While depression is a real issue, I think people suffer from all the Skinner box reward cycles built into games / apps now days. Cook dinner takes time and some effort, clicking delver now and soon food just shows up. Things that lack that level of reinforcement just seem less interesting.

Sure, I could physically travel to interesting places or just click around on Google maps. The joy might not be as great as actually seeing the same thing in person, but places are so much easier to get to online.

A physical firing range is seriously intense, but messing around in a FPS does not involve leaving the house and it takes so much less skill. Not to mention something like guitar hero vs. an actual guitar.

Tough love doesn't work here. Logic doesn't penetrate. Worse, I worry you could come across as trivializing addiction, depression and other mental health issues.

When in doubt seek help. That is what we need to encourage. And I know first hand how hard it is to seek help and keep seeking it, but the very act can be its own little bit of healing.

No, I think parent is exactly right. I feel similar to the OP, but I know for sure it's not a depression. And I think I suffer the same problem the parent described. The real world just seems so messy and complicated compared to virtual worlds.

You may call it a mental health issue, but it is neither addiction nor depression; if anything, it's just not being addicted to real world enough.

How do you know it is not depression? This is a very personal topic, but I never thought of myself as depressed until I fell into a hole so deep that I had to search for medical help (and then I still thought about EVERYTHING but depression: High-functional autism, ADHD, whatever ..) - diagnosis and therapy helped me tremendously and looking back there would've been zero chance for me to recognize that I was suffering from depression on my own. It's one of the hallmarks of depression to rationalize it away "don't be such a wuzz ... all is fine, you are lazy, stop doing that", so it's very risky to say "I know for sure it's not a depression" - you are probably the worst judge for that (just to make this clear: It's your life, if you feel all is fine and you just don't want to go out then it is fine, enjoy your life - my comment is only intended as a second perspective on a real serious issue).

Depression has certain criteria, for example things like you don't enjoy anything, you feel tired all the time, you consider that you shouldn't live, and so on. I had a mild depression, and I know this is not it. I am happy, I like to meet people from time to time, etc.

It's not addiction either - I spend my days on the Internet (or in computer games) a lot, but if I had to spend a week without it, it wouldn't be a problem. I don't have to be connected 24x7 either. I also sometimes abandon the game for no reason.

It's really just you don't feel so motivated by the things in the real world compared to virtual possibilities. Let me reiterate, I think parent was spot on when he talked about the "artificial Skinner box of instant rewards", and I don't think there is a psychiatric category describing this.

It's not a mental disorder, just like overeating (and being overweight due to that) isn't (usually) a disorder. But yeah, it may be a mental health issue. It's mentally unhealthy behavior, just like eating too much is unhealthy.

"It's an actual chemical imbalance"

It's actually a hypothesis that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance.

I wish more people knew this. The entire "chemical imbalance" shtick is a myth. If you are ever told this, your response should be, "What chemical? What level am I at? What level should I be at?".. But, alas, there is no blood test, or any other kind of test, which can yet determine this. That's not science.

I agree with you, but you are also losing the message.

They are trying to say it's not a matter of willpower that you can just make it go away. It's something real and outside your control.

The chemical imbalance part is nonsense, the message it implies is not.

If depression caused by terrible things happening, or loneliness, that is not also outside of your control?

I've had depressed periods, but it was completely understandable given the situation I was in.

I think the whole "chemical imbalance" is an easy fix, rather than trying to fix society, or the situation they are in. It's quick and easy to give pills rather than fix a life.

Now i'm sure they're are actual medical causes for depression, but I think its overused.

Obviously there is depression caused by events, that type is "easy" to fix because (usually) you can fix the external events, or at least talk about them and come to terms with them.

But there is also depression caused by nothing whatsoever. Nothing detectable anyway.

People tend not to believe it can be possible, until they experience it (personally or by talking to someone who is experiencing it).

Talking about it (therapy) does nothing, because there is nothing bad happening to talk about. The person is just depressed for no reason at all, it's like someone pressed a "be depressed" switch in their brain. The person is aware of it, wants it to stop, and has no control over it at all, and no ability to change it.

It's that type that they call "chemical imbalance". The chemical imbalance part is nonsense of course, but the existence of this type of depression is not.

> but I think its overused.

In TV commercials, yes, I agree. But in real life? No, I don't think it's overused.

I think its overused, because its exactly that type of depression they tried put on me.

When in reality I was lonely, didn't have much opportunity to socialise etc.

It was only fixed when I got out that situation, basically by chance by getting a introduction into an accepting social circle. I am now very happy.

The highest sucide rates are basically in young men, basically because how society treats them. I don't think its because young men are more prone to chemical imbalances, compared to women or older people. Its because its that stage in life, when men are literally lonely because of the transition from college to work and you can end up isolated and alone.

A myth?

Put yourself in my shoes: Do I believe some Internet commenter without further evidence, or do I believe Robert Sapolsky?

I don't know who Robert Sapolsky is, I admit my ignorance, but you shouldn't believe people just because they are people. You should believe peer reviewed studies instead, regardless of who writes them.

Just saying. Claiming that Robert Sapolsky himself (whoever that is) is more correct than the post you are replying to, without providing citations to (peer reviewed and accepted) studies is nonsensical.

> That's not science.

Science is sometimes harder than a single test.

For example, there's no blood test for autism. There's no blood test for PTSD. But my best friend's brother took years to talk to me, and sometimes still goes into rages; one of my partners would wake up in the middle of the night convinced I was trying to kill her.

Brains, minds, reinforcement learning systems, are complicated. By entirely abstract mechanisms they can be rewired to beautiful and terrible extremes. I very much doubt that the trauma that induces PTSD depends on any pre-existing biological state to allow PTSD to take hold, nor does PTSD necessarily induce some biological state (other than the biological brain-configuration that it is obviously implemented in). PTSD seems to be the best example of the human mind's ability to learn being exploited in the same way a buffer overflow exploits a browser. Obviously something is there; it's impossible to see someone flashback and deny the condition exists; but will there ever be a blood test for PTSD, or any diagnostic test more sophisticated than something like the DSM?

Psychology is not an easy science. Like physics, it depends on reverse-engineering the rules to a complex system, but that system is the human mind, and unlike physics, which exists only at a single level, to understand the mind, we have to cross levels of abstraction, much like it would be utterly futile to try to understand a program by recording the patterns it activated on the silicon of a CPU. And worse, everybody thinks they're an expert, because everyone has N years of experience dealing with human minds.

It's easy to think that any science should have a nice, clean, reductionist, petri-dish and blood-test approach. But the universe is under no obligation to make things easy. In a sense, psychology is the hardest science, because it is simply so difficult to cross these abstraction boundaries easily.

All this is not relevant to the fact that there is no evidence for depression being caused by a chemical imbalance.

That we can fix it by changing the chemical balance is certainly evidence in support of it being caused by a chemical balance.

Never mind a chemical balance being caused by depression!

Yes, the point of my post was not to argue for the serotonin hypothesis of depression. If you think that, might I suggest that you missed my point, and you should perhaps reread with an eye towards absorbing novel information and viewpoints rather than trying to classify literally everything as either on a FOR or AGAINST side in a binary argument?

You were arguing that the absence of a blood test doesn't necessarily undermine chemical imbalance theories because of the complexity of the systems involved.

...this is still not my point. I was not addressing chemical imbalance theories at all.

Rather, I was trying to argue that the absence of a blood test doesn't make depression ascientific.

Nobody is saying that depression is ascientific. The context of the thread was that chemical imbalance theories are ascientific.

Yeah. I've experienced the exact same feeling, and had points in my life where I didn't leave my house for months on end. It was depression that was the cause; CBT, anti-depressants (and exercise soon after) helped fix that and now it's no longer a struggle.