Depression is when we don’t care for anything.

@estelle
Very true. But like many human experiences, it's hard to have true empathy for it without experiencing it to some extent oneself. Let us all foster empathy in one another. It is absolutely possible to recover, to heal. Let us help one another do this, those who have been there helping the many thrust therein, paying the help forward. 🫂

I'm already absent,
From my body, from my head

My eyes are half closed and they don't open anymore.
I cry like a stream that must
necessarily sink

I'm...
A small hard shell
That breaks slowly
What was inside is gone.

#poem #SilentSunday #QuietSunday #depression

Our nervous system is wired to generate meaning from a stream of discontinuous, uncertain, sometimes ambiguous information. To do this, our brain uses probabilistic #beliefs that allow it to filter out its sensory information, but that are deeply disturbed in depression.

If we suffer from depression, we are constantly plagued by dark thoughts. We may tend to believe that we are worthless, that we have made terrible mistakes, that our loved ones reject us, or that our condition is a burden on their shoulders from which we must release them.

These beliefs are also at the heart of repetitive, circular mental content. These ruminations gradually lock us into a smaller and smaller space. They are self-reinforcing, feeding increasingly negative beliefs, invading the entire spectrum of our minds.
These depressive beliefs are critical because they are often associated with the worsening of the disorder and the risk of suicide

#depreciation #psychology #neuroscience

…
Studies in non-depressed subjects have shown that we are collectively biased in our #beliefs.
We are much more sensitive to positive than negative information when we adjust our personal beliefs. This bias in updating beliefs tends to favour positive beliefs about our own skills, our own experiences. As a result, we tend to believe that we are better drivers, better lovers, better at sports than the reality of our performance. This bias is present in all civilizations, although it varies according to the groups considered. We know that men tend to have a stronger positive bias than women. The positive bias is also stronger among descendants of settlers compared to Japanese.
It could still be, fundamentally, an effective way to finally protect ourselves from the misfortunes of the world. If we were realistically aware of the dangers of the world around us at all times, then our #mentalHealth would probably be much more fragile. We would be constantly anxious.
…

#bias

…
This protective mechanism for our mental health disappears when we suffer from depression. Tali Sharot's team, and later Tobias Kube and Winfried Rief's team, showed that depression reduces the ability to refresh these beliefs after positive information. This loss of the positive may even have led some psychiatrists to say that there was a form of depressive realism, in the sense that depression offered an uncompromising view of the world.
It is not known whether this depressive pseudo-realism is related to increased attention to negative stimuli or to greater porosity of beliefs to such unfavourable information.
…

@psychology 🧶

#selfDepreciation #wellness #knowledge #science #psychology #neuroscience #brain #suicidal #suicide #depression #rumination #confidence #bias #beliefs #mentalHealth #TaliSharot #positive #phenomenology #SilentSunday

@estelle @psychology Fascinating study, and very relevant to an interpretation of neuroticism that I’ve developed. It is almost as if neuroticism, the personality trait of the Big Five most clearly associated with depression, allows individuals to experience a greater breadth of emotions and cognitive aspects of human experience that skew perception away from the optimistic bias. These neurotic individuals are sensitive and attuned to the negativities of the world through the percepts supplied by emotion, and through this tempestuous proclivity towards emotion, their perception is shaped. Thus, they can feel the pain that is naturally associated with depression. This, however, may not be an evolutionary weakness or inherent flaw, but an advantageous ability to accurately perceive threats in the environment. I believe that this may be a sign of a cognition oriented towards self-doubt and recursive checks of truth, thereby raising self-awareness through their more rigorous interpretations at the cost of being self-conscious.

#psychology #neuroticism #personality #evolution #depression #thebigfive #theoryofpersonality

@luked522
Thank you very much for your thoughtful answer.
Since you present yourself as a student, i dare a suggestion: Do you realize that your explanations contains both assessment=analysis and opinion?

@estelle Yes, that’s an excellent observation, thank you for pointing it out. I do believe that opinion and subjective thought inevitably shape both perception and analysis, as interpretation is never fully divorced from the one who interprets. I assume the portion of my post you’re referring to as opinion is the reevaluation of neuroticism not as a weakness, but as an evolutionary advantage. If so, I would clarify that my post was intended as an interpretation of neuroticism, rather than a strictly objective or empirical report.

@estelle I’ve reflected on this thought of mine, and have since realized that this very much poses a question of whether, in this case, these people are neurotic so they engage in these kinds of recursive self loops, or if they’re neurotic because they engage in them. Then, when is the supposed intelligence it grants introduced to the subject who is experiencing this? Does neuroticism have some positive correlation with openness to experience, or, more likely, is it just specific to this particular experience, as it is distinguished from a broader facet of neuroticism as might be called depression? https://getmona.app/rich_text/246377609761

@estelle Now that I’ve reviewed the posts here more closely, I’ve realized that in the process of encoding and decoding the memory of engaging in this conversation, it became a site of rumination in my mind, and its meaning appears, in my present state, to have twisted. Interestingly, this relates I think to this particular subject, as I was somewhat prompted to perform a recursive check of myself and my thought processes in order to verify with truth. Thus, this truth about what actually happened in the conversation was obtained through a kind of self-consciousness, which is probably where my subjective guiding line originated from in my initial thought process here. Obviously, this idea isn’t empirically validated via statistical analyses and the application of an inductive rigor, so it’s only telling of my own experience, not an ubiquitous one.