The alleged scientific concensus of the irrationality of violent discipline against children

Could research on corporal punishment in the home be misleading due to confounding by genetic factors or other methodological issues?

While doing research on this topic I found very interesting WP: talk, sections with someone making objections, and getting the most effective diplomatic replies I have every seen. Very impressive. here it is.

Worried your worry is untreatable?

Last night I started to wonder: Did I only try SSRI’s for depression (I tried antipsychotics and mood stabilisers too but those aren’t ‘just’ for depression)? Is that why pharmacotherapy failed? What if I try a different class like Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs)s

Treatment resistant depression is common.

Treatment-resistance is relatively common in cases of MDD. Rates of total remission following antidepressant treatment are only 50.4%. In cases of depression treated by a primary-care physician, 32% of patients partially responded to treatment and 45% did not respond at all

...

Treatment-resistant depression is associated with more instances of relapse than depression that is responsive to treatment. One study showed that as many as 80% of patients who needed more than one course of treatment relapsed within a year. Treatment-resistant depression has also been associated with lower long term quality of life

• Wikipedia. However, anxiety can be treatment resistant too.

You may wonder, what do you do if treatment for an anxiety disorder fails? The group of anxiety patients that is resistant to the treatment has been shown to have very poor quality of life and have highest rate of suicidal attempts than any other disorders..

“The two biggest risk factors for treatment resistance are inadequate treatment and failure of patients to comply with treatment. The other important risk factor is having a comorbid condition, such as depression, bipolar disorder, or substance abuse,” says Bystritsky

Conversely, medications with multiple mechanisms of action or 'poly-pharmacy cocktails' seem to be most effective in the treatment-resistant population. The scientific literature does not contain any good efficacy data for polypharmacy. However, it is apparent that the use of multiple medications with different indications is a rule rather exception in the treatment-resistant anxiety patients

...

For same of the patients, this regimen could be appropriate and even life saving. For some of them it could mask an underlying problem by numbing the feeling and not addressing abnormal coping of these patients. The examples of this could be an oversedated OCD patient, who continues his compulsive behaviors or a PTSD patient where the core traumatic even has never been addressed in psychotherapy. In my opinion, the extensive polypharmacy in patients should be periodically reevaluated and a second opinion should be obtained. It is especially important when the patient is treated with a complicated regimen for more than 2 years without clear improvement. Sometimes a 'subtraction' of medications from a polypharmacy regimen could lead to an improvement.

Other strategies are discussed in the source article in molecular psychiatry

Evidence suggests the worse psychological harms from violence are closer to home than you might expect

Would you rather be a victim of domestic violence, or the victim of armed conflict (think ISIS, or Naxalites or Insurgencies in Africa)?

This conclusion – that fighting itself is often not as bad as hardship and domestic abuse and other traumas that can fill every day – is one borne out in other research on adversity.

from Mental health and conflict research from Colombia.

Experience of the armed conflict was more linked to anxiety while non-conflict violence was more related to aggression and substance abuse. Depression and suicide risk, however, were represented equally across all of the categories.

It’s worth saying that being ‘trauma obsessed’ is really just a American and European condition – as I’ve discussed before, Latin American psychology in particular has a strong tradition of looking at problems on the community level rather than always aiming to treat the individual victims.

Effective hedonism: sex

Students have less sex than others of the same age (except my students, who have assured me that is impossible) and married people have more....Research suggests that promiscuity is not associated with increased happiness and, in fact, that the number of sexual partners needed to maximize happiness is exactly one....Money may bring you happiness, but it won’t buy you more sex. Being homosexual doesn’t make you any happier than anyone else, but it does mean having more partners....People who cheat in marriage (10% of the married people in the sample have had sex with more than one person in the previous year) are less happy. Men who use prostitutes are also less happy. That is, promiscuous people are less happy

from less happy

I also wonder how societal attitudes towards sexual behavior affect individual happiness. If I engage in a behavior that is considered socially unacceptable and I am unhappy, is that because of the behavior or because of the social acceptability of the behavior?

Are there cross-cultural studies?

Summary of 80,000 hours research as it applies to pursuit of employment for hedonistic purposes

”A widely used definition of stressful situations is one in which the demands of the situation threaten to exceed the resources of the individual.”

One puzzle is that people with higher responsibility jobs, which you’d expect to be more stressful, have been found to have better health outcomes than those with lower responsibility jobs.

“Current evidence indicates that perceived psychosocial stress is independently associated with increased risk of stroke.”

Steve Jobs started out passionate about zen buddhism. He got into technology as a way to make some quick cash. But as he became successful, his passion grew, until he became the most famous advocate of “doing what you love”.

Some studies suggest that people in higher responsibility positions, with greater job demands, have better health outcomes and are less stressed than people in lower responsibility positions. This may be because those in higher responsibility positions also tend to have greater autonomy, control and power.

Overall, the studies actually found that higher job demands3 (and low control to a lesser extent) were associated with higher risk of heart disease and mortality:

”It is important to note that the low stress levels of leaders may both cause and result from leadership. That is, individuals with low stress levels may be particularly well-suited for leadership and as a result, may select into leadership positions. Conversely, leadership roles may confer lower stress because of the psychological resources that they afford.”

"...those who believed that stress had a large effect on their health had double the risk of suffering a heart attack...."

"”There is a simpler, less mysterious way of accounting for the results: people who experience stress but who suffer minimal ill effects from it come to believe that stress cannot hurt them, whereas people who do suffer ill effects come to believe that stress is harmful. Voilà, we now have the correlation those researchers found but with belief as an outcome rather than a cause.”"

When have you been most fulfilled in the past? What did these times have in common? Imagine you just found out you’re going to die in ten years? What would you do? Can you make any of our six factors more specific? e.g. what kinds of people do you most like to work with?

My follow up questions are:

1. How well does constructed interventions on the basis of identified modifiable risk factors for a disease predict the effectiveness of the intervention - a kind of systematic review of backwards vs walk forward forecasting in epidemiology
2. Does hyper awareness of opportunity cost from effective altruism engagement make people less happy?
3. Given that there are longitudinal studies on stress and positions of responsibility or leadership why do they focus on studies that can't draw temporal, causal inferences in the 80k article? Lacking methodological expertise, are we? ;)

Not quoted from 80k, but in a piece they link to:

...generally try to avoid or ignore hostile people' (Epstein's test)

Something tweetable?

mindset:

Reframe demands as #opportunities

Reframe #stress as useful rather than threatening

Let me know if you tweet or share in some form or another so I can track my impact (if any!) and keep doing this