Why It’s Getting Harder To Treat Existential Depression
Explore more resources for understanding and addressing Existential Depression here: https://bit.ly/4bMRSMY (Made with 💚 by the HG Team!)
▼ Timestamps ▼
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00:00 – Introduction
01:58 – Medication practice
05:45 – Cognitive behavioral therapy
07:00 – Depressive realism
10:04 – Exploring past philosophies
14:04 – What is the point in action?
20:55 – What do we do about it?
26:40 – Thinking, feeling and doing
29:07 – Happiness and where it comes from
32:36 – A lack of lateralization
35:05 – The sinusoidal rhythm of life
39:23 – Acceptance
41:56 – Dereflection
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44 Comments
Existential depression can make it feel like there’s no path forward, keeping you stuck in cycles that don’t create progress. It’s a unique challenge—one that traditional treatments often aren’t equipped to deal with.
Our team put together some resources to help you understand Existential Depression, and start moving forward. As always, hope this helps! 💚: https://bit.ly/4kI20dS
"If you're not depressed, then you're not paying attention."
Wow. I love that image of "action, thoughts, and feelings on three different axes".
Really speaks to me, because it reminds me of the speed of light and a graph with time on the one axis and space on the other. The more you move in one, the less you move in the other, because you always move at light speed (in this diagram).
And it instantly made sense to me that there could be a "speed of life" that you constantly move in, and you can point that arrow in any direction, but you can't maximize every dimension at the same time.
And suddenly it makes sense that a lot of thought would inhibit your ability to have a lot of emotion and action, too.
(Outside of the image, this holds: You have limited time, spent either dealing with emotion, action, or thought.)
Hello. Would it be possible to make a video on metacognitive therapy? I found it helped me the most.
So so so relatable
Damn this was a good one
I think it’s because psychiatry just sucks. I’ve never particularly felt that I was depressed, but yet have a diagnosis of MDD. I’m pretty sure that I have other issues causing fatigue, but no doctor will do anything other than tell me it’s depression.
What can I say Dr. K, Albert Camus is m Taylor Swift
Walker Percy in his book Lost in the Cosmos asked how any rational person in the modern world couldn't be depressed. He wrote this in the 1980s.
Okay, stop minding things I can’t control. Like the MAGA takeover of government. Or wars overseas. Or environmental degradation including climate change. Pretty much anything the New York Times reports nowadays. Cancel that subscription, focus on what I can control and free my mind. This is also where I have to find some way to believe that God is in control and that Justice & love will prevail.
I love when highly intelligent people help us to understand the complexities of our minds and how to improve the quality of our lives. You are a gift. Thankyou Sir for your generosity 😊
I rarely react to video's on youtube but some of you might need to here this:
The distinction made in the video between "depression" and "existential depression" can also be understood in the following sense:
As HGGG said, depression, as in the "typical" one is being caused by some traumatic experiences, which do not effect your way of being directly, but mere implicit. Which means that if an individual indeed goes into therapy, they can get around the trauma and find a way to work around it.
The existential depression is of a different kind. It is not caused by something as a "trauma" but most of the times a series of circumstances and pure "unluck". This manifest into the pure, immanent sense of being of that individual. What I mean by this is that the existential depression finds it roots into the being of the person which is a whole lot harder to resolve. Therapy thus becomes not a place where a patient needs to be "fixed", but rather a place where the patient can BE. There is nothing wrong with someone whom is existentially depressed. They tend to live life on a higher then average temperature, one which life is not made for. Therefore therapy should create a space in which the patients creates the idea that they indeed have a space where they can be, and if the therapist is aware of it, create some kind of positive coping to let the therapist see that life CAN be lived in high temperatures.
Some of you might say that this is CBT, but it is not. The surroundings of the being are not getting "coped" with, it is the being of the being itself which will be the subject of matter and will learn to create a new space of being, for that being.
Hang in there. There is light at the end of the tunnel.
😢
I find this advice very helpful in general, for any type of depression or anxiety, thank you very much. I do own "man's search for meaning" by Frankl but I haven't gotten to read it yet, very insightful and useful ideas I'm hearing in this video 👍
Hold up. But "mind-set" is an incorrect spelling?
I think we are collectively coming to the conclusion that the proverbial juice of our society is not worth the squeeze.
The cat is out of the bag. We all know how utterly corrupt, fake, and wasteful almost everything companies/governments do is and naturally, people seek escape from such a way of life, seeing as how working/preparing for work/sleeping takes up the vast majority of our existence and many of us get absolutely nothing positive out of it.
The only real motive for me to participate is to one day escape the eternal consumption engine once and for all and never waste another second of the gift of life earning profits for shareholders at pointless jobs that dont even need to exist.
Thank you for making it all makes sense. I was recently seeing a therapist who I chose because one of the things they specialize in was existential therapy. I only saw him for 2 to 3 months, but he had an outsized impact. I didn’t know that that’s what I was dealing with, but it quickly became apparent during our sessions. By the end, his guidance, and spending some time getting to know the lyrics of the song “The Seeker“ by The Who, and I was finally okay with the journey being the destination. Great video, great topic, thank you for helping me understand it better.
Hopleness is learned, imagine a video-game where you always loose and start at the beggining.
I’ve usually been able to convince myself things would ultimately be ok in the past, but things both on a larger level and personal level seem to have fallen into a territory where expecting a positive eventual outcome would definitely be more of a distortion.
22:02 One-Punch Man is actually a pretty good example here, just not for us as the audience. You're basically describing Saitama's life, it that he's bored because he wins all the time so easily.
9:20 first time i’ve been validated for the extent to which i’m philosophically sitting down and looking at my life. i felt this way for a long time, but i realize now there were such extreme guidelines on life in my head when i was a kid that as soon as i was an adult in control of what the guidelines were i’ve never been more content. there’s always more work to do, but maintaining a sense of agency and inviting spontaneity into my life has been key to loving myself
Can anyone see world is a messed up place, here, swallow some pills and world becomes butterflies and unicorns again… You cannot treat bad life experience, just cannot… What has been seen, cannot be unseen, what has been exoerienced, cannot be firgotten… You just cannot fix that bad life experiences with some chemistry… Therapy is just making you blind and ignirant of the reality, but world stays the same shithole it always was, is and will be
On the flip side of existential depression, if there is no hope it does not matter. I have no duty to fix anything or save anyone. If it doesn't matter what I do, then I'm the only person who can say whether I'm making good or bad life choices. It's like being on the titanic, and realizing that there's a lifeboat right in front of you. Snap out of it, save yourself! The ship may be sinking, but I'm not planning on drowning with it.
16:08 Can I envision something like that? That a lot of people are doing day in, day out? Surely you mean my daily work, don't …. oh, ok. Social media. Yeah, sure.
I have existential depression!!! If I’m 66…do you think your younger coaches would be able to relate to my existential depression?
20:55
I only get depressed when i take my society mask off, and i am alone with my thoughts. Every time i am taking my mask of in real life, what ive noticed, is that everyone has that mask on and we started to become really superficial, i want something genuine, i dont know how to start feeling that something genuine because the other people, at least in my life are scared to talk about deeper things.
Is anyone else feeling like this, or is it something entirely else?
Only 1rd? I was a person put on them at a young age and i made myself stop taking them because they actually made me more emotional. i had more physical issues in my life at the time as a kid that made me feel that way. Growing up poor with physically and mentally abusive parental figures is a good way to be depressed about life. Also being homeless and living in hotels with your family of 4 does that too. If the numbers are more close to 2/3 then that's a wonderful argument for anti depressants but I'd argue more often then not most people are similar to me and it's outside influence that affects them not a chemical imbalance.
7:20 buying lotto ticket thinking they can win.
This is a distorted reality
My situation is I actually figured out the stock market for what others thought was my distorted reality — difference is I solved the markets — imagine how distorted my reality became- as if I won the lotto-
If I solved the markets then make money right? But I quit bc my family didn’t care and I thought I could have become much more with them. But the fact they weren’t going to be with me shot down not only family but we were going to do things together grow together…
Depression and man of inaction. Cognitive therapy seems to be where I want to improve in.
Even grinding in games doesnt feel meaningfull anymore. And a normal job also feels like im moving latteral 🙁
Just anything i do feels like im doomed….
Even if i do i think and when i feel to much again i just rather enter my head again…
Aghhhhhh
And i cant do anything that leads to something because even if its objectively leading towards something my mind will just make it meaningless again…
So everything is latteral seriously.
Download or audio-record this video, you never know what the future of youtube looks like. But you can control something about YOUR future.
It described myself like nobody did before. Thank you.
I have been dealing with "Existential" depression since I was a teenager. All CBT has taught me is how to cope with it.
I'm a typical thinker and tried to do/learn/eperience new stuff, but still gave it up or lost interest in new things I try. It seems like you still need a big "Why" to get seriously into new things and follow through. Otherwise you will stuck trying figuring out "your purpose" changing new interests/ hobbies every day or so. Doing stuff just in sake of doing stuff and a vague idea that this way maybe some day you will be able to find out what you really want in life is wrong. It just doesn't work this way. A lot of internet gurus and other self-help influencers tell people to "just do something, do more". But without clear goal setting you will eventually fail. Just doing shit is desperate and hopeless way to figure yourself out. IMHO
Sertraline helped with my anxiety, but hasn’t helped with my depression
Life is overrated 🤷🏻♀️
I have turned lemons into lemonade my whole life. Got dumped and got better from it do many times. But when you’ve found that one person there is nothing more important anymore
i’m going to throw up i feel like you made this video for me (obviously not haha) but i for-real never heard anyone say what im thinking. I recently was in a slump trying to grapple with no one thinks like me. but this video shows people do think like me. I mean i wouldn’t wish this on my worst nightmare. So, sorry for all the others who feel like this too 😵
30:50 oops, slipped into a different dimension, almost thought I was hallucinating
how do you keep dropping video after video where you talk directly to my heart
This is exactly the video I needed my whole life. How come physiologists are not trained on this? This is part of the psychology too.
A good reminder I read : Doing it imperfectly is far better than never doing it
I've been working out of existential depression. I didn't know there was this term for it but I've told a few close people that I think I've been depressed in some way for a long time. A lot of the pitfalls you mentioned I've been dealing with so it's helpful to hear that those are normal and what typically gets done to make progress.
I know things are getting better for several reasons, one being that I started taking my dog to the dog park because I care about him getting to socialize and it's been helping me socialize too.
I am an atheist who doesn't understand the point of anything. I am absolutely terrified of dying or not existing, but I feel the same exact way when I think of eternal life. What is the point of either? It feels like a paradox, and it really hurts my brain lol. I have felt this way even as a young child, I don't understand this world. I am a very creative person and I love to understand how and why things work (and I am good at it)…when I can't understand something, it really bothers me.