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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • Letter from Charles Darwin to Asa Gray (22nd May 1860)

    With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.— I am bewildered.— I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

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  • Well, I agree that everybody is different in certain ways but one of the main lessons of being in group was the revelation that broadly speaking we all want the same things and a lot of the mis-aimed strategies we’d adopted was stopping us from getting that stuff. A lot of people came through that community throughout the course of a year and while some of the stories were absolutely horrific, the problems were much the same, person to person.

    Yes, the therapy was less effective for some than others and drugs absolutely should be available as a first-aid but I think that people should be moved on to other therapy as soon as they can use it.

    I’m particularly hopeful about the results we are now seeing from psychedelic research into treatment resistant depression as I think that there are people for whom talk therapy won’t work but if you look at recent research into SSRIs it seems that some are barely improving on the placebo effect.

    So yes I’m in favour of multiple approaches but it seems that SSRIs are outcompeting other treatments because the decisions are being made on the basis of cost and that means that those other treatments simply will not exist in the future.



  • The last decade has seen a particularly significant increase in depression in the United States, with prevalence rates increasing by 33% between 2013 and 2016, with the largest increase among youth and young adults

    Back in the day we used to try to address depression with various talk therapies and group therapies. This wasn’t perfect and was also relatively expensive but at least it offered a sense of connection and tried to tie people back into society.

    Now it’s all about pills, which are a huge money-spinner and are cheaper than talk therapy. When things make money you tend to see an increase in them.