I really like the way you phrased "meta-suffering" as a term for the many cognitive self-defeating cognitions. The "rumination" symptom commonly observed in people with mood and anxiety disorders (a.k.a "dwelling") seems to be a related condition. Some Buddhists call it addiction, or attachment, to suffering.
The diathesis-stress model is a my favorite way to analyze to mental illness, including depression. In other words, I think depression is a heritable, biological phenomenon and the correlated cognitive biases create a feedback cycle - especially when you factor in the influence of environment and life experience. The cognitive biases on their own aren't enough to cause a depressive episode, and a depressed person may not hold these same biases when their condition subsides for a period.
That being said, cognitive biases accompanying depression have been studied quite a bit. This would save you the trouble of going through an IRB to create your own study, Shannon ; ) You could always do a meta-analysis, though!
Based on Beck's Cognitive Model, 6 primary biases emerge in depression/cognition literature.
These constructs are not definitive, as ther...
This is the exact opposite of my experience. Mood tracking just makes me focus on how bad I feel. Thinking "this too shall pass" of bad moods and "carpe diem" of good ones makes me go "I know I'm biased the other way, but come on, at least pretend to be consistent". I know low points go away, but I know they'll come back worse so it's even more depressing. I know high points will come back, but I know they'll be weaker each time and that soon my best mood will be my current worst mood. Actually curing the depression is the only thing that helped.
I wasn't sure why this was on topic until I saw the part where you're explaining about how people need to actually track their moods due to them frequently being incorrect about how unhappy they are. Then I had a hindsight bias experience and was like "Wait a minute. This seems so obvious. Why do I need to read a post about it?"
I did recognize this as hindsight bias, but your post might get better ratings from others if that area were written in a way that makes it more obvious that unhappy people are biased toward thinking that they are going to be unhappy. There's probably a name for that. "Appeal to history" or something, or some psychology term.
Then I questioned whether depression was a relevant topic for LessWrong. I naturally have an interest in the topic since I'm a psychology enthusiast, and, knowing that you work with depressed people, I became curious about what you had to say. But I wasn't sure that others here would be interested. Then I remembered that statistic I had heard, that 50% of the population experiences depression at some point. You may want to mention that so people know why this information may be relevant here.
Also, I haven't seen you on for a while. How have you been?
I've just finished a major cycle of analysis and meta-analysis of my cognition in preparation for a proposed series on self-hacking in the face of mental illness, and I have reason to believe that the primary proximal cause for my depression is that I no longer want to become stronger - I only want to want to become stronger.
The reasons for this are many. Agency is hard. But, the actual process, at its proximal end, is rather easy to map: I want to want to become stronger. Becoming stronger is hard. I therefore want to believe that I'm doing something hard...
Try monitoring your moods for awhile and get a baseline for what your moods actually are.
This suggestion needs to be more specific. Otherwise, people will just say, "well, when I thought about my mood over the past week, it wasn't so great," or "I already know what my mood is like."
I found this app more-or-less at random. It has the advantage that the source code is on github so you can customize it to meet your specific needs.
Also, this article needs some citations. Like, any.
Also, this article needs some citations. Like, any.
I'm not sure how including citations would improve this article. It's based on a personal experience. If the author had gone out and done a bunch of research, chosen a depression-relieving method based on those already studied, tried it, and then written about it, it would have made sense to include citations to the original research. But at this point, with the bottom line already written, looking up a couple of articles on depression just to have citations doesn't add anything to the presentation.
Hm, looks to me like you committed the noncentral fallacy twice. "Scientific evidence"--evidence can still be evidence without being "scientific". "Quackery"--yeah, there are people who scam others with fake medical advice with little regard to the others' actual health. That doesn't mean that all medical advice from non-doctors should be disregarded. For example, I resolved a long-standing repetitive strain injury thanks to this guy. If I decided to disregard his advice because he wasn't a doctor, I'd probably still be controlling my computer using voice recognition (did this for almost a year and it seriously sucked).
If you work with people who didn't find the standard interventions helpful, and they find your assistance helpful, that doesn't mean your thing works better - it means it works better on a group filtered for finding standard interventions unhelpful.
As the article I linked points out, the actual penetration of science-based psychotherapy even among professionals is low, and certainly it was even lower one decade ago. Hence, your experience is far from surprising.
However, the proper course of action is to push for science-based psychotherapy, not to go for DIY or New Age ("cutting edge Buddhist related philosophies") systems that have possibly even less scientific support than mainstream methods.
Sure, you have experience that your method works. Freud had experience that his psychoanalysis worked. So did Jung. And Moniz and Freeman with their lobotomy. They even got testimonials and Moniz even won a Nobel Prize. But these practices were not supported by scientific evidence, and they ultimately proved ineffective and, in the case of lobotomy, actively harmful.
Beware of sponteneous regression (1/3 of mental health patients get better even without therapy), the placebo effect and the confirmation bias (researchers, even professional scientists, tend to rememeber favorable outcomes and forget unfavorable ones). There is a good reason why medical experimental protocols are so strict and complex.
Sorry about the ranting, rough night.
No problem, best wishes.
Thanks for writing this. It doesn't seem to be something I can work with at the moment-- my self-attacks are too hair-triggered-- but it seems generally true and sensible. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more upvotes.
I think I noticed that, holding ‘objective’ (FLOABW) reasons to get sad constant, the less I have eaten recently the more likely I am to get sad. Has anyone experienced the same?
FLOABW
It's "For Lack Of A Better Word", for those like me who haven't encountered it before.
Thanks for this. Although I don't suffer from depression, the comments about meta-suffering really resonate with me. I think (this is unverified as of yet) that my life can be improved by getting rid of meta-suffering.
I wrote this for the Positive Vector website awhile back and lots of people have found it valuable, so I want to share it with the Less Wrong community as well. I think this applies to most people - meta suffering thing is something I see everywhere, even though it is most prominent with people who have depression. This is based on my experience with working with depressed people and with studying Buddhism, especially Big Mind. Enjoy!
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The roots of suffering are often deep. But not all of the suffering happens at the root. A lot of the suffering that people experience is “meta” suffering. Meta suffering is when you suffer because you are distressed that you are suffering. You are feeling depressed and hopeless, and there is a part of you that genuinely fears that it will never end. That you will feel this way forever. This fear of the suffering persisting can cause you much more suffering than whatever started your suffering. And it can last much longer. At some point days later, you might think to yourself about how terrible that initial suffering was, and feel fear and suffering about the possibility of it coming back.
Many people suffer as much or more from meta-suffering than suffering that comes from physical or situational sources!
The good news is that meta suffering is much easier to fix than deeper forms of suffering.
One thing you can do is to collect data* in order to develop an accurate model of how often you actually feel bad. Try monitoring your moods for awhile and get a baseline for what your moods actually are. At least half of the people who have suffered from major depression who have done this and spoken with me about it have been surprised to find that they often feel better than their self-perception when they assess their mood at random points throughout the day.
Regardless of what your default mood state or range is, once you know what it is, you are likely to feel less fear. You can look at what your mood historically does over time, and feel more confidence that this is what it will do in the future. When you are in the state of despair and wondering if it will last forever, odds are that it won’t.
Another extremely powerful technique for dealing with meta-suffering is accepting that you are suffering. The meta suffering is suffering because you really want to change your state and are not successful. If you can just be with the state and not making yourself bad or wrong for being in that state, then all you have to deal with is the base state of suffering, which will be less intense and last less long than if you tack on that extra meta layer.
The ironic thing is that just by thinking that thought, if you are prone to depression, you will probably notice yourself meta suffering and then feel guilt or shame about it. If this happens, my advice is to take it to the next level – feel compassion and acceptance for your meta-meta-suffering.
As you make this a practice, and feel acceptance and compassion for your suffering, you will feel more freedom from the meta level, and have more resources to work with the underlying suffering or depression.
Another common way in which meta suffering sabotages people with depression is for them to feel depression as soon as they start feeling good. The story that some people have is that it is futile to think that they might feel so good in the future, and it is better not to get their hopes up and have them crushed. I encourage the person with this meta suffering story to assure the meta suffering part that they do not have obligation to feel good in the future. Feeling good in the present is of value, for however long it lasts, and that is worth appreciating and a good thing.
Desiring more pleasant states is great. Working to create those states is fabulous.
Feeling guilt, shame, depression, or other suffering because of not liking your current state or projected future state does not contribute to your feeling better, and is something that is pretty purely good to release.