[freework]

If you ask 10 different people why they are depressed, you'll get 10 different answers. This illustrated why I think the scientific method is the wrong way to go about understanding the human mind.

Also, if you ask a depressed person why they are depressed, they may not know exactly why they are depressed. I spent my entire high school years depressed. It wasn't until a few years after I graduated college before I realized the reason why I was depressed: it was because I had abusive parents. If you had asked me in high school why I'm depressed I would have said something like "I'm a bad person but I have no reason why". At the time I thought my parents treated me like I was a bad person was secondary to the actual problem.

If you really want insight on what makes the human mind depressed, then ask people who have overcame their depression. The first step to overcoming depression is to discover what is making you depressed. If someone is still depressed, they probably don't know what is making them depressed, and so their "data" is just noise.

The problem with the psychology field is that it has an obsession with "data". Everything has to be on a pie chart of a line graph or something like that. Every "study" has to be on a grand scale and then averaged together to make a single conclusion.

The problem is that the human mind of not replicatable. You can perform a "study" on a sample of people and get a result, and then replicate that exact same study on the exact same sample of people at a later time, and still get a different result. In order for the scientific method to be applicable, you have to be able to get the exact same result each time you replicate the study. This is not possible in psychology.

[whats_a_quasar]

This is just objectively not true. Population-level data has been used to establish all sorts of things about psychological disorders. You mention your experience of parental abuse causing depression: it absolutely does! And that relationship was established unequivocally decades ago by showing the correlation between adverse childhood events and the development of depression.

One of your specific complaints is that depressed people do not report the causes of their depression very accurately. This is also true! The unreliability of depressed people is emphasized in the diagnostic criteria, and a good psychologist will probe for other underlying issues. But researchers absolutely can identify causes of depression by supplementing self-reports with objective data.

> The problem with the psychology field is that it has an obsession with "data".

Yeah, that's how science works. By collecting evidence you can make descriptive statements about the world. If psychologists didn't present data, they would be instead be rightly criticized for presenting data.

It sort of seems like you jump from the poor accuracy of depressed people's self reports to dismissing the entire field of psychology. Humans are complicated and messy, but we do know a ton about psychological disorders.

[whats_a_quasar]

For what it's worth, I was also reacting to this assertion:

> The first step to overcoming depression is to discover what is making you depressed. If someone is still depressed, they probably don't know what is making them depressed, and so their "data" is just noise.

This was not my experience, and hasn't been the experience of others I know who have been depressed. The condition is often caused by an acute stressor, but in my case it was caused by a lack of social interaction and exercise during the pandemic. Trying to identify the "cause" of my feelings wasn't helpful because they weren't rational - instead I had to get out of bed, exercise, eat, and socialize until the episode cleared.

[protoman3000]

It’s saddening to hear about your years of depression. Parental abuse traumatizes deeply, and while I may not feel the same pain like you, I can imagine it is destroying life completely. I hope you can receive my and other people’s compassion and won’t relapse into depression.

I would still like to give some response on your content in hopes that you can benefit from it.

Psychology, or the part of what is accessible to the non-academic public, and Clinical Psychotherapy are related but different fields. Psychology alone can be very disappointing to people in pain - I can relate, and shared your sentiment, as I was in pain back then, too. Since I dug deep into the academic literature of Clinical Psychotherapy and the books for the general public, I realized I was just looking in the wrong corner of the library.

Compare Psychology being talking about what a nail is, to Clinical Psychotherapy being talking about how to construct a hammer and hammer the nail correctly into the wall. It’s related but not the same. And only one is really useful for us if our goal is to hang a beautiful painting on the wall.

Hope you find some inspiration from this. Whenever it comes back, please remember to get help quickly before the wounds get septic and require much more difficult intervention. There are good people out there.

[tap-snap-or-nap]

You cannot rely on self-reporting as an accurate way to diagnose someone. You need to do single subject studies and doing a sample studies for this is obviously not the right way to go about it. Data collection is very important to understand human behaviour.

[BlueTemplar]

While some psychologists might not be aware of this (like the Reason criticism suggests... though mostly has the overworked angle), it seems to be almost insulting to suggest that researchers at his level are not ?

[caddemon]

You'd be surprised how niche this sort of discussion is in neuropsych research. Is it because researchers aren't thinking enough about the big picture or because the NIH is incompetent and the researchers just go along with what they need to get funding? Idk, but either way it's not great. I suspect this problem exists in a lot of sciences but psychiatry in particular seems to have overcorrected for some of its less rigorous history.

That said, I don't think it's correct to say the scientific method can't apply. We absolutely have to be more careful about averaging over many people with different actual disease but the same current shitty label, and we also have to be better about looking at longitudinal signals. But there are ways to do this in a more scientific manner (e.g. involving well-defined testable predictions).

I agree that as part of this transitory period (especially with the sample sizes that most psych studies can feasibly get) there should be more synergy between qualitative human-focused approaches and what the by the book science people are doing. It's unfortunate how far behind research psychiatric practice can lag in some respects, and in other respects the psych researchers seem to not take practitioner observations too seriously these days.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

<< The problem is that the human mind of not replicatable.

I am willing to agree that it is still more art than science in its current state, but I personally think we are slowly moving towards a replicable mind after all -- a terrifying prospect, because it would truly prove 'free will' is an illusion. It currently seems impossible due to sheer number of factors with overlapping effects. I don't think it is impossible though.

[OkayPhysicist]

I suspect it is improbable, because an honest, undeniable belief that you lack free will would drive someone stark raving mad. It would represent a fundamental phase change in the way an individual interacts with the world, which I would wager would be antithetical to effective transmission of the belief.

Far more dangerous would be the 90% mark, where understanding of psychological determinism advances to a point where people still believe they have free will, but are wildly effective at influencing others. That looks like advertising today, but worse.

[caddemon]

Yeah I don't think we're getting there in our lifetimes, especially not with how neurobio/psych research has been progressing lately, but I agree it is theoretically possible. And along the way there are many imperfect models that could still be highly useful - I don't think replicable is a binary thing at this level of abstraction.