alt Hacker NewsIf you view a world at a certain angle there is always something to worry about: 1. World in not perfect, it doesn't confirm to how we want it to be (and could not even in theory given that different people want it to be different) 2. The future cannot be predicted with 100% accuracy so even if all is perfect today you can worry that it will turn bad in the future.
When looking at the same reality one persons sees the situation as OK and another as a an endless and hopeless disaster it is hard to tell who is right. A depressed person would tell that most people around him are wrong and are optimistic only because they don't understand how bad all is.
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This is the "people with anxiety should just stop being worried" attitude that failed to help for centuries. Whether or not you believe SSRI's are clinically effective, denying the existence of mental health disorders is not helping.
No, anxiety and depression aren't simply a matter of perspective.
> A depressed person would tell that most people around him are wrong and are optimistic only because they don't understand how bad all is.
Or because of a legitimate chemical imbalance or some other cognitive issue they can’t control alone. Right?
Depression and pessimism are not the same thing.
That's incredibly reductive. I'm sure some people's depression can boil down to a matter of perspective, but it's naive to extrapolate that to everyone with depression.
I'm incredibly optimistic and am content with my position in life. My default state is being mindful of the present and I don't think about things too far into the future. I very rarely ever feel stressed out over things in life.
However, none of that changes the fact that I feel completely empty and find no joy in things. Interests are nearly non-existent, emotions dialed to 1, and the only thing I'm motivated to do is lay in bed staring at the ceiling... unless I'm on sertraline.
Admittedly that's just anecdotal, but I worked in a clinical neuroscience lab researching treatments for severe treatment-resistant depression (read: people who tried so many options including CBT that they even tried electroshock therapy). The only thing that helped those subjects was a regimen of personalized neuroimaging-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation for 10 minutes every hour for 10 hours every day for a week. Even then, it wasn't permanent. Some saw improvement for months, others only weeks.
For some people, it's not just a matter of "perspective".