The "Chemical Imbalance" hypothesis is extremely simplistic and seems very appealing to believe amongst the HN crowd. Unfortunately the evidence for it has been sorely lacking and within the past couple of decades more psychologists have been advocating for a wholistic understanding of mental illness. That is it has causes which are complex. It is a mix of childhood experiences, relationships, maladapted development and many other individual circumstances.
Try psychodynamic therapy, it works to treat the root causes of depression, not offerring a magic chemical imbalance pill that makes you dissassociate from the root causes of sufferring.
I didn't mention this above, but I've largely solved these problems (this understanding is what I concocted in the process of figuring out how to solve them). For me the root cause is often anxieties and solving those anxieties makes significant progress on solving the depression.
(Also, there is another node in the system worth mentioning: the tendency for "vortexing" ie addictive/obsessive behavior that turns off the brain's analysis / awareness, used as an escape mechanism to avoid contending with a hostile reality. In my case, video game addiction. Vortexing fixes one in the anxious-avoidant state, and realizing one is vortexing, aka, operating in a very small subspace of thought-space, can break out of a depressive spiral. It's a whole thing that I don't know exactly how to put into words, but I feel like I've made lots of progress on it and have the tools to solve it the rest of the way now.)
It's funny your term "vortexing" has an actual name in the world of psychology, it's called dissociation. Anyway well done for realizing these things, it's taken me years of continued therapy to keep making progress on mental health. I only brought it up because I believe everyone can benefit from therapy. :)
The golden standard of depression treatment is long term talk therapy to actually work with the qualitative nature of ones depressive thoughts and sufferring and resolve those feelings, not magic chemical imbalance pills that don't actually work much better than a placebo and cause disassociation from ones real life problems.
Your appeal to reductio ad absurdum here fails because it's not established that SSRIs work by restoring an imbalance. SSRIs are only little more effective than a placebo, suggesting there's something deeper at play with regards to depression. Yes they may be an effective measure in serious cases of depression but they certainly are not a cure and many people do not just turn "normal functioning" after SSRI treatments like you're suggesting. The disease model of depression simply is not true.
> SSRIs are only little more effective than a placebo, suggesting there's something deeper at play with regards to depression.
Alternatively, that there is more than one cause of what we call "depression", and that SSRIs are only effective against some (but not all) of those causes.
"Little more effective than a placebo" conflicts with the large number of patients who claim SSRIs have been a life-changing treatment for them.
One way to reconcile this is by observing that if (just making up numbers here) 50% of people have no effect and 50% have a good effect, the overall effect is going to probably appear small, despite the fact that 50% of the patients had a very real positive effect.
"Little more effective than a placebo" conflicts with the large number of patients who claim SSRIs have been a life-changing treatment for them.
That statement only makes sense if tested against placebos. A lot of folk on placebos make identical claims.
The notion that it's not much better than a placebo is partially true. Short term; placebos and SSRI's aren't that dramatically different. Also, for unknown reasons, the effectiveness of SSRI's is diminishing somewhat (not due to tolerance - diminishing in results given to new patients). This makes it all a bit muddled.
If you pop out a much further distance though - placebos lose their effeciveness faster than SSRI's (and some people on both never lose effectiveness).
The SSRI's are definitely doing something, often something useful. Maybe for some people they are the long-term solution. I'm generally as suspicious of over-generalization in any direction. People are all different so blanket statements aren't likely the most correct.
Something I've heard a lot of clinicians repeat (though I don't know where the statement originates) is something to the effect of: "If you have someone who is terrible depressed - get them on SSRI's because you can't help them if they're dead; and then begin the work of addressing the issues that lead to the depressive states."
Again - a bit of a blanket statement - but probably the best general course of action. Start with staving off the immediate threat, then see if you can work on a solution that doesn't involve medication forever. If you can't you can't and shouldn't get hung up on that, but if you can, you probably should.
Glucosamine is taken a lot by runners as its promoted as a suppliment that helps cartilidge in the knees. Runners are unlikely to be current smokers and more likely to be working their lungs in a healhty way.
> A lot of people don't (and in my opinion, shouldn't) conflate such a primal activity as "sacred". Is it really a good idea to put sex up on a pedestal?
I think people should have a realistic view of what sex is. It certainly is not a mechanical & purely physical act (perhaps thats what you mean by "primal"). Sex represented in porn tends be unrealistic and treats women as objects purely for male gratification, to use as some sort of sexual punching bag and evacuate feelings. Essentially it teaches viewers to dehumanise women and dissassociate from real life.
Stats are showing that women are consuming lots of porn now too.
And I always find the 'dehumanizing' argument amusing, it's like saying that Nine Inch Nails represents all industrial music, or that all 90s rock is represented by Nickelback. If you go out seeking examples of dehumanization the systems are such that that is all you will find. If you seek out homemade videos by real couples happily posting them to Pornhub or Onlyfans, that is also what you will mostly find. If you seek out wild fetish stuff, then that is also what you will mostly find.
This is not the 90s, porn is quite diverse. For every headline out there manufactured to bring outrage to moralists, there are a hundred other stories which are much more benign.
Personally I'd do away with 'mainstream' porn, my inner voyeur likes the homemade stuff too much.
> Stats are showing that women are consuming lots of porn now too.
And that somehow makes porn nice and healthy does it?
> Personally I'd do away with 'mainstream' porn, my inner voyeur likes the homemade stuff too much.
I'm not sure I understand your argument, nor confident you understand mine. Just because a couple make homemade videos together and post them up, it doesn't mean the viewer who is getting sexual gratification has any sort of real connection to the performers. It's complete fantasy, dependant on the human body as solely as means of sexual gratification rather than any wholistic context. Now take that mindset to to the real world as see how maladapted it leaves you. Here in the UK there's an epidemic of highscool aged girls being pressured into sending nude images by boys. Of course porn can't be to blame for all of this, but I'm sure it plays a big part.
I'd also like to point out nothing I'm talking about is related to morality (since you mentioned it). Whatever people want to spend their time doing is up to them. I'm simply making the argument that porn can be harmful and lots of mainstream porn is really focused around turning women into sex objects and outlets for dealing with displaced emotions. I've no doubt that there's something deeper that drives your voyeurism too, maybe inquiring about that might make you pursue something more fulfilling than images on the internet.
Let's stop pretending there are no consequences to porn.
> It was so traumatic .... Lena decided to go back two more times to do more humiliation scenes with same producer. $$$$
I'm not sure if you're trying to imply snarkily that because Lena went back to do more pornography shoots that she is lying about her experience and trauma. But just in case that is what you're implying it's worth me pointing out that repitition is a very common consequence of sufferring a trauma. The mental effects of trauma cause a cycle of trauma re-enactment behaviors.
I think the defense from porn sites would be that you could apply this to a whole range of destructive behaviors, from self-harm, to stealing, to causing trauma in others (in fact this is considered an important factor in essentially all forms of abuse). Yes, people can use porn to destroy themselves. It's not the worst thing people do, by far. There's the occasional story of porn actually helping (you know, because money).
Why should you need to prove that you're doing porn shoots for the right reasons ... and not when buying anything even remotely sharp (which may be used for self-harm), or for private sex acts (so why shouldn't there be limits on buying condoms or lube or ...)?
And yet when we put it in ways that would really make a difference, like requiring when a teacher buys a "barely 18" magazine, the police gets notified. Or, in Europe, when buying or surfing to anything extreme-right (a BIG no-no for anyone in public office in many WW2 participant countries, Germany, France, Belgium, ...). That would be totally unacceptable, and yet would probably protect more people than porn regulations.
And, lastly, porn (and ...) is a way people survive. If you take it away you are taking away people's livelihoods, which will have strong negative consequences for them. Is homelessness better or worse than porn? Because all these "protect women" efforts are a bit like youth care: any careful look at the alternative will make you question if these people have the good of those women at heart.
Read more here: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/why-we-...