5 ms·

A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health

46 points by eternalban 7y ago

heartbeats 7y ago
I've had this same thought for a while now. Mental illness (and I am not using this term judgmentally) is, essentially, when your perception of the world persistently does not agree with the external reality: for example, you're under the impression that you're fat when in reality you're nigh emaciated. If that's a correct characterization, is depression really a mental illness? If people perceive their lives to be dreadful, whereas in reality their lives are dreadful, where does the misconception come in?
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Sorry, but that's a pretty terrible definition of mental illness. Mental illness can be any case where your mind has fallen into a pattern of being chronically unhelpful to you; this can mean it doesn't report on reality correctly, or that it sends incorrect (or merely destructive) emotional signals, or whatever else. That said, this is one of the reasons I like to think of it as "mental health" rather than "mental illness". It's more like weight/nutrition, where a person doesn't simply have a problem or not have a problem; it's a sliding-scale. Everyone's mind benefits from care, the degree of one's challenges just varies based on personal history and genetics.
  - claudeganon 7y ago
    There’s actually some evidence that depressed people perceive the world more accurately: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8x9j3k/depressed-people-see-the-world-more-realistically https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8x9j3k/depressed-people-s... Happiness might be more a form of delusion, albeit a productive and even necessary one.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      It's been my experience that the human psyche fundamentally needs a certain amount of self-delusion (or at least suspension of disbelief) to be able to function. Any hopes or dreams or beliefs are in some sense disconnected from reality, but are also extremely necessary. We must be able to step outside of reality, without losing track of it.
  - heartbeats 7y ago
    Aren't both of those examples special case of my definition though? "[i]t doesn't report on reality correctly, or [...] it sends [...] incorrect signals." But what if the mind is reporting on reality correctly, and the signals it's sending are correct, it's just that we do not like them very much? Can a signal be entirely correct, but destructive? If so, it just seems like a special case of the expression "the truth hurts". It's not my mind which is defect by informing me of the present state of affairs, it's the present state of affairs which are regrettable.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  This is too simple. A lot of depressed people know that the world is not as bad as they feel but they still feel bad. People with OCD know that the world won’t go under if they don’t count the number of traffic lights in the way home but the emotion is still there. Only people with hardcore mental illness don’t even know that their perception of the world is not correct. Most people know but still can’t do anything about it.
  - denverkarma 7y ago
    I think actually, knowing your perception of the world is not correct is the really hard part, because then you can’t just go through your day comfortably, you have a constant mental struggle against a faulty autopilot. Imagine driving a car with misaligned steering that pulls sharply to one side. You could do it, but it would get tiring, and it would feel dangerous to go on a long road trip because if you lost focus for a minute you could crash. My own experience with mental health issues is that it feels about like that.
- justin66 7y ago
  Depression is much more than perceiving your life as being dreadful. > Mental illness (and I am not using this term judgmentally) is, essentially, when your perception of the world persistently does not agree with the external reality This definition is not even remotely adequate.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- claudeganon 7y ago
  The incongruity comes from the collective ideological demands of Capitalist societies (that they are sustainable, don’t lead to ecological collapse, endless war, devolve into fascism in their periodic crises, etc) and the lived experience that, yes, they do actually do all of the things their ideology denies. As a kind of society-wide psychological complex, Capitalism can’t function without massive amounts of this denial and projection. But the threadbare nature of those defenses is everyday more exposed, and inwardly directed, especially following the collapse of the USSR (which existed in a similar, but differently conjugated state).
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    Mental illness has nothing to do with political systems. It exists in all systems.
    - claudiawerner 7y ago
      Existing in all systems is not the same as it having nothing to do with political systems - especially political systems that occupy all of daily life, as they do. There is no aspect of urban daily life that is free from the compulsion to use one's time to make money, either to survive or accumulate, and nobody - neither the capitalist nor the worker - is free from that concern.
      - Ididntdothis 7y ago
        What political system would avoid mental illness?
        claudeganon 7y ago
        You’re continuing to elide both my and the parent’s point not that any political systems are free of mental illness, but that they result in different rates, experiences, and forms of instantiation. This isn’t even contested in the psychological literature. For example, go read about how schizophrenia manifests and is experienced in the developing vs. developed world. Or how depression and rates of suicide increase in the wake of economic crises.
- finaliteration 7y ago
  > Mental illness... is, essentially, when your perception of the world persistently does not agree with the external reality I don’t think that’s correct. I’ve had depression and anxiety my entire life, and I’m well aware that sometimes things aren’t as awful as my mind makes them out to be (and sometimes they are), but the conflict with reality isn’t what fuels my despair and angst. If it were then I think it would be a lot easier for people to just think or reason their way out of the “pit of despair” that is depression. > If that's a correct characterization, is depression really a mental illness? I don’t think it’s useful or helpful to try to define our way out of the problem. Changing the definition of a thing doesn’t really help the people who are suffering and trying to just get out of bed in the morning.
- drunken-serval 7y ago
  Okay, so what is hearing voices that aren’t there?
  - claudeganon 7y ago
    It’s an organic psychological phenomenon that is actually very socially and politically determined in how it is experienced: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mad-in-america/201005/schizophrenia-mystery-solved https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mad-in-america/20100...
- cuspycode 7y ago
  That's psychosis, i.e. when perceptions don't correspond to reality. Mental illness is a much larger concept than just psychosis.
claudiawerner 7y ago
Excellent article, and to anyone interested in the topic, I'd suggest going beyond the review and reading Mark Fisher himself. His book, Capitalist Realism, as mentioned by the article, is short but an essential read to understand the politics of mental health: its current privatization at the hands of pharma companies and individualization at the hands of self-help authors and YouTube stars.
- mbostleman 7y ago
  Privatization, pharma? Between regulation and licensing it was my understanding that in practical terms pharma is at least as much public as it is private.
  - intopieces 7y ago
    claudiawerner is talking about the privatization of mental illness, not Pharma, as outlined by Mark Warner in the essay “The Privatisation of Stress” from 2011.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
_bxg1 7y ago
Is the website dead for anyone else?
- mmastrac 7y ago
  Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200216142141/https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/future-no-future-depression-left-politics-mental-health/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200216142141/https://lareviewo...
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago
  It's dead for me as well, the server backend is overloaded, it took 3 minutes to process my request but eventually sent me the page. Try https://web.archive.org/web/20200216142141/https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/future-no-future-depression-left-politics-mental-health/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200216142141/https://lareviewo....
austincheney 7y ago
(2019) The article seems to articulate that happiness is the opposite of depression and that unhappiness is synonymous with depression. That could be arguably a thing in a purely rhetorical sense but is absolutely incorrect in a clinical sense. Clinically speaking depression is the multi symptom result of one or more chemical imbalances in the brain resulting in arrhythmic emotional states. The opposite of depression from a clinical perspective is emotional balance. This is why treating specifically the symptoms of depression often results in relapses at later times.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  Mark Fisher addresses a component of the chemical imbalance theory, and why it doesn't go far enough: >This commodification lay in the so-called ‘bio-chemicalization’ of depression. This is the assertion that depression is caused primarily by biochemical imbalance in the brain, namely low serotonin levels. To treat mental health illness is to treat the symptoms of a single person who ‘owns’ their illness. Depression is internalised and individuated. As such, we lose a sense of collective responsibility for mental health illness in terms of causation, understanding and treatment. >This is not to dispute that depression is not neurologically verifiable. Rather, it is to dispute that the neurological disposition of depressed people is caused only by internal, biochemical factors. If, like Fisher, we ask: ‘What causes low serotonin levels?’ we are forced to comprehend mental health illness as a culturally contingent phenomena caused by a conjuncture of biochemical and societal factors. From: https://thepanoptic.co.uk/2017/08/06/repoliticising-depression-late-mark-fishers-vital-lesson/ https://thepanoptic.co.uk/2017/08/06/repoliticising-depressi... >This is a crucial question. The way in which social and political problems are converted into individual pathologies, to be explained via chemical imbalances or family history, neatly sums up so much of what has happened under capitalist realism. It’s what I’ve called the privatisation of stress. Depression has been described as a pathology of responsibility: you feel intensely responsible for the state that you’re in. The excruciating paradox is that, while you feel that only you can get yourself out of depression, the condition consists precisely in your inability to act. There’s more than an analogy with the political hopelessness and fatalism that have characterised capitalist realism. From: https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=3454 https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=3454 You can actually see just how much scrutiny the pure theory of chemical imbalance has come under from psychologists and sociologists on Google Scholar[0]. "The cause of mental disorders such as depression remains unknown. However, the idea that neurotransmitter imbalances cause depression is vigorously promoted by pharmaceutical companies and the psychiatric profession at large. We examine media reports referring to this chemical imbalance theory and ask reporters for evidence supporting their claims. We then report and critique the scientific papers and other confirming evidence offered in response to our questions. Responses were received from multiple sources, including practicing psychiatrists, clients, and a major pharmaceutical company. The evidence offered was not compelling, and several of the cited sources flatly stated that the proposed theory of serotonin imbalance was known to be incorrect. The media can play a positive role in mental health reporting by ensuring that the information reported is congruent with the peer-reviewed scientific literature." [0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=depression+chemical+imbalance+theory&btnG=&oq=depression+chemical+ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=depr...
throwaway020620 7y ago
This is blatantly incorrect to the point of being offensive. > If the individual is responsible for her own happiness, then she is also responsible for her own unhappiness Just hold right there. There was nothing about "responsibility for unhappiness" in the source that was quoted. Author just casually added this part. "Responsibility for your own happiness" just means that it's _you_ who is in control and that you actually can change things - no matter how bad they look at the moment. > It is a deeply moral message. Failing to be happy is simply immoral. If you are such an immoral and bad person that you have become unhappy — or depressed — it is you, and you alone that is to blame. Being unhappy does not make yourself a bad person. This is literally one of the first things you hear when you visit psychologist to treat your depression. > Yet the psychiatric and public discourse remain bent on treating depression as a personal problem devoid of context Incorrect. Context is incredibly important and is being discussed a lot during therapy sessions. And so on and so forth. Source: my own experience with depression. Edit: grammar
- fonadesty 7y ago
  > There was nothing about "responsibility for unhappiness" in the source that was quoted. I'm sort of baffled by this claim of yours. The quoted source is very clearly saying that happiness is up to the individual: > Happiness is a personal responsibility. Happiness is not something you can expect to get from others. Everybody has the key to their own happiness. And hence also the responsibility to put the key in the right lock. Likewise, I think your other points seem to miss the point of the author. She's not claiming that being unhappy makes you a bad person, she's illustrating that that's a common viewpoint in modern society, and is attempting to refute it. She also views therapy very favorably, and is trying to imagine a therapy that focuses on the collective rather than the individual.
denverkarma 7y ago
This article is very “inside baseball” for the far left. As far as I could understand, the article basically says: depression is caused by the world being terrible, and the world is terrible entirely because of capitalism, so depression is mostly capitalism’s fault. Therefore, we on the left (the article is explicit that it is only for “we on the left”), must learn that therapy is a kind of important political collective act to help us recover from our depression so we can fight capitalism, and not be fooled into thinking it’s something that our depression is something we have individual agency over. I guess. I don’t have a deep understanding of depression, except that it is a very real and difficult thing that many people struggle with. So let me caveat that first. But I have to say, my gut reaction is that it’s rather sad to take a worldview that makes things so dire as to say one’s own depression and the apparent increase in depression around the world is entirely due to the politics you oppose. To me this reads as the tragic consequences of ever escalating polarization. Instead of seeing the politics around you as merely diverse ideas held by your friends and neighbors, you see it as something more like a species differentiator - and “they” are in control. Well, yes, that would be dire. But out in the real world it turns out the vast majority of people on the right and the left are not so far out to the wings of their ideology, and that if they sat down over a nice meal they could have a great conversation and really enjoy each other’s company, perhaps even learn from each other and positively influence each other. The political world around us is indeed depressing, but I would argue we shouldn’t wish that we could get out of bed so we can “throw a brick through a window,” but perhaps instead so we can work toward understanding and reconciling with our neighbors instead.
- denverkarma 7y ago
  Hah! This got downvoted in the first second after posting, which to me says the down-voter couldn’t have read past the first sentence. Come on now, HN downvotes are for unconstructive or inappropriate comments. If you disagree you’re not supposed to downvote, you’re supposed to reply :)
  - dec0dedab0de 7y ago
    On hn downvotes are for posts you disagree with. Inappropriate or unconstructive get flagged. For what its worth I upvoted your first comment because i agree, and downvoted your second for complaining about votes
starpilot 7y ago
Depression isn't sadness. Sadness is healthy, depression is when it runs amok like a cancer, sometimes with no apparent cause. Someone with a great life, job, friends, health, can be horribly depressed. That's what makes it illness. It's not due to low serotonin levels. The serotonin / chemical imbalance theory has been out of favor for the past ten years: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-007-9047-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-007-9047-3, right now we think it's more related to decreased levels of neurogenesis but we're not entirely sure. The "happiness is an inside job" thing works if you're not depressed. When you are, it's like your "happiness muscles" don't work at all. You're just a non-responder to positive stimuli. It's like telling someone that any other illness is really their fault, with the underlying message being that they want you to go away.
dayofthedaleks 7y ago
'Anxious? Depressed? You might be suffering from capitalism: Contradictory class locations and the prevalence of depression and anxiety in the United States' https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4609238/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4609238/

46 points by eternalban 7y ago

I've had this same thought for a while now. Mental illness (and I am not using this term judgmentally) is, essentially, when your perception of the world persistently does not agree with the external reality: for example, you're under the impression that you're fat when in reality you're nigh emaciated. If that's a correct characterization, is depression really a mental illness? If people perceive their lives to be dreadful, whereas in reality their lives are dreadful, where does the misconception come in?

_bxg1 7y ago
Sorry, but that's a pretty terrible definition of mental illness. Mental illness can be any case where your mind has fallen into a pattern of being chronically unhelpful to you; this can mean it doesn't report on reality correctly, or that it sends incorrect (or merely destructive) emotional signals, or whatever else. That said, this is one of the reasons I like to think of it as "mental health" rather than "mental illness". It's more like weight/nutrition, where a person doesn't simply have a problem or not have a problem; it's a sliding-scale. Everyone's mind benefits from care, the degree of one's challenges just varies based on personal history and genetics.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  There’s actually some evidence that depressed people perceive the world more accurately: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8x9j3k/depressed-people-see-the-world-more-realistically https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8x9j3k/depressed-people-s... Happiness might be more a form of delusion, albeit a productive and even necessary one.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    It's been my experience that the human psyche fundamentally needs a certain amount of self-delusion (or at least suspension of disbelief) to be able to function. Any hopes or dreams or beliefs are in some sense disconnected from reality, but are also extremely necessary. We must be able to step outside of reality, without losing track of it.
- heartbeats 7y ago
  Aren't both of those examples special case of my definition though? "[i]t doesn't report on reality correctly, or [...] it sends [...] incorrect signals." But what if the mind is reporting on reality correctly, and the signals it's sending are correct, it's just that we do not like them very much? Can a signal be entirely correct, but destructive? If so, it just seems like a special case of the expression "the truth hurts". It's not my mind which is defect by informing me of the present state of affairs, it's the present state of affairs which are regrettable.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
This is too simple. A lot of depressed people know that the world is not as bad as they feel but they still feel bad. People with OCD know that the world won’t go under if they don’t count the number of traffic lights in the way home but the emotion is still there. Only people with hardcore mental illness don’t even know that their perception of the world is not correct. Most people know but still can’t do anything about it.
- denverkarma 7y ago
  I think actually, knowing your perception of the world is not correct is the really hard part, because then you can’t just go through your day comfortably, you have a constant mental struggle against a faulty autopilot. Imagine driving a car with misaligned steering that pulls sharply to one side. You could do it, but it would get tiring, and it would feel dangerous to go on a long road trip because if you lost focus for a minute you could crash. My own experience with mental health issues is that it feels about like that.
justin66 7y ago
Depression is much more than perceiving your life as being dreadful. > Mental illness (and I am not using this term judgmentally) is, essentially, when your perception of the world persistently does not agree with the external reality This definition is not even remotely adequate.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
claudeganon 7y ago
The incongruity comes from the collective ideological demands of Capitalist societies (that they are sustainable, don’t lead to ecological collapse, endless war, devolve into fascism in their periodic crises, etc) and the lived experience that, yes, they do actually do all of the things their ideology denies. As a kind of society-wide psychological complex, Capitalism can’t function without massive amounts of this denial and projection. But the threadbare nature of those defenses is everyday more exposed, and inwardly directed, especially following the collapse of the USSR (which existed in a similar, but differently conjugated state).
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Mental illness has nothing to do with political systems. It exists in all systems.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    Existing in all systems is not the same as it having nothing to do with political systems - especially political systems that occupy all of daily life, as they do. There is no aspect of urban daily life that is free from the compulsion to use one's time to make money, either to survive or accumulate, and nobody - neither the capitalist nor the worker - is free from that concern.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      What political system would avoid mental illness?
      - claudeganon 7y ago
        You’re continuing to elide both my and the parent’s point not that any political systems are free of mental illness, but that they result in different rates, experiences, and forms of instantiation. This isn’t even contested in the psychological literature. For example, go read about how schizophrenia manifests and is experienced in the developing vs. developed world. Or how depression and rates of suicide increase in the wake of economic crises.
finaliteration 7y ago
> Mental illness... is, essentially, when your perception of the world persistently does not agree with the external reality I don’t think that’s correct. I’ve had depression and anxiety my entire life, and I’m well aware that sometimes things aren’t as awful as my mind makes them out to be (and sometimes they are), but the conflict with reality isn’t what fuels my despair and angst. If it were then I think it would be a lot easier for people to just think or reason their way out of the “pit of despair” that is depression. > If that's a correct characterization, is depression really a mental illness? I don’t think it’s useful or helpful to try to define our way out of the problem. Changing the definition of a thing doesn’t really help the people who are suffering and trying to just get out of bed in the morning.
drunken-serval 7y ago
Okay, so what is hearing voices that aren’t there?
- claudeganon 7y ago
  It’s an organic psychological phenomenon that is actually very socially and politically determined in how it is experienced: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mad-in-america/201005/schizophrenia-mystery-solved https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mad-in-america/20100...
cuspycode 7y ago
That's psychosis, i.e. when perceptions don't correspond to reality. Mental illness is a much larger concept than just psychosis.

claudiawerner 7y ago

Excellent article, and to anyone interested in the topic, I'd suggest going beyond the review and reading Mark Fisher himself. His book, Capitalist Realism, as mentioned by the article, is short but an essential read to understand the politics of mental health: its current privatization at the hands of pharma companies and individualization at the hands of self-help authors and YouTube stars.

mbostleman 7y ago
Privatization, pharma? Between regulation and licensing it was my understanding that in practical terms pharma is at least as much public as it is private.
- intopieces 7y ago
  claudiawerner is talking about the privatization of mental illness, not Pharma, as outlined by Mark Warner in the essay “The Privatisation of Stress” from 2011.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

_bxg1 7y ago

Is the website dead for anyone else?

mmastrac 7y ago
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200216142141/https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/future-no-future-depression-left-politics-mental-health/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200216142141/https://lareviewo...
segfaultbuserr 7y ago
It's dead for me as well, the server backend is overloaded, it took 3 minutes to process my request but eventually sent me the page. Try https://web.archive.org/web/20200216142141/https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/future-no-future-depression-left-politics-mental-health/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200216142141/https://lareviewo....

austincheney 7y ago

(2019) The article seems to articulate that happiness is the opposite of depression and that unhappiness is synonymous with depression. That could be arguably a thing in a purely rhetorical sense but is absolutely incorrect in a clinical sense. Clinically speaking depression is the multi symptom result of one or more chemical imbalances in the brain resulting in arrhythmic emotional states. The opposite of depression from a clinical perspective is emotional balance. This is why treating specifically the symptoms of depression often results in relapses at later times.

claudiawerner 7y ago
Mark Fisher addresses a component of the chemical imbalance theory, and why it doesn't go far enough: >This commodification lay in the so-called ‘bio-chemicalization’ of depression. This is the assertion that depression is caused primarily by biochemical imbalance in the brain, namely low serotonin levels. To treat mental health illness is to treat the symptoms of a single person who ‘owns’ their illness. Depression is internalised and individuated. As such, we lose a sense of collective responsibility for mental health illness in terms of causation, understanding and treatment. >This is not to dispute that depression is not neurologically verifiable. Rather, it is to dispute that the neurological disposition of depressed people is caused only by internal, biochemical factors. If, like Fisher, we ask: ‘What causes low serotonin levels?’ we are forced to comprehend mental health illness as a culturally contingent phenomena caused by a conjuncture of biochemical and societal factors. From: https://thepanoptic.co.uk/2017/08/06/repoliticising-depression-late-mark-fishers-vital-lesson/ https://thepanoptic.co.uk/2017/08/06/repoliticising-depressi... >This is a crucial question. The way in which social and political problems are converted into individual pathologies, to be explained via chemical imbalances or family history, neatly sums up so much of what has happened under capitalist realism. It’s what I’ve called the privatisation of stress. Depression has been described as a pathology of responsibility: you feel intensely responsible for the state that you’re in. The excruciating paradox is that, while you feel that only you can get yourself out of depression, the condition consists precisely in your inability to act. There’s more than an analogy with the political hopelessness and fatalism that have characterised capitalist realism. From: https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=3454 https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=3454 You can actually see just how much scrutiny the pure theory of chemical imbalance has come under from psychologists and sociologists on Google Scholar[0]. "The cause of mental disorders such as depression remains unknown. However, the idea that neurotransmitter imbalances cause depression is vigorously promoted by pharmaceutical companies and the psychiatric profession at large. We examine media reports referring to this chemical imbalance theory and ask reporters for evidence supporting their claims. We then report and critique the scientific papers and other confirming evidence offered in response to our questions. Responses were received from multiple sources, including practicing psychiatrists, clients, and a major pharmaceutical company. The evidence offered was not compelling, and several of the cited sources flatly stated that the proposed theory of serotonin imbalance was known to be incorrect. The media can play a positive role in mental health reporting by ensuring that the information reported is congruent with the peer-reviewed scientific literature." [0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=depression+chemical+imbalance+theory&btnG=&oq=depression+chemical+ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=depr...

throwaway020620 7y ago

This is blatantly incorrect to the point of being offensive. > If the individual is responsible for her own happiness, then she is also responsible for her own unhappiness Just hold right there. There was nothing about "responsibility for unhappiness" in the source that was quoted. Author just casually added this part. "Responsibility for your own happiness" just means that it's _you_ who is in control and that you actually can change things - no matter how bad they look at the moment. > It is a deeply moral message. Failing to be happy is simply immoral. If you are such an immoral and bad person that you have become unhappy — or depressed — it is you, and you alone that is to blame. Being unhappy does not make yourself a bad person. This is literally one of the first things you hear when you visit psychologist to treat your depression. > Yet the psychiatric and public discourse remain bent on treating depression as a personal problem devoid of context Incorrect. Context is incredibly important and is being discussed a lot during therapy sessions. And so on and so forth. Source: my own experience with depression. Edit: grammar

fonadesty 7y ago
> There was nothing about "responsibility for unhappiness" in the source that was quoted. I'm sort of baffled by this claim of yours. The quoted source is very clearly saying that happiness is up to the individual: > Happiness is a personal responsibility. Happiness is not something you can expect to get from others. Everybody has the key to their own happiness. And hence also the responsibility to put the key in the right lock. Likewise, I think your other points seem to miss the point of the author. She's not claiming that being unhappy makes you a bad person, she's illustrating that that's a common viewpoint in modern society, and is attempting to refute it. She also views therapy very favorably, and is trying to imagine a therapy that focuses on the collective rather than the individual.

denverkarma 7y ago

This article is very “inside baseball” for the far left. As far as I could understand, the article basically says: depression is caused by the world being terrible, and the world is terrible entirely because of capitalism, so depression is mostly capitalism’s fault. Therefore, we on the left (the article is explicit that it is only for “we on the left”), must learn that therapy is a kind of important political collective act to help us recover from our depression so we can fight capitalism, and not be fooled into thinking it’s something that our depression is something we have individual agency over. I guess. I don’t have a deep understanding of depression, except that it is a very real and difficult thing that many people struggle with. So let me caveat that first. But I have to say, my gut reaction is that it’s rather sad to take a worldview that makes things so dire as to say one’s own depression and the apparent increase in depression around the world is entirely due to the politics you oppose. To me this reads as the tragic consequences of ever escalating polarization. Instead of seeing the politics around you as merely diverse ideas held by your friends and neighbors, you see it as something more like a species differentiator - and “they” are in control. Well, yes, that would be dire. But out in the real world it turns out the vast majority of people on the right and the left are not so far out to the wings of their ideology, and that if they sat down over a nice meal they could have a great conversation and really enjoy each other’s company, perhaps even learn from each other and positively influence each other. The political world around us is indeed depressing, but I would argue we shouldn’t wish that we could get out of bed so we can “throw a brick through a window,” but perhaps instead so we can work toward understanding and reconciling with our neighbors instead.

denverkarma 7y ago
Hah! This got downvoted in the first second after posting, which to me says the down-voter couldn’t have read past the first sentence. Come on now, HN downvotes are for unconstructive or inappropriate comments. If you disagree you’re not supposed to downvote, you’re supposed to reply :)
- dec0dedab0de 7y ago
  On hn downvotes are for posts you disagree with. Inappropriate or unconstructive get flagged. For what its worth I upvoted your first comment because i agree, and downvoted your second for complaining about votes

starpilot 7y ago

Depression isn't sadness. Sadness is healthy, depression is when it runs amok like a cancer, sometimes with no apparent cause. Someone with a great life, job, friends, health, can be horribly depressed. That's what makes it illness. It's not due to low serotonin levels. The serotonin / chemical imbalance theory has been out of favor for the past ten years: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-007-9047-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-007-9047-3, right now we think it's more related to decreased levels of neurogenesis but we're not entirely sure. The "happiness is an inside job" thing works if you're not depressed. When you are, it's like your "happiness muscles" don't work at all. You're just a non-responder to positive stimuli. It's like telling someone that any other illness is really their fault, with the underlying message being that they want you to go away.

dayofthedaleks 7y ago

'Anxious? Depressed? You might be suffering from capitalism: Contradictory class locations and the prevalence of depression and anxiety in the United States' https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4609238/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4609238/