At least you don’t get menstrual cramps every month.
Consider yourself lucky. 
We all hate life, we all suffer from depression. Is it that hard to understand?
Exactly what I mean you dont understand. Depression in the clinicle sense is not depression in your eyes, you are talking about normal depressive behaviour. Depression in contrast is a disorder that prevents people from being able to function in “normal” life
Here is an op-ed from 1998 that Sam Crane wrote:
I think that is rather pertinent to this discussion as well as why I am deeply suspicious of anti-depressants and how over-prescribed they are. Certainly they improve the quality of life for some people, but that they work in this particular task is separate from the ethical concerns the drugs themselves pose.
Yeah, they do. You’re obviously blind to that fact.
Depression that disables people? Then it’s just a greater sense of it then.
Joker have you never taken LSD??? I know that you’re hard-wired to disagree w/ me about most things, but from what I can tell about you from your posts, that’s exactly the drug you need. Seriously. And I don’t mean that in a bad way and I’m not being sarcastic. Take some acid.
I don’t know about Joker, but I would like to try it sometime.
AAAGHHH!!! 
I read that wrong. You should take some too though. It’s a wonderful experience. 
Only drinks alcohol and smokes cigars.
( If I get depressed I usually eat icecream while I watch a good slasher film of the horror genre.)
Personally I have had great experiences with LSD that I would list as some of the most enlightening experiences of my life, however I wouldn’t blindly endorse it. Lum is right, it can lead to hideous experiences, bad trips, especially in people with depression or past histories of mental illness. Not knowing someone I wouldn’t just recomend it to them, however I wouldn’t definetly tell them to look into it. It could be a great tool for a philosopher and also help them form a better perspective on life.
You project your own problems on the rest of humanity, speak for yourself.
This made me laugh, I usually don’t agree with your posts Joker but this is funny. The idea of indulging in a comfort food while you watch people get murdered.
Actually its a disorder caused by an imballence of chemicles in the brain. Saying that normal depressive thoughts are the same as the disorder of depression is completely wrong
Show me the “fact” that EVERYONE is depressed. I’m not depressed. I’m anxious about a few things in life…but depressed? Nope. I don’t know where you get off trying to say that a chemical imbalance affect everyone when it obviously does not. Take serotonin levels in a hundred people…if you can find an imbalance suggesting depression in every single one of them I’ll eat my own head.
I think it is good to be critical of the widespread use of these drugs thinking in terms of individuals.
I’d also like to focus for a moment on the problem on a societal level.
We are cutting off feedback about our lives. By saying that if you are suffering you have some sort of genetic disorder or predisposition and these are the medications to fix your ‘sickness’, we are cutting off a lot of information by pathologizing individuals. Once you get rather large numbers of people suffering ‘mental’ problems you are probably dealing with problems in the society - the work world, schools, how we relate to each other, etc. But giving people these pills that cut off their NORMAL reactions to these problems we create the illusion that we are dealing with the problem when we are not.
At a certain point we are hiding symtoms, which is what I think a lot of this medication is doing.
In the late 50s and early 60s white middle class women - who should have been happy with their lives - were being medicated to the gills with barbituates and other drugs. They were not happy. Instead of noticing that there was a systemic problem doctors dealth with it as individual problems. Ten years late a lot of these same women and their peers became feminists. Whatever you think of feminists, I think most of us have gotten used to the idea that women can do all sorts of things we thought only men should do and take it for granted that being a housewife might not be satisfying for all women.
What is happening these days?
Children are getting diagnosed more and more with ADD and ADHD.
Looking at restless children as having a disease makes certain corporations a lot of money, is a quick fix, magic bullet solution that gives teachers and parents a simple out.
But what if the problem is not the children but
schools - where you are supposed to sit still most of the day and be passive
coupled with
the vast amount of overstimulation we have today - computers, cellphones, TV, DVDs, Ipods and so on. Children today are constantly bombarded with information and stimulus, even more so than children 10 years ago. Also their parents are undergoing higher stress levels than parents were 10 years ago. To assume that a child who reacts to modern life with impatience and restlessness and inattention has a genetic disorder is silly. It seems likely to me he is having reactins within the normal range to a situation of restraint coupled with overstimulation and stress.
We can make a choice as a society:
we can begin to look at ways to make society fit us better
of we can make us
fit a sick society better using pharmaceuticals and then later genetic modification.
It’s funny. When I was growing up I was taught that the great thing about the US was the government (society) was for the people not like the bad USSR where the people were supposed to act and live for the state. But here and now we have a situation where capitalist companies are creating propaganda and tools to make us adapt to a sick society rather than using our emotional reactions to life in that society to transform society.
Aidan - waiting for your facts still…
Id rather not, I dont hold youtube in the highest regards when discussing psychological issues. If we were talking about a monkey on a skatebourd I might have looked.
I haven’t watched it either, but I see no reason to make singular claims regarding the nature of depression. If there is a chemical imbalance involved in less superficial cases of depression (which I have no reason to doubt) it doesn’t mean that non-pharmaceutical means can’t be employed as part of an overall approach to dealing with depression. There is no reason I can see to think that there is a single cause of depression. If there was I’m sure we would have figured out a simple ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ by now.
Depression is only present in a cirtain type of brain though it will stay dorment untill something outside effects it this is what people mean by different causes of depression. Anyway it doesnt matter, we are getting away from the point I was making which is that clinicle depression is not the same as normal depressive thoughts