IDF thanks to mandatory service
(2) if you have aptitude you end up in the signal Corp, who are good at what they do.
I wouldn't call this a conspiracy, and the parents speculation is very thin. If the author got this from the IDF they almost certainly wouldn't be publishing; breaking that kind of confidentiality can end really badly
Microsoft [1][2] and Google [0]have been doing this for years. Google's billion word language model dataset is a notable example which was central to a lot of important research.
You're horribly mistaken, likely because you haven't spent time in communities that aren't hostile to women. It's really hard to know whether your community is hostile to women unless you're a woman. A lot of guys just don't understand how much harassment a typical woman experiences, and when they hear it criticized basically fall back on "well I don't see it" and conclude it must not be happening rather than trying to collect more information.
a) Where did I say that women aren't experiencing harassment on some gaming communities? In fact, I explicitly acknowledged it. Your post is kind of pointless virtue signaling or something.
b) I just pointed out that it's just generally not about your gender. It doesn't matter if you're a man or woman: every newcomer gets harassed in really rough ways using the most biting insults available. A fat guy will get the obvious insults. An ugly guy will get obvious insults. A young kid who has a high pitched voice because he hasn't hit puberty yet will get obvious insults. A gay man will get obvious insults. So will a black guy or an arab. Or a christian. They'll use any facts they know about you. And guess what, women are treated equally here as well and will get insulted. Not saying it's right, but it's what actually happens to everybody. Gamers are treating women equally, I thought that's what women wanted?
c) The only difference is that when a woman gets harassed, most of civil society is sympathetic about it by default and she'll get a horde of white knights expressing sympathy. When a man gets his feelings hurt, he's portrayed as weak for showing emotion. Maybe this is part of the reason that some men are seeking an escape from society?
d) It's really hard to know whether your community is hostile to men unless you're a man. A lot of women just don't understand how much harassment a typical man experiences, and when they hear it criticized basically fall back on "well I don't see it" and conclude it must not be happening rather than trying to collect more information. (2 of us can play this game)
e) While this is a fascinating discussion that I'd love to have, this point about sex and male/female relationships is 100 times more important than debating about harassment to women gamers for the hundredth time. Things like family and relationships are important motivating factors to men, and when social reforms (some people call that progress, some don't) remove or lower that factor for ~80% of men, civilization will also decline.
Your point is wrong, though. Targeting everyone based on their distinct still isn't being equally hostile to everyone - you're just more exclusionary. That just means gaming communities are racist and fat shaming and etc in addition to being sexist. Equal harassment would mean they target people based on shared characteristics - like skill level, for example.
What is the difference between "cliche" and "same, tired," and "tried-and-true"? (That is a rhetorical question, but the reader is encouraged to answer it for themselves as an exercise).
There is a nearly irresistible temptation for people reading comments like the grandparent to engage in tribal thinking. "I'm against being a dick to women," they think, "This guy, who shows signs of being a dick to women, therefore has nothing of merit to say."
I don't really have a point, except: Beware your epistemology! Your cognitive biases put Trump in office and you still don't understand why. If you can master the difficult art of reading things you disagree with, there may yet be hope for you.
a) Red pill? Gamergate? What's that stuff? Certainly nobody should ever google any information and do their own research and make up their own mind.
b) You'll notice that in my responses I didn't say that women weren't being harassed nor did I say that harassment was right. So why the hostility? I'm speaking IMO accurately about gaming culture.
c) Speaking of tired cliches, what would you call the "women are always eternal victims in every walk of life" school of thought?
PS: I love women and want them to have the same rights as men. I think telling the truth about gaming culture is honest and fair and the right thing to do.
And when you ask Google Assistant, it audibly credits the source up-front, just like the parent comment was suggesting: "According to <site here>... <snippet text>"
When on Earth did anti science trolls take such a prominent role in HN? It's not hard for me to imagine a misinformation campaign run against HN, because I can't really understand how someone technical could countenance anti climate change ideas.
You can come up with reasons to justify anything, once you're motivated by ideology. Being "more technical" sadly really only means that the justifications you come up with are more technical-sounding.
If you've done any sort of computer modeling, it's pretty easy to understand why technical people would have doubts. It's pretty easy to do it wrong and it's pretty easy to make it look right. Anyway, questioning is science and the debate is more about whether the sky is falling, whether man is primarily responsible, and if so what the next steps should be. So you can acknowledge that deforestation contributes to global warming as an example while being skeptical of the claims and modeling the environmentalists make.
> “Gradually, in the months after [the report] came out, the evidence kept mounting that Tom Karl constantly had his ‘thumb on the scale’ — in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets — in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy,” Mr. Bates said Saturday on Climate Etc.
> “What John Bates has done is to expose this culture based not on robust science, but on promoting an agenda,” Mr. Pielke said in a comment on Climate Etc. “Regardless of one’s views on policies, the scientific method should not be hijacked as they have done.”
Bates is an insider source as is Roger Pielke. We'll find out more as the investigation unfolds. There's more to this lack of discipline to scientific methods as they push for policy changes and their own agenda.
> Another prominent climate scientist, the University of Colorado’s Roger A. Pielke Sr., said Mr. Bates‘ experience was “consistent with my experiences” with Mr. Karl on the Climate Change Science Program in 2005.
These modeling are base statistic which takes into account random errors.
Just cause you did computer modeling doesn't grant you magic power to understand machine learning or the vast swarth of area in statistic, mathematical modeling, etc...
And it certainly doesn't give you power over the dozen of experts in different fields that spend their whole lives in it and saying global warming is a thing.
If you're so skeptic about "computer modeling", then why google, apple, and many other are banking on Machine Learnin such as Neural Network?
The foundation of data science, some argue, is computational statistic. Which falls under this so call computer modeling you're bringing up.
I never said it grants you magic power to understand machine learning. You're putting that in my mouth.
What I was putting forth was an understanding on why some techies may be skeptical of the computer modeling which is the evidence of AGW and the near immediate doom and gloom. Machine learning is not infallible. We're very much in the infancy. And all of a sudden scientists are experts at modeling the sun, earth, moon, currents, etc? This is not social network / ad network / ecommerce optimization we are talking about.
Of course the models account for random errors but they also include a lot of assumptions. You can doctor any model to fit your agenda.
Computer models and neural networks have incredible potential and application, but to suggest that everyone should accept these models of the universe from scientists as if they are infallible makes no sense.
http://www.npr.org/2017/04/17/523634144/tax-filings-seen-dip...