> no. no it is not. please look at areas where they do not have even close to as much anxiety. getting exercise and socializing is extremely important for humans.
Look, ultimately, we're in a public forum, and it's not my job to personally change your mind; it's my job to engage constructively and as insightfully as possible in a way that betters the conversation for other readers.
If this is your model on mental health care, then your comment speaks for itself and I think that other people on HN have enough information to come to their own opinions about whether you're qualified to talk about "social contagions."
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Purely in the interest of being as constructive as possible, this is a really harmful view of mental health, not because the interventions mentioned in the parent comment are useless, but because they are an oversimplification of a complicated problem. Exercise/diet/etc... can absolutely help with issues like depression, but those actions are usually taken alongside counseling and with aid, occasionally (but not always) in conjunction with medication. Psychological interventions and mental health interventions are multi-faceted and highly individual; there is no single easy universal solution that will work for everyone.
Like please, don't ever tell someone with depression that their problem would just be solved if they made more friends. Friends are important and can help in some situations, but that advice is not helpful. And similarly, while gender dysphoria is not exactly the same as depression, it is also a condition that is a lot more complicated than just whether or not someone has enough friends or exercises enough.
But again, I think in regards to the broader debate, I would just say that people who talk about psychological issues as if they're just dietary issues -- maybe those people aren't the best sources to get advice from about the proper treatment for transgender youth.
> So you disagree that exercise, socializing, etc. are extremely important for mental health?
Of course I don't disagree with that.
But with that I'm bowing out, I can't think of a better illustration of what I've been talking about then the parent comment. I think it's pretty obvious whether or not that comment is a fair characterization of anything at all that I said above.
And again, I would just suggest to readers that the type of logic that leads to someone mischaracterizing what I wrote about mental health so completely is also probably not worth paying attention to when it's applied to debates about transgender care.
Look, ultimately, we're in a public forum, and it's not my job to personally change your mind; it's my job to engage constructively and as insightfully as possible in a way that betters the conversation for other readers.
If this is your model on mental health care, then your comment speaks for itself and I think that other people on HN have enough information to come to their own opinions about whether you're qualified to talk about "social contagions."
----
Purely in the interest of being as constructive as possible, this is a really harmful view of mental health, not because the interventions mentioned in the parent comment are useless, but because they are an oversimplification of a complicated problem. Exercise/diet/etc... can absolutely help with issues like depression, but those actions are usually taken alongside counseling and with aid, occasionally (but not always) in conjunction with medication. Psychological interventions and mental health interventions are multi-faceted and highly individual; there is no single easy universal solution that will work for everyone.
Like please, don't ever tell someone with depression that their problem would just be solved if they made more friends. Friends are important and can help in some situations, but that advice is not helpful. And similarly, while gender dysphoria is not exactly the same as depression, it is also a condition that is a lot more complicated than just whether or not someone has enough friends or exercises enough.
But again, I think in regards to the broader debate, I would just say that people who talk about psychological issues as if they're just dietary issues -- maybe those people aren't the best sources to get advice from about the proper treatment for transgender youth.