They really don't know what causes anxiety, or clinical depression. The are having a horrid time finding the true cause of these ailments. If anyone is seeing a MD who claims to know what causes depression and anxiety see someone else. It gotten so disappointing in the research community; very few companies are actively even looking for the root cause to these horrid diseases. So many people took these tri, and hetrocyclic drugs for depression, and if they worked--it was most likely placebo. Yes--panic attacks, and generalized anxiety respond to benzodiazepines most of the time, but hey are addictive, and no researcher who is smart would Not claim to know how they work. I wish you well.

I truly believe the best medicine is knowing you are going to get better. The placebo effect is sometimes stronger than any antibiotic. I sometimes believe the placebo effect is the only verifiable existence of God? When I am sick, I do a little research on the Internet, but have found it's better to just believe the medicine will work. Oh yea, I try to chose my doctors well--Board Certified who actually tried to keep current after years of practice.

True in spirit, but untrue definitionally. The thing is, the psychiatric profession still basically subscribes to a Behaviorist theory of mind when it comes to treating neurological problems. There's no consideration of what's going on in your head when you have a neurological malady; your head is a black box, where drugs go in, and altered behaviors sometimes come out. "Clinical depression" isn't the name of a specific thing that we know goes on in the brain (in fact, it seems to be a whole cluster of things); rather, clinical depression is "the thing which taking an SSRI usually makes lessen." When a psychiatrist says you may be clinically depressed, what they're really saying is, "you have symptoms that may be manageable by the effects of this or that drug." They have no idea whether they're treating the root cause, or just masking it, and a lot of them don't care. They just want to see your behavior alter, like a rat given a swim test.

And really, thinking of things like SSRIs as "medicine" is part of the problem. SSRIs and the like are crutches--given to you to lessen the symptoms of a problem enough for it to stop being overwhelming, so that you can actually manage to make it to the CBT-practicing therapist every day, have the energy to find the the better job to get away from your horrible boss, etc. I wrote more on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347620

(P.S.: In this case, though, if I might be a bit more pedantic: I didn't say that all those maladies in my post were caused by those imbalances. I said that inducing those imbalances, in the way that Lyme disease does, will mimic the symptoms of those maladies. Clinical depression may not be "just" a serotonin imbalance--but inducing "just" a serotonin imbalance tends to produce the symptoms of clinical depression. ;)

(P.P.S.: note that I never used the word "disease" or "illness" once. See my link above--these words don't apply to things like nearsightedness, so they don't really apply to the kind of problems neurological imbalances manifest as, either.)

On a more relevant note, there has been more and more fMRI work on identifying the actual issues within the brain. I know less about unipolar depression, but some results have shown that bipolar patients actually have slightly different brain structures and vastly different neural activity during an episode. Science is actually working on figuring out the black box mind-thing, and hopefully it'll keep getting better at it. Treatments just have to slowly catch up.

(Edited: grammar/spelling, due to writing on a tablet.)

Depression is, as we know, very deadly. The method it uses to kill is to destroy happiness, self-worth and motivation. This could mean a person with depression feels helpless, feels deserving of the ill feeling and could also have zero motivation to help themselves. With these symptoms lessened, it can give suffers the room they need, so to speak, to identify and overcome all of the issues in their lives.

We say depression has no clear root cause but that makes a lot of sense. A person can only have so many little negative experiences before every single experience looks negative. If dozens of insignificant but still negative events happen in my life, I can bet my mood won't be that great and I will have a hard time pin-pointing exactly what's making me feel this way. Sometimes even big negative issues which you believe you have overcome could still have left latent habits which can wreak havoc on your mood.

That's my depression. I'm also one of the lucky ones that SSRI's help -- I use them the same way you would a band-aid; I take them for a couple of months, and the episode passes as long as I keep up my job, exercise, healthy sex and social life.

All of this (and CBT) lets me manage my depression... but it's just that, MY depression, how my symptoms manifest, how I can fix it, etc.

Good post.

When it comes to depression, the primary factor isn't really a "placebo effect". It's true that most of the treatments do no better than a fake pill, but they also do no better than doing nothing at all and just waiting.

Moods have cycles. You tend to go to the doctor for treatment when your mood is UNUSUALLY BAD. Some random time later, you'll probably feel a lot better. Maybe the seasons will change and you'll get more sunlight, or things will get better at work, or just...random fluctuation.

If at your MOST DEPRESSED you go see a doctor who believes in treating depression with pills, he'll assign treatment A. You try that a while; it doesn't help. So he has you switch to treatment B. Still depressed. Treatment C. Now you start to feel better. A believer in medicine takes that to mean "Drugs A and B don't work for you, but C cured your depression!" But you were certain to be taking SOMETHING when you got better, so maybe it's just a coincidence that you were taking C at the time that happened.

...they'd solve problems in entirely different ways, out of necessity for not recognizing patterns as easily. And then you can reflect that intuition to understand what it would be like to be more intelligent than you are: someone who would also solve problems in different ways, for seeing their structure more easily...

Let me unpack this a bit; it annoys me to end that every person depending on his/her coterie ( think technology coteries, humanities coteries, political/legal coteries etc) seems to nourish his/her own definition of what intelligence is and how - if at all - it can be measured and quantified on a nice linear scale.

Surely we all agree that such a definition and quantification is useful. I hope that is not up to debate. Only the most hyper egalitarians, insisting on the absolute equality of social statuses of all humans, would refute the utility of such quantification.

For instance, most learned, secular and urbane people do not think twice before frowning on religious zealots. Their views and outlook of the world seem like they belong in the stone-age. Whatever their scriptures say or hold, a religious devotee has to suspend the most basic premises of logic and reason to be able to subscribe utterly risible notions of how one ought to conduct his or her life based on preposterous doctrines.

In essence they almost invariably have to belong to a lower order of intelligence (if you set aside the atypical cases of candidates who are esteemed scholars, scientists and technologists, who are nevertheless fervently religious, of whom we can be sure there are more than a handful).

Surely we should be able to define - using certain parameters whatever those are - and quantify this "lower order of intelligence" in an objective manner.

After all we just cannot describe their quantum of intelligence through purely the notions - as moronic those notions might be - they subscribe to. There has to be an objective assessment.

Since such a quantification is useful - for purposes of classification or otherwise - what then is the most current (more or less universal) consensus on the measure of intelligence?

Obversely, when defining stupidity, is there no single measure that more or less captures "the congenital lack of capacity for reasoning"? [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupidity#Definition

But I think, in your comment, what you're doing is conflating intelligence with rationality. Raw intelligence doesn't help you to notice when you have an ingrained-but-senseless belief (thus predicting precisely your "candidates who are esteemed scholars, scientists and technologists, who are nevertheless fervently religious".) One of the primary properties of modern religion is its non-falsifiability -- it makes no predictions about your everyday experience you could keep track of to form a sense of "how it's doing." Because of this, a religion can sit comfortably in your mind alongside everything else you "know", and no piece of evidence you run into will ever rub up against it and wear it away.

Noticing that you have beliefs that aren't causally attached to the rest of your experience is a skill which you have to learn explicitly. This set of skills (instrumental rationality) together are a multiplier for the productive output of your intelligence, but they don't make you any more or less intelligent. Really intelligent people might come up with these skills on their own, as meta-patterns that seem to hold between pattern in different disciplines, but most anyone can learn to be more instrumentally rational by being trained in these skills by someone else. You can't learn to be more intelligent. (Though good sleep, exercise, and stimulant drugs all seem to help... at least according to IQ tests.)

It's worth pointing out that most criticisms of IQ tests are that the amount of novelty in the problems is pretty heavily dependent on your cultural background.

One that comes to my mind pretty quickly: after the first test to collect people's "novel" results (the one that'll be used as input for the final score), have them take 2-5 more tests with the same tasks (enough so that the questions are utterly non-novel by the end.) Show them the correct answers for the problems on the test they just did between each session.

Now take the scores from all the tests (including the first one), and fit a curve to them. The second derivative at the point of the first test then (might!) represent the novelty they were experiencing at that point. Now figure out how much extra novelty they experienced compared to an average member of the population, and use that as a coefficient to the final IQ score from the first test.

Actually I find your delineation, quite satisfying an explanation.

However it begs one to ask what good is an impoverished measure of intelligence (IQ) that only computes your ability to recognize and exploit novel patterns, generalized across different domains (word problems, pictures, music), under time pressure if it doesn't so much as envelope the simple ability of a person to observe and verify that certain beliefs he or she holds subscribes to aren't causally attached to the rest of his or her experience

Isn't that simple enough a mental exercise?

Indeed, isn't that also a similarly intelligent exercise that constitutes the ability to recognize consistent patterns of denials and refusals in one's unremitting adherence to a religious faith?

What good is to ascribe intelligence (as in high IQ) to a person if the measure of intelligence is so narrowly defined?

I am left wanting for an explanation as to why the large majority of experts would concoct such an useless gauge of intelligence.

For the sake of pedagogy, instrumental rationality, I am certain, is a very fulfilling piece of terminology. I am also quite certain it is composed of attributes that are not necessarily equivalent to those of intelligence.

However if instrumental rationality is a skill than is not bestowed to you at birth unlike intelligence (from what I derive from your You can't learn to be more intelligent line) then what - in its thinnest scope - does intelligence constitute ?

Although I am not all that perturbed by it, this jargon of instrumental rationality and its neat separation from intelligence seems to have been contrived by theologians in a divinity school somewhere so as to not hurt the sentiments of the religious devotees.

I wouldn't be one bit surprised if also the various contrivances of intelligence - spatial, kinesthetic, rhythmic, linguistic, naturalistic, existential, mathematical, intrapersonal and interpersonal - are also more inventions of convenience than clearly circumscribed goods or measurable quantities.

You are referring to Howard Gardner's popular idea of Multiple Intelligences, which has been roundly criticized for having pretty much zero support. To quote the book,

Consider a thought experiment. Imagine that someone objected to the emphasis given to horsepower (engine power) when evaluating automobiles. They feel that horsepower looms too large in people's thinking. In an attempt to deemphasize horsepower, they then being to term the other features of the car things like "braking horsepower" and "cornering horsepower" and "comfort horsepower". Would such a strategy make people less likely to look to engine power as an indicator of the "goodness" of a car? I think not. [...] Just as calling "all good car things" horsepower would emphasize horsepower, I would argue that calling "all good cognitive things" intelligence will contribute to the deification of MAMBIT [Mental Abilities Measured By Intelligence Tests].

I might go out on a limb at this point and suggest that defining religious people as stupid is not particularly helpful, even operating from your own assumptions as stated in your own definition. Some intelligent people might happen to disagree with your assumptions as well, but I'll leave that argument as well outside the normally appreciated scope of HN discussion.