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Firstly, thank you.

> For example, calling "how long do mice swim before giving up if you chuck them into a tank of water" is roughly equated to "amount of depression" (this is oversimplified a bit; you correlate a bunch of those measures etc. but still a lot of very weak signals).

Do I understand this? A purely reductionist view of my understanding: this is quantified as "the amount of will to live"? If my understanding is proper, how do you measure this without killing people? I grok that it is an extreme example, I am attempting to glean applicability of such an experiment to humans.

> And even the human black-box stuff in the DSM manuals admits a lot of different subtypes, lots of different and sometimes opposite symptom clusters, etc. It is entirely possible that mechanistically "depression" is a diverse group of mechanisms all boxed up into the most familiar mainstream concept/word.

Totally unrelated, but wife is an LCSW and I've glanced at the DSM. I've become convinced that book is near entirely for insurance purposes, similar to the ICD-10.

ICD-10: W220.2XD: Walked into lamppost, subsequent encounter.



> Do I understand this? A purely reductionist view of my understanding: this is quantified as "the amount of will to live"? If my understanding is proper, how do you measure this without killing people? I grok that it is an extreme example, I am attempting to glean applicability of such an experiment to humans.

I mean in this is one model and typically a "result" means several models are all consistent with the researcher's mental model of the thing. But yes, the forced swim test is one measure of "will to live" and it's treated as that because of similarities to "that which we call 'depression'" or whatever

It is better than nothing, unless one takes it too seriously.

[0] mice float, they don't drown when they give up, assuming you take them out quickly enough [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4401172/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3353513/




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