“Mental illness” (as it’s used in pop culture today) is a made-up term designed to gaslight people into believing that their natural, healthy reaction to the 21st century is somehow wrong and a pathology.
To be depressed in [current year] is no more normal than itching yourself when you’re wearing a wool sweater. Nobody would call that an “illness,” would they?
It’s fine to critique how “mental illness” is portrayed in pop culture, but the medical term is important. Yes, society is tough, but that doesn’t mean your struggles aren’t real or treatable. You can’t fight for change if you can’t get out of bed. Taking care of yourself is never something to feel bad about. <3
I take issue with calling it “treatable.” From personal experience, the treatment doesn’t really fix anything - it just makes it noticeably easier to bypass your natural reaction to being in an extremely unfavorable environment. That’s not treating the problem, it’s masking it akin to slapping a fresh coat of paint on walls with a serious mold infestation inside.
It’s addressing the symptom instead of the actual problem, and our entire society is geared towards doing this because it allows people to keep being used to better the lives of those one-percenters running everything while pushing the cost of keeping the people doing so back onto those same people. It’s disgusting, and it’s nearing a breaking point that’s gonna be very ugly when everything snaps.
I see what you’re saying, but they can’t become a comrade if they died of despair. We need all the people we can get, so if that’s what it takes them to get to enlightenment, so be it. I say, eat the pills that make you numb until you’re to a place where you can stand, then let them go (and maybe step into some psychedelics if you want to/are able) and open your eyes to the horror around you, now able to face it. Then we can fight the system together.
It worked for me anyway.
Thanks for sharing. ‘Treatable’ does not mean ‘curable,’ and you are not the first person to make that confusion.
I think you’re misrepresenting the comment.
Depression as a medical term only applies to people who have objectively nothing to be depressed about. Nobody would (to turn it up to 11) argue that a concentration camp inmate has depression when he’s feeling like everything’s fucked, because very objectively, everything is fucked in his environment.
The comment is instead about people who are thrown into a depressing, pointless situation they can’t escape, just like the prisoner, only much much milder. They see no future, because there truly is no future for them. Now, that would be horrible for society, because those people might start to question why exactly they’re in this situation. So as a bandaid, they get diagnosed. It’s not actually shit, you just see it like that, because you are sick. Here, take a pill. It’s gaslighting.
The rolling Stones had a song about mother’s little helper 50 years ago. It’s not exactly new.
This is essentially medical misinformation, and dangerous. You don’t get to tell me off for misrepresenting a comment when 0.01 seconds later you misrepresent an entire field of medicine lol.
I hate that I am even giving you the tiniest benefit of the doubt but to combat your lying by research and example: People who survived actual concentration camps still suffer i.e. suicidal ideation into the rest of their lives, even though the cause of that trauma is “fixed.”
There is so much cause for trauma out there, from family, to natural disaster, to war. These traumas are deadly and ruin lives through generational trauma, addiction and suicide. In summary, your comment accusing people often just trying to care of themselves and their families, as abusing “bandaids” that actually help them to live meaningful and fulfilling lives is despicable. Go fucking fix society dude! Just don’t piss all over people who have, often for the first time in years, been given a chance to overcome disability and make something positive of their existence.
Depression as a medical term only applies to people who have objectively nothing to be depressed about.
WTF? No.
I mean the can’t-get-out-of-bed part probably isn’t some quick fix if-only-someone-had-told-me-doctors-exist-sort-of-thing. It probably points to larger, unchanging issues.
In some cases, the answer could be “move”… but again that is not viable for many, even if we’re just talking about housing cost.
Clinical depression isn’t somethings fixed with exercise. I’ve had friends who ran 5-6 miles a day try to kill themselves out of the blue. Fuck off with this bullshit simplistic view of mental health.
Not to throw shade but where is this magical time in history with no worries or existential threats?
This isn’t about a time with no worries in their respective present, this is about the future. A couple decades ago there still was genuine hope for the future, an almost certain expectation that the future will be better.
A look at science fiction will confirm that: You get none of the space utopias from the sixties that honestly believed in the goodness of people today. There is only bleak techno dystopia from the nineties onwards, where everybody fends for themselves and no hope for long lasting peace is in sight.
I don’t think there were many existential threats before MAD
Personal existence has always been threatened since we had the ability to understand mortality, the new stuff (MAD and climate change) are pretty unique in that they threaten civilisation as a whole, and that’s pretty new
While on one hand I completely agree. On the other hand most generations in human history saw difficult times. One thing we have now is easy access to extra layers of constant despair by always being able to see any bad thing that is happening every minute of every day, on the news, on social media, from our politicians, etc. Then it even creeps into discussions with friends. The general dispare has crept into the discussion and taken over. But at the end of the day, most people have food, shelter, water, family, friends, and some level of healthcare (all be it problematic in the US).
For those of us lucky enough to not be destitute, or a current or future target of a repressive regime, it is important to remember to take some time to actually enjoy life instead of always feeling helpless about a profoundly imperfect world. Depression caused by the status of the world can also be avoided by taking action. Those that help, rarely let the status of the world get them down. Because, they know they did their part to move it in the right direction.
I will grant that social media has given us access to all of the misery we want all of the time, and that those algorithms also prioritize content that makes us angry.
However, it would be toxic positivity to say that things are actually fine or even pretty good.
Things are objectively getting worse. Income inequality is somewhere between near gilded age levels and worse. The planet is dying in front of our eyes. Fascists are taking power in many governments.
Things are actually pretty bleak. That doesn’t mean there’s no hope. But burying your head in the sand and pretending things are fine … well, I can understand that impulse. And I can understand that for some, it’s a coping mechanism. And for sure, do what you gotta to get by and all. But it’s not helpful in the broader sense.
I don’t disagree with a single word you said. But having perspective and leaving time to be human is not burying your head in the sand.
The last things I tried to say was that taking action is one thing you can do to mitigate your sense of helplessness. People who help others or try to make the world a better place often end up in a better mental space. It has the added benefit of working against all of the bad shit that is happening. Pick something, anything you care about, and try to make a difference. Even if you only make a tiny difference, if a thousand other people go out there and make the same tiny difference, suddenly you’ve moved the needle. In my experience, despair is nearly always coupled with paralyzed inaction.
Amazingly, youthful angst and depression have been steadily increasing for several decades, with no puzzlingly large blip in recent years. You can jump to a conclusion that the problem is the one thing that personally bothers you the most, but maybe it’s a spectrum - for example, a lot of psychologists have been blaming teenage depression on too much screen time and not enough in-person social contact.
blaming teenage depression on too much screen time and not enough in-person social contact
That might be a part, but I’d ask you this: When is the last time that mankind truly had hope for the future? This isn’t just about individual people - it’s the entire media landscape.
ITT: superfund positivity.
