It's important to distinguish here between mild depression and major depressive disorder. The suggestions zevrem have offered can help people will mild depression, especially if they identify their problem as outside themselves (ie. dislike of job.) They are also suggestions offered to people with MDD, but usually it's later in the person's treatment, when 'fake it till you feel it' can be a legitimate treatment option.

A danger I suspect more common in the intelligent is good old rationalization. The intelligent person sees clearly their dysfunction, and so can rationalize that behavior. Not as functional, but as inescapeable. Feeling trapped is one of the hardest aspects of depression. The intelligent person sees the trap more clearly, so rationalizes a greater hopelessness to escape it.

Because intelligent people expect things to be easier. They expect to be better at skills, problem solving, etc, and when they encounter the crippling effects of emotional shock after a major life change of this nature, they don't accept that yes, depression, stress, and fear will actually make you functionally less intelligent. So they get MORE depressed.

I think that's part of the connection--intelligence may not manifest depression more, but when it does, it seems worse, because intelligent people place a larger expectation on themselves to NOT have these things happen. And in the case of patients like mine, intelligent people get more depressed because they think they should have learned to cath faster, transfer faster, have fewer bowel accidents, and kick more ass with bumping a wheelchair up stairs. Similarly, when intelligent people have difficulty with normal activities like job hunting, bank balancing, or staying fit, they take this failure harder. Because if they're so damn smart, why do they suck at these things so much, etc, etc? Part of it is because being intelligent doesn't necessarily give you an aptitude for bank balancing. It doesn't make you more emotionally prepared for the grueling process of ego crushing that is job hunting. It doesn't give you will power. It just. Means. You're. Intelligent.]

Thanks Gio, this is me.
It takes a lot of effort to do get past the whole, this should not be so hard; to do anything this basic, why are you failing so much? By the time I get around that I am tired and still have to do the task...oh well. This task is an everyday thing that all folks can do, you have no reason to not do this, and do it well. This is a thought chain that is depressive and loops in to a never ending fail block it not checked. So, in this case I can BS to a level of "functional aptitude" and hold a job; but not start a career.
The effort that it takes to fake it, whatever it might be; zaps my energy to so productive things, and pisses me off to a loop of hopelessness. Just like you said, Gio about traps.
I have bursts of Productivity followed by spells of not giving a fuck. I guess that If I can even out my bursts of Productivity this would get rid of my depression/lazy spells and I would have more energy for finding a permanent full time job; in this unstable market . Sigh.

So, in short depression can spring from a verity of issues and treating it is going to vary from person to person. Finding out why someone is depressed is half of the battle to treating it effectively.

Sometimes you have to stop thinking and just do what you need to. Telling my brain to shut up is one of the best things I can do for myself in a depressive episode.

This...is how I have do things sometimes!

Last edited by SexingTouga24/7/365 (05-11-2013 04:33:26 PM)

... I'm not entirely certain what to say to you, since I'm not even certain if what I've tried to say to you already is something you even heard. I suppose I should have made it more clear I was speaking a bit sarcastically.

I appreciate the intent of kindness in your suggestions here. Please just realize that they could potentially make you sound like a facetious jerk to someone else (not that I'm one to talk, given my last post...). Not everyone responds well to these kinds of things, even though they do have value to others. I am far better than I have been in many years, and it's not because of anything I did on purpose. Things like what you mention seemed really pointless. Meditation only served as either a gateway to more self-mental-mutilations, or sleeping. Eating was usually a chore. Everything just was and had no point, even things I knew would help me.

Not everything can be fixed holistically, or on your own. I needed friends and people that loved me to keep telling me everything's fine and that the world isn't as bad as it seems and that they've been there. They didn't try to help, really. They just existed and loved me.

And even that won't work for everyone.

I do apologize for somewhat going off on you, but I got very tired of people spouting off things like you said, the cures of 'fixing your surroundings' and 'do little things to make things better'.

If you call the cyclical self-loathing that comes about from not doing simple chores something society has burdened me with, I suppose so. There were always things about how ugly and undeserving I was of existing, because I was useless and a drain on all the people I knew, but that's less me feeling like a productive member of society and more me hating myself because 'why can't I do this simple thing, ugh'.

A continuation:

I feel the Pavlovian stuff is "shock therapy" stuff. I think a lighter form of therapy is to ask yourself why you care about these things. Why are you beating yourself up? Is it because you want to help your family? Then think about ways to help your friends and family. You probably have ambitions beyond "doing chores," or at least you have a more general, holistic, (and proactive!) view of what it is to help your family and friends. Think of some general concepts, then assign some measurable factors to them. There's a guy, Tom Gilb, who helps large corporations design project requirements, and one of the exercises he does is that he has people assign measurable factors to hazy concepts like romantic love, such as the # of kisses/day, hours of skin contact, # of white lies told to the partner, stuff like that, then assign desirable levels to these factors. It is crucial that you develop these metrics, it is very difficult for something to succeed if you don't even know what you're trying to accomplish. In fact, I would suggest you do this even if you go through with the Pavlovian conditioning.

And above all, think of yourself, and what you want from yourself. Chances are, other people can get on perfectly fine without you, attachments aside. First worry about bettering yourself.

And on that note, I'm going to leave the Internet for a couple days. Please try not to break anything while I'm gone. ;)

Last edited by zevrem (05-13-2013 06:46:13 PM)

I just want to say before I exit this thread that Pavlovian conditioning, at least in the form of "covert conditioning" utilizing visualization to associate desirable behaviors with desirable outcomes and undesirable behaviors with undesirable outcomes, has a history of being quite helpful for a wide array of addictions and behavioral disorders.

I think I have a result that is relevant to this thread. I posted it here.

Take a character string of nothing but the character 'a'. It can be 100 characters long, it could be a billion characters long, you can not increase its complexity by adding more a's. This is an intuitive result. Mathematically, this means that we can create a very small program that is capable of generating this character sequence (print x number of 'a').

This is the essence of intelligence: being able to look at data and create a much smaller program that can replicate the data.

Insanity, on the other hand, is the exact opposite: looking at data and creating a program to generate the data that is larger than the data itself. It's creating anti-patterns instead of finding patterns, introducing complexity instead of decreasing it. So instead of creating the program listed above, or simply echoing the character string, an insane machine would say (print abcda delete the last four characters, print badcd, delete the last 5 characters, print another a, etc.). This, I think, is the basic premise behind Marxism and other religions.

The popular definition, doing the same thing twice and expecting different results, is not a very good definition. If you do the same play twice in football, the play will probably fail the second time even if it worked the first time. This would also preclude the use of repeated trials in science, and nobody's stupid enough to give THOSE up.

Last edited by zevrem (05-24-2013 12:42:47 PM)

So uh, that made me think. About how we're describing depression here. And a possibility occurred to me.

A lot of the statistics for early childhood diseases seem on the rise. More autism, for example. Sure, it's possible that the population has just become more likely to be autistic because of immunizations , but it also seems likely that in the last few decades we've become more adept at identifying it, and more importantly, more likely to find it due to improvements in health care and parents being more likely to bring psychological and behavioral concerns for their children forward.

Intelligent children get, frankly, a world of attention above and beyond the rest--better access to child health services in the school, more observant less overworked teachers, and often (for better or worse) more parent involvement. Is it possible that we're not seeing more depression in this population, we're just seeing this population more?  Could it also be that we eagerly overdiagnose depression in these kids? Clinicians want an answer for unusual behavior, a sense of social isolation, or abruptly adult-like behaviors and outlooks too early in life. At this point I'd even suggest they are overeager for the diagnosis because there's an expectation that many intelligent kids suffer from it.

I know this doesn't address the adult population, but this connection people find between the two features seems often to begin early in life.

Just gonna throw my short two cents in here. Depression in intelligent kids and teens was a thing when I was in high school, but I don't think it was a very well-documented or studied thing yet. Either that or my school had a shitty shrink for a counselor. She actually said to me once, and I remember it very clearly:

I've been doing this for years, and I've talked to a lot of kids. It always surprises me that it's the really intelligent ones, the ones you would think would be the happiest, that suffer from depression. Almost always. It's painful to watch, but just remember, you're definitely not the only one.

Of course, I never gave her the chance to help me, so I don't know if she was good at her job. When I couldn't (wouldn't) explain why I was freaking out, eventually she referred me to a psychiatrist, who put me on useless pills. If they'd known my mother was going insane, and that was why I was depressed, they might have done something. But then again that profession is full of useless anyway.

I was on Lamictal for "manic-depressive" behavior and was on and off the psychiatrist's couch for a couple years. I've gone through long, long cycles of rationalization and reflection, and I've come to the conclusion that mainstream psychiatry, which is all derived from Sigmund Freud any way, is bunk, and that pretty much the only things that are really valid are Pavlovian conditioning, operant conditioning, and some instinct.

Keep in mind that the only real purpose of psychiatry and, for that matter, morality in general, is to condition people to "fit in." There's no higher, more intelligent principle than that at work. The ideas that motivate the masses are vacuous and uninspiring, and, in most cases, nonexistent. You shouldn't really feel a need to accept them for anything other than practical purposes. Shame is a product of the internalization of these values, and it helps to realize that these values really aren't worth internalizing.

Last edited by zevrem (07-02-2013 08:59:44 PM)

Guess not.

Edit: In case it wasn't clear, zevrem just got another, longer suspension.

I can see the whole social aspect of giftedness playing a part in our tendency towards depression. The older I got and the smarter I got, the harder it was for me to interact with other kids my age. I always felt like I was dumbing myself down for everyone else's sake and I got really resentful after a while. And in turn got lonelier and had more stress and mood problems.

I think a lot of the issue for a good number of gifted people is that while we're prone to depression, we're also prone to anxiety. Hence a lot of the social problems. I know how to act around people, I could probably have a lot more friends than I do if I got out and socialized more. But I'm terrified of people in general. And that seems to be the way a lot of gifted people are. It's not so much a lack of understanding in how to be social, but a feeling of fear to do so, usually because we feel different from most of the people around us. Especially if you were given a hard time for it when you were younger. A lot of gifted kids get bullied, and that can be pretty traumatic. I was considered a "social butterfly" by my teachers up until the third grade. I can safely place a good amount of blame on being harrassed for years on end for why I don't get warm fuzzies when I socialize with people I don't really trust.

As for why there are maybe more depressed kids nowadays, could it just be that over time the percentages of people prone to mental illness is increasing? Mental illness is very heritable. In families where it exists, it tends to exist in more and more people as the generations go on. And it does seem to get more severe as it travels down the bloodline. Maybe that combined with the stress of life today just means more and more kids have a natural predisposition toward depression and other MI