There is another, third perspective one can have on this.
One can both find good reasons and explanations for his behaviour, and at the same time his choices can be judged harshly.
I feel we have to heed the complexity of life and the situations people end in.
Each of us has different tendencies. Some are by nature straight shooters. Others again, overthink a situation and lack the cognitive or emotional intelligence to always arrive at the perfect answer for a situation we are in.
Both things can be true:
Him making a choice that seems inevitable for the situation he is in.
Also can be true, him wasting the life of another person (his wife) and him not seeing it this way. This is a bad deed from her perspective and can remain so.
But consider, for example, that he probably resented her and she was proxy for society’s pressure to confirm. Or, he thought that he gave her what she wanted (kids) and provided for them. In his eyes he paid his dues and got nothing out of it.
He might have realised that if he doesn’t get those small escapes (the affairs), he might not make it. You won’t know the make up of his reward system and his emotional make up.
When she wanted the divorce, his coping behaviours became habit. And he might not have been able to see a way out, or not have had the strength to change his reward seeking habits.
We also don’t exactly hear how he died in detail.
Im am not excusing him, but I am trying to be devil’s advocate to your absolutist stance, to provide a counterweight.
When the wife wanted to divorce, the dad recruited his mother-in-law to convince the wife to stay on the marriage.
He was selfishly hiding information and making lifelong decisions for everyone because "he knew best."
The dad died of a heart attack. His family was too ignorant to know a quick drive to the hospital was the best action. They didn't know because the 911 operator told them to wait for the ambulance (for legal reasons, they will not tell you to rush to the hospital. Imagine the liability of a wreck).
There's no need to play devil's advocate. Private decisions were made, and we all have the privilege of reading about the outcome. It gives us much to consider, and not much else.
The problem with suicidal depression is that if someone has created the thought pattern that death is best, then removing the symptoms of depression (lethargy, lack of energy, no willpower) now gives the person the ability to actually follow through with the act.
Medications almost always target symptoms and never address root causes.
This is a good thing to know, but should also be noted that the same thing can happen with simply naturally recovering from a depressive episode.
The phenomenon should not be considered a reason to not medicate (which I don’t think you are implying, but some may take that as the conclusion). Instead it’s definitely something important to explicitly make people aware of.
Depression or the feeling so much mental agony that the idea of escaping with death becomes comforting, is a signal that something is wrong.
Realizing this has been important with weathering my own occasional dealings with severe[0]depression, once I realize “something is wrong”, I can start the annoyingly slow process of trial and error making changes to correct things. This turns depression from “how reality is” into “this is just feedback on my body’s state”. It turns things getting worse into either a “this is either a transient state or the wrong solution”.
[0] Which I define as the point where any passive ideation (fantasies of dying) starts to enter the gradient of becoming involuntary. As opposed to regular negative thoughts which can (and should) be brushed away as easily as a fly landing on me. Curiously, once I noticed it also affected my ability to experience color. While I could technically see colors, it was like have a mental partial greyscale filter because there was no beauty in it, color was just a meaningless detail.
A sudden improvement in mood is one of the key warning signs for suicide. Often it's genuinely just a sudden improvement, but sometimes it is a byproduct of the relief people experience when they commit to ending their life. If you know someone who is severely depressed, you should watch them very carefully if they suddenly seem carefree.
>once I noticed it also affected my ability to experience color
A small amount of evidence does support the notion that depressed people literally see the world as being less vibrant.
This is what my psychiatrist more or less warned me about when I went on medication; that a lot of people who are suicidal lack the energy and ability to plan their suicide, and medications can sometimes undo those particular symptoms and people manage to end themselves.
I'm not sure what kinds of studies have been done about it, but I've had a few therapists same similar ideas. If it's not a studied phenomenon, then it has folks that believe it exists.
I'd like to make the point that even if this does occur, it doesn't mean, "therefore this medication shouldn't be used/is worse than doing nothing," just that awareness and caution is needed.
I went through a frankly terrible few months on my current meds because they removed the emotional numbness before removing the bad feelings. However, once that was over they effectively gave me my life back after 10+ years of continual exhaustion and brain fog.
This theory is a science-free zone. It seems far more likely that the drug induced sudden, overwhelming suicidal thoughts than someone said "I feel the best I've ever felt and life is looking up. I think I'll kill myself and make all the good feelings go away".
Furthermore, if the latter were true, it would be an indication that depression was a symptom rather than a cause and the psychiatrist misdiagnosed and improperly treated the patient.
EDIT - I ask because the only results I get when searching are a Harvard article debunking it. I'd rather hear the opinion of someone that actually believes in it before I read about why it's all malarky. I believe in arguing against the best version of someones argument.
It was just the best “every man” link I could provide for understanding how efficacy of toxin-clearing (toxicity) could be related to depression, other struggles with homeostasis.
I’m not quite following the previous conversation here, but your comment brings to mind that one theory of a possible “function” of depression, is as a “sickness behavior” to help isolate a sick animal from others to protect the group. A sheep or cow getting sick and going off on its own is a common thing.
I’m not sure if it has a technical name or if it’s been rigorously studied, but it’s a common observation which even I’ve seen (and reported to growers I work for).
> but your comment brings to mind that one theory of a possible “function” of depression, is as a “sickness behavior” to help isolate a sick animal from others to protect the group. A sheep or cow getting sick and going off on its own is a common thing
It's one explanation of the phenomenon. I'm not remotely convinced by it, but that doesn't mean I think it's untrue.
What I do think we can conclude is that we have no evidence depression is caused by infection. (Singularly and universally, as OP implies.) With higher confidence I believe I can conclude that interrogating chatbots designed to keep your attention is a poor way to resolve this.
> we have no evidence depression is caused by infection
Besides talking to patients and reading case files.
You can wait another decade or three for someone to spend the money on a specific study that meets your individual criteria (I'm sure very high), for doing obvious things like:
1.) Treating known infections, testing for others,
and
2.) Addressing nutritional gaps, as well as tracking circadian/endocrine, and nervous symptoms (which often intertwine with depression symptoms!)
but I will not wait.
I'd prefer to no longer be depressed, and/or unwell.
So I'll do the obvious things – even if they're not obvious to you, yet.
Stopping back in, because I unironically came across someone's almost-surely AI assisted summary that does a better job than I have summarizing the processes being discussed:
==
===
Why the Sick Get Sicker
Most people think illness progresses because of pathogens, toxins, or genetics — but the deeper truth is that tension, stress, and breathing patterns control the trajectory of health more than anything else.
When the body is stressed, the breath changes.
When the breath changes, the lymph stagnates.
When the lymph stagnates, toxins accumulate.
When toxins accumulate, inflammation accelerates.
And that is how sick becomes sicker.
Here’s the breakdown:
1. Stress Immediately Changes Your Breathing Pattern
When the nervous system senses stress — emotional, physical, mental, or energetic — breathing becomes:
• shallow
• rapid
• high in the chest
• tight in the ribs
• limited in diaphragm expansion
This cuts oxygen supply, raises cortisol, and signals the body to brace.
Bracing = stagnation.
2. Your Breath Controls Your Lymphatic System
The lymphatic system is the body’s drainage system, and it has no pump of its own.
It relies entirely on:
• diaphragmatic breathing
• muscle movement
• fascia softness
• a calm nervous system
Shallow breathing = no diaphragm movement.
No diaphragm movement = lymph stagnation.
When lymph stagnates:
• waste can’t drain
• toxins recirculate
• inflammation builds
• swelling increases
• the immune system gets overwhelmed
This is why people in long-term stress decline rapidly.
You've contributed nothing curious to this thread whatsoever, just threw some doubt in, then buggered off during the replies – more or less communicating "stuff I can't directly or completely refute is AI slop".
That's....disappointing.
I saw this textpost made by someone else, and literally thought of you, JumpCrisscross.
But is the only true cure to the suffering. We’d have to undergo a massive reorganization of society (and upset a few hefty profit margins) to prioritize that, so we settle for the messy symptom management we have.
That story doesn’t work for people with depression who otherwise have very good lives.
I grew up in a stable household with a loving family and both parents present and supportive. I’ve never had financial hardship, either as a kid depending on my parents to provide or as an adult providing for myself and family. I did very well in school, had plenty of friends, never had enemies, never got bullied or even talked bad about in social circles (so far as I know…). I have no traumatic memories.
I could go on and on, but despite having a virtually perfect life on paper, I have always struggled with depression and suicidal ideation. It wasn’t until my wife sat down and forced me to talk to a psychiatrist and start medication that those problems actually largely went away.
In other words, I don’t think there’s a metaphorical “cow” that could have helped me. It’s annoying we don’t understand what causes depression or how antidepressants help, and their side effects suck. But for some of us, it’s literally life saving in a way nothing else has ever been.
First of all, I want to write that I am glad you found something that worked so that you are able to remain here with us.
Though, I am curious about the, "otherwise have very good lives" part.
Whose definition are you using? It seems the criteria you laid out fits a "very good life" in a sociological sense -- very important, sure. You could very well have the same definition, and perhaps that is what I am trying to ask. Would you say you were satisfied in life? Despite having a good upbringing, were you (prior to medication) content or happy?
I am by no means trying to change your opinion nor invalidate your experiences. I just struggle to understand how that can be true.
As someone that has suffered with deep depressive bouts many times over, I just cannot subscribe to the idea that depression is inherently some sort of disorder of the brain. In fact, I am in the midst of another bout now. One that's lasted about 3 or so years.
To me, I have always considered emotions/states like depression and anxiety to be signals. A warning that something in one's current environment is wrong -- even if consciously not known or difficult to observe. And if anyone is curious, I have analyzed this for myself, and I believe the etiology of my issues are directly linked to my circumstances/environment.
> I don’t think there’s a metaphorical “cow” that could have helped me.
The smart-ass in me can't help but suggest that maybe medication was your cow?
To be honest, I've never really thought about it... I suppose I mean in both a sociological and self fulfillment way.
> Would you say you were satisfied in life? Despite having a good upbringing, were you (prior to medication) content or happy?
I would say "yes" overall. Aside from the depression (typically manifesting as a week or two of me emotionally spiraling down to deep dark places every month or so), I was very happy and satisfied. That's what makes the depression so annoying for me. It makes no sense compared to my other aspects of life.
> In fact, I am in the midst of another bout now. One that's lasted about 3 or so years.
*fist bump*
> To me, I have always considered emotions/states like depression and anxiety to be signals. A warning that something in one's current environment is wrong -- even if consciously not known or difficult to observe. And if anyone is curious, I have analyzed this for myself, and I believe the etiology of my issues are directly linked to my circumstances/environment.
I think that's a great hypothesis so long as it's not a blanket applied to everyone (which I don't think you're doing, to be clear; I mention this only because it is what motivated my original response to the other commenter).
I don't want to go into private details of family members without their permission, but I will say that given the pervasive depression in my family and mental health issues like schizophrenia and bipolar disorders (neither of which I have, thank goodness), I feel like there's something biologically... wrong (for lack of a better word?)... with us, particularly since you can easily trace this through my mother's side.
> The smart-ass in me can't help but suggest that maybe medication was your cow?
Ha fair. I interpreted the story to be about depression being a symptom of your situation (job, health, etc.) and if you just fixed that then there's no need for medication. That definitely makes sense in some (many? most?) situations. But not all, unfortunately.
Take my baseless speculation for what it's worth, but could it be that you were depressed because your life was too easy? We humans are meant to struggle through adversity. Can you really appreciate your financial security if you've never faced financial insecurity, or appreciate companionship if you've never experienced loneliness?
It’s a reasonable question but I doubt it. We weren’t affluent at all and I worked my butt off for everything. And that’s good, because I agree that if things are too easy it turns into a curse.
> I don’t think there’s a metaphorical “cow” that could have helped me.
The medication is the cow for you. In this story your support system figured out what would work best for you, which was medication, and facilitated that.
It’s a story about a doctor that serves patients in rural Cambodia. Help from the local community would look different in Borey Peng Huoth, for example.
The story in the article that is being discussed here does not say that the doctor was explicitly not a member of the community that he served. You would have to just sort of make that part up and then come up with an explanation for how the doctor even knows that story if he wasn’t part of that community.
The doctor in the story exists in pretty recent history, which you would call modernity. If for some reason you’re using “modernity” as a way to say “systemic alienation of the individual” rather than “modernity” meaning “happening in the modern world” then yes, by your definition of that word, it is indeed a story about “modernity” being to blame for poor treatment for depression.
Part of the diagnosis procedure for major depressive disorder is ruling out physical conditions that can cause similar symptoms. No one is going to miss that the guy had his leg blown off.
I mean sometimes. For me it was multivariate for sure. Biggest problem - wife and kid. Helped a ton. My specific wife, really. I doubt someone else would have helped me. I had a lot of self defeating thought patterns she helped me fix.
My understanding is that the optimal scenario is taking an SSRI in combination with therapy. The SSRI adds flexibility for the brain to respond to therapy and envisage new possibilities. If you don't include therapy, you've just established a new baseline to habituate to.
This is true overall, but it only works for a limited set of patients. It's pretty likely that what we're calling depression is a different set of diseases that manifest with common symptoms, and SSRIs + therapy work wonders for some variants, but not others.
In fact, we actually do know this to be the case already: bipolar disorder also manifests with the same symptoms as depression for some time, and SSRIs + therapy are definitely not enough to treat bipolar disorder. Most likely there are other similar diseases that present with depressive symptoms that we have yet to identify distinctly and don't know how to treat effectively.
Yup. Depression medication can significantly help the emotional symptoms, but that takes longer to be effective.
I’m bipolar and a lot of the medication I take does not become fully effective for months. For me, my medication slowly became more effective over years as my brain no longer had to compensate for hardware problems.
I also had a close family member who committed suicide shortly after going on Prozac -- this also happened nearly 30 years ago. His young son later went on Prozac himself (several months after his fathers suicide) and immediately started demonstrating bizarre disinhibited anti-social behavior (e.g., damaging property, stealing from friends, etc). He was immediately yanked off Prozac when he started articulating his own thoughts of suicide. The bizarre anti-social behavior improved after discontinuing Prozac.
For some people, Prozac is a very dangerous drug. It is fully deserving of its FDA black label warning (which it didn't have 30 years ago).
Suicidal ideation is a risk for many CNS drugs, and not unique to Prozac as far as I know. But yes this is a major risk factor that needs to be taken in account before such kind of treatments.
Isn't that a possibility with a lot of drugs though? I think it depends on the rate and not a "does or does not" type of questions. Now if the drug doesn't help more than a placebo that's clearly a huge negative, but if it has a high rate of success vs placebo then they will make adjustments and watch out for the side-effect (of course) letting patients know it's a possibility and to report if it starts happening.
The efficacy of anti-depressants has been consistently over-inflated, so generations were poisoned with side-effects: suicidal ideation, homicidal tendencies, etc.
Results: Meta-analyses of FDA trials suggest that antidepressants are only marginally efficacious compared to placebos and document profound publication bias that inflates their apparent efficacy. These meta-analyses also document a second form of bias in which researchers fail to report the negative results for the pre-specified primary outcome measure submitted to the FDA, while highlighting in published studies positive results from a secondary or even a new measure as though it was their primary measure of interest. The STARD analysis found that the effectiveness of antidepressant therapies was probably even lower than the modest one reported by the study authors with an apparent progressively increasing dropout rate across each study phase.*
But of course, in the case of this article the OP is presenting just their side of the story. It doesn’t present the other side of the story where companies rushed dangerous products to market with no oversight which made the regulations necessary.
They find that $27 million in regulatory cost is a huge burden.
But I think if their product is successful it seems like it could be the kind of thing that a large percentage of semi trucks install.
If even 10% of semi trucks purchase the product, $27 million is a drop in the bucket.
Instead of bitching at the world over regulatory costs, OP should bitch as his investors for not being generous enough. Or maybe his investors should be firing him for failing to account for regulatory cost and time.
And all this bitching is happening despite the fact that he was successful in having the regulatory agent expedite the process. 14 months to get a brand new instrument of this sort approved doesn’t seem crazy to me. It seems quite in line with the estimated time needed for a company like Toyota to crash test and certify a new vehicle model with the various emissions and safety agencies.
If OP would like to move faster they need to get out of the sort of industry that makes products that can very easily kill people.
The parent comment is talking about outsourced lead battery recycling. What is the middle ground there? I think your very abstract argument about over regulation probably belongs in another thread.
This leads to us asking the deepest question of all: What is the point of our existence. Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand)
This can be answered though, albeit imperfectly. On a more reductionist level, we are the cosmos experiencing itself. Now there are many ways to approach this. But just providing us with the right chemicals to feel pleasure/satisfaction is a step backwards. All the evolution of a human being, just to end up functionally like an amoeba or a bacteria.
So we need to retrace our steps backwards in this thought process.
I could write a long essay on this.
But, to exist in first place, and to keep existing against all the constraints of the universe, is already pretty fucking amazing.
Whether we do all the things we do, just in order to stay alive and keep existing, or if the point is to be the cosmos “experiencing itself”, is pretty much two sides of the same coin.
>Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand)
When you suddenly realize walking down the street that the very high fentanyl zombie is having a better day than you are.
Yeah, you can push the button in your brain that says "You won the game." However, all those buttons were there so you would self-replicate energy efficient compute. Your brain runs on 10 watts after all. It's going to take a while for AI to get there, especially without the capability for efficient self-repair.
Indeed - stick me in my pod and inject those experience chemicals into me, what's the difference? But also, what would be the point? What's the point anyway?
In one scenario every atom's trajectory was destined from the creation of time and we're just sitting in the passenger seat watching. In another, if we do have free will then we control the "real world" underneath - the quantum and particle realms - as if through a UI. In the pod scenario, we are just blobs experiencing chemical reactions through some kind of translation device - but aren't we the same in the other scenarios too?
Good question that probably shouldn’t be downvoted.
A subjective answer is, if you have been there and know this to be real from personal experience.
A more general answer would be, as long as we humans sufficiently interact with reality, we will have a respository of life experience to benchmark against.
Once we cease to do that, and are the product of a life in front of the screen, then we won’t know anymore.
Edit:
This place is relatively close to where I live.
"Good question that probably shouldn’t be downvoted."
The very same question like it is, could be literally repeated under any article and is definitely offtopic as it is a general debate how to spot AI and what are the limits of knowledge. Interesting offtopic, so tolerated here if the debate that follows is interesting, but offtopic nevertheless. More ontopic would have been to state why these concrete pictures seem fake.
Give it a couple of years and no one will be able to fully answer the question. I’m quite sure humanity as a whole will in the near future uncover several articles that are like this in quality and citations but find out they are entirely generated and from then on out we won’t know.
We only know now because generated things still have artifacts. That is slowly changing. If the article was written by an AI right now absolutely cannot be fully known.
Thats why this move is good news for the rest of the world. Our competitive advantage will increase, year after year, albeit from a low level compared to the US.
To add to this, it is even funnier how travel agents undergo training in order to be able to interface with and operate the “machine readable“ APIs for booking flight tickets.
What a paradoxical situation now emerges, where human travel agents still need to train for the machine interface, while AI agents are now being trained to take over the human jobs by getting them to use the consumer interfaces (aka booking websites) available to us.
This is exactly the conversation I had with a colleague of mine. They were excited about how LLMs can help people interact with data and visualize it nicely, but I just had to ask - with as little snark as possible - if this wasn't what a monitor and a UI were already doing? It seems like these LLMs are being used as the cliche "hammer that solves all the problems" where problems didn't even exist. Just because we are excited about how an LLM can chew through formatted API data (which is hard for humans to read) doesn't mean that we didn't already solve this with UIs displaying this data.
I don't know why people want to turn the internet into a turn-based text game. The UI is usually great.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, in terms of signal/noise. LLMs can extract signal from noise (“summarize this fluff-filled 2 page corporate email”) but they can also create a lot of noise around signal (“write me a 2 page email that announces our RTO policy”).
If you’re using LLMs to extract signal, then the information should have been denser/more queryable in the first place. Maybe the UI could have been better, or your boss could have had better communication skills.
If you’re using them to CREATE noise, you need to stop doing that lol.
Most of the uses of LLMs that I see are mostly extracting signal or making noise. The exception to these use cases is making decisions that you don’t care about, and don’t want to make on your own.
I think this is why they’re so useful for programming. When you write a program, you have to specify every single thing about the program, at the level of abstraction of your language/framework. You have to make any decision that can’t be automated. Which ends up being a LOT of decisions. How to break up functions, what you name your variables, do you map/filter or reduce that list, which side of the API do you format the data on, etc. In any given project you might make 100 decisions, but only care about 5 of them. But because it’s a program, you still HAVE to decide on every single thing and write it down.
A lot of this has been automated (garbage collectors remove a whole class of decision making), but some of it can never be. Like maybe you want a landing page that looks vaguely like a skate brand. If you don’t specifically have colors/spacing/fonts all decided on, an LLM can make those decisions for you.
That's a nice way of explaining it. I also feel like some sort of LLM purist by being critical of features that serve only to pollute emails and comms with robotic text not written by an actual person. We will as societies have to come up with a new metric for TL;DR or "this was a perfectly cohesive and concise text", since LLMs have obscured the line.
One can both find good reasons and explanations for his behaviour, and at the same time his choices can be judged harshly.
I feel we have to heed the complexity of life and the situations people end in.
Each of us has different tendencies. Some are by nature straight shooters. Others again, overthink a situation and lack the cognitive or emotional intelligence to always arrive at the perfect answer for a situation we are in.
Both things can be true:
Him making a choice that seems inevitable for the situation he is in.
Also can be true, him wasting the life of another person (his wife) and him not seeing it this way. This is a bad deed from her perspective and can remain so.
But consider, for example, that he probably resented her and she was proxy for society’s pressure to confirm. Or, he thought that he gave her what she wanted (kids) and provided for them. In his eyes he paid his dues and got nothing out of it.
He might have realised that if he doesn’t get those small escapes (the affairs), he might not make it. You won’t know the make up of his reward system and his emotional make up.
When she wanted the divorce, his coping behaviours became habit. And he might not have been able to see a way out, or not have had the strength to change his reward seeking habits.
We also don’t exactly hear how he died in detail.
Im am not excusing him, but I am trying to be devil’s advocate to your absolutist stance, to provide a counterweight.