I've been seeing an increasing cynicism for anything that isn't a finished product and I'm a bit confused and concerned. It also seems a bit random. Like someone's blog post is okay, but a research paper is garbage? These can definitely be overselling, but I think that's a different discussion about the weird academic incentives (which we definitely should have, but is different). I feel like there's just an acceptance of cynicism and complaining but weirdly not for critiques. Just feels like we're throwing context out the window arbitrarily.
This is an open question which I've pondered for a while (so atemerev, your circumstances may not align, but I hope you don't mind me asking it here):
> I wonder how often/ to what degree, circumstances of long covid might be attributed to individuals whom pre-covid were on the cusp of developing more severe symptoms of burnout or depression (for the first time), being abruptly nudged over that threshold?
It strikes me, this likely happened in some cases, such that some individuals simultaneously faced both kinds of cognitive phenomena for the first time
So implicit – I wonder how often the two are conflated? Or how one ought to reconcile specific (relevant) circumstances between long-covid, and burnout/ depression?
So back to yourself atemerev (with no assumptions): can you speak to this at all?
I had COVID at the end of 2022 and became deeply and severely depressed right after and for the first several months of 2023. It was terrible. I was shaking uncontrollably for days, I never slept for more than a few minutes at a time, I didn't eat, and I had panic attacks constantly. I really thought that it would never end and that my brain had somehow broken.
I did have stressful events I was dealing with in life before this occurred, but I was managing. While I had COVID, I realized that I would get very unexpectedly sad and sometimes cry for no reason. As COVID got better, my depression symptoms stayed and got worse.
I ended up sick with something that required antibiotics and within a week of taking those, my symptoms started to ease up. A month later I was doing much better. A few months later and I was back to normal. I also started therapy during this depression event and continue it today just in case.
I really don't have a way to prove that it was connected to COVID or the antibiotic use, but I can tell you that my mind was not functioning correctly during this. I could mentally know everything was totally fine, but my body would still decide to dump adrenaline and fear on me unreasonably. It was like being trapped in a broken body that was torturing me. People would try to tell me that everything was fine, and I would explain that I knew that, but my brain chemistry was still on fire and logic didn't help.
Anyway, I fought hard, I reached out to friends, I did therapy as often as I could, I started exercising, did breathing exercises, took lots of walks outside, and I eventually got through it. It felt hopeless but I just did those things anyway through sheer force of will. Eventually I got through it and that hell is only a memory now that continues to fade with time.
I believe this was related to some kind of inflammation somewhere that was linked to a very bad COVID infection.
This is weird. If you don't mind my asking, why don't you google for studies with larger scale experiments/surveys rather than using a single random data point ?
I also wonder the role social contagion has in it all. Not to detract from the issues GP or others in here are reporting, but most if not all symptoms of long covid could potentially be psychosomatic. Of the people I know who suffered longterm effects like this, every single one had very stressful jobs / lives or a lot of anxiety previous to infection.
I'm also reminded of my mother who suffered from electromagnetic hypersensitivity and would shut off the wifi at night because she couldn't sleep. Years later her general situation has changed to the better due to certain developments in her life, and the issue has since disappeared completely and the wifi hums on happily during the night now, with her sleep having improved significantly overall. That's all to say that we know social contagion and psychosomatism are a thing.
Unfortunately it's very difficult to have this discussion because some people won't even consider this possibility and default to painting skeptics as inhumane brutes.
not all circumstances of all cases – and to be clear, covid is brutal, so is burnout. remember though, they aren't mutually exclusive
i've heard some speak of long-covid symptoms as if burnout, without other respiratory concerns. and given numbers of sufferers of both, there must be many who have experienced burnout before covid, so already make a distinction
where symptoms overlap, and circumstances align, the simplest explanation for those overlapping symptoms, might be the aligned circumstances; and anything we can do to simplify the problem space is worth exploring, in parallel, of course
The site looks like a clean implementation of a simple idea, allowing someone to acknowledge a negative event, and by expressing in words and externalising, let it go
On the below post, I wonder what your thoughts are on this kind of interpretation of depression? Does it fit with your understanding and the above method?
https://fragments.themanual.io/zonal-ban/
I'd phrase as 'depression is burnout of the self', or 'burnout is depression of non-self contexts' such as alternate, or specialist contexts, per project/ profession, etc. (with self simply being the default context)
It's a conceptual model and the abstraction is a computational system - as opposed to the current trend of Integrated Information Theory (IIT). Writing up seems to be the means to demonstrate for the time being. If I've misinterpreted please do correct me.
- IIT is exotic and complicated. Simply reducing the bounds of any problem IIT might be needed to explain may help. I'm absolutely suggesting a more conventional and therefore accessible logical abstraction can explain much of what we see.
- Perhaps analogous to 'you don't need blockchain or machine learning for that problem!'
The phrase 'bigger than one person' is also ambiguous - I simply meant in the volume of work required to demonstrate the scope of significance. Perhaps more specifically:
- How might an independent researcher find collaborators with related tangential special interests or experience?
I appreciate I may have said more than you're interested in, but thanks for the opportunity to respond.
I am an AI researcher who's interested in how a brain works. Do I want to be your collaborator? No. Why not? For the reasons I stated above. Even if you had a working demo, it's not very likely it would capture my interest - unless it was doing something truly mind-blowing. I've seen a few demos over the years (OpenCOG, Spaun, Numenta's NUPIC, etc) - not impressed so far. And you haven't even bothered to build a demo.
Even if you describe something that's better than IIT, no one would really care, because no one really cares about IIT either. It does not provide any useful or particularly interesting insight into how a brain works. It's a philosophical theory, and I want to see something a lot more practical.
