EP Seligman's theory called learned helplessness. The theory states that a great deal of depression grows out of a feeling of helplessness: the feeling that you cannot control your environment.

So that's what days were like. A bunch of tiny frustrations, and a bunch of tiny successes. But they added up. Even something which seems like a tiny, inconsequential frustration affects your mood. Your emotions don't seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the quality.

Loki falls. Thor catches him. This does not solve as many problems as Thor thought it would.

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Stephen Fry is awesomesauce

After New York, Natasha takes Clint to Russia to either put him together or watch him fall apart. [3,596 words]

RT @MarekTh: Anwen Roberts, @herrurbach und @tante über "Dark Side of Action" (Engl.) @republica #depression

So the first artifact the DSM series created was lumping these two forms of depressive illness together. In fact, they are so disparate that the depression term itself should be abandoned. It is now shopworn with use and has approximately the same scientific value as other discarded psychiatric diagnoses such as hysteria and madness.

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There has been almost no progress in psychopharmacology for the last thirty years: among drugs for “depression,” none has been shown superior to the first of the tricyclic antidepressant medications, imipramine, that reached the American market as Tofranil in 1959. Among antipsychotics (with the possible exception of clozapine, an effective but dangerous agent), none is superior to the first antipsychotic ever launched, chlorpromazine, marketed as Thorazine in the United States in 1955.

Why this lack of progress? You can’t develop drugs for diseases that don’t exist. And in U. S. psychiatry today the principal diagnoses are comparable to a handful of smoke.

X: Depression is just so boring. And I feel like it'll get better, but then it'll get worse again, and it goes on forever.
R: It's like you're trying to beat the boss at the end of the level, and you've played it a million times and you can't quite get that last move, and you know that when you finally do beat it you'll just have to play another level.
X: And the next level is exactly the same! Have we not evolved beyond Pacman?
R: Depression really is a lot like Pacman, isn't it? You're running around in a maze of infinite loops while ghosts try to eat your head...
X: Plus Tetris.
R: Wow, yes, exactly. Ghosts trying to eat your head while blocks are falling on you.
X: And you have to get all these precise moves exactly right or you'll die. And you're frantically eating pills.
R: Can you imagine if someone actually coded Pacman plus Tetris? It would be the worst game ever! And yet everyone would play it!
X: "Depression: The Game." All the blocks are grey. At intervals they turn into trollfaces.

Recently, however, an alternate hypothesis has emerged from this one and is turning it inside out. This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.

Clear Channel buys, dismantles Boston's WFNX #depression