ME/CFS vs atypical depression

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wabi-sabi

Established Member (Voting Rights)
So I had started watching a youtube video on depression by a professor at Stanford. It was sounding really good until he mentioned something called atypical depression (which I had not heard of before) and how it was biologically similar to CFS. At that point I got upset and stopped watching, but it brought up two questions:

1) I've found atypical depression described as lacking anhedonia and having the capacity to feel happiness at happy events, but with psychomotor slowing. I've always conceptualized depression as a mood disorder, so.. this does not make sense to me as description of depression. Is this really what genuinely expert mental health professionals think?

2) Where do I find good info on differentiating atypical depression from ME/CFS. I'm just too tired to look for myself right now.

3) Here's the video below. Is this guy a legit mental health expert? Or is he the American Wessely?
 
The classification of mental illness in the US has always been significantly different from in the UK. Which presumably simply means that you can move these names around how you like.

Depression is a particularly unhelpful category I think. It simply means a negative state of some sort.

The photo at the start of the video does not inspire a lot of confidence!
 
Read some blogs written by people with depression about what their life is like. It sounded very different from my life.

Diagnostic criteria are such an oversimplification that a lot of details are lost. If we make a list of the more important symptoms in depression and ME/CFS they seem similar. If you look at how they play out in real life over time they seem much more different to me. For example: depression tends to come in sufficiently distinct episodes that last months. In ME/CFS we're sick all the time (except maybe mild cases initially), the illness is often fluctuating, and we have sufficiently distinct crashes often related to exertion that tend to be shorter than depressive episodes.

Some people with depression can also work throughout their depressive episode (with difficulty). In ME/CFS you don't see patients continuing to work while in a crash.

ME/CFS often features recognizable orthostatic intolerance, which is not a feature of depression as far as I know.

ME/CFS can be accompanied by depressive mood during the crash phase but it's a component of PEM and different from a depressive episode which tends to be much more persistent.
 
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I used to suffer from something like this. The cause was having the wrong balance of fun vs. work/stressful stuff in my life. Keep in mind that that balance looks very different because I'm autistic. I wasn't sad all the time, I just couldn't cope with my workload. I was dramatically functional back then, as evidenced by the fact that I pushed myself until I caused severe psychological suffering.
 
It's around at 24:00 mark. He says "interestingly atypical depression seems to have a lot of biochemistry in common with chronic fatigue syndrome". Sounds like a comment made in passing on the way to contrasting atypical depression to psychotic depression rather than anything specifically on ME/CFS. Depression could be part of the symptom (either secondary or as part of sickness behavior), so I wouldn't react too strongly at the mention of it.
 
wabi-sabi said:
So I had started watching a youtube video on depression by a professor at Stanford. It was sounding really good until he mentioned something called atypical depression (which I had not heard of before) and how it was biologically similar to CFS. At that point I got upset and stopped watching, but it brought up two questions:

1) I've found atypical depression described as lacking anhedonia and having the capacity to feel happiness at happy events, but with psychomotor slowing. I've always conceptualized depression as a mood disorder, so.. this does not make sense to me as description of depression. Is this really what genuinely expert mental health professionals think?

2) Where do I find good info on differentiating atypical depression from ME/CFS. I'm just too tired to look for myself right now.

3) Here's the video below. Is this guy a legit mental health expert? Or is he the American Wessely?
Click to expand...



This is looks a good definition and description of atypical depression.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21131-atypical-depression
 
Hoopoe said:
Read some blogs written by people with depression about what their life is like. It sounded very different from my life.
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That is my sense as well when I hear depressed people describe their symptoms and experience.


poetinsf said:
Sounds like a comment made in passing on the way to contrasting atypical depression to psychotic depression rather than anything specifically on ME/CFS.
Click to expand...

I was wondering what biology he was referring to, but didn't want to waste energy listening to him if he was talking nonsense. In my reading about ME/CFS I haven't come across any biology that is similar to depression, so I was wondering if anyone else had. I am trying to come up with ways to explain to myself differences between neuro and psych disease.

Reacting too strongly is what I do, now that I have ME/CFS brain damage!
 
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