Depression is when we don’t care for anything.
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Depression is when we don’t care for anything. We want to stay under the duvet. The duvet is comfortable. We would like to get out of it but we only have the motivation to stay warm.
Depression can develop into a disinterest for the world. Smiles appear bland, uninteresting. Pleasure and displeasure become indistinguishable, leading to a progressive anaesthesia of emotions.
#EstelleSays #depression #selfCare #self #people #disappointing #relationship #relationships #friendship #mentalHealth #predictions #perceptions #beliefs #representations #probabilities #hallucinations #bias #psychology #SilentSunday #fragility
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"It's like… my head is filled with something black and gooey, it takes up all the space, all the energy.
I try to force myself to do things, to see people.
But it exhausts me so much, it drains me out…
And it's often painful, I can see that people are angry with me."
~ Mirion Malle, in "That's how I disappear"#depression #quotations #safety #selfCare #self #people #disappointing #relationship #relationships #friendship #mentalHealth #predictions #perceptions #beliefs #representations #probabilities #hallucinations #bias #psychology #SilentSunday #fragility #beliefs #hallucinations #bias #SilentSunday
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Dr. Heather Etcheversreplied to Estelle Platini last edited by
@estelle
Very true. But like many human experiences, it's hard to have true empathy for it without experiencing it to some extent oneself. Let us all foster empathy in one another. It is absolutely possible to recover, to heal. Let us help one another do this, those who have been there helping the many thrust therein, paying the help forward. 🫂 -
Estelle Platinireplied to Dr. Heather Etchevers last edited by
I'm already absent,
From my body, from my headMy eyes are half closed and they don't open anymore.
I cry like a stream that must
necessarily sinkI'm...
A small hard shell
That breaks slowly
What was inside is gone. -
Our nervous system is wired to generate meaning from a stream of discontinuous, uncertain, sometimes ambiguous information. To do this, our brain uses probabilistic #beliefs that allow it to filter out its sensory information, but that are deeply disturbed in depression.
If we suffer from depression, we are constantly plagued by dark thoughts. We may tend to believe that we are worthless, that we have made terrible mistakes, that our loved ones reject us, or that our condition is a burden on their shoulders from which we must release them.
These beliefs are also at the heart of repetitive, circular mental content. These ruminations gradually lock us into a smaller and smaller space. They are self-reinforcing, feeding increasingly negative beliefs, invading the entire spectrum of our minds.
These depressive beliefs are critical because they are often associated with the worsening of the disorder and the risk of suicide -
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Studies in non-depressed subjects have shown that we are collectively biased in our #beliefs.
We are much more sensitive to positive than negative information when we adjust our personal beliefs. This bias in updating beliefs tends to favour positive beliefs about our own skills, our own experiences. As a result, we tend to believe that we are better drivers, better lovers, better at sports than the reality of our performance. This bias is present in all civilizations, although it varies according to the groups considered. We know that men tend to have a stronger positive bias than women. The positive bias is also stronger among descendants of settlers compared to Japanese.
It could still be, fundamentally, an effective way to finally protect ourselves from the misfortunes of the world. If we were realistically aware of the dangers of the world around us at all times, then our #mentalHealth would probably be much more fragile. We would be constantly anxious.
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This protective mechanism for our mental health disappears when we suffer from depression. Tali Sharot's team, and later Tobias Kube and Winfried Rief's team, showed that depression reduces the ability to refresh these beliefs after positive information. This loss of the positive may even have led some psychiatrists to say that there was a form of depressive realism, in the sense that depression offered an uncompromising view of the world.
It is not yet known whether this depressive pseudo-realism is related to increased attention to negative stimuli or to greater porosity of beliefs to such unfavorable information.
…#selfDepreciation #wellness #knowledge #science #psychology #neuroscience #brain #suicidal #suicide #depression #rumination #confidence #bias #beliefs #mentalHealth #TaliSharot #positive #phenomenology #SilentSunday
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@estelle @psychology Minor point: the literature on “depressive realism” is fundamentally flawed, because the literature supposedly showing “optimism bias” in the first place is fundamentally flawed, see
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010028516301177
