Minichan

I think I'm somewhere in the middle. Not sure if a middle ground even exists within depression, but eh, w/e.

I spend most of my life in neutral, emotionally speaking. I sometimes tend towards depression and self pity, but I'm usually content with life unless I have some reason not to be.

I think depressed people are just on the wrong diet. That's my opinion.

@previous (D)

I would agree with you there, diet and exercise are a big factor when discussing ones wellbeing. Two things I don't get enough of. I said no but saying that I've had episodes where I have spiralled into depression.

@77,640 (D)
Ah, alright.

@OP
But seriously, what the fuck.

yeah
last option

@previous (RedFox !FANATICibM)
Hugs bro.

@77,660 (RedFox !FANATICibM)
try eatin gmore whole grains

not atm

Mostly I'm okay. :3
Sometimes I just get...I dunno. Pissed off. Mostly at myself. Lol.

I'm much more anxious then depressed.

I know a depression man.

Not at all. I'm apprehensive about the upcoming exams but that's about it. I more or less have my shit together.

@77,660 (RedFox !FANATICibM)
But then nobody will be posting foxes!

(Edited 34 seconds later.)

@previous (Killer Lettuce !!iNo3FkiZx)
I don't do that much any more anyways.

@previous (RedFox !FANATICibM)
Why not? =0

@previous (A)
Too lazy to hunt for one for each post now.

Yeah, a little. I have a lot of shit to deal with IRL right now. :-/

I find suicide to work out very well

Anyone that says depression is simply caused by the wrong diet is ignorant as fuck.

@previous (O)
A poor diet makes it worse.

@previous (totoforhire !!Phkn/3Gic)
Yes, but if eating well was all it took to fix it depression wouldn't be the epidemic that it is today.

@78,040 (O)
Nobody said that was the sole cause. I think their point was that it may worsen depression along with not exercising enough.

@78,055 (O)
But it happens to be an epidemic in a country with an exceptionally poor diet.

@78,063 (B)
Well, Anon D DID say that....

@previous (totoforhire !!Phkn/3Gic)
Implying America

@previous (O)
What country were you referring to?

@previous (totoforhire !!Phkn/3Gic)
I wasn't. Depression is a problem for millions of people everywhere.

@previous (O)
It's very prevalent in the US and doctors will confirm that a bad diet increases depression symptoms.

@previous (totoforhire !!Phkn/3Gic)

yes exactly. if your depressed just eat more whole grains and HEALTHY fats like olive oil.

@78,055 (O)
Maybe it's not all it takes to fix it, but I bet a lot of people wouldn't be depressed if they were healthier, and that starts with a healthy diet. And even if being healthy won't cure it completely, it could help, and couldn't hurt. It's kind of like saying "if eating well was all it took to lose weight, obesity wouldn't be the epidemic that it is today." The fact of the matter is, obesity wouldn't be as bad, in any country, if people ate right. But the fact of the matter is most people don't eat right, and aren't healthy, and that's why there's obesity. The same can be said about depression.

@78,107 (D)
More importantly, exercise and lose weight and build muscle. Exercise will steamroll you through any depression, because it gets your energy level up and makes you feel better about yourself. Getting healthier from the exercise will also make you feel better, and the improved physique will give you more self esteem and confidence.

@77,635 (B)

> I think I'm somewhere in the middle. Not sure if a middle ground even exists within depression, but eh, w/e.

Diet and exercise are definite helps. But sometimes you can't even get yourself to that point :(

@78,107 (D)

> if your depressed just eat more whole grains and HEALTHY fats like olive oil.
> just

then it just goes away, huh?

@previous (O)
Olive oil is an antidepressant, you betcha!

@78,107 (D)
I eat whole grains out the ass already and it hasn't helped.

@78,117 (O)
I don't think anyone is saying that healthy eating makes depression magically disappear, but it has proven to help.

@78,116 (Q)
> But sometimes you can't even get yourself to that point.
Yeah, I know that feeling. Not so much the diet, moreso being/staying active.

I have a hard time believing a good diet DOESN'T help. It's no secret that our diet is the worst it's ever been (look around you) and depression has gone through the roof.

Not that there aren't legitimate cases of depression, but they probably account for maybe 5% of all cases. The majority of depression cases are just fat basement-dwellers who live on frozen pizza and Coke.

@previous (S)
> The majority of depression cases are just fat basement-dwellers who live on frozen pizza and Coke.
That's more a chicken vs egg thing. The become "fat basement dwellers" as a result of depression, which becomes a vicious cycle.

> It's no secret that our diet is the worst it's ever been (look around you) and depression has gone through the roof.
That's a bit simplistic. The world around has changed drastically. Food is one of many, MANY factors...

@78,182 (S)
One trend I noticed is that the increase in obesity started around the same time that the whole low fat/no fat craze started. Marketers would make things low fat by removing most of the good unsaturated fat, and increasing the number of carbs. This led to diets that were made up of mostly carbs and saturated fats. The classic food pyramid that most people know also screwed things up, as the whole is practically backwards. There are much better food pyramids out there now, but there's still debate about which is the best one, just as their is debate about dieting. The 2000 calorie per day recommendation is also bullshit. That's only if you're also doing to 1-2 hours of recommended daily exercise. Most people can get by on 1200-1600 calories per day, still exercise, and still not starve or lose weight.

I'm on the ketogenics diet, which is apparently the same diet Nega is on, and the majority of the calories in the diet come from unsaturated fats, and I eat less than 30 carbs a day most days and get just enough protein. I've lost about 10 pounds just this month, and I only weighed about 170 to begin with. Imagine how much fat would melt off someone who is fatter. Also, the diet lowers insulin so that your body is not storing fat, increases testosterone, increases HGH, improve heart, lung, and brain function by 20-25%, and lowers free radicals in your body (the reason they say antioxidants are good is because they absorb free radicals). There are also many other benefits to the diet. All this on a diet that is high in fat. The low fat thing is bullshit. I feel like a super hero. It's almost like we're intentionally being led to put utter crap in our bodies to keep us out of shape and lethargic.

@78,221 (O)
Yes, it is a vicious cycle. That's why you need to break the cycle and get out and exercise. The key to beating any depression is to break the cycle. I understand that that's hard when you're depressed. I think what they should do is stop prescribing bullshit anti-depressants that sometimes make things even worse or work no better than placebo, and they should just start prescribing adderall. It has the same stimulant effects as an anti-depressant plus it gets your motivation going which is how it helps people overcome ADHD. Combine that with behavioral therapy so that people understand how and why they need to use that motivation to get out there and be active and live life and get in shape, and boom most depression is cured. Adderall + caffeine + B vitamin complex = WIN. I take 20mg of adderall and a 5 hour energy and I feel like Charlie Sheen.

@previous (Broseph !!fxnDb+Ve4)
Aderall sounds good but I already have high blood pressure... apparently this will make it worse. Should I risk it? I'm also confused that's it's used to treat ADHD... wouldn't you use a drug that slows people down for AHDH, not speed them up?

(Edited 37 seconds later.)

@previous (O)
Talk to your doctor about it. It's not approved by the FDA as a treatment for depression, but I'm sure if they paid the FDA enough they could easily make it happen. Also adderall will not necessarily raise blood pressure because it's more of a brain stimulant than a physiological stimulant, but it varies from person to person. I noticed no increased heart rate, and actually feel much more calm and have less road rage on adderall. It makes other people go haywire.

@previous (Broseph !!fxnDb+Ve4)
Mmm, it's not available in my country anyway.
Sigh.

Nothing. Fucking. Works.

give_up.exe

:-(

@78,272 (O)
You have a problem with focus, broheim?

@previous (T)
no just depressed and unmotivated as fuck...

NO ONE IS UNHAPPY THESE DAYS, BUT EVERYONE IS DEPRESSED

No one is unhappy these days but everyone is depressed. Jerome Wakefleld, a professor at New York University, has sounded a warning against the tendency of medical science to apply drugs to block natural human emotions.

In the last few years of my practice as a doctor, I must have heard hundreds or even thousands of people say that they were depressed but only two or three admit that they were unhappy (and one of those was in prison).

When I started out in practice 35 years ago there were depressed people but they were relatively few in number. Their illness was truly incapacitating. They were often very subdued and slowed down, lacking in interest, neglecting themselves, not eating or drinking properly and feeling profoundly guilty for no good reason. Rich people with this kind of depression sometimes believed that they were destitute. They wanted to die, or at least not to live. Some even believed that they were already dead.

In the days before there was effective treatment such people would be admitted to an asylum and would spend their days sitting on a chair at a table set against a wall to prevent them from going anywhere. They would be watched, day in, day out, by an attendant until - two, three or four years later - the fit of melancholia passed. It was a dreadful business. Effective treatment means that such extreme cases are now very few and far between. That, of course, is all to the good.

Unfortunately the replacement of the word 'unhappiness' by 'depression' is not all to the good. It turns a normal human experience - that of unhappiness - into a medical condition, to be treated and cured by doctors. Most human unhappiness is understandable. If a recently widowed person appears too happy too soon after the death of his or her spouse we suspect that the marriage could not have been a very happy one. It is one thing to make an effort not to cry in public, but another not even to be sad.

Unhappiness usually arises from the situation in which people find themselves, either through circumstances beyond their control or as a result of their own choices. It is like pain: undesirable but necessary for us to learn from experience and to avoid whatever causes it. We think that a person who could feel no pain would be fortunate but in fact those few people who are born without a capacity to feel pain suffer many serious injuries and lead short lives.

The world, said Dr Johnson’s biographer James Boswell, is not to be turned into a great hospital; but that is precisely what the replacement of the word 'unhappiness' by the word 'depression' does. For if unhappiness is an illness, why not every other human experience as well? When a person tells a doctor that he is depressed he is in effect asking for a cure, in the same way as he expects the doctor to cure a cough. The doctor has very little time at his disposal so he colludes with the patient. Instead of trying to find out what it is that is making the patient unhappy and suggesting that he change it, he hands the patient a pill.

Since pills are only handed out for illnesses, the patient now has confirmation from the doctor that he is indeed ill. He does not have to change the circumstances that are making him unhappy, which is a great relief because no one likes to change. That is because change s difficult and painful and can be impossible. Sometimes the pills actually work: the patient feels better. But as often as not he feels better because of the placebo effect. A sugar pill would have done just as well. At other times the pills do not work and the patient returns to the doctor, who tells him to double the dose. When the double dose fails to work the doctor switches him to another pill and, when this does not work either, to yet another.

Each time, of course, the patient has to take the pills for a certain number of weeks before they can be said not to have worked and since there are a large number of pills for a doctor to choose from, this slightly ludicrous foxtrot in the surgery between doctor and patient can go on for years. In the meantime, the cause of the patient’s unhappiness goes unexamined and unchanged.

The effectiveness of anti-depressants against most forms of unhappiness is very slight, if it exists at all. This is not altogether surprising because at first they were tested in the Fifties on seriously depressed people, in whom they appeared to work miracles. To call everyday unhappiness depression and then to treat it with anti-depressants is like calling every swelling cancer and then treat it with anti-cancer drugs.

The drug companies feared at first that there would not be enough seriously depressed people to make the manufacture of anti-depressants profitable. But the abandonment of the word unhappy for depressed came to their rescue: they became among the most profitable drugs ever developed. The American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz once published a very funny article in The Lancet. Dr Szasz suggested that henceforth happiness should be considered an illness. After all, it is quite rare and often leads people to do foolish things. As a result, it is potentially dangerous. Therefore, those few people who suffer from it need treatment. Luckily, there are plenty of medicines available to doctors that can make their patients feel worse and thereby control their happiness.

This makes no more (or less) sense than treating unhappiness as a disease.


By Theodore Dalrymple

@78,294 (O)
Sorry to hear that. Cheer up, dude. For me I personally enjoy the outdoors with playing disc golf. I find it puts me back into my center. Just do something that will clear your head.

@78,302 (S)
I agree with this, however...

This DOES describe me:

> depressed people but they were relatively few in number. Their illness was truly incapacitating. They were often very subdued and slowed down, lacking in interest, neglecting themselves, not eating or drinking properly and feeling profoundly guilty for no good reason. Rich people with this kind of depression sometimes believed that they were destitute. They wanted to die, or at least not to live. Some even believed that they were already dead.

Why the fuck I'm posting about it on minichan I don't know...

@78,282 (T)
I take adderall for ADHD, but it's not so much a focus problem as it is a motivation problem. Some psychiatrists even recommend changing the name of ADHD completely because lack of attention is just one of the symptoms of the real underlying problem which is lack of motivation, will-power, self-control, self-regulation or whatever you want to call it. That's why someone with ADHD can still play video games for hours on end. So I take adderall because it helps motivate me and also makes me feel calm and gives me more self-control. It seems to have the opposite affect in people who don't have ADHD and take it, as then they're just speeding.

Anyway, adderall is also a powerful appetite suppressant, so in addition to it helping me get up in the morning, motivating me to go to the gym, allowing me to drive place to place with much less stress, and improving my performance at work, it also suppresses my appetite to help me with my diet. Plus it clears my head, helps me focus, and improves my communication skills and helps me interact with others. It's like a miracle drug for me.