Cool thanks for the feedback everyone! I haven’t done much thinking about root cause vs symptoms but I agree that especially with mental health it does seem right that ‘root cause’ isn’t really a useful term given the complexity.
I changed up that last recommendation a bunch to get rid of symptom/root cause dichotomy:
“[revised] Try a bunch of other things. There are a lot of medications and pills you can take which have relatively low downsides and which can potentially be game-changers. This includes things like antidepressants, various supplements, nootropics, or other medication. Again, it’s probably worth thinking of these as abnormally good lottery tickets. Expect most to fail but eventually something might really work. [see comments section for more on how to think about treating symptoms vs root causes]”
Cool thanks for the feedback everyone! I haven’t done much thinking about root cause vs symptoms but I agree that especially with mental health it does seem right that ‘root cause’ isn’t really a useful term given the complexity. I changed up that last recommendation a bunch to get rid of symptom/root cause dichotomy:
“[revised] Try a bunch of other things. There are a lot of medications and pills you can take which have relatively low downsides and which can potentially be game-changers. This includes things like antidepressants, various supplements, nootropics, or other medication. Again, it’s probably worth thinking of these as abnormally good lottery tickets. Expect most to fail but eventually something might really work. [see comments section for more on how to think about treating symptoms vs root causes]”