So much of "mental" health is really just physical health. As a young person with mood issues I could never really understand why I felt the way I felt at times, and would always just chalk it up to some vague self diagnosed mental disorder. But the older I get I realize it all comes down to my physical state. Am I tired? Have I slept right? Have I eaten? Too much caffeine? Too much alcohol? Have I exercised? Practically every bad mood can be traced back to these. Yet people will ignore all that and convince themselves they need to take a pill to make themselves feel better.
Agreed. This has been my experience as well. Whenever I get to a dark place, I eventually pick up the weights again and w/in a few weeks I'm feeling much better. Fixing mental health issues with working out is a meme in the fitness world too.
Probably not a popular opinion among the HN crowd, but I think there are way too many anxiety/depression cases caused by lifestyle. It's like, you sit in front of a computer screen for 12 hours a day chugging sugary lattes, no shit you have anxiety. Go do some hill sprints until you're exhausted.
On the other hand, you may get all of these things right, and still experience no improvement.
Personally, I'm starting to feel that most "diet and exercise" advice is just a subtle way of showing a middle finger. Sending someone on a wild goose chase, thus making them go away. In my circles, I've never heard of a single case where a medical problem - whether physical or mental - was solved by changing diet or a more active lifestyle. The closest I've seen was shuffling meals around because of a bad interaction with a drug.
Keeping sleep, diet and exercise truly optimal, against challenges of the modern world and already compromised physical or mental state is a full-time job on its own. Even if it could help - which I doubt - few people have enough time and energy to go this route. Hell, finding the optimal balance in the first place is essentially a full-time N=1 research work.
Pills are good thing. The right ones, administered in correct doses, under supervision of medical professionals - they work wonders. Modern medicine in many ways a miracle. Being able to function again, to feel good, to spend quality time with people you love, can be as simple as popping a lozenge at appropriate time. It's infinitely better than structuring your entire life around managing your condition with "natural" remedies.
To be clear: I'm not saying we should be medicating ourselves for everything. Not all drugs are good, and all drugs have side effects. They're still very crude tools. I'm trying to offer a counterpoint to the (what I feel is) growing trend of rejecting modern medicine just because it smells too much of industry (as if that was a bad thing). In my view, the problem with medication is just that it's not good enough. But it's getting better, year after year.
We don't know if this is the case yet but I suspect that the grand majority of ailments currently treated with Psychologists and Psychiatrists will turn out to be things in the future that we know the cause of and can treat properly at a biological level.
There was a paper maybe a month ago about Penile dysfunction in a Covid long hauler who died. Post Mortem DNA analysis of the dysfunctional area showed Covid19 was causing the dysfunction, it was persisting in those cells nearly a year after the initial infection. This person did not show positive on covid19 tests and none of the long haulers do, this person did not shed viral load and infect others, but clearly that virus was still present causing a raft of problems in their body.
I would bet big on other viruses doing this in our body and causing all sorts of local problems and if we knew what we were looking for and had ways to kill the infected cells we would cure a whole raft of chronic conditions. What you suffer from is likely a combination of the virus that is doing it and where it is persisting. It is becoming an increasingly accepted position with a variety of papers showing viruses stick around, control cells and maintain presence and cause all sorts of weird effects in the body and I suspect we are going to find them the cause of a lot of problems we call mental currently.
I am all but certain that right now what we call mental health is really just physical that we just don't recognise properly because we haven't done the DNA analysis of sufferers post mortem to understand the real root cause. I also think the current practice of Psychology is hurting the chance of the biological research from occurring at the sort of pace and funding it should while it does research that doesn't look deeply into the biology of common conditions.
Many years ago, when I was much younger, I had anger issues. I started to play sports (football, wrestling, track) and they vanished. I told myself I was always too worn out to be angry. Now, whenever I don't feel right, I can just go for a walk. I'm so out of shape today, a 30 minute walk can wear me out enough to get my head right.
Exactly. The overcomplicated way people think about things like this reminds me of the counterpoint Michael Pollan quote about what you should eat: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." If people made sure they slept properly, didn't drink too much (caffeine or alcohol) and got regular exercise, they'd feel transformed. It took me until my 40s to realise that!
I don't think any rational therapist wouldn't at least try to get you to self-treat your neurosis with some simple exercises, fresh air, and socializing before they prescribe something. Things like chronic depression are absolutely going to require something more aggressive than a walk in the park though. And I don't think anyone prescribes microdosing.
My second-hand experience is that many psychiatrists will indeed reach straight for meds when they are looking for a solution.
People are naturally incentivized to use the tools they've spent decades acquiring. Just like every programmer when presented with a problem tends to solve it with code. A psychiatrist's career is based on prescribing medicine, so that's what they're gonna do.
(Psychologists and therapists, however, will likely tell you to take a walk in nature and think about your mother.)
aphextron|4 years ago
chrischattin|4 years ago
Probably not a popular opinion among the HN crowd, but I think there are way too many anxiety/depression cases caused by lifestyle. It's like, you sit in front of a computer screen for 12 hours a day chugging sugary lattes, no shit you have anxiety. Go do some hill sprints until you're exhausted.
TeMPOraL|4 years ago
Personally, I'm starting to feel that most "diet and exercise" advice is just a subtle way of showing a middle finger. Sending someone on a wild goose chase, thus making them go away. In my circles, I've never heard of a single case where a medical problem - whether physical or mental - was solved by changing diet or a more active lifestyle. The closest I've seen was shuffling meals around because of a bad interaction with a drug.
Keeping sleep, diet and exercise truly optimal, against challenges of the modern world and already compromised physical or mental state is a full-time job on its own. Even if it could help - which I doubt - few people have enough time and energy to go this route. Hell, finding the optimal balance in the first place is essentially a full-time N=1 research work.
Pills are good thing. The right ones, administered in correct doses, under supervision of medical professionals - they work wonders. Modern medicine in many ways a miracle. Being able to function again, to feel good, to spend quality time with people you love, can be as simple as popping a lozenge at appropriate time. It's infinitely better than structuring your entire life around managing your condition with "natural" remedies.
To be clear: I'm not saying we should be medicating ourselves for everything. Not all drugs are good, and all drugs have side effects. They're still very crude tools. I'm trying to offer a counterpoint to the (what I feel is) growing trend of rejecting modern medicine just because it smells too much of industry (as if that was a bad thing). In my view, the problem with medication is just that it's not good enough. But it's getting better, year after year.
PaulKeeble|4 years ago
There was a paper maybe a month ago about Penile dysfunction in a Covid long hauler who died. Post Mortem DNA analysis of the dysfunctional area showed Covid19 was causing the dysfunction, it was persisting in those cells nearly a year after the initial infection. This person did not show positive on covid19 tests and none of the long haulers do, this person did not shed viral load and infect others, but clearly that virus was still present causing a raft of problems in their body.
I would bet big on other viruses doing this in our body and causing all sorts of local problems and if we knew what we were looking for and had ways to kill the infected cells we would cure a whole raft of chronic conditions. What you suffer from is likely a combination of the virus that is doing it and where it is persisting. It is becoming an increasingly accepted position with a variety of papers showing viruses stick around, control cells and maintain presence and cause all sorts of weird effects in the body and I suspect we are going to find them the cause of a lot of problems we call mental currently.
I am all but certain that right now what we call mental health is really just physical that we just don't recognise properly because we haven't done the DNA analysis of sufferers post mortem to understand the real root cause. I also think the current practice of Psychology is hurting the chance of the biological research from occurring at the sort of pace and funding it should while it does research that doesn't look deeply into the biology of common conditions.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
Clubber|4 years ago
frereubu|4 years ago
tootie|4 years ago
munificent|4 years ago
People are naturally incentivized to use the tools they've spent decades acquiring. Just like every programmer when presented with a problem tends to solve it with code. A psychiatrist's career is based on prescribing medicine, so that's what they're gonna do.
(Psychologists and therapists, however, will likely tell you to take a walk in nature and think about your mother.)