Tea at Trianon: To Overcome Depression

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

To Overcome Depression

From Psychology Today:

Compared to others, people with depression often make fewer positive interpretation biases (e.g., failing to interpret a smile as a sign of romantic interest) but more frequent negative interpretation biases (e.g., interpreting a frown as a sure sign of disapproval and rejection).

The mechanisms behind the interpretation biases in depression likely involve higher-order cognitive processes, which naturally rely on more basic cognitive processes like attention, working memory (i.e. short-term memory), and long-term memory.

Beck’s schema theory suggests depressed people hold negative self-referential beliefs (e.g., “I am a failure”) in their memories. These negative schemas guide what depressed people attend to, how they interpret ambiguous information, and what they recall. And these reinforce the maladaptive schemas. For instance, depressed people are more likely to interpret a problem as a sign of personal weakness and use it to confirm their negative views of themselves.

Before continuing, some clarifications: Paying attention to potential negative consequences of actions or making negative interpretations are not always dysfunctional and maladaptive. In some situations, pessimism is adaptive, whereas being overly optimistic is maladaptive. In fact, negative thinking could be beneficial when the goal is preparing for contingencies.

What is dysfunctional is less the negative interpretation and more the lack of flexibility in revising the negative interpretation when one should (e.g., when provided with disconfirming evidence). (Read more.)

From Psyche:

People who’ve never been through depression might assume it’s just an extreme form of feeling low. Don’t we all find that our daily activities can sometimes lose their sparkle? Yet, accounts of people with depression point in a different direction. As another person said to the psychologist Dorothy Rowe, recorded in her book The Experience of Depression (1978): ‘I awoke into a different world. It was as though all had changed while I slept: that I awoke not into normal consciousness but into a nightmare.’

Such reports support the idea that depression stands apart from other forms of everyday experience, as the philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe has emphasised in his book Experiences of Depression (2015). Depressed people often say it involves a fundamental shift, like entering a different ‘world’ – a world detached from ordinary reality and other people. Depression seems to be a more totalising kind of experience than some others. Perhaps it is even a distinct state of consciousness, and can, in turn, reveal something about the nature of consciousness itself.

The self-reports of people with depression point to a deep and interesting connection with consciousness. To make sense of this idea, think about the effect of sleeping and dreaming on your mental life, or the experience of emerging from dreamless sleep into wakeful consciousness. In these transitions, our consciousness undergoes a profound structural shift. Consider, for example, how your experience of the passage of time when dreaming diverges from your experience of time when awake: we frequently experience days and weeks passing in a dream in the space of a few waking hours. Similarly, our sense of self and identity is highly malleable in the dream: we sometimes perceive ourselves from the ‘outside’ looking down at our bodies, dream of being someone other than ourselves, or dream of being detached from a body altogether.

While depressed people are not literally in a different world, they are in a different state of consciousness

Similar sorts of structural changes to conscious experience occur after taking psychedelics. Examples include the well-documented phenomenon known as ‘ego dissolution’ – the breakdown and loss of self in its entirety – or the dramatic warping of space in the psychedelic state. In both dreams and psychedelic states, people report robust, wide-ranging alterations that disturb and alter not only their sensory experiences but their conception of themselves and their connection to reality and other people. (Read more.)