The problem with depression is that it skews your entire ability to think clearly and rationally about the future. You're no longer "a rational agent", but "a depressed agent", and it's really bad.
From an outside view, of course only very extreme pain or the certainty of inevitable decline are worth the catastrophic cost of death, but from the pov of a depressed person, all future is bad, black and meaningless, and death seems often the natural way up.
Absolutely! Depression changes one's priors and one's perception of evidence, making a depressed agent even further from rational than non-depressed humans (who are even so pretty far from purely rational).
That said, all agents must make choices - that's why we use the term "agent". And even depressed agents can analyze their options using the tools of rationality, and (I hope) make better choices by doing so. It does require more care and use of the outside view to somewhat correct for depression's compromised perceptions.
Also, I'm very unsu...
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