You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

gjm comments on Open thread, Mar. 2 - Mar. 8, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: MrMind 02 March 2015 08:19AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (155)
Tags: open_thread

Comments (155)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gjm 06 March 2015 10:06:14AM 3 points [-]

I am neither a medical professional, nor have I ever been treated for depression, but my impression is that being depressed is itself a more serious risk factor for getting stuck in bad local optima like that; as well as making sufferers feel bad it also tends to reduce how much how they feel varies. I haven't heard that giving depressed people antidepressants reduces the range of their affective states.

Comment author: kalium 08 March 2015 07:52:51AM -1 points [-]

It depends on the type of local optimum. I am reasonably sure that becoming too depressed to do enough work to stay in was the only was I could have gotten out of graduate school given my moral system at the time. (I hated being there but believed I had an obligation to try to contribute to human knowledge.)

Also flat affect isn't at all a universal effect of antidepressant usage, but it does happen for some people.

Comment author: gjm 08 March 2015 02:59:10PM 0 points [-]

Isn't flat affect also a rather common effect of depression?

Comment author: kalium 08 March 2015 11:30:59PM -1 points [-]

It happens but again it's not at all universal. Scott Alexander seems to think emotional blunting is a legitimate effect of SSRIs, not just a correlation–causation confusion. He also notes that

There is a subgroup of depressed patients whose depression takes the form of not being able to feel anything at all, and I worry this effect would exacerbate their problem, but I have never heard this from anyone and SSRIs do not seem less effective in that subgroup, so these might be two different things that only sound alike.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit