When have we been talking about anyone’s diagnosis? We’ve been talking about the common misperception that depressive episodes caused by environmental triggers are not a result of treatable neurochemical dysfunction. MDD can certainly be a result of environmental triggers, and there are a wide variety of neurochemical bases of it. I distinctly said in my first comment that I was referencing a small part of your reply. I’m not trying to have a needless fight, I’m trying to correct a common public misperception that you reiterated. I do that whenever I see a misunderstanding of science; I care about public science education, especially on topics important enough as psychiatric conditions that are often fatal without treatment. If you feel like this is a pointless fight, sorry. I only commented because I understood your comment to mean something that, no matter my read of your wording, you clearly say you weren’t meaning.

MDD is a real disability. It can and often is precipitated by environmental triggers, and episodes can resolve once the environment is changed. Just because someone experiences remission in such a case doesn’t mean they don’t have a disorder that should be treated prior to another episode. Dichotomizing chemical and psychological/environmental is harmful.

My point is that such a lay interpretation isn’t helpful, and it may be harmful. Plenty of people with MDD have an environmental trigger prior to their first episode, and have their episode remit after that precipitating factor is managed. Convincing someone that their experience isn’t chemical suggests against treatment seeking during remission, such as seeking therapy, which could help prevent another episode (and one that may not have an environmental trigger). A depressive episode can be fatal. Telling someone that because their prior episode remitted spontaneously or after the environmental trigger changed might prevent them from getting the proactive and preventative treatment that they need to keep them from experiencing another episode and thus keep them alive. Don’t gatekeep depression.

And how do you think addressing stressors works? Some non-chemical means?

That first bit is totally untrue. Do you think our grief is not chemical? That we can’t have neural rewiring occur following the loss of a loved one? Don’t dichotomize experience and neurochemistry. They’re two sides of the same coin.

You’re normal in that respect:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aur.1962

In fact, the idea that autistic individuals are immune to propaganda is, itself, media propaganda. The study that those articles report on was a single study that found that autistic individuals show less of a framing effect on their own preferences. It’s much more easily explained by autistic individuals having strong, internal preferences for their own likes/dislikes than it is by autistic individuals being immune to propaganda.

Speaking from experience here, too.

I’m so in the minority here, but I have a different perspective.

I worked at a grocery store for years, with about a third of my job being cart duty. I loved it when people left their carts outside of the corrals, for a few reasons.

First, if a lot of people did so, I would point it out to whoever was the manager on at the time before I went outside. My manager knew that I would take longer before coming back in, and that would give me more time to stroll/relax/enjoy the outdoors before coming back in to customer craziness. Having those extra minutes because my manager didn’t know how long I should take was nice.

Second, sometimes I had to walk way the hell out to the edge of the parking lot, which was really nice for a long walk away from customer craziness. Such walks were very nice when the weather was nice.

Third, it was job security. Working during the recession made my managers want to let as many people go as they could, but customers who made it so even the most efficient cart duty workers took a while to clear the lot effectively kept more of us employeed than management would have employed otherwise.

For those reasons, whenever the weather is nice, I try to leave my cart in a weird spot that is anchored by something. I realize that many other cart duty folks probably dislike me for it, but I know I appreciated it when others did this. So I do it for the folks like me.

I know all of the arguments against it and I’m not trying to debate here. Just sharing a different perspective; sometimes, leaving your cart in a terrible spot can be nice for some of the workers.

Put in some big T-posts around the border, like 10 ft ones, one on each of the four corners. Once they’re pounded in, string up some fairy lights around 9 ft off the ground and then another set around 6 ft off the ground. Assuming you have a ~4 ft fence with chicken wire for squirrels, this light configuration will keep them out–even if you don’t keep the lights on overnight, since deer hate jumping into stuff they don’t see ahead of time.

With this configuration, our garden has been deer-free in an area that has a ton of them. I see around 20 unique deer literally every day on my property, and I’ve never seen any of them in my garden, nor have I found any deer-eaten veggies.