> Depression is caused by laziness and anxiety by hopelessness.
I wish this were true, but its not even close. I wonder how your kids will react when they move away, and you're not around to police their emotional expression. If they're like me, they will promptly collapse into paralysis and self-destruction.
I strongly suggest that you frequently give your kids long stretches of time (months) to practice regulating themselves, without your interference.
And if they have anxiety or depression, please let them see a professional. If my parents had noticed the signs earlier, they would have saved me decades of pain.
At this age I am teaching emotional regulation on a daily basis.
As for when they grow up, adults who cannot manage their emotions get fired or are sent to jail. It is critical to be slow to anger, quick to forgive, and work at building strong friendships.
You imply we aren't teaching emotional regulation on a daily basis? We have always placed a great deal of emphasis on talking about feelings and developing "tools for our toolboxes" to deal with them. Unfortunately those tools are largely inadequate when there isn't a rational cause for a debilitating emotional state.
People who have never experienced a particular challenge are quick to assume credit for its absence and assign moral failings to others who experience it. It's insufferable but common.
Imagine a millionaire who had millionaire parents lecturing his children on how they're not allowed to be poor. Lo! They're not! The lectures worked.
Anger seems to me to be one of the least understood emotions. In my opinion anger should be practised at every possible opportunity in order to cultivate as good as relationship to it as other emotions. Otherwise it will seem like it's out of your control due to not knowing its limits and how much of it you need due to it being suppressed. It is a necessary emotion for our wellbeing.
They're welcome to share their emotions but poor behavior isn't acceptable. Anger is fine. Yelling isn't. We'll talk it though. Tonight i got yelled at 3 times for not helping. I asked why I got yelled at. "Because I was angry". The anger wasn't justified but real so we discussed. I got a hug shortly after. No discipline. Just patience.
We take the same approach! While I don't agree that depression is laziness, we do teach that feeling sorry for yourself is akin to laziness. When we're disappointed about things not going the way we wanted we're allowed to grump about it for 5 minutes, but then it's time to brush ourselves off and move on.
> Depression is caused by laziness and anxiety by hopelessness. My kids know that they aren't permitted to be lazy or say they are bored. They don't have anxiety because they have hope despite circumstances.
This sounds horrible. If I weren't depressed or anxious, being told that I wasn't ever permitted to be lazy or say that I was bored would make me so; and, if I were, then being told that I was lazy and hopeless would make it worse.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not but that is kind of the truth. A breakup is horrible, in its worst case it is similar to an untimely death and can come with grief and maybe even worse because the person is still alive and in your life so you're reminded by their absence even deeper and could experience jealousy, and the drip feed of interaction can elongate the time it takes you to move on with your life and find the person who is more right for you.
But while the sadness is real and shouldn't be ignored or suppressed, wallowing is unhelpful and you ought to move on with your life - just like if someone close to you dies, the deceased most likely would want you to be happy and continue living a good life and move on.
Objectively you're right, but I hope you think twice before saying to someone who has experienced a tragedy, "You need to move on." Similarly if you're in an argument with a friend or loved one and they are upset I hope you think twice before saying "You need to calm down" or, "You're overreacting." Objectively those may all be correct, but they are unhelpful, and are likely to have the opposite effect. They minimize the weight of the emotions. Most of us cannot just turn emotions on and off, much as we try and wish we could.
> Depression is caused by laziness and anxiety by hopelessness.
Others have responded to the depression/laziness part -- I was wondering if you could clarify what you mean by anxiety being caused by hopelessness? To my way of thinking hopelessness and depression have a lot of overlap, but anxiety not so much... It's more like a feeling of dread.
Fear of the dentist is common but understanding that the inconvenience is required for the desired outcome, the reason for the suffering, there is a hope to look to allowing the suffering to have meaning.
> Depression is caused by laziness [...]. My kids know that they aren't permitted to be lazy.
Do you really believe this, or do you believe your children aren't depressed? Your comment is not in accordance with science. Depression is a complex topic. I'm having trouble imagining a way to be more wrong. Is this satire?
You can use me as an example! When I got diagnosed I was very physically active and also quite clean.
One of the hardest things for me with depression is the incredible guilt I have. What right do I have to be depressed when my life is objectively fine? Why should I get therapy when that might mean one less space for someone who is dealing with trauma or poverty or something else that gives them a "right" to be depressed? This causes a feedback loop of guilt leading to more depression and vice-versa.
Like I tell my kids, it's normal to sometimes feel depressed or hopeless. If you're dealing with a difficult circumstance then it's reasonable to have those feelings, and the only way to address those feelings is to deal with the circumstance. What's not normal is feeling depressed and hopeless for no logical reason at all.
I appreciate your sharing your experience. I think it's very valuable that human beings describe to each other their decision making, actions, and outcomes. Often, people attempt to dissuade the sharing of information, and I think that leads to us, as humans, being less able to form an accurate model of the world. I appreciate your pushing through that form of opposition.
It’s pretty tough to exercise or clean your house when getting out of bed feels like an insurmountable task.
Depression isn’t like an infection or cancer—it’s a diagnosis based on established criteria, as are most mental disorders. Experts may disagree on diagnosis or treatment, but that doesn’t make it useless.
By that logic, you might as well say autism is caused by avoiding eye contact—since there’s no blood test for it either.
Ahhh this explains a lot. You should learn about internalized ablism, and probably stop teaching vulnerable humans the same, under the guise of "emotional regulation".
Did somebody else tell you that your emotions need to be regulated this strictly? Did you learn that if you express your emotions you won't get any help? That is not a normal situation to be in.
I understand, but I can assure you that I don’t expect an autistic person to force eye contact with me—especially when it drains their energy. Insisting on that would be wrong.
I’m not opposed to people pushing themselves a little, but we can’t expect anyone to become “fixed” by trying ever harder. That approach wastes energy, is unrealistic, is non‑inclusive, and is simply cruel.
If you think people with depression, ADHD, or anxiety should just push through their symptoms to meet arbitrary social expectations—expectations that are fundamentally ableist—you’re not doing anyone a favor. In a world that’s becoming less ignorant and more inclusive of neurological differences, that attitude will only alienate you, as this thread clearly shows.
> In a world that’s becoming less ignorant and more inclusive of neurological differences, that attitude will only alienate you, as this thread clearly shows.
What an off-topic threat to try and get someone to pretend like they agree with you.
I hope you can take your personal anecdotes and add them to a larger body of research and other people's experience to refine your understanding. If you're right that everyone who has Depression is actually just lazy, you'll see lots of support for that. If, instead, you find a lot of different experiences you might conclude that Depression is a pretty nuanced and complicated topic, which might both expand your understanding and help you bring more empathy to the suffering people around you.
You are very, very extremely inexperienced in this area, as anyone who deals with or has someone in their close family that deals with serious, life-threatening depression will tell you.
And that's okay!
I would encourage you to look at the number of comments from different people who have a history of dealing with this kind of thing for a long time.
I agree 100% and it is an uphill battle requiring significant effort. That is where discipline is required. Exercising that discipline will bring positive results. There is nothing other than self stopping someone from cleaning instead of crying under a blanket.
WTF? You cannot comment like this on HN, no matter what you're replying to or how wrong you think they are. We've had to ask you before to avoid abusive comments. We have to ban accounts to do this repeatedly, and it's only because the parent comment was pretty bad too that I'm not banning you this time. Please take a moment to remind yourself of the guidelines and avoid ever commenting like this again if you want to keep participating here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You seem to have your mind thoroughly made up, which should raise a flag that you might be suffering from a bad case of Dunning-Kruger, and need to re-ask questions you think you already know the answers to.
> Depression is caused by laziness and anxiety by hopelessness.
While pizzafeelsright gets heavily downvoted, I think their may be some (dark) truth behind it: if you weren't lazy, you would sommit suicide instead of living a depressed life. :-(
I also have a feeling that there might be another (dark) truth behind the link between anxiety and hopelessness.
> Depression is caused by laziness and anxiety by hopelessness.
No offense, but teaching your kids this kind of nonsense is borderline abusive. It's so far away from so many people's experiences, and is just plain wrong. I hope you can recognize how damaging this could be for your kids down the road.
