flâneur

Burdens | Slate Star Codex

slatestarcodex.com · 24,396 words · saved by 1 readers

[Content note: Suicide. May be guilt-inducing for people who feel like burdens. All patient characteristics have been heavily obfuscated to protect confidentiality.] The DSM lists nine criteria for major depressive disorder, of which the seventh is “feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt”. There are a lot of dumb diagnostic debates over which criteria are “more important” or “more fundamental”, and for me there’s always been something special about criterion seven. People get depressed over all sorts of things. But when they’re actively suicidal, the people who aren’t just gesturing for help but totally set on it, they always say one thing: “I feel like I’m a burden”. Depression is in part a disease of distorted cognitions, a failure of rationality. I had one patient who worked for GM, very smart guy, invented a lot of safety features for cars. He was probably actively saving a bunch of people’s lives every time he checked in at the office, and he still felt like

Burdens | Slate Star Codex Home About / Top Posts Archives Top Posts Comments Feed RSS Feed Slate Star Codex Blogroll Economics Artir Kel Bryan Caplan David Friedman Pseudoerasmus Scott Sumner Tyler Cowen Effective Altruism 80000 Hours Blog Effective Altruism Forum GiveWell Blog Rationality Alyssa Vance Beeminder Elizabeth Van Nostrand Gwern Branwen Jacob Falkovich Jeff Kaufman Katja Grace Kelsey Piper Less Wrong Paul Christiano Robin Hanson Sarah Constantin Zack Davis Zvi Mowshowitz Science Andrew Gelman Greg Cochran Michael Caton Razib Khan Scott Aaronson Stephan Guyenet Steve Hsu SSC Elsewh

related reading