Summary

Look at how you or other people walk. Then going a bit meta.

Disclaimer

This post is probably not high quality enough to deserve to be top level purely on its qualitative merits. However I think the sheer importance of the issue for human well-being makes it so. Please consider importance / potential utility of the whole discussion and not just the post, and not only quality when voting.

The problem

Minor depression is not really an accurately defined, easily recognizable thing. First of  all there are people with hard, boring or otherwise unsatisfactory life who are unhappy about it, how can one tell this normal, justifiable unhappiness from minor depression? Especially that therapists often say having good reasons to be depressed still counts as one, so at that point you don't really know whether to focus on fixing your mind or fixing your life. Then a lot of things that don't even register as direct sadness or unhappiness are considered part of or related to depression, such as lethargy/low energy/low motivation, irritability/aggressiveness, eating disorders, and so on. How could you tell if you are just a bad tempered lazy glutton or depressed? And finally, don't cultural expectations play a role, such as how Americans tend to be optimistic and expect a happy, pursue-shiny-things life, while e.g. Finns not really? 

Of course there are clinical diagnosis methods, but people will ask a therapist for a diagnosis only when they already suspect something is wrong. They must think "Jolly gee, I really should feel better than I do now, it is not really normal to feel so, better ask a shrink!" But often it is not so. Often it is like "My mind is normal. It is life that sucks."  So by what heuristic could you tell whether there is something wrong with yourself or other people?

Basis

This is heuristic I built mainly on observational correlations plus some psychological parallels. Has nothing to do with accepted medical science or experts opinion. My goal isn't as much as to convince you this is a good heuristic, but to open an open-ended discussion, asking you if it seems to be a good one, and also trigger a discussion where you propose other methods.

How I think non-depressed men walk

"Having a spring in the step." This old saying is IMHO surprisingly apt. I like this drawing  - NOT because I think depression is based on T levels, but I think this cartoonishly over-exaggerated body language is fairly expressive of the idea. For all I know this seems more of a dopamine thing, eagerness, looking forward not testosterone.

It seems to me non-depressed men push themselves forward with their rear leg, heels raised, calves engaged, almost like jumping forward. This is the "spring" in the step. The actual spring is the rear leg calf muscle. Often this is accompanied by a movement of arms while walking.  A slight rocking or swaying of the NOT hips but chest / shoulders may also be part of it, but I think it is less relevant. The general message / feel is "I'm so eager to tackle challenges! That's fun!"

Psychologically, I think all this eagerly-looking-forward-to-challenges spring in the step means a mindset where you are not afraid of the future, but not because you think it will be smooth sailing, but because you are confident in yourself to be able to tackle challenges and even enjoy doing so. This seems like a healthy mindset.

How I think depressed men walk

Dragging feet. Dragging a slouched, sack-like, non-tension upper body. Leaning forward. Head down. Shoulders pulled up, hunched up to protect the neck, engaging the upper trapezius muscles. A chronic pain in the upper traps (from their constant engagement), when having your upper traps massaged feels SO good, may be a predictive sign of it. Comes accross as embarrassed, scolded-boy body language.

Another way of walking I noticed on myself and probably counts as depressed is the duck-walk. The movement is started by the upper body slightly "falling" forward, the center of gravity starting to go forward, then "catching" the fall by sticking forward a leg, and the foot hits the ground flat, not with the front part of the foot but the whole foot, like a duck.Basically your heels are almost never raised and calves are not engaged much. This would be impossible / difficult if you had a springy step i.e. pushing forward with the rear leg, you would have to raise a heel for that, but possible if you fall forward and catch, fall forward and catch. Often not raising feet high (related verbs: to scuff, to shuffle). 

How I think non-depressed women walk

Generally speaking  I use the same heuristic for women who seem like they are  "one of the boys" type  (i.e. those who wear comfortable sports shoes, focus on career goals not seducing men etc.) 

But this clearly does not work with all women, for example, that springy step thing is pretty much impossible in stillettoes for example. Rather I think non-depressed women often tend to sway the hips. It is an unconscious enjoyment of their own femininity and sexiness, not a show put on for the sake of men.

I don't really have clear ideas of how depressed women walk, all I can offer is not like the above. When both the eager spring and the sexy hip sway are missing, it may be a sign.

For people of non-binary gender and other special cases: again all I can offer is that if you are non-depressed, you probably have either the eager spring or the hip sway.

Am I putting the bar too high? False positives?

Is it possible that it is a too "strict" heuristic? While I think these heuristics are generally true for peopel who are in an excellent emotional shape, feel confident, love them some challenges, feel sexy etc. this may be possible that this emotional shape is higher than the waterline for depression, it is possible that some people are not depressed and yet below this like, have less confidence, less eager, happy expectation, less self-conscious sexiness or something like that.

Essentially I think my method does not really have many false negatives, but could possibly yield false positives.

Have you seen many cases that would count as false positives?

Meta: why is minor depression so difficult to tell / diagnose accurately?

There are clinically made checklists, but they sound like a collection of unrelated things.  Could really the same thing cause you to sleep too much or not enough, eat too much or not enough? Doesn't it sound like Selling Nonapples? Putting everybody who does not have just the perfect sleeping or eating habits into one common category called depression? 

For example in the West most people see depression as "the blues" i.e. some form of sadness. But often people don't report feeling sad, but report being very lethargic and not having energy and motivation and that, too, is often seen as depression. Some people are just negative and bitter and not enjoy anything, and yet they don't see it as their own sadness but more like "life is hard". I guess in both cases it is more line internalizing sadness, considering being sad a normal thing, and not really expecting to feel good. (This may be the case of mine and surprisingly many people in my family / relatives. A life-is-tough, survivalist ethos, not fun ethos.) 

Then you go outside the West and you find even more different things. I cannot find my source anymore, but I remember a story that in a culture like Mali women generally don't express their emotions, are not conscious of them, and there depression is diagnosed through physical symptoms like chest pain. 

Is minor depression an apple or a nonapple? A thing, one thing, or a generic "anything but normal happiness" bin?

I think my walking heuristic does predict something, and that something is probably close enough to the idea of minor depression, but whether it is a too broad tool with many false positives, or whether it predicts only a narrowly specific case of depressions, I cannot really tell and basically I asking you here whether it matches your experiences or not.

What are your heuristics? What would be a low false positives easy heuristic?

P.S. Researchers found a reverse link saying walking in a happy or depressed style _causes_ mood changes. It seems the article assumes everybody knows what walking in a happy or depressed style means. In fact this is what I am trying to find out here!

P.P.S. I know I suck at writing, so let me try to reformulate the main point a different way: we know people cannot be happy all the time and often have such a unsatisfying life that they are rarely happy. How can we find the thin line between being normal common life dissatisfaction based unhappiness (hard or boring life) and minor depression? Can walking style be used as a good predictor of specifically this thin line?

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35 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 9:17 PM
[-][anonymous]9y80

I'd be interested if there was any evidence that this had any predictive power, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be. I don't expect much evidence to emerge either, because any effect of mood/emotions would likely be overwhelmed by variance in bodyweight/muscle mass. Lighter/stronger people have better posture than others. That being said, changes in posture in an individual without corresponding changes in health may well be indicative of their mood.

Meta: You don't suck at writing. It's very clear what you're saying. Your problem is sentences like this:

Rather I think non-depressed women often tend to sway the hips. It is an unconscious enjoyment of their own femininity and sexiness, not a show put on for the sake of men.

Which, to say the least, seems to be wild speculation.

[-][anonymous]9y00

Which, to say the least, seems to be wild speculation.

Let's say that if err I must, I try to err on the side of the less... socially problematic... assumption. But it does seem to make sense for me. I don't think people live for giving constant shows to other people, it would not make a lot of sense.

I think the problem with "unconscious enjoyment of their own femininity and sexiness" is that it isn't clear what it means. Why don't men swing their hips as an unconscious enjoyment of their own masculinity and sexiness but women do?

How would you test whether or not that's true?

I try to err on the side of the less... socially problematic... assumption

You don't have make any assumptions.

I think the error here isn't that you picked the wrong motivation, but that you assumed that there is any motivation at all.

A woman's center of gravity is in the hips, walking is a pendulum-like motion which requires some amount of side-to-side motion as center of balance shifts. The more purposeful and energetic the gait, the more side-to-side motion is required to maintain speed/balance. For men, with a higher center of gravity, the side-to-side is in the shoulders. But a non-depressed man isn't shimmying their shoulders because they unconsciously enjoy their own virility and sexiness.

It think you're attributing emotional motivations to a mechanical necessity of how people walk. Now granted, hip swinging CAN be exaggerated for effect, but if you're using it as an assay for depression, you'll generally be looking at typical energetic hip swinging rather than atypical seductive hip swinging.

I'm not saying its distasteful to find that gait attractive, it is a secondary sexual characteristic after all and thus indicates fertility/post-puberty. But yeah, the assumption of motivation/intention is a point of frustration when I run into it because I literally have no way to ambulate without men thinking there is some conscious or unconscious sexuality-based subtext. And it's not by any means an uncommon assumption, maybe 75% of men over 25 make this assumption.

I have a pear shaped body, so my center of gravity is low even for a woman. As a matter of fat vs. muscle distribution, it is most like saying I grew breasts because I unconsciously feel feminine and sexual. Feelings just don't have anything to do with fat distribution.

[-][anonymous]9y00

I was actually referring to

It is an unconscious enjoyment of their own femininity and sexiness

The two possibilities you give aren't the only ones there are.

Yeah, OP needs to get out more. That was kind of painful to read.

What about older women? What about women from cultures with strong modesty norms? What about tomboys? What about women who hang their hat on something other than their bodies? What about women from matriarchal cultures? etc.

[-][anonymous]9y00

What about tomboys? >What about women who hang their hat on something other than their bodies?

Use the first method rather obviously, or was that unclear?

What about women from cultures with strong modesty norms? > What about women from matriarchal cultures?

No idea, but I cannot really make such a quick heuristic so universal, I think that would be difficult.

Women are half of the world, dude. You are just not coming across very well.

Men are half the world, too, yet you don't list all the types of men, demanding that diversity of personality types in men be acknowledged and treated. You're actually coming across worse than him - he's merely (and painfully) ignorant, whereas you should know better.

Yes, OP's treatment of men is little better. But:

(a) I am replying to a subthread that started discussing women specifically. There is no "equal airtime" rule for gender for every thread in which gender comes up. Discussing a specific gender issue does not imply willingness to throw the other gender under the bus, or dismissing the issue as not existing for the other gender. As I am sure you know, because you follow the principle of charity -- right? This is LW, not tumblr.

(b) OP's take on women is "worse" than OP's take on men, to me. Men are described in terms of physics -- "spring in the step." Women are described in terms of sex appeal. Both descriptions have problems because they are not engaging with the complexities of human brains and human self-esteem. But the simplifications in play are different in character, too.

[-][anonymous]9y-10

The problem is with the women half of the world, it is with the not-broadly western (say, matriarchical or modest) half, I think I covered the western half pretty well, by dividing women into femmes and tomboyish careerists, one or the other tends to fit reasonably well, given the that first is the traditional role and the second is the role created by feminism, so both typical western cases covered. But yeah, I haven no idea how this would work in a modest culture. Never seen one, aside from the Muslim girls in the West who look a lot like they don't want to be modest, it is their parents who want them to be modest. Is that a problem?

I think I covered the western half pretty well

Oh my god, just stop.

[-][anonymous]9y10

Well, if you don't want to explain yourself then there was no point in starting this subdiscussion, it is not like anyone learns something from it. But OK, let's stop.

Okay, phrasing? Terrible. You just implied that women fit only one of two personalities.

(Yes, you generalize men as all belonging to -one- personality group. However, you never explicitly -said- men all fit into one personality, whereas you more or less did with women.)

There are clinically made checklists, but they sound like a collection of unrelated things.

The fact that the list looks like it's a list of unrelated things doesn't invalidate the list. It rather shows that psychologists who research depression have found out things about depression that aren't intuitive from the outside.

That doesn't mean that further research can't improve on the scales but simply taking the Hamilton scale for depression gives you a good answer. According to Wikipedia scores of 0-7 are normal and scores >=20 are depression strong enough for clinical depression. That means scores of 8 to 19 are minor depression.

If the thing you care about is diagnosing minor depression using the diagnosis tool in which psychologists invest a lot of effort makes more sense then using a homebrew solution.

That said mental factors do lead to physical changes. According to Feldenkrais "All negative emotion is expressed as flexion"

Researchers found a reverse link saying walking in a happy or depressed style causes mood changes. It seems the article assumes everybody knows what walking in a happy or depressed style means.

No, they likely did run machine learning to do the clustering.

Thinking well about walking styles is a open topic for research. If you want to know more read somatics literature. Moshé Feldenkrais, Thomas Hanna or Frederick Alexander.

But it's no easy subject. I took 3 years to understand what the primary movement direction up means. http://connectingupthedots.com/2014/03/20/understanding-the-primary-directions-which-way-is-up/ is a blog post by someone practicing the Alexander technique who also took years.

A year ago I was at a dance festival and the teacher demonstrates how he changed his movement direction from up to down during dancing Merengue. He didn't told us before the demonstration what he's doing but said we should figure out. I was the only person who was aware of the change of the movement direction. When I described what he did, he suggested that I must have taken the class before because he teaches those classes regularly and normally nobody can see the difference. Even through people going to dance festival know more about movement than the average person on the street, he can still teach that class a lot of times without anybody managing to see the difference.

Trying to have correct posture and forcing the body to move right without having a concept of movement directions produces tension and is often not very sustainable.

Thinking well about walking styles is a open topic for research. If you want to know more read somatics literature. Moshé Feldenkrais, Thomas Hanna or Frederick Alexander.

In particular, I think Hanna's basic Red Light Reflex and Green Light Reflex maps pretty well to the depressed/non-depressed walking styles given here.

Paul Ekman has mapped emotions to facial expressions extensively. Apparently there has been a fair amount of research going on lately about the bodily expression of emotion to be used in virtual environments.

When I described what he did, he suggested that I must have taken the class before because he teaches those classes regularly and normally nobody can see the difference.

Good eye. I find it hard to assimilate a movement and translate it into concepts just from looking at it. I have to really break it down and focus on component pieces. The bigger problem I find is that many instructors simply lack a meaningful language to communicate movement precisely, and have no idea that their terms are just labels they use for what they, perhaps, can visually assimilate. That you and your instructor could actually communicate is a real trick.

The bigger problem I find is that many instructors simply lack a meaningful language to communicate movement precisely, and have no idea that their terms are just labels they use for what they, perhaps, can visually assimilate.

I don't think that language is the main issue. Words point to places. If you don't understand where they point than language doesn't help.

The author of the linked Alexander blog also says that he repeated the words for years without understanding what they mean. I don't have direct experience with Alexanders technique and it's vocabulary but I can immediately understand what he's talking about because I have the underlying concept.

The more I learn the more I get the feeling that most of my Salsa teachers don't get it and that includes people who did a 3-year Bachelor in "dancing on stage".

Around a year one of them was for a month in the US and when she came back she had the insight that "intention forward" was very important for the girls to do. She told them this repeatedly. Two months later all the girls in the course are much more tense. It was pretty messed up and she didn't change something about the way she taught.

Given my understanding of the effort it takes I have little optimism that academics who have never been taught how to move get movement at a level to effectively study it. It's quite depressing ;)

On the plus side it seem to me like understanding movement helps me to get rid from a medical issue that doctors told me would never go away. My right shoulder used to be higher than my left. After my first: "Now, I move properly. If I move forward I move up, if I move backwards I move down" it went away in a day.

Unfortunately it came back as my attention wasn't anymore on it. 2 weeks ago I learned something new and now the shoulder are at the same height again and the strategy takes less effort. It seems like the arms have to go in the other direction. If the body goes up, the arms go down. If the body goes down the arms go up.

It feels very right that way but unfortunately I don't expect that most readers will understand what I mean with up and down.

Good eye. I find it hard to assimilate a movement and translate it into concepts just from looking at it.

I'm not sure that the eye is the main problem. It feels much more kinesthetic. If I wanted to speculate maybe about having mirror neurons that pick up the pattern.

I have to really break it down and focus on component pieces.

Unfortunately breaking things down doesn't actually work. A movement intention to move up, is something different when you break it down to look what all individual parts are doing.

It took me quite a while to learn that breaking things down doesn't help and that it's often useful to just focus on one movement. It's not hard because it's complicated. It's hard because it's simple.

It took me quite a while to learn the lesson. If you break down a movement it's not whole anymore. Natural movement is not about trying to do 5 different components at the same time.

Maybe you have to learn the components to then "forget" them to focus on the whole. I'm not sure. A teacher told my on that subject "Simplicity is the distillate of complexity."

[-][anonymous]9y00

What is the name of the broader category of the thing you two are discussing here? I feel like I am missing out on something that looks like a whole discipline, like a 18th century person reading a treatise of nuclear physics: some words are vaguely familiar, but not clue what the whole thing is and is about.

Thomas Hanna gave the discipline the name Somatics. A more broad term would be body work.

Apart from that both buybuydandavis have years of experience with partner dancing and how most dancing instructors are't that great.

Unfortunately somatics never really succeeded in establishing itself as a socially respected field. Thomas Hanna died early in a car crash. Dying in a car crash is quite ironic for a guy who thought he solved half of the problem of aging.

Nuclear physics has the advantage that it can have formal definition and if you don't understand something at least you know where the terms is defined and how you could make up for your lack of understanding if you put in enough effort.

Somatics at the moment doesn't have that property. Words like "move in the upwards direction" might seem familiar on first glance but the point to a deeper concept. You also have a different people who try to make up their own vocabulary and no unified field.

Related fields are fascia and kinesiology. Both of them have textbooks published by academic publishers. The field of fascia is interesting because it seems to be making progress.

Anatomy Trains with is a Fascia book for example tells me that oxytocin makes fascia contract. Fascia contraction does have an effect on posture. When it comes to the permanent bad body posture of depressives that's locked into fascia. At present those are isolated facts, but I think there hope that research will connect them together.

Hello LessWrong!

I'm happy to see that my site: www.connectingupthedots.com has been linked a couple of times here.

I'd like to throw my two cents in on the discussion about understanding these "zen-like" ideas, why it takes so long, and why conveying them in words is problematic.

It's good to remember that words are only descriptions of ideas, not the ideas themselves, thus trying to learn from a verbal description is bound to have problems as interpretation of bodily feelings and many other subjective things (which are affected by everything from genetics to personal experience). Similarly the descriptions of thought (what we hear as language in our head) isn't thought but a description of a thought- some substance is lost in translation and then the blanks are filled by our habits.

The Alexander Technique is unique in that the primary vehicle for transferring the skill is not verbal, but by the teacher giving a direct experience of the desired state through hand-on work. It is not somatics or body work although there is a bit of that included in the process. Alexander believed (and rightly so) that the mind-body were one unified thing; there is not anatomical division of mind and body of course; everything is connected.

Every thought that enters your head has a physical and emotional response. Therefore thought is action, or at the very least thought initiates action. i.e.: you are angry and clench your jaw, you are happy and smile. “I didn’t get the job” (fill in emotional/physical response here). What we experience as the mind (pre-frontal cortex), body (reptilian brain & nervous system), and emotions (limbic brain) work as a whole, they are literally connected of course, to create our version of reality (perception). This is a simplification in terms of brain function, but generally holds true.

In regards to depression to get on topic with the OP, Its this habitual perception that is a major cause of depression- your interpretation of reality becomes a stimulus that is reacted to with a depressed emotional response; this becomes cyclical as the habitual depressed reaction affects your perception of reality. It is important to point out that the "true reality" doesn't change but our perception which is functionally equivalent to our personal reality does and its near impossible to make a distinction if you are in a hypnotic depressed (could also be described as some-what unconscious or less-conscious and aware, lower vibration level, etc.) state.

To work with this with the AT it's a three part process that is cyclical and ultimately simultaneous:

1) Awareness- becoming more conscious of your self and environment around you; this is far deeper than it seems on the surface as until you become aware of what's there all kinds of things you are doing (stimulus and response) feel like you are doing nothing or "normal", when in fact you are doing all kinds of habitual behaviors.

2)Inhibition/direction- This is not Freudian inhibition. Once you are aware of what's going on you have to learn to not react to the stimuli that you react to in harmful ways. This is not the same as holding yourself still while reacting- it's stopping the reaction at a nervous system level; catching the impulse while it's still a thought and choosing to not react. Direction is the intention/conception of what you do want. It is related to Zen in that you can't do direction. It happens when you set up the space for it to happen and then get out of the way. Like a compass points north but doesn't go north, our job isn't to micromanage the mind-body with consciousness but to provide subtle direction and inhibition in a very wide-angled general way.

3)A healthy relationship of the head-neck-back, also known as "Primary Control" in AT jargon. Alexander discovered that the organization of the Primary Control profoundly affects the quality of general use of the whole self. If the Primary Control is well organized, the general coordination of the self trends toward integration and organization, whereas if the Primary Control is not in a healthy relationship there is a tendency toward mal-coordination and disintegration. The Primary Control does not operate in a vacuum, as use of other parts affect it and the whole, but as the area in question contains the majority of our nervous system and is the central axis of support for balance and movement its role to play is both basic and of the utmost importance. If the habitual use of the Primary Control includes mal-coordination and disintegration it will manifest in the specific parts and in the activities of life which depend on the use of the self (everything).

Put simply, use affects functioning. Most therapies try to change functioning without addressing use- we do not have the conscious bandwidth to directly control all aspects of balance, breathing, movement, or even thinking, so again we must form habits. The quality of all these habits collectively can be called the habitual use of the self. “First we make our habits, then our habits make us.” Charles C. Noble. By changing how you do the things you do, it interrupts the cyclical patterns in place making more room to change the behavior. People generally aren't successful quitting smoking in one step, but not having a cigarette after every meal can lead to realizing that you didn't even want one, it was just a habit leading one to question the source of the desire of the cigarette- is it truly wanting one or just the habit of smoking?

This turned into an essay, so I'll stop :) Thanks again for the patronage of my site. Best, John@connectingupthedots.com

[-][anonymous]9y00

Thanks, it gets interesting! On Primary Control: any reasons why not call this simply spine ?

Also, my experience is that on a very amateur level this does not work, but on an advanced, expert level of course still may. Still for example when I was going to weight lifting gyms, I was trying to correct my posture by strengthening back muscles, such as low trapezius with face pulls. It never worked. I also tried consciously improving posture like imagining I am hanging from thread connected to the top of my head. Did not work. If I was not paying attention for sec, snapped back. But when I do something that makes me proud, I am automatically standing up very erect, stand tall, in good posture! Or when I am happy.

So to me on the amateur level it seems you can fix posture by fixing mood or emotions but you cannot fix mood or emotions by fixing posture.

Can you given me a bit of an explanation why does this nevertheless work on the professional level? Why do you have success with fixing emotions with posture instead of the other way around? Why don't you do the other way around like instead of telling people to move the chin 3cm back (this is how I imagine it) telling people to e.g. "visualize you just won a prize and everybody is clapping" ?

We could come up with a more robust heuristic. I agree that this might lead to too many false positives. I think this method would be more useful if you used it to make multiple measurements over time and if we added more of what we know of the symptoms of depression. The difference between depressed and sad (well, the obvious outward difference) is that sad goes away and depression lingers.

It seems like it would be useful to create a checklist or inventory of outward symptoms so that a friend observing could keep track of your mood. Emotional blunting is one of the symptoms of depression so it is totally plausible that a friend keeping track would notice before you. Someone experiencing depression isn't motivated to keep track of their day-to-day mood fluxuations, so an outside observer can be very helpful in this respect. "Hey, I noticed that you've seemed down more often than not for the last couple weeks. Do you think you might have some mild depression starting up?"

Relatedly, there are now apps for phones which measure the speed at which bipolar people talk. Depressive and manic episodes can be picked up long before the symptoms become apparent to the bipolar person or the people around them. Depression causes people to act and talk slowly and lethargically, and to also be more reticent. This could be another possible and useful method to observe for depression. http://www.uofmhealth.org/news/archive/201405/listening-bipolar

Clinical guidelines for depression: Experiencing at least 5 of these symptoms and some of them almost every day for 2 weeks or longer

  • A depressed mood during most of the day, particularly in the morning
  • Fatigue or loss of energy almost every day
  • Feelings of worthlessness or guilt almost every day
  • Impaired concentration, indecisiveness
  • Insomnia (an inability to sleep) or hypersomnia (excessive sleeping) almost every day
  • Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in almost all activities nearly every day
  • Recurring thoughts of death or suicide (not just fearing death)
  • A sense of restlessness or being slowed down
  • Significant weight loss or weight gain

Observable traits a friend could spot (based on these clinical symptoms):

  • Slow, dragging gait
  • Unusually quiet/reticent
  • Slower speech
  • Apparent fatigue
  • In bed too much (generally covers both depressive insomnia and oversleeping)
  • Talking/thinking about sad things a lot
  • Tendency to self-blame or self-berate out of proportion to reality
  • Indecisiveness or apathy when making decisions
  • Dropping activities they usually enjoy doing
  • Avoiding contact with people more than usual, or avoiding contact with people they usually enjoy
  • Not being very engaged in conversation, not laughing, not showing interest in normally interesting things

And if these symptoms are happening regularly over two weeks, its probably a good idea to talk to them about their feelings and the possibility of getting professional help

[-][anonymous]9y00

One issue I see here is two weeks i.e. that it is for people who are usually not depressed. I am trying to find out what if you are always depressed all your life. If you were never different. Especially if it is seen as perfectly normal in your family, relatives, and so on.

This is why I need to look into something different from the mainstream. The mainstream is looking into something temporary that is measured in weeks or months. I am looking into finding depressive personality especially in circumstances where that looks like normal. For example a depressive personality never usually enjoyed anything. He was told by parents to go to school, okay. He was told to get a job, okay. He feels life is duty, not fun. Whole subcultures can work this way. Just think of people who are simply poor. Parents who work 2 shifts in shitty jobs to put food on the table will raise kids like you must do X, Y, Z in life, never teach them how to enjoy things. So they engineer a depressive personality sometimes.

One strong confounder here is genes + culture.

To put it crudely, take an Italian to Finland and he'll diagnose 80% of Finns with depression. Take a Finn to Italy and he'll diagnose 80% of Italians with mania.

[-][anonymous]9y00

This is part of the reason I don't understand where the experts draw the line. You would think Canada and the UK are close enough culturally... I remember once a Canadian guy giving a sales demo to Brits and generally they they were annoyed how over-enthusiastic he was over it, and they considered it an American style getting imported into Canada... big full-toothed grins and all that. They were more or less thinking if you are happy about a product either you are stupid or think your audience is. Later on we discussed how best to sell things in the UK and an experienced entrepreneur told us smiles are okay but without showing teeth, as a 32-teeth grin would be too much enthusiasm.

where the experts draw the line

There is no line, it's a continuous spectrum, and likely to be multidimensional, too :-/

tl;dr -- culture matters a lot.

Having lived that life, and not fully over it, it has its advantages, as well. I didn't really notice physical pain. Tragedy isn't meaningful. And there are some things that reach through depression; certain kinds of excitement, for example, and certain kinds of humor. And the nihilism which sometimes afflicts those prone to care seems laughable - life has no meaning, you complain? So what?

It's not miserable; it just -is-.

I've encountered three things that helped: LSD made me -realize- I was depressed, and would give me a few weeks without depression. 10,000 IUs of vitamin D turned ordinary days into good days. And St John's Wort, whose effect is extremely subtle and noticed more in its absence than its presence, made me care.

[-][anonymous]9y00

Vitamin D? Wow. You just swallowed all the pills in the morning at once and bang got high or how exactly should I imagine this? And was it D3 or a complex? How much was your body weight? This recommends 80 IU per body weight kg, so for 125kg people that would make it 10000.

D3. I take the pills in the morning. The effect is... interesting.

Thus far I've gotten two other depressed people to try D3. Their reactions, paraphrased for some amusement value:

Day 1: Huh. I've had a good day. X and Y and Z have gone right for me. Yeah, I started the vitamin D today, but I need an objective day to see whether or not it's actually responsible. Day 2: Wow. Two days in a row. This is making it difficult to assess how the vitamin D is working. Day 3: Wait... wait... is it really the vitamin D doing that? Can't be. X and Y and Z happened, that's why I had a good day. Day 4: OH GOD I'M A SACK OF CHEMICALS

Having been on vitamin D for about a year now - after a few months the effect stops being so dramatic; the first few weeks are ecstatic. You get adjusted to a new base level of whatever is going on, and your internal happiness levels compensate. Things are still overall better than they were before for me, though.

The other thing I've done which had a substantial effect on my overall sense of well-being was meditation. (I've also once been able to go directly into a lucid dream through meditating as I fell asleep. I forgot I could teleport in dreams, however, so I spent most of the night struggling to control my mind enough to make flight work reliably.)

ETA: On dosage, somebody - I think on Less Wrong, actually - mentioned a study about how 10,000 IUs was used, with some success, to treat depression. I tried that figure, without consulting body weight recommendations, and it worked. I'd guess, without strong medical basis, that depression isn't caused by a deficiency of vitamin D, but rather that at higher dosages vitamin D treats the symptoms of the underlying cause of depression.

[-][anonymous]9y00

Interesting. After reading your comment on Friday, now it is my third day on 5000 IUO, I did not really dare to try 10, so far not much of an effect. Probably masked by having visited a rural friend on Sunday who always has homemade brandy ready, well, I guess I won because he fell asleep and I didn't, still, there is hangover :)

You male? Heard about Vit D and testosterone being connected and T shots being used to treat male depression with some success. To test this: combine it with zinc, zinc deficiency is also fairly common and can be a T bottleneck.

On causality - I tend to look at these things differently. For example when they treat depression with exercise, it is more useful to look at it the opposite way: any natural animal would get a lot of exercise. Lacking it must cause some sort of a symptom, depression being in this case. And perhaps the same thing can be said about sunlight, the most natural thing for an animal is to run around in it, spending our lives in artificial caves must have some sort of an effect.

Hm. I'll try adding Zinc and see what effect that has, if any. I'd guess my zinc levels are pretty low, but I'll have to check my vitamins.