Is depression caused by Fun Deficiency Syndrome?

Real science points to lots of conclusions with various amounts of support, including the paradoxically contradictory with very good support for both. What real science does not point to is unsupported and unsupportable hypotheses generated with an eye towards maximizing buzzword content, replacing concepts capable of being operationalized and therefore objectively tested with vapid, vaporous value judgements, pasted together with enough real words to sound at least minimally educated, while managing to insult most of a large population suffering from a clinical syndrome by blaming them for failing to recognize and accept this "one essential" wild assed assertion.

Real journalism doesn't make these kids of idiotic flailing motions either. But somewhere in between rehashing the old and hashing the previously unprinted explorations into 'higher consciousness' (not just drugs, but any thinking capable of escape velocity from planet rationality), excessive juxtapositions of science fiction and science terms as would make a Slashdot editor blush and any reader of anything technical but non-factual feel knowledgeable, and self-enforced selective ignorance relabeled as a liberal editorial (and advertising) policies that allow one to make empty assertions as though valid until questioned, at which point the liberalism kicks in as a defense mechanism but with a smirk that tries to lie its way out of the fact one is being defensive (as if one needs to, right?), we find an old friend not beating but actually riding a dead horse.

RU Sirius, will you PLEASE put that smelly thing down? You make great clown, but even Wavy Gravy will tell you there's no rubber nose big enough to hide some kinds of st00pid.

A major FUBAR in the article in forcing "fun" and risk taking into congruence. They are not. After the fact, chronic risk takers will claim it was fun. One need only observe them during the act in order to see that's not so.

An extremely disturbing angle is the claim that depressed people need only experience things a certain way and they would no longer be depressed. Depression is in fact a lack of appropriate emotional response. Depressed people will not respond to "fun" with improved mood. Those who respond to fun with improved mood were not depressed.

Do you think maybe you meant "sad" rather than depressed? Do you think maybe you should have? You wouldn't be alone. Far from it, most prescriptions for anti-depressants are written to cure sadness. Many people think they are depressed because they're sad. Catch this underhand toss: sadness is an affective response. Depression is lack of affective response -- "flat affect".

Fun and adventure do not produce dopamine, any act of exploration of any portion of one's environment (including internal) that is interrupted by noticing something produces dopamine. It is the brakes that ceases behavioral examination and instigates cognitive examination. Dopamine is not the "reward" system because it was what kicks in to make you feel good. "Reward" is in the Skinnerian sense of reinforcement. Dopamine doesn't cause it, it allows it to happen. Both positive and negative reinforcement require a stimulus be made salient and dopamine's braking action allows this to happen. Above all, dopamine's action is to allow you to notice.

Adrenalin is increased when the result of cognition says that the stimulus is important, especially a threat. Adrenalin is not a brain chemical, it's a hormone and can't pass the blood/brain barrier. On the brain side, the same chemical is called epinephrine (and noradrenalin is called norepinephrine). What causes these? Dopamine. They are direct metabolic products of it. The brakes slam on and you notice. If salient enough the combined actions of dopamine and NMDA produce learning (memory trace imprinting via the latter, reinforcement via the former allowing uninterrupted signal repetition). And having noticed and processed the stimulus, the stimulating transmitters are available to restart exploration.

Oxytocin's apparent action is in social bonding. Depressed people may not feel it but their behavior indicates that in as much as they were bonded before, they remain so. Of course that's under investigation, which is why I say "apparent". The one thing that's known is that it's the 'let down' hormone to bring on availability of milk for breast feeding. Doing so gives a positive feeling. But so does taking a badly needed piss. "Fun"? Oxytocin?

Serotonin. The alpha and omega of depression. Oh but wait, what's this? Serotonin depletion causes depression in only a minority of cases? And selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are so ineffective that they are now selling an adjunct medication based on this, ignoring the fact that a low correlation between serotonin and depression is to blame, not a deficiency in some newly devised pharmaceutical.

Most depression is situational. It comes about from excessive crisis state without relief, the "learned helplessness" that results not in suicidal ideation (that some also confuse with depression) but in "failure to thrive" in behavioral and well as cognitive realms. Since all this stuff acts on brain chemicals, people can get stuck in a downward spiral, feeling hopeless, thus not being able to think their way out of the crisis, thus feeling more hopeless. Some people are more prone than others, and everyone is more prone at some times in their lives than others. These are the times they're candidates for anti-depressant therapy, and then only to get them to be able to think themselves the rest of the way out. Once they start solving their problems, they feel better about themselves and bootstrap out of depression.

Are you going to try to say that being able to think about and solve one's problems is "fun"? Then you're saying killing yourself is too. Most depressed persons who kill themselves do so when they start to come out of it. What behaviors shall we prescribe as "fun"? Roller coasters? Texas hold-em? Bumper cars? You line up a clinical full of depressed people and see if you can get them to respond to any of this.

No, rather than "fun", we should be looking at "funny". There is a body of science done on humor. And some of it directly relates to depression. Specifically, we know of one behavioral intervention that produces relief of depressive feeling and symptoms in a majority of cases. Smiling. Oh, they don't feel it at first and certainly don't do it spontaneously. But if you make a depressed person smile a dozen or two times a day for a minute at a time, let's just say that fluoxotine stocks would plummet. And there's probably nothing more involved than the association between an affective state and one of the six universal facial expressions, no chemical internal or external needed.

So, RU, there's your calling calling you back. Put the rubber nose back on and maybe you could actually accomplish some good along these lines. Articles like this one, though, are useless in that the people who need them don't read them. Worse, people that do read them might need them some day and waste their time trying to have fun rather than doing something that works.

Finally, as to "one of the greatest failures of medicine", my verbose nature pales and fails. Genetically mediated conditions, interacting with all manner of unhealthy environmental conditions. Auto-immune disorders in which a body becomes too much of its own good thing. Allopathic medicine using substances produced for their profit margin, to treat symptoms rather than illnesses. Utter lack of a public health version of clinical psychology, tracking the effects of poor socio-economic status and its results on a group, culture, society, political body and finally global inter-societal interaction. THESE could rank up there with the greatest failures of medicine. Depression (not sadness) caused by lack of fun? The very idea that this might be so should appear idiotic to anyone reading the article, except not many are going to be able to determine that your supporting evidence such as in presented in the green box is an amalgam of pseudo-related statements with complete bullshit. There is no "compulsive fun seeking syndrome" outside this article. It is made up. It is false. There are obsessive and/or compulsive risk takers, which as noted has little to do with 'fun'. There is no such syndrome valued by any "industry" such as prostitution and extreme sports, when the vast majority of practitioners with no sort of clinical manifestations make those industries work just fine. The "syndrome" is most assuredly NOT "also called" ADD. Attention, lack of it, or lack of disattention are all problems of executive function, not of behavioral excess in searching for sufficient stimuli. This is not only a lie, it is a dangerous one. Lastly, your little blurb is misguided in acknowledging that dopaminergics such as used to treat RLS (you're referring to pramipexole -- Mirapex -- also used to treat Parkinson's) can result in OCD-like behavior, but then claim ADD symptoms are due to lack of fun, when the same classes of drugs are used to treat ADD. Mirapex is Ritalin, amphetamine and cocaine without the high. You start out by claiming medical science is failing us, and end up providing us with an object lesson in that happening, including the reason why -- because too many people with too many agendas that differ from actually helping someone create and spew entirely too much bullshit with entirely too little oversight, because as we can all see, an internalized sense of responsibility is too much to be expected from The Medical Industry and from small publishers who think they can fly under the wire when it suits them.

Yeah, Sirius, I'm blaming you. You're senior editor. If you couldn't tell the author was a fucking bonehead, you should learn to or else hire some research to check on submissions. Or just mark it all "editorial", "opinion" or "advertising".

I was going to leave a comment... something like how LOS can cause male pattern baldness and ingrown toenails but damn, it looks a little dangerous out there.

.....and, surely what allows depression to sit in, in the first place is a lack of awareness of the self? And that we have essentially given over the care of ourselves to the evils of the health care systems, or lack thereof? If people were more aware of their inner workings & taught in a simple manner to know & understand them, then surely it would be harder to slip into severe states of depression, for which electro shock treatment, is still today used as a cure & treatment in some cases...that & the culture of handing out anti depressants, has to be wrong. Awareness has to be half the battle??? I've seen people in this state severe depression its really awful like watching people trapped inside their own bodies completely lost and drowning fun implies a high imagine the aftermath of the downer for a person with severe depression after some extreme exhilaration thats been used as a tool to snap them out of it? It may do though its more likely to kill them in a way or completely destroy them. They would feel deflated even more in the own abilities to achieve this "happiness" on their own, and utterly destroy themselves by not being able to, without the realization that the high was essentially a false induced emotion.... suicide.

no kiddin'