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kalium comments on Brainstorming for post topics - Less Wrong
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Proposal: If you're depressed, maybe your life sucks. A meta-contrarian post where I argue that you can't always "have a positive attitude" towards bad things in your life, and that fixing your life's problems might be a better strategy than learning to cope with them.
Yes! I see so many arguments that the environment simply doesn't matter in depression, and most of them seem to come from, say, grad school administrators who benefit from denying that they're creating a horrible environment with no clear expectations, no positive feedback, no opportunities to socialize, etc. If depression is always a purely random chemical imbalance, well, it's a pretty neat coincidence that mine vanished within a week of my quitting grad school.
Also, I think something that contributes to depression at my end is a background mental script that I'm always feeling the wrong thing, and part of that script is that I should be tough enough to not be affected negatively.
Please write about this or link me to someone who has already. Congratulations on your escape.
At the time, I had a moral system in which it was not permissible to leave grad school because science was the thing I should be doing. However, towards the end of my first year I became too depressed to do any problem sets and as a result I had to drop all my classes at the last minute and would then have had to reapply to get back in, which wasn't happening. If I'd been slightly less vulnerable to stress-related depression, I suppose I'd still be there (and still be quite unhappy, so maybe the whole thing was adaptive after all).
I don't have a good link to post, but if I write more extensively I'll put it here.