I am neither a medical professional, nor have I ever been treated for depression, but my impression is that being depressed is itself a more serious risk factor for getting stuck in bad local optima like that; as well as making sufferers feel bad it also tends to reduce how much how they feel varies. I haven’t heard that giving depressed people antidepressants reduces the range of their affective states.
It depends on the type of local optimum. I am reasonably sure that becoming too depressed to do enough work to stay in was the only was I could have gotten out of graduate school given my moral system at the time. (I hated being there but believed I had an obligation to try to contribute to human knowledge.)
Also flat affect isn’t at all a universal effect of antidepressant usage, but it does happen for some people.
It happens but again it’s not at all universal. Scott Alexander seems to think emotional blunting is a legitimate effect of SSRIs, not just a correlation–causation confusion. He also notes that
There is a subgroup of depressed patients whose depression takes the form of not being able to feel anything at all, and I worry this effect would exacerbate their problem, but I have never heard this from anyone and SSRIs do not seem less effective in that subgroup, so these might be two different things that only sound alike.
I am neither a medical professional, nor have I ever been treated for depression, but my impression is that being depressed is itself a more serious risk factor for getting stuck in bad local optima like that; as well as making sufferers feel bad it also tends to reduce how much how they feel varies. I haven’t heard that giving depressed people antidepressants reduces the range of their affective states.
It depends on the type of local optimum. I am reasonably sure that becoming too depressed to do enough work to stay in was the only was I could have gotten out of graduate school given my moral system at the time. (I hated being there but believed I had an obligation to try to contribute to human knowledge.)
Also flat affect isn’t at all a universal effect of antidepressant usage, but it does happen for some people.
Isn’t flat affect also a rather common effect of depression?
It happens but again it’s not at all universal. Scott Alexander seems to think emotional blunting is a legitimate effect of SSRIs, not just a correlation–causation confusion. He also notes that