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Long term depressed person trying to share a good experience

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Hi

[TL;DR: youtube.com/watch?v=TIcf-2A...

Don't believe your brain when it says that you are not being irrationally negative, do not believe it when it praises you for your vigorous realism as it tells you that you will always be alone and better off dead. There are chemical explanations for your brain falsely reporting such things. Listen to this engaging lecture to remind yourself that there are some people that know exactly what they are talking about when it comes to depression, that you have a REAL PROBLEM with a REAL SOLUTION.]

[2shilly;didn'tWatch I PROMISE that I am not here to farm views. I don't own or mirror the video, it is not lackingviews and probably isn't even monetized, I am only posting because it helped me and could thus help others.]

---------------

I am here because I watched a free video I would like to strongly recomend to anyone who is depressed: youtube.com/watch?v=TIcf-2A... because it made me feel like there might exist a legitimate solution for my problems and motivated me to seek them out, which is something I am lucky to think once every 2 years.

The video is of a talk about Depression given by a very engaging neuroscientist/psychologist. You don't need any background knowledge to understand anything he says, he is an excellent communicator and is in no way condescending.

He explains the current neurological understanding of depression and the experiments that lead to it, including how the most common classes of antidepressants actually work and why they are thought to work. He then gives a more 'psychologist'-y description and the two are linked together seamlessly.

Having watched it I realise that I had fallen (since rehab almost 3 years ago) into several mental traps and developed some false beliefs:

- No one in psychology or drug treatment actually knows what they are talking about, they are all healing-crystal-chuffing pseudoreligion-flogging logical-positivism-intolerant goons because the science is too young, we don't have the tools to know how the brain works. [The dude clearly knows what he is talking about, the current understanding of depression is based on quite conclusive empirical evidence.]

- My symptoms are not clearly diagnosable, they are too varied/mixed/inconsistent ("I am just an untreatable anomoly that ought to make better choices") [I experience a significant majority of the symptoms he describes and it is clear from the way he talks that it doesn't matter if some are absent.]

- I am just a pussy and the only way out is to 'deal with it' like 'everyone else does'. [He strongly emphasizes the debilitating impact of depression, even explains why the above view is so easily propagated. It is NOT NORMAL to feel CONTINUOUSLY TERRIBLE, the body let alone the mind cannot handle it.]

There are more but I will stop.

I think I probably benefitted more from the video than the average person would because my Dad was a very knowledgable, very critical person and his influence on me was such that I want to puke at AA/NA/Smart meetings/councelling sessions/CBT and I find the vast majority of the language of psychology disgustingly vague.

Hopefully someone else who struggles with the vagueness inherent in this condition and its treatment is also inspired to imagine that they might be cured.

Good luck, my people!

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