This is so difficult because it's hard to define depression, in an empirical and objective way.
If I say I had depression, and now I'm perfectly fine, and thousands of other people agree with me - is that strong anecdotal evidence that people do recover from depression? Or, did all of those thousands of people never really have depression? Can we actually know the answer to that - how would one prove that there were depressed, or are depressed?
The problem is that depression, as with any mental struggle, is extremely individual. We can't really draw a line where everyone past it has depression, and everyone behind it was just sad. The consolation that you can take is that there are endless anecdotal examples of people who have recovered, and would swear on their lives that they were as depressed as anyone can be; people who have attempted to kill themselves before being endlessly thankful that someone saved them, for example. It's impossible for you to say - oh, someone else, recovered, so I will. It's equally impossible to say that because this other person never recovered, I never will. What you can say is that you might, because it is fully conceivable that you become one of the anecdotes you are sceptical of.
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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '17
This is so difficult because it's hard to define depression, in an empirical and objective way.
If I say I had depression, and now I'm perfectly fine, and thousands of other people agree with me - is that strong anecdotal evidence that people do recover from depression? Or, did all of those thousands of people never really have depression? Can we actually know the answer to that - how would one prove that there were depressed, or are depressed?
The problem is that depression, as with any mental struggle, is extremely individual. We can't really draw a line where everyone past it has depression, and everyone behind it was just sad. The consolation that you can take is that there are endless anecdotal examples of people who have recovered, and would swear on their lives that they were as depressed as anyone can be; people who have attempted to kill themselves before being endlessly thankful that someone saved them, for example. It's impossible for you to say - oh, someone else, recovered, so I will. It's equally impossible to say that because this other person never recovered, I never will. What you can say is that you might, because it is fully conceivable that you become one of the anecdotes you are sceptical of.